I also find the quality of answers, and of questions(!) poor. A little googling usually finds better information. And then there's the line-going-dead issue that plagues most question/answer forums (fora?): after some back-and-forth somebody suggests to try something, and the supplicant never responds. Did that work, and they went on with their life? Did they give up? Are they still trying to find an answer? Nobody will ever know.
I think the huge influx of low quality, often unanswerable questions is the biggest problem facing Stack Overflow. They make it much more difficult for expert programmers to find the interesting questions that deserve an answer. There are tools in place to remove these questions, but not enough people are using them.
Most of this is just a symptom of Stack Overflow being too successful. It was good when it was just a few thousand good/nice people. Now that it has critical mass, you have to deal with the rest of the people. I doubt that the problems are going to be solved by having good people leave.
In four years you should have learnt that it's "Stack Overflow" with a space and that you can only get moderator status when you have a diamond next to your name.
Then again, there are plenty of 3-year+ users with 100k+ who still think moderators are any other users who disagree with them and/or can only vote to close a question.
When you don't want to see the effects of leaving joke questions around as more and more users use that as a reason to increase the noise, then you don't want to see why moderation and locking/deleting needs to take place.
There are a set of tools that you gain access to when you hit 10k reputation, which are often referred to as the "10k moderator tools." I think this is what the author is talking about when he says he was close to moderator status.
It seems that most of the OP's angst are over the relatively simplistic points system. In his Java ternary example, perhaps it could be counterbalanced with the upvotes you receive and the worthiness of the question (as marked by stars and upvotes). But then the scoring system would become much less obvious and then you'd have complaints about that.
Either way, even with the deluge of non-useful content...I'm amazed at Google's ability to almost always get me to the most relevant discussion, even with a bare amount of generalizing my search query...and in the cherry-picking testing I've done, the Google search engine usually does a better job than SO's own engine (though SO's related-questions sidebar is also quite good). I wonder if some Googler's 20%-time idea was to closely study the SO API and build an algorithm and quality flags specific to the SO domain, as a way to keep devs loyal to the Google search platform?
I think "the worthiness of the question" is proxied by the upvotes on the answer.
Imagine two good answers, one on an advanced question and one on a very basic one. The basic answer gets way more upvotes. Is that unfair? It helped a lot more people, apparently, which is the goal of the site. It more readily demonstrates that the author creates content that helps a lot of people, which is the goal of points.
As long as you don't imagine that more points means more knowledge, I don't see the issue.
Overall I agree, but I think his analogy of feeding fish vs teaching is a bit of a chicken and egg problem: oftentimes today if I'm googling a trivial problem, Stack Overflow is the first result, and I'm actually glad that is the case the majority of the time.
Seriously, this is what I want as well. I don't want to read a years-old forum thread full of whitespace and content-less replies or, god forbid, EE, to figure out the answer. I'm glad SO is filled to the brim with direct answers to a myriad of questions. Saying it's ruining pedagogy is over-thinking the site's purpose.
His bullet #2 under "Creeping authoritarianism" is so incredibly correct! It's exactly what happened to wikipedia, and why editors are leaving in droves.
With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question, the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home page you will get basically no points. So a hard question is doubly bad - it takes a long time, and by the time you are done you'll get no points.
Yep. Any community that gives censorship powers to an "elite" group runs into this problem. I'd add to his points (which are good) by noting that when your job description involves censoring, the obvious way to make it look like you're doing your job is to censor lots of stuff.
This is just a gut feeling, but (at least for the stuff I tend to search for) Google results leading to Stack Overflow are more likely than not to wind up on a page that's been zapped by a "moderator".
If you're running a Q&A site, and people are Googling the Q's, it would behoove you to have the A's. Or so it seems to me. Apparently SO management has a different opinion.
The difference with SO was (supposed to be) that the only people who got those privileges had high karma which was earned by being a good citizen of the site.
I found the entire post really bitter, but yeah, that part was incredibly interesting. Wikipedia is basically in the hands of an incredibly pedantic bureaucracy which is far more obsessed with process and incredibly obscure rules rather than producing quality articles.
When top tier NASA scientists find their edits to global warming articles changed by homeschooled children who spend every waking moment on wikipedia, you know the system is broken.
StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.
That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.
I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that's bad. But if you think points exist to show "this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy", it's good. The latter is their intent.
Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.
I have to agree with your statement. I've also used SO to ask esoteric questions about niches in technologies I work with every day. Most of the time those questions don't get answers quickly. However, after a period of time I can see they've helped others by the views and awards that come in sometimes a year or more after posting. I view SO more as a way to display example use cases of strange behavior or puzzling functionality that I discover as I'm working through issues. Especially for things that official documentation explains poorly or not at all.
"Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber?"
Yes, in that the worlds largest helper only supports simple boring common questions, as per the article. If you're trying to do stats in scala, and the only help you can get is "hello world" in java, that's not good for Scala, statistics, or much of anything else, making the world overall dumber.
By analogy, lets say reality TV shows completely push video documentaries off the air. This is not so far fetched. The net result is likely to be dumber.
By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes.
Theoretical mechanism would look something like noob who could someday write detailed comprehensive treatments of some Clojure topic tries to get started, sees 99% of his available resources for help are java oriented, eh, better stick with java in case I need help later on, and the possibility of noob growing up to be clojure author of a detailed treatment has disappeared.
"The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes."
Its one of many effective ways to start learning a language, although not the only way. To distort or screw something up, you don't necessarily have to mess up 100% of the population, just a good chunk of them. You could try to argue that few to no experts ever took their first steps as cookbook script kiddies, but I don't think that would be successful.
This does not make sense whatsoever. You don't go to SO to get a feel for a language. You go to SO to get quick answers for a problem you are having for a language already chosen.
Some languages are better supported and have broader ecosystems than others, and for a given language this tends to be self-perpetuating as a result of its effect on the languages which people choose to learn and use. This you blame on Stack Exchange? I concede the model is less than perfect, but really.
And you seem to mistake knowing languages for understanding programming. The essence of the skill is the ability to formally specify an algorithm which solves a given problem; the rest, more or less, is libraries and syntax.
>> If you're trying to do stats in scala, and the only help you can get is "hello world" in java
Are people posting Java "hello world" answers on your Scala questions? I doubt it. Are you manually slogging through dozens of Java questions looking for Scala ones? You should be searching.
I see no reason why you should ever have to look at Q&As irrelevant to you.
Worst case: you have questions nobody can answer. Which means one of two things:
1. Your question is unclear or too specific to your situation
2. You're working in a niche area.
If #2, you're no worse off than if SO didn't exist. So what's the problem?
StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly.
Yes, and that is an incredibly valuable service.
I haven't participated in StackOverflow actively, neither asking nor answering questions, for various reasons, some perhaps related to some of the OP's complaints, but it has saved me many hours of searching through documentation and mailing lists just by being there.
I suspect the contribution to global programmer productivity is enormous. It's true that it may tend to reduce the amount of very detailed knowledge about very narrow topics that people need to memorize but I think that externalizing this type of knowledge is the way to go. As long as your mental models about the basic workings of the software you're using are essentially correct I don't think there's much harm in depending on external resources for specific details.
Wasn't the original brief of SO mostly "be a better expertsexchange.com"? Which was... a site designed to be at the top of a search engine result for a programming question, serve you ads, and aggressively try to get you to become a paid member to see results. Everyone hated expertsexchange.
Now people are starting to hate SO, for very different reasons. At last! They've become the new expertsexchange in every way.
That's exactly why they changed their domain name to experts-exchange.com at some point [1]. I think many people still call it that out of contempt for their SEO and paywall antics.
"find a good answer quickly" -- SO completely nailed this requirement. If I Google something and SO is in the results, I go to it like a moth to a flame. The very design of SO ensures quality answers. If anyone writes anything that is incorrect or not ideal, it will get downvoted/edited/discussed/deleted immediately, completely ensuring the subpar content is gone right away.
Still, SO has managed to build up a mostly competent community that provides relevant answers to most questions;
if SO manages to loose this community then signal to noise ratio will further increase, the site will go down the drain and new competitors will appear.
Are people really that motivated by points and badges? I think these are similar to toy money/monopoly money. if a person does not like the process of investigating a problem then this will not be a sufficient motive for participation; if its not fun then nothing will help here. Career incentive? I doubt that, for a real job they will look at other things.
Still SO has a dilemma, like wikipedia it is a huge amount of text and it needs some meta moderation, and then some meta meta moderation too; so monopoly money is probably supposed to move a person up along this hierarchy. The problem is that a hierarchy of moderators will eventually piss off at least some competent contributors, if not all of them; this problem is common to most sites: slashdot, wikipedia, SO, HN - over time they all run into this problem.
Its like in real politics; nation states need bureaucrats, but these can also turn into a mortal danger to the state
No, you're wrong. If this was true, why is it that nearly any question you find on SO from Google is marked as "closed for not conforming to ideology or other arbitrary reason."
What are you searching for? I've literally never seen this on anything on Stack Overflow when coming from Google. I have seen it on some posts while I've been using the site directly, and it's almost always justified, from what I can tell.
Under "poor pedagogy" the author explains the "give a man a fish" problem on Stack Overflow, then goes on to explain that giving fish is how he gained most of his reputation. How about being part of the solution instead of part of the problem? No one is stopping you from teaching people how to fish.
The system is such that there's no incentive to teach people how to fish. First, the best way for people to learn is not by completely solving the problem for them, but that's what people want in an answer. Second, by the time you've written out a pedagogical response, other people have swept in with quick, just-give-me-the-fish answers, and the question asker has moved on.
>It's possible because I did what many of the people whose questions I answered (and got points for) should have done for themselves: I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer.
I had a very similar experience. I got the most points (3 times as many as any other question I ever answered) from showing how to perform the most basic task in ckEditor, I library I had not used before or since answering.
On the other hand, I would often spend hours getting a demo to work to demonstrate a concept that answered the person's unanswered question and writing a detailed explanation... then nothing. No response. Out of spite, I started deleting all my answers that were not accepted and had no upvotes.
Unlike the OP who was playing the Stack Overflow game, I use SO like a typical programmer: I type my question into Google which often returns results from Stack Overflow. Sometimes I'll come across an unanswered question or one with a better answer, so I'll submit an answer. If I can't figure something out after a few hours of trying, I'll ask the question on SO.
Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine -- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the interwebs where the question is answered.
What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.
I don't really see those Necro badges as devalued by other badges. I have 14 of them that I'm pretty proud of. I think each one of them represents a good answer to a question most people had ignored or forgotten about. I'd much rather have a Necro badge than 10 upvotes on a question that 10 other people were racing to answer as soon as it was posted.
I don't really post on StackOverflow - people have tended on the rude side a little more than should be the norm there from my experience. I use IRC heavily though for my programming help needs. SO is nice for its searchability though, and how many solutions to problems are posted there. It has its utility.
> There's an old cliché in English: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. StackOverflow is filled to the brim with people giving fishes.
This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant to reward "karma" based on the quality of answers, more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer, when a simple one-liner is probably all the questioner is really seeking.
On the other hand, maybe that's what StackOverflow is really for -- getting things done, NOW. Even if that "getting things done" answer is just a band-aid, and the questioner hasn't really learned anything.
In my experience, people who find themselves applying band-aid after band-aid to their code (myself included) rarely connect the dots all the way back and realize that all their subsequent problems were largely due to their initial "fix".
more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer
This is what turned me off from SO. The strategy to garner points (at least in the topics I'm expert in) is to lurk waiting for quickly-answered questions. Pounce on these, by entering a rough, approximate answer, so you can score the credit. Then, if you're feeling charitable, go back and flesh it out properly once you've got the karma in your pocket.
Time and again I've entered a correct and complete answer, to score nothing because somebody beat me (and I'm a very fast typist, btw) with a quick one-liner that provides little value - and in many cases, hasn't even been completely correct. On more than one occasion, after reading the "winning" answer, I've been left frustrated, thinking "come on, that sample you posted won't even run, let alone do what you claim".
I suppose that part of the blame lies with those seeking answers. The user interaction is such that they'll allocate upvotes when they see something that looks promising. Once they've actually tried it, and found that answer wanting, there's little incentive to go take back the undeserved rewards.
The green check mark is worth 25 points, one time, and an asker can reassign it (and the points) if a later answer proves more worthwhile than one already accepted. Every upvote is worth 10 points, and an answer can get upvoted for as long as it exists.
If you're playing the game for points, the way to win it is to find questions with lots of Google juice, and then answer them with every bit of correctness and completeness you can possibly muster. This strategy requires patience and discipline, which the "throw off a quick stupid answer as fast as possible" strategy admittedly does not. Over time, though, it's bulletproof, and if you're going to play the game for points in the first place, then I think this is the best way to combine that and actually contributing something worthwhile.
Paraphrasing:
'the SO system rewards karma based on the quality of answers'
Fixed:
'the SO system rewards karma based on the number of people that find an answer useful'
The population of people needing answers is heavily biased towards newbies. 100% of new programmers need answers to simple questions. (And only a small fraction of them have learned how to use search Google or documentation properly.) 60% of those never move on to more advanced questions [0]. Therefore advanced questions cannot ever target more than 40% of the total user base, where basic syntax-questions target 100%.
It's even worse when you consider that most of the really advanced questions that can generate the most awesome answers are never asked because the advanced users know how to teach themselves and don't need SO.
I totally agree with the general gist of your comment, but I think that it's entirely possible to have high-quality answers that aren't necessarily advanced.
i left so a month ago, and while i agree with one point here (creeping authoriarianism) i am completely opposed to "teach a man to fish".
for me, as a professional programmer, that site is useful because it has direct, simple answers.
but it seems to have been taken over by students who are resentful that there should be simple answers without some evidence of suffering (it really seems to be that).
why should i have to explain "what i have already done" to a bunch of schoolkids when all i want is for someone who has solved this issue before to post the right answer so i can get on with life?
i'm an adult. i can make my own decisions about when i learn and when i want an answer. i don't need someone else's priorities - from a completely different context, apparently motivated by jealousy over grades - shoved down my throat.
but anyway, while that bugged me, it was the dismissive mods that finally drove me away (at 19k points).
(am i the only one that thinks that good questions - interesting ones - are no longer getting quality answers because people that could have answered them have left? and that they're no longer being asked as a consequence? the time when i wrote answers like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-there-a-good-w... has long, long passed)
Knowing what you have already tried is useful from a troubleshooting perspective...not to mention that if I suggest something you've already tried, it is wasted time on both our parts; mine for suggesting it and yours for waiting for me to make the redundant suggestion.
Many times there are multiple potential causes for an issue. Ruling out what has already been tried is what any competent troubleshooter is going to do.
Most of those "show your work" responses are designed purely to force the asker to prove that they have tried to solve the problem himself before asking Stack Overflow.
Showing your work can needlessly complicates the question, especially if it requires a lot of explanation. It's also irritating because someone knows the answer but is withholding it until you do what he wants.
I had that exact experience when I asked this question:
Right. The "show your work" stuff is about establishing a proof of work for effort expended on a question before anyone expends effort on an answer. It's a way of keeping the system honest, so askers aren't purely freeloading off answerers. It's a human blockchain!
- Any answer I put there will be available via Google in 5 minutes, so I can definitely reference it myself in the future. (I'll even ask and answer questions I just figured out so that I can find them later.)
While it is true that simple answers get a lot of credit, it is also true that most common questions have simple answers. Sure a bit of Googling may get you the answer but sometimes it takes an experienced user to find a Google answer. Just knowing the right thing to search for requires some skill. Dead obvious questions that can be easily Googled or are repeats are flagged and often removed.
Sure in an ideal world someone answering that very specific question that is difficult to answer would get more credit but it is not perfect. That is also why the bounty system exists because someone can have a specific hard to answer question that would be very beneficial to them while not many others would be helped and thus upvote. So that person can offer a bounty.
The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1].
The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications.
I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn't even reply to my mails.
It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the edit.
Mike could have avoided that by just using the same account to edit his original post. You can always edit your own work without it going through the review process.
The biggest problem with this convention is that new & anonymous users cannot comment, so the only option they have is to edit the post. These then get rejected out of hand and useful contributions disappear. This is doubly wasteful since this behaviour often discourages people from every contributing again.
No, new and anonymous users do have another option, they can post their own answer.
That's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what happened here. The author of the post tried to edit his own answer with a second account. He should have just used his original account and this would have never happened.
No, new and anonymous users do have another option, they can post their own answer.
Which is less wrong than an edit but it`s still wrong when the appropriate response is a comment.
A community can be judged by it`s responses to newbies. By this measure it fails miserably since the most common feedback many newbies get from SO are bare downvotes and rejections. What should happen is a polite response explaining the problem and the what should be done to correct it.
Speaking as a contributor and reviewer on Super User and Stack Overflow, your opinion of what should happen is shared by more or less everyone who is an established member of the community. The trouble is that there are a lot of newbies, many of whom don't take time either to read the "about" and "how to ask good questions" advice which the sites make prominently available for new users, or to characterize their problem in sufficient detail to make it solvable, or to search for the trivially obvious answer to whatever question they're asking.
Once you've seen enough of this sort of thing -- and, again, especially on the highly popular sites there is a lot of it -- there's a certain fatigue which sets in; you get jaded, I suppose, and that seems from what I've seen to be the proximate cause for newbie questions getting downvoted to oblivion or flagged for closure without anyone taking a moment to advise the asker on what he should've done differently.
Is this ideal? Of course not; in fact, it's not even close, and I say that as someone who has considerable experience with the phenomenon so described. But Stack Exchange sites are moderated by volunteers, and you can't issue ukazes to volunteers without a significant risk of losing them -- after all, if you make them not want to do what they do, they'll just stop doing it.
In any case, just as a community can be judged by its attitude toward newbies, so can those newbies be judged by their attitude toward the community in which they attempt to participate. As in any other such case, it is entirely reasonable for those who have invested time and effort into Stack Exchange sites to expect that new users will deport themselves with respect for the rules and mores of the community.
With regard to giving the ability to comment to new and unregistered users, there's a problem similar to that of low-quality newbie questions; so to broaden the provision of commenting privilege would produce an instant and enduring deluge of spam. You really can't expect volunteers to handle sewage disposal, especially when the sewage is deep enough to require hip waders. Again, this is not ideal, but it is a consequence of the Stack Exchange model's basic assumptions, and I'd have to say that model has acquitted itself well enough in practice to vindicate the claims made on its behalf.
99.99% of the time, rejecting a suggested edit that changes code is the right thing to to. The competence of the reviewers isn't really the issue. The author should have just used his original account to make the edit and this would have been a non-issue.
The incompetence of the mods is relevant because it is one of the main criticism of TFA. It's a nice example of the Pete principle.
If a mod doesn't understand an answer he should just pass, not vote according to what's right most of the time. They are incompetent, both regarding LuaJIT and as moderators.
He doesn't even recognize that he's using two separate accounts, but other people are supposed to recognize him and his accounts should have mod powers?
Again, if he had just used his original account to edit his answer, he wouldn't have needed any of that.
He's a world class expert in compilers and high performance, low level programming on modern hardware.
This addresses the core point of the article, being that the SO "meritocracy" is badly implemented, and conflates heavy site usage with maturity and technical ability.
Edit: If not a mod status, a VIP status. SO would gain a lot if its staff were to individually recruit people as talented as he is.
You're using the fact that he had two accounts as an excuse, but it really doesn't hold up. This was an edit with inarguable merit. Yet users rejected it because they were using the heuristic "changes to code is bad" as a substitute for understanding the edit. That's bad moderation. If you don't understand a change, you shouldn't vote on its worthiness.
So instead of taking the one in a thousand chance that its the wrong thing to do (which, from what I've seen, is generous) they should let edits languish for days or weeks until someone sufficiently knowledgable shows up? That just doesn't sound like a worthwhile tradeoff.
If something should not be edited through another account, then the software should just not allow it.
If it allows it, and delegates the check to moderators, then these moderators should either reject it if they are sure the change is wrong. In all other cases they should allow it.
You have no idea what the spectrum of edits is on SO. Why do you think your heuristic is obviously better, despite making no argument for it?
The heuristic they use is something along the lines of "only accept edits that are grammar fixes, equivalent thereof, or rewordings". Content changes without the authors consent are considered poor form.
A very unfortunate incident, but there are bound to be mistakes made when there are tens of thousands of developers and over six million questions. Eventually, bugs are going to appear. The kind of dumb mistakes that developers (and other humans) make all the time. That doesn't make the error any less painful. Stuff happens.
s/moderators/folks with lots of imaginary internet points enabling a restricted subset of the moderating powers available on SO/
You must also know about meta. I looked for ways to contact the mods in the UI and didn't find any. I suppose it's in the FAQ, but I didn't think about it at the time.
I've occasionally found, via google search, a good answer on SO for a question I had. But it's rare. I don't ever think to go there to search directly, and I don't participate in answering questions there.
I find it's much more effective to simply read the documentation of the language/function/feature I'm having trouble with, than it is to try to formulate the precise phrasing of the question that will lead me to the answer I need in my circumstance.
...unless the subject of your inquiry is something like Angular, where the documentation is severely lagging the info available in their own Disqus comments and SO.
Please everybody, please post your "obscure" questions to Stack Overflow. Yes, it's unlikely that you'll get a good answer in any sort of useful timeframe for many of the reasons the OP lists.
Sometimes you do get a good answer quickly, saving you hours of frustrating searching.
But most times you will have to spend hours figuring it out yourself or you'll end up giving up. Answering your own question won't get you a lot of points but it will probably get you a few over time. More importantly, because of SO's high google rank, you've made your answer easy to find for the next few people who have the same quesiton.
You may also get attempts at answers which don't answer the question, and then people whining at you to accept one when none of them are actually adequate. A small price to pay, admittedly.
The core problem lies deeper than the reasons OP listed, though: Complex problems require tradeoffs, and tradeoffs require discussion. Stack overflows format is 100% incompatible with discussion. Thus, Stack overflow is largely incompatible with complex problems.
Incompatible by fiat, not by any technical reason. There is no reason the comment system couldn't be expanded into a more extended/threaded system to allow precisely that.
That and the "not a good fit" close reason is the primary thing wrong with SE.
I find it interesting that there aren't more comments on this post; wondering is some Hacker News SO contributes disagree with Richter. I usually find myself kindda needing to comb through lots of SO answers to find something that actually explains a solution to a problem. I think that SO is a site you go to to when you don't have much time to actually learn what need to know. However, I should add that I have gotten good link by contributors that have helped me learn more about the topic of my question. Perhaps this is that we should be doing - sharing validated material that explains the topic one is trying to understand.
He doesn't have a problem with Stack Overflow, really. He has some loathing for his own practice of treating the site as a game and finding useless ways to rack up meaningless points. He never explained why he bothered to collect these points, but clearly one day he realized that this was pointless and decided to blame the site rather than himself.
I go there now and then to answer questions. My latest answer[0], about a way to get gnuplot to do a certain trick, took me a couple of hours to get right and got me 25 whole points for being the accepted answer. I worked on this because it seemed to be an interesting challenge, I was interested in figuring out how to do it, and nobody else was answering. I sharpened my gnuplot skills in figuring it out and helped someone. To do this for "points" is asinine (unless a big score gets you something else, like a consulting contract - in which case what's the complaint?).
Another +70 for now in 2 hours on HN, not bad, hmm I should link some answers of mine here ;)
Coming back to the SO topic, I got my initial ~600 pts within just a few days on "who's first", but it's not fun to do it long term. Then got ~400 pts for Java trivia [1], now I usually just write my 2 cents when googling for something and finding the best answer not satisfactory.
Sometimes I also self-answer myself for certain things I think could be useful for others, or me-in-the-future e.g. [2]
That is roughly how I work too. I have tags I care about and among those, I look for questions I believe I can answer based on my knowledge. Either I have used some aspect of what they're asking for in the past or by research I'll uncover something I should use in the future.
To use the site for the sole purpose of gaining points seems asinine to me. What do you get from that behavior? Only what the gamification gives you. I didn't understand that anyone can be a mod though so it doesn't surprise me that people would subvert the system to be the ones to "CLOSED NOT RELEVANT" other people. There seems to have been a pedantic movement and it can probably be traced back to people like this just boosting points to be the head bitch in charge. It explains a ton to me now...
The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that
"I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then
synthesized an original answer."
Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons --
1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere else (eg [0,1,2]).
2. To help educate other programmers about languages that I like very much, and would like to see in wider use. I endeavour not to just give a "how to do X" answer, but instead explain what the different approaches are, and why some approaches are better than others (eg [3,4,5])
3. To stay in touch and build a reputation among the wider community of Haskell programmers - not by amassing internet points, but by asking interesting questions and giving interesting, thoughtful answers.
If you just game Stack Overflow for imaginary internet points, it's no wonder you don't find it very fulfilling.
I agree. I view SO in a similar manner as you. Several times I've been able to find explanations of bizarre behavior from different frameworks that weren't listed in the official documentation.
That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers.
He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he gets off a well thought out and explained one (the kernel answer, I believe).
It doesn't matter how silly you think it is. You don't create a system that reinforces bad behavior and then say "oh, but you should magically turn off your human nature and do the opposite of the what the system teaches you to do". Systems need to be designed to reinforce good behavior, otherwise we get reddit and HN and wikipedia and SO.
I agree with that. Whenever I use the site, the 'description' from "Whose Line is it Anyway?" plays in my head.[0] However, it's the same as any website where there is a "karma" system (like this one for instance ;) ). It feel good getting points, it feels bad losing points. It feels good knowing you have tons, and are in the "Top x% of answerers" or whatever.
Do I think that's necessarily the right way to get people to come to your site and answer programming questions? Maybe not (no, I don't really), but it certainly does keep people coming back to the site. That and the fact that it's probably the biggest answer repository on the net.
Oh, and here's an upvote for you to show no hard feelings. I believe your general statement is correct, I'm just not sure that's what the author is going for.
The people in charge of where the site "goes" via moderator tools are the people who play the game to accumulate points to get mod powers.
What you reward, you get more of. Therefore the site will move in the direction of point collecting game players.
Doesn't particularly matter what they "should" do, what the site is designed to do, intentionally or otherwise, rightly or wrongly, is what the site will do.
Telling everyone including the people in charge not to do what they are designed to enjoy doing is basically abstinence based sex ed. "Here's something you haven't seen, it's a lot of fun, now don't do it" Good luck with that.
Lets say HN karma points were rewarded on the basis of using the F word in posts. I don't think advising people the moral high ground would be to abstain would clean the place up, if the whole purpose of the design is to encourage it. This might actually be a funny April fools joke to think about...
> and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he gets off a well thought out and explained one (the kernel answer, I believe).
I don't contribute much to SO, though I do a fair bit to some other SE sites (SF, SU, DBA) and it is the same on those but there is a fairly logical explanation most of the time.
A question that requires a more detailed answer is often more specific than one that doesn't, and that more general question is going to get a wider audience (both at the time and afterwards with people finding it in searches) so will attract more votes both for itself and the responses.
The points awarded to an answer are only really relevant within the context of question it is in response to (i.e. compared to the points awarded to other responses to that question). So if you care about your total score just answer simple general questions (this is perfectly acceptable behaviour, any useful answer is helpful to the site as a whole), if on the other hand you want a little mental stimulation answer some of the more involved questions instead.
True but nobody is refuting the logic of how it works. They're refuting the reasoning behind why it works that way. As is, you get more points and labeled as an expert of a language if you choose to answer the easy, low hanging fruit questions. On the other hand, if you actually are an expert of a language and tackle those questions that only experts can answer, you get 10x-100x less points.
But aren't the problems which only experts can answer by their very nature both problems that most people won't encounter and problems that most passers-by are not likely to feel confident passing judgement on possible solutions for? There is the "bounty" system which I think tries to account for that a bit but I don't see it often used, other than that the only way around the expert requiring problem problem is some form of manual curation by domain experts, which would potentially introduce a small shipment of other worm cans.
While you call out the author, note that the primary motivator StackOverflow offers to users are those very internet points you decry: You can't blame someone for playing to the very mechanics of the site.
Would StackOverflow be popular if it didn't have leader boards and reputation points and arrays of expertise-claiming badges? Would people spend their time working on other people's problems if it didn't earn them something they hoped to spin into professional credibility?
I suspect no.
And of course StackOverflow uses gamification to encourage people to do work for other people, for free. It is no big secret that many users are essentially free labor that do the dirty work of digging through a lot of terrible links on Google to try to find something that answers the question. For those who take advantage of this it is a wonderful resource.
There are some supremely excellent questions that through the crowd and wiki-like editing the answer ends up being exemplary. But in the general case it does seem that it allows people to skip the boring work and get groups of people fighting for badges and imaginary credibility to do it for you.
There is value in answering questions beyond just the points. A lot of answers require understanding the mechanics of the code and not just getting the right result. Then there is the matter of effectively communicating that to someone else. Last, there is feedback about your answer which further refines your skill.
He wants it to be an educational site instead of the much more pragmatic site that it is clearly designed to be. He doesn't have fun working in 2 languages he hates. He thinks that obscure answers that few people care about should count more than answers seen and used by many.
"Hey Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Stop doing that." -- He managed to play that out over a couple pages of bloated text and blames the site and not himself.
You still can't deny that the mechanics of the site are somewhat broken - I have answered questions, had the answers upvoted, only to see the question edited by a mod and changing the fundamental question and adding more specifics, at which point my answer becomes incorrect and is downvoted. This is plainly a stupid mechanic.
>> "the primary motivator StackOverflow offers to users are those very internet points"
I disagree. The reason I answer questions on SO is because of the incredible help I get from it form my own questions and those already answered. I think a lot of people contribute as a way of giving back and internet points don't encourage them in anyway. Sure there are people who internet points are important to but I would guess (and I admit I have no evidence to back this up) most of the people using SO care very little about points.
Some data points. Took a poll around our office (it was kind of thin because of the holiday) and of the 4 devs that responded and said they use SO, all 4 said they don't actually care about or pay attention to the points, they just use it as a source of information.
The vast majority of people using stack overflow are simply consuming questions/ answers they have arrived at via a Google search. These people won't care about points but it doesn't tell us anything about the motivations of those that are regularly answering questions.
Here's a data point from another end of the spectrum: I've provided more than 1000 answers. I love it.
If there were no StackOverflow I would use other means more: Usenet/mailing lists, irc.
I don't find it offensive that someone tries to reduce my motivation to accumulating points. It is just another example of "someone wrong on the internet".
As they say, "what gets measured gets managed." If you build your site around gamification, don't be surprised when your users try to turn it into a game.
How many good questions do you see that are "CLOSED AS NOT A REAL QUESTION"? The site is fine for what it is, but there's definitely a market for building a better StackOverFlow.
StackOverflow seems to have devolved into a bunch of shit questions. Anything too technical doesn't get answered, since the real veterans have left, and anything not technical enough (like an approach to a problem) gets closed.
That annoys the heck out of me, because if it truly is not a real question, then the "general masses" of answer authors would naturally agree. Instead some deletionist authoritarian jerk needs to force his idea on everyone else, because obviously no one else is worthy enough to make a judgment. Why feel the need to force what they call the truth on everyone, if it is in fact the truth? Or more likely they're full of it and just enjoy watching the world burn. The worst part is the selection of judges is based basically on who spends the most clock time googling for people too lazy to use google, it has nothing to do with taste or skill or ability or experience. Random selection would be more effective.
A site could be designed that isn't based on an anti-social, exclusionary, classist, authoritarian philosophy. The tragedy is it wouldn't look too much different than SO. So close, and yet so far...
Build your leveller's idea of Stack Overflow, then, and let it compete on its merits against the one which already exists. I'll be interested to see the result.
"Instead some deletionist authoritarian jerk needs to force his idea on everyone else, because obviously no one else is worthy enough to make a judgment."
I think they caught this disease from Wikipedia, where deletionist authoritarian editors kill articles on real people because they're "not notable enough" while allowing thousands of words to be written about minor characters in TV series.
Usually questions are "closed" by 5 users (not by a moderator) so make it "5 jerks" (and I am one of them BTW...)
A question should be closed because it's a dup, or because it's not clear, or there's not enough information and the author didn't bother responding to the comments that mention that etc.
If you don't think so - you can write a comment and vote to "repoen".
If you feel better by calling us "jerks" - good for you...
Asking about the colour of the bikeshed always draws more upvotes and views than a question asking why the screws buckle and eject when the outside temperature reaches 30C but only if the interior is 21C.
Popularity does not mean a question is within the scope of the site guidelines.
There is a time and a place for everything. For opinion-based questions about programming, that place is http://www.slant.co/ (not affiliated with Stack Exchange).
I just checked this out and it looks horrible. There are no categories. It's just a long list of unrelated questions, like "What's the best app for listening to music?" and "What's the best 2D graphics and physics engine?" It looks completely unusable.
This is one of the most annoying part of stack overflow,instead of closing the discussion,they should have a provision to move to more opinionated discussion list.
They do. When you vote to close a question (and anyone can do that, not just moderators), you have to give a reason. One of the predefined reasons is "belongs on SuperUser stack exchange," and another where you can fill in a reason, such as "belongs on Programmer stack exchange." (Programmer is for code review, style questions, opinion-based stuff, etc.)
My experience is that programmers.stackexchange is even more militant about closing questions than stackoverflow. I guess they got tired of receiving all of the unwanted garbage and it makes them extra sensitive.
> The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points
Nope. His argument is that the site encourages its users to behave that way and that this results in several very real, relevant, negative impacts on the usefulness of the site and the quality of the answers (and questions).
Your suggestions are not a sufficient solution for the problems he describes.
Is there any tangible, real-world value to points on Stack Overflow (maybe some form of recognition when applying for jobs), or are they really just imaginary internet points (like reddit karma)?
SO must change their rules to make those who downvote or vote to close to give their reasons, and they should give the OP enough time to amend the question or explain themselves if the question is not clear enough.
You already do have to give a reason for closing a question. That reason is displayed when a question is closed. You have plenty of time to edit your question to make it clear before it's deleted. Once you edit it, it can be reopened.
The OP complains that he got 5000 points for doing "nothing". On the contrary, I think those are the most valuable points. If your answer is still useful to somebody 2 years later, that's a great indicator on how useful your answers were.
IMHO, The banning of "what have you tried", and the removal of "too localized" will lead to even more poor pedagogy.
The question to which the author links (2387218) is a perfect example of a wholly unresearched question, where the only possible valid answers are "RTFM/STFW" or "here's a fish".
This was the kind of thing that would have been deleted under "too localized" as it offers no benefit for future seekers of enlightenment.
I suppose it may be flagged for deletion according to this criterion:
> Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results.
but that doesn't quite seem to fit. The question is not "give me teh codez", but it does show that the asker has not attempted any solutions.
242 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThen again, there are plenty of 3-year+ users with 100k+ who still think moderators are any other users who disagree with them and/or can only vote to close a question.
When you don't want to see the effects of leaving joke questions around as more and more users use that as a reason to increase the noise, then you don't want to see why moderation and locking/deleting needs to take place.
It seems that most of the OP's angst are over the relatively simplistic points system. In his Java ternary example, perhaps it could be counterbalanced with the upvotes you receive and the worthiness of the question (as marked by stars and upvotes). But then the scoring system would become much less obvious and then you'd have complaints about that.
Either way, even with the deluge of non-useful content...I'm amazed at Google's ability to almost always get me to the most relevant discussion, even with a bare amount of generalizing my search query...and in the cherry-picking testing I've done, the Google search engine usually does a better job than SO's own engine (though SO's related-questions sidebar is also quite good). I wonder if some Googler's 20%-time idea was to closely study the SO API and build an algorithm and quality flags specific to the SO domain, as a way to keep devs loyal to the Google search platform?
Imagine two good answers, one on an advanced question and one on a very basic one. The basic answer gets way more upvotes. Is that unfair? It helped a lot more people, apparently, which is the goal of the site. It more readily demonstrates that the author creates content that helps a lot of people, which is the goal of points.
As long as you don't imagine that more points means more knowledge, I don't see the issue.
With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question, the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home page you will get basically no points. So a hard question is doubly bad - it takes a long time, and by the time you are done you'll get no points.
This is just a gut feeling, but (at least for the stuff I tend to search for) Google results leading to Stack Overflow are more likely than not to wind up on a page that's been zapped by a "moderator".
If you're running a Q&A site, and people are Googling the Q's, it would behoove you to have the A's. Or so it seems to me. Apparently SO management has a different opinion.
When top tier NASA scientists find their edits to global warming articles changed by homeschooled children who spend every waking moment on wikipedia, you know the system is broken.
That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.
I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that's bad. But if you think points exist to show "this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy", it's good. The latter is their intent.
Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.
Yes, in that the worlds largest helper only supports simple boring common questions, as per the article. If you're trying to do stats in scala, and the only help you can get is "hello world" in java, that's not good for Scala, statistics, or much of anything else, making the world overall dumber.
By analogy, lets say reality TV shows completely push video documentaries off the air. This is not so far fetched. The net result is likely to be dumber.
"The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes."
Its one of many effective ways to start learning a language, although not the only way. To distort or screw something up, you don't necessarily have to mess up 100% of the population, just a good chunk of them. You could try to argue that few to no experts ever took their first steps as cookbook script kiddies, but I don't think that would be successful.
And you seem to mistake knowing languages for understanding programming. The essence of the skill is the ability to formally specify an algorithm which solves a given problem; the rest, more or less, is libraries and syntax.
Are people posting Java "hello world" answers on your Scala questions? I doubt it. Are you manually slogging through dozens of Java questions looking for Scala ones? You should be searching.
I see no reason why you should ever have to look at Q&As irrelevant to you.
Worst case: you have questions nobody can answer. Which means one of two things:
1. Your question is unclear or too specific to your situation
2. You're working in a niche area.
If #2, you're no worse off than if SO didn't exist. So what's the problem?
Yes, and that is an incredibly valuable service.
I haven't participated in StackOverflow actively, neither asking nor answering questions, for various reasons, some perhaps related to some of the OP's complaints, but it has saved me many hours of searching through documentation and mailing lists just by being there.
I suspect the contribution to global programmer productivity is enormous. It's true that it may tend to reduce the amount of very detailed knowledge about very narrow topics that people need to memorize but I think that externalizing this type of knowledge is the way to go. As long as your mental models about the basic workings of the software you're using are essentially correct I don't think there's much harm in depending on external resources for specific details.
Now people are starting to hate SO, for very different reasons. At last! They've become the new expertsexchange in every way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts-Exchange 4th paragraph.
if SO manages to loose this community then signal to noise ratio will further increase, the site will go down the drain and new competitors will appear.
Are people really that motivated by points and badges? I think these are similar to toy money/monopoly money. if a person does not like the process of investigating a problem then this will not be a sufficient motive for participation; if its not fun then nothing will help here. Career incentive? I doubt that, for a real job they will look at other things.
Still SO has a dilemma, like wikipedia it is a huge amount of text and it needs some meta moderation, and then some meta meta moderation too; so monopoly money is probably supposed to move a person up along this hierarchy. The problem is that a hierarchy of moderators will eventually piss off at least some competent contributors, if not all of them; this problem is common to most sites: slashdot, wikipedia, SO, HN - over time they all run into this problem.
Its like in real politics; nation states need bureaucrats, but these can also turn into a mortal danger to the state
I had a very similar experience. I got the most points (3 times as many as any other question I ever answered) from showing how to perform the most basic task in ckEditor, I library I had not used before or since answering.
On the other hand, I would often spend hours getting a demo to work to demonstrate a concept that answered the person's unanswered question and writing a detailed explanation... then nothing. No response. Out of spite, I started deleting all my answers that were not accepted and had no upvotes.
Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine -- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the interwebs where the question is answered.
But the answer that has earned me the most points is a stupid throwaway CSS answer that's technically wrong: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1817792/css-previous-sibl...
What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.
This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant to reward "karma" based on the quality of answers, more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer, when a simple one-liner is probably all the questioner is really seeking.
On the other hand, maybe that's what StackOverflow is really for -- getting things done, NOW. Even if that "getting things done" answer is just a band-aid, and the questioner hasn't really learned anything.
In my experience, people who find themselves applying band-aid after band-aid to their code (myself included) rarely connect the dots all the way back and realize that all their subsequent problems were largely due to their initial "fix".
This is what turned me off from SO. The strategy to garner points (at least in the topics I'm expert in) is to lurk waiting for quickly-answered questions. Pounce on these, by entering a rough, approximate answer, so you can score the credit. Then, if you're feeling charitable, go back and flesh it out properly once you've got the karma in your pocket.
Time and again I've entered a correct and complete answer, to score nothing because somebody beat me (and I'm a very fast typist, btw) with a quick one-liner that provides little value - and in many cases, hasn't even been completely correct. On more than one occasion, after reading the "winning" answer, I've been left frustrated, thinking "come on, that sample you posted won't even run, let alone do what you claim".
I suppose that part of the blame lies with those seeking answers. The user interaction is such that they'll allocate upvotes when they see something that looks promising. Once they've actually tried it, and found that answer wanting, there's little incentive to go take back the undeserved rewards.
If you're playing the game for points, the way to win it is to find questions with lots of Google juice, and then answer them with every bit of correctness and completeness you can possibly muster. This strategy requires patience and discipline, which the "throw off a quick stupid answer as fast as possible" strategy admittedly does not. Over time, though, it's bulletproof, and if you're going to play the game for points in the first place, then I think this is the best way to combine that and actually contributing something worthwhile.
Fixed: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the number of people that find an answer useful'
The population of people needing answers is heavily biased towards newbies. 100% of new programmers need answers to simple questions. (And only a small fraction of them have learned how to use search Google or documentation properly.) 60% of those never move on to more advanced questions [0]. Therefore advanced questions cannot ever target more than 40% of the total user base, where basic syntax-questions target 100%.
It's even worse when you consider that most of the really advanced questions that can generate the most awesome answers are never asked because the advanced users know how to teach themselves and don't need SO.
[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
for me, as a professional programmer, that site is useful because it has direct, simple answers.
but it seems to have been taken over by students who are resentful that there should be simple answers without some evidence of suffering (it really seems to be that).
why should i have to explain "what i have already done" to a bunch of schoolkids when all i want is for someone who has solved this issue before to post the right answer so i can get on with life?
i'm an adult. i can make my own decisions about when i learn and when i want an answer. i don't need someone else's priorities - from a completely different context, apparently motivated by jealousy over grades - shoved down my throat.
but anyway, while that bugged me, it was the dismissive mods that finally drove me away (at 19k points).
(am i the only one that thinks that good questions - interesting ones - are no longer getting quality answers because people that could have answered them have left? and that they're no longer being asked as a consequence? the time when i wrote answers like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-there-a-good-w... has long, long passed)
Many times there are multiple potential causes for an issue. Ruling out what has already been tried is what any competent troubleshooter is going to do.
Showing your work can needlessly complicates the question, especially if it requires a lot of explanation. It's also irritating because someone knows the answer but is withholding it until you do what he wants.
I had that exact experience when I asked this question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13240039/group-count-with...
- I've gotten a lot of help there
- It's nice to help other people in return
- Any answer I put there will be available via Google in 5 minutes, so I can definitely reference it myself in the future. (I'll even ask and answer questions I just figured out so that I can find them later.)
Sure in an ideal world someone answering that very specific question that is difficult to answer would get more credit but it is not perfect. That is also why the bounty system exists because someone can have a specific hard to answer question that would be very beneficial to them while not many others would be helped and thus upvote. So that person can offer a bounty.
The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications.
I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn't even reply to my mails.
[0] http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/How-does-LuaJITs-trace-...
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/3395606
I know I have seen nearly 1 in 20 edit suggestions are some random person suggesting an edit to a post that completely changes the meaning.
Mike could have avoided that by just using the same account to edit his original post. You can always edit your own work without it going through the review process.
That's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what happened here. The author of the post tried to edit his own answer with a second account. He should have just used his original account and this would have never happened.
Which is less wrong than an edit but it`s still wrong when the appropriate response is a comment.
A community can be judged by it`s responses to newbies. By this measure it fails miserably since the most common feedback many newbies get from SO are bare downvotes and rejections. What should happen is a polite response explaining the problem and the what should be done to correct it.
Once you've seen enough of this sort of thing -- and, again, especially on the highly popular sites there is a lot of it -- there's a certain fatigue which sets in; you get jaded, I suppose, and that seems from what I've seen to be the proximate cause for newbie questions getting downvoted to oblivion or flagged for closure without anyone taking a moment to advise the asker on what he should've done differently.
Is this ideal? Of course not; in fact, it's not even close, and I say that as someone who has considerable experience with the phenomenon so described. But Stack Exchange sites are moderated by volunteers, and you can't issue ukazes to volunteers without a significant risk of losing them -- after all, if you make them not want to do what they do, they'll just stop doing it.
In any case, just as a community can be judged by its attitude toward newbies, so can those newbies be judged by their attitude toward the community in which they attempt to participate. As in any other such case, it is entirely reasonable for those who have invested time and effort into Stack Exchange sites to expect that new users will deport themselves with respect for the rules and mores of the community.
With regard to giving the ability to comment to new and unregistered users, there's a problem similar to that of low-quality newbie questions; so to broaden the provision of commenting privilege would produce an instant and enduring deluge of spam. You really can't expect volunteers to handle sewage disposal, especially when the sewage is deep enough to require hip waders. Again, this is not ideal, but it is a consequence of the Stack Exchange model's basic assumptions, and I'd have to say that model has acquitted itself well enough in practice to vindicate the claims made on its behalf.
The incompetence of the mods is relevant because it is one of the main criticism of TFA. It's a nice example of the Pete principle.
If a mod doesn't understand an answer he should just pass, not vote according to what's right most of the time. They are incompetent, both regarding LuaJIT and as moderators.
I'd expect mods familiar with Lua to recognize him, and he should have mod powers, to begin with.
Again, if he had just used his original account to edit his answer, he wouldn't have needed any of that.
He's a world class expert in compilers and high performance, low level programming on modern hardware.
This addresses the core point of the article, being that the SO "meritocracy" is badly implemented, and conflates heavy site usage with maturity and technical ability.
Edit: If not a mod status, a VIP status. SO would gain a lot if its staff were to individually recruit people as talented as he is.
If it allows it, and delegates the check to moderators, then these moderators should either reject it if they are sure the change is wrong. In all other cases they should allow it.
It's really that simple.
The heuristic they use is something along the lines of "only accept edits that are grammar fixes, equivalent thereof, or rewordings". Content changes without the authors consent are considered poor form.
Probably too late, but... If he ever decides to come back, he'll be able to edit his own posts without review.
http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11318414/4
If he'd raised an issue on meta, I'm sure a real mod would have sorted this out, or he could have just used the same account to make this edit.
You must also know about meta. I looked for ways to contact the mods in the UI and didn't find any. I suppose it's in the FAQ, but I didn't think about it at the time.
I find it's much more effective to simply read the documentation of the language/function/feature I'm having trouble with, than it is to try to formulate the precise phrasing of the question that will lead me to the answer I need in my circumstance.
Sometimes you do get a good answer quickly, saving you hours of frustrating searching.
But most times you will have to spend hours figuring it out yourself or you'll end up giving up. Answering your own question won't get you a lot of points but it will probably get you a few over time. More importantly, because of SO's high google rank, you've made your answer easy to find for the next few people who have the same quesiton.
That's simply not fixable.
That and the "not a good fit" close reason is the primary thing wrong with SE.
I go there now and then to answer questions. My latest answer[0], about a way to get gnuplot to do a certain trick, took me a couple of hours to get right and got me 25 whole points for being the accepted answer. I worked on this because it seemed to be an interesting challenge, I was interested in figuring out how to do it, and nobody else was answering. I sharpened my gnuplot skills in figuring it out and helped someone. To do this for "points" is asinine (unless a big score gets you something else, like a consulting contract - in which case what's the complaint?).
[0]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20294482/show-y-label-in-...
Coming back to the SO topic, I got my initial ~600 pts within just a few days on "who's first", but it's not fun to do it long term. Then got ~400 pts for Java trivia [1], now I usually just write my 2 cents when googling for something and finding the best answer not satisfactory.
Sometimes I also self-answer myself for certain things I think could be useful for others, or me-in-the-future e.g. [2]
[1] "What does the “+=” operator do in Java?" - it's more than x = x + y; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7456462/what-does-the-ope...
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924937/lucene-custom-sco...
To use the site for the sole purpose of gaining points seems asinine to me. What do you get from that behavior? Only what the gamification gives you. I didn't understand that anyone can be a mod though so it doesn't surprise me that people would subvert the system to be the ones to "CLOSED NOT RELEVANT" other people. There seems to have been a pedantic movement and it can probably be traced back to people like this just boosting points to be the head bitch in charge. It explains a ton to me now...
1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere else (eg [0,1,2]).
2. To help educate other programmers about languages that I like very much, and would like to see in wider use. I endeavour not to just give a "how to do X" answer, but instead explain what the different approaches are, and why some approaches are better than others (eg [3,4,5])
3. To stay in touch and build a reputation among the wider community of Haskell programmers - not by amassing internet points, but by asking interesting questions and giving interesting, thoughtful answers.
If you just game Stack Overflow for imaginary internet points, it's no wonder you don't find it very fulfilling.
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9190352/abusing-the-algeb...
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10753073/whats-the-theore...
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19177125/sets-functors-an...
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11684321/how-to-play-with...
[4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12968351/monad-transforme...
[5] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20857165/move-or-copy-in-...
He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he gets off a well thought out and explained one (the kernel answer, I believe).
Do I think that's necessarily the right way to get people to come to your site and answer programming questions? Maybe not (no, I don't really), but it certainly does keep people coming back to the site. That and the fact that it's probably the biggest answer repository on the net.
Oh, and here's an upvote for you to show no hard feelings. I believe your general statement is correct, I'm just not sure that's what the author is going for.
[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAGwNtI26w
What you reward, you get more of. Therefore the site will move in the direction of point collecting game players.
Doesn't particularly matter what they "should" do, what the site is designed to do, intentionally or otherwise, rightly or wrongly, is what the site will do.
Telling everyone including the people in charge not to do what they are designed to enjoy doing is basically abstinence based sex ed. "Here's something you haven't seen, it's a lot of fun, now don't do it" Good luck with that.
Lets say HN karma points were rewarded on the basis of using the F word in posts. I don't think advising people the moral high ground would be to abstain would clean the place up, if the whole purpose of the design is to encourage it. This might actually be a funny April fools joke to think about...
I don't contribute much to SO, though I do a fair bit to some other SE sites (SF, SU, DBA) and it is the same on those but there is a fairly logical explanation most of the time.
A question that requires a more detailed answer is often more specific than one that doesn't, and that more general question is going to get a wider audience (both at the time and afterwards with people finding it in searches) so will attract more votes both for itself and the responses.
The points awarded to an answer are only really relevant within the context of question it is in response to (i.e. compared to the points awarded to other responses to that question). So if you care about your total score just answer simple general questions (this is perfectly acceptable behaviour, any useful answer is helpful to the site as a whole), if on the other hand you want a little mental stimulation answer some of the more involved questions instead.
Would StackOverflow be popular if it didn't have leader boards and reputation points and arrays of expertise-claiming badges? Would people spend their time working on other people's problems if it didn't earn them something they hoped to spin into professional credibility?
I suspect no.
And of course StackOverflow uses gamification to encourage people to do work for other people, for free. It is no big secret that many users are essentially free labor that do the dirty work of digging through a lot of terrible links on Google to try to find something that answers the question. For those who take advantage of this it is a wonderful resource.
There are some supremely excellent questions that through the crowd and wiki-like editing the answer ends up being exemplary. But in the general case it does seem that it allows people to skip the boring work and get groups of people fighting for badges and imaginary credibility to do it for you.
He wants it to be an educational site instead of the much more pragmatic site that it is clearly designed to be. He doesn't have fun working in 2 languages he hates. He thinks that obscure answers that few people care about should count more than answers seen and used by many.
"Hey Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Stop doing that." -- He managed to play that out over a couple pages of bloated text and blames the site and not himself.
I disagree. The reason I answer questions on SO is because of the incredible help I get from it form my own questions and those already answered. I think a lot of people contribute as a way of giving back and internet points don't encourage them in anyway. Sure there are people who internet points are important to but I would guess (and I admit I have no evidence to back this up) most of the people using SO care very little about points.
If there were no StackOverflow I would use other means more: Usenet/mailing lists, irc.
I don't find it offensive that someone tries to reduce my motivation to accumulating points. It is just another example of "someone wrong on the internet".
(I say this clutching my own HN karma...)
I loved SO in the beginning. Now it's a cesspool.
Evidence?
A site could be designed that isn't based on an anti-social, exclusionary, classist, authoritarian philosophy. The tragedy is it wouldn't look too much different than SO. So close, and yet so far...
I think they caught this disease from Wikipedia, where deletionist authoritarian editors kill articles on real people because they're "not notable enough" while allowing thousands of words to be written about minor characters in TV series.
A question should be closed because it's a dup, or because it's not clear, or there's not enough information and the author didn't bother responding to the comments that mention that etc.
If you don't think so - you can write a comment and vote to "repoen". If you feel better by calling us "jerks" - good for you...
Happy new year!
150 question upvotes.
Popularity does not mean a question is within the scope of the site guidelines.
True, but it might indicate adequate reason for modifying the guidelines.
Nope. His argument is that the site encourages its users to behave that way and that this results in several very real, relevant, negative impacts on the usefulness of the site and the quality of the answers (and questions).
Your suggestions are not a sufficient solution for the problems he describes.
The question to which the author links (2387218) is a perfect example of a wholly unresearched question, where the only possible valid answers are "RTFM/STFW" or "here's a fish".
This was the kind of thing that would have been deleted under "too localized" as it offers no benefit for future seekers of enlightenment.
I suppose it may be flagged for deletion according to this criterion:
> Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results.
but that doesn't quite seem to fit. The question is not "give me teh codez", but it does show that the asker has not attempted any solutions.