

Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow - dlp211
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-quality-is-dropping-on-stack-overflow?cb=1

======
wirrbel
SO aims at a simple Q&A format. I wonder why people expect it to yield "great"
questions. A lot of actually fruitful topics are closed for provoking
discussion.

    
    
       "... as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.   Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."
    

Stackoverflow is not an intellectual forum, its a simple question-and-answer
database with debate being discouraged, and a very limited space for the kind
of questions allowed. This is by design and its great, because finally when
asking a question on XML, you are NOT bothered with people starting to discuss
whether XML is actually a thing worth considering. But its the same
_beneficial_ rules, that in the long run lead to a plattform where people just
paste in their error messages and expect other people to dive through those.

~~~
chc
I don't see how "not a forum for debate" means "a forum for 'plz email teh
codez' posts" in your reckoning. There are many fine questions with right
answers that are not open-ended navel-gazing.

~~~
Perdition
The point is that if debate isn't allowed you aren't likely to have higher
quality posters than the average for programmers. And the reality is that
there are tons of lazy/stupid programmers out there that just want "plz email
teh codez".

The forums that I have seen work best at maintaining abnormally high levels of
quality posters are ones where the Q&A is effectively secondary to the debate.
The reason is that the fun of debating keeps the high quality posters around
and answering shitty/repetitive questions.

~~~
chc
I think your first conclusion is wrong. From what I have seen, Stack Overflow
appears to be fairly well-supplied with quality posters, but they just don't
have as many questions as the "plz email teh codez" crowd. The problem isn't
that good questions are generally going unanswered, and it isn't even that
good and novel questions are in short supply, but that there aren't as many
good questions _and_ they're having trouble stemming the tide of bad
questions. The disproportionate rise of bad questions is the core problem.

------
rurounijones
I think So is being overrun with "Help Vampires" (
[http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/](http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/)
)

However, the twist with SO is that people looking to inflate their rep
actually like help vampires to a certain extent because their questions are
usually quick and easy to answer which increases speed at which they can buff
their scores.

Combine these two and you get a community where posting hard, reaching,
questions with in-depth answers becomes the exception rather than the norm.

~~~
dwd
The solution to fixing Stack Overflow is ultimately to hide karma points and
prevent the distortions it causes. If you take away the external incentives
you will hopefully be left with a community who simply help each other.

------
sosuke
I've been a StackOverflow user since it started, I've been a member for over 3
years, and I can't comment on an answer because I only have 46 rep. I'm sure I
hit the site everyday finding value in it, when I started at my last job they
gave me a tour of their Android work and joked it was made by StackOverflow.
The site is difficult to use, everywhere I click it says I need n more rep to
use a piece of functionality.

~~~
fabian2k
It is intentional that new users are steered towards answers instead of
comments. SO is a question & answers site and comments are mostly meant for
clarifications, not for discussion. This is something that new users that are
used to how forums work are not expecting. The hope is that by the time they
have 50 reputation, they understand a bit more how comments should be used on
the site.

There are additional reasons, the existing moderator tools would not be
sufficient to deal with the kind of abuse that would be possible if anyone
could post comments, there is simply no meaningful review of new comments on
old posts.

And acquiring 50 reputation is generally not hard, that is 10 upvotes on
questions, 5 upvotes on answers or 25 suggested edits that improve other
posts. You could also earn 200 reputation on any other Stack Exchange site and
be able to comment on all of them.

~~~
sosuke
That makes sense, it would be nice if there was a linked site for discussion
though. As a lurker my first instinct to dip my toes in the water is to
comment on something first.

------
jzwinck
The root cause is the same as this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650799)
"Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?"

SO has become the go-to site for everyone who thinks they might want to solve
a problem using a computer, and really lame, poorly researched questions get
asked by people with few incentives to ask good ones.

~~~
kordless
Seems like instead of rate limiting users ability to ask bad questions, you
should rate limit the viewing of bad questions by good answerers. In order to
keep up the effort of answering questions, maybe some automation is in order
to do best-effort auto answering or collapsing of questions into related ones.

~~~
jzwinck
I agree with your first sentence for sure. Another way to implement it would
be to avoid showing new questions with no upvotes to many users--only show
them to a small sample of users and see if in the first ten minutes the
question gets voted up or down to gauge its quality. That way we'd limit the
"shotgun" effect of sending crappy questions to thousands of people all at
once (we sometimes see 6 or 8 downvotes on a single question before it gets
closed or deleted, which implies a ton of people saw it despite that it was
crap).

~~~
kordless
I like it! Would be sorta like A/B testing the questions...

------
minikomi
I think Stack Overflow needs to enter a curation phase. There's still lots of
gems popping up ( [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13134825/how-do-
functors-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13134825/how-do-functors-
work-in-haskell/13137359#13137359) ), but they're so drowned out in the noise.
A weekly "best of" for tags I subscribe to - perhaps with bonus points for
being featured - would do a bit to boost quality. How would it work though?
Have a "curator" role you could gain after a certain point threshold, which
allows you to vote for best ofs. . and gain points for consistently accurately
suggesting best ofs? If you suggest too much which is never voted for, that
counts against you... but if you constantly suggest answers / questions which
are featured that counts towards your rep.

Perhaps have a separate "exchange" to achieve this?

------
justplay
100% agree, I even
tweeted([https://twitter.com/ppiplewar/status/460199400610856961](https://twitter.com/ppiplewar/status/460199400610856961))
this thing few days ago.

On this days, I only answer questions which are worthful and most of the time
it falls under `featured` category.

------
dpcan
Well, how many "good" questions are there really?

I asked several "good" questions a couple years ago, but it's now been
probably 1.5+ years since I've even needed to post a question at all because
everything I've needed to know is there (and sometimes in 3 different
variations).

~~~
worldsayshi
Yes and if this is true for most of the knowledgeable users most of the time
it's not a mystery if fewer good questions are asked. I suppose a large
quantity of bad questions could be due to increased exposure.

------
zippergz
Is it really that the volume of poor questions is increasing, or that the
volume of good questions is decreasing? I know I gave up on asking questions
there a while ago, and I'd like to believe that the questions I did ask were
fairly high-quality.

~~~
chc
Both, I think. But the curves were somewhat different. The really good
questions started trailing off quite some time ago (presumably the low-hanging
fruit got picked), but the flood of crap didn't really swell until relatively
recently. There are fewer good questions, but there really didn't use to be
five or more instances of "How do I make one object talk to another?" every
single day. That is a new development.

------
bpowah
It's really just a geometric growth problem. I've been a member for 5 years
and I feel like it hit it's "Eternal September" a couple years ago. And I'm
sure the people who have been a member since the beginning feel like it went
to hell around about the time I joined! I've often wished they had an option
to filter questions by asker's rep score.

------
islon
That’s the logical end to "everyone should learn to code". Imagine the same
fever happening to painting and we have a paintersoverflow site where people
would be asking how to mix primary colors.

------
fixedd
I wonder if there might not be some currency buy-in model that would work.
Instead of your in-site "cred" getting bumped, maybe that cred is worth
something tangible. Maybe in order to buy into the site you have deposit $5
worth of cryptocurrency X and to ask a question you have to "pay" a dollar
worth of that currency and those dollars are "credited" based on how the
answer/upvote pool decides.

I can think of at least 10 problems with this approach, but I think it might
be feasible.

------
gedrap
I guess that's the other side of being mainstream - people, who are not
perfect users, are using your product too.

Those not perfect users are not only the ones who post questions but also the
ones who answer them just for the points. So closing questions which are just
copy pasted error messages is solving only half of the problem.

But the other problem is much more subtle. You can't ban (or whatever)
someone, who answers questions... Or can you?

------
enscr
I have my gripes with SO but I can't imagine a day without it. The number of
views on trivial questions says that finding an answer on SO is easier than
the way we document code. If there's supplementary documentation done in a Q&A
or FAQ fashion, with the right tweaks to rank up in Google, people would not
use SO to ask things like ' how to iterate through a list'.

------
frozenport
My theory is that the help vampires have a certain geographic distribution,
and they come from cultures where this kind of behavior is accepted.

~~~
camus2
give us your insight,dont be shy,where you do you think they come from?

------
jonheller
Conversely, I've found the answers to be less and less helpful and more rude.
Just yesterday I asked a question as I thought my web server was spawning a
new port for each request. The response was:

"You are just wrong. There is no port shown in the URLs as the slash after the
domain."

He was right, but what is with the need to phrase it that way?

------
DodgyEggplant
SO saves time, but drives away the expertise: If I need a help in a bigger,
complex and not so trivial questions such as what framework to choose (e.g.
angular vs backbone), chances are that question will be closed as not
relevant. That leave very technical specific questions which are easily
answered by references book.

------
wyager
Perhaps, after all this time, there are fewer questions left to ask.

~~~
jqm
That's my thought.

People who care to do the research probably can find the answer in most cases
because it has been asked before.

Leaving the new questions to (generally) be asked by people too lazy to do
basic research.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
Occasionally I come across a problem that I cannot find an answer to. I post a
question that meets SO criteria.

Lately I find that people answer less and less. And those that do take the
time, often don't follow up if I come up with additional information.

------
camus2
I dont think "crappy questions" are a problem so much than the inability to
filter the crap. With SO being that popular there will always be loads of
crap, the issue is as a user i dont have the tools right now to filter
crap(questions being downvoted for instance).SO doesnt want to finish like
Quora,does it?

