
My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow - luu
http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php
======
jofer
First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and
rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said.

I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the
chat communities. (By "chat", I mean:
[http://chat.stackoverflow.com/](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/))

There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with
it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It
effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's
not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can
pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.

Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt
to be closed as "too localized".

I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an
admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed
before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost
always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.

~~~
codinghorror
We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other
places. You want vote diversity.

~~~
rbobby
An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google
might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably
deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag.

I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently
(enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question...
but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something
"thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are
fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).

~~~
shagie
Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's
"closed" \- the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits
from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be
discussed again.

More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle
opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the
question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.

------
jasode
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel
Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009.
The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of
"anthropology". The science of trying to _really understand human behavior_
and make the website amplify good communities.

What I see 6 years later is a lot of " _why is this question closed as 'not
constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!_"

There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow
and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow
guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human
behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story
so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain.

I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if
stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time
writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage
abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework,
or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc.

On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are
mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?

So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad
questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the
2 situations is dominant.

[1][http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s](http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
Shog9
It's both.

The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend
the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience,
get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques
their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people
who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find
fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to...

The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming.
Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day
(Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging
around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this
(if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many
do, you drink from the firehose at
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest))
or some mixture (if you stick to the home page).

The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters
in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal
September thing, _because that 's most of what they see_. The chance of
dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just _stumbling upon_ a new
question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with
lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well...
You're probably not answering very much anymore.

The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front
of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my
homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick.

Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack
Overflow pretty much forever.

~~~
ellyagg
Who cares how many times a question comes up? That is just such a non-issue, a
peeve of a minority of replaceable people, because people are always
replaceable, including the ranks of those who answer the most questions.
Resurfacing questions is helpful for people new to programming topics and who
are just discovering the lay of the land by using the New filter on
StackOverflow. Novelty for advanced users should be an incredibly low
priority, yet because advanced users have power, it becomes a big priority.
The fact is, if some advanced users get bored by the stream of novice
questions and leave, that's fine, there will always be new experts to take
their place: SO is extremely popular that way.

What really frustrates me is that the usual interface to SO is Google, yet SO
closes so many questions as duplicates that this interface is massively under-
optimized. It would be much easier to find the solutions to problems if there
were variations in Google's index for every different way a question's been
asked (and answered).

And answering questions is a great way for intermediate developers to
concretize their own knowledge. There's always a new wave of developers
needing to learn. Why on earth SO fetishizes itself now as a DRY repository of
programming questions is beyond me. Ok, it's not actually beyond me, it's
because SO is made up of programmers, and programmers tend be compulsive about
DRYing up everything in sight even when that's not the best solution to the
problem.

The complaints of SO's elites are the same I've seen since always on mailing
lists and forums by the folks who have the most power and thus force their
ideals on everyone else. It repels novice users and creates a hostile
environment for mentoring and learning. What's sad is that when SO first came
out, it was set apart from these incumbents for being welcome, open, and
friendly.

Another side issue is that the SO culture almost certainly is not receptive to
female developers. I thought of this the other day when I saw some woman's
post in the negatives. The sort of chest-thumping, rule-brandishing nitpickery
that's the order of the day is an intimidating turn-off for a large swathe of
people.

What's happened to SO is why every institution has to be replaced eventually,
as SO will be, by some question and answer site that returns to SO's roots.
The world is crying out for it again the same way it was when SO was founded.

~~~
Shog9
Nice rant. Not sure how this relates to what you're replying to, so I'm not
gonna attempt to rebut it... But for future reference, "people are always
replaceable" tends to be a euphemism for "we're gonna treat you like canon
fodder" \- not really a good attitude, IMHO.

If you want to clarify what you're responding to, I can try to provide a more
helpful response; until then, here's some useful references for the "roots" of
SO's current policies:

\- [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-
long-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-
programming-questions/)

\- [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-
pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-
sand/)

------
O____________O
Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I
end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The
worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't
answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will
suffer the same aggravation or simply give up.

The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old
questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great
information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of
power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly
doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that
it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.

I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community,
"blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric
approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest
stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.

~~~
codinghorror
Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of
popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.

~~~
O____________O
Usually closed as non-constructive (I think that's S.O.'s wording).

------
jarcane
It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single
question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be
locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within
very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex).

It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that
community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me
with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often,
even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers
(often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over
some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator,
it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish
to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with
censure as actual assistance.

Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an
endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.

~~~
fredley
A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post.
The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are
finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive
a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism.

On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦
after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock
posts.

Disclosure: I am a Stack Exchange moderator

~~~
tjradcliffe
I'm curious about the five vote threshold. Has it been fixed throughout the
history of the site? Is it still appropriate given the degree to which the
site's popularity and traffic has grown?

~~~
jarcane
Indeed. I was really surprised by that number, and by the sheer number of
people with edit/delete privileges.

That's just begging for abuse.

------
nvivo
Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes
it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your
question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question
should be on stackoverflow".

It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people
with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.

~~~
Guvante
"Which site do I submit to" shouldn't be as hard of a problem for certain.

Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as
anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for
professional questions not minor schema questions).

~~~
_almosnow
Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller
than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there
so someone may help me".

~~~
Guvante
I find the true value of SO to be "populating google with good answers to
questions", but that is just me :).

------
teh_klev
I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of
context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions
being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of
expertise [0].

I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a
really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There _is_ a rising
deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an
"expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are
missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're
working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS
they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own
participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years.

I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in
comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented
much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his
ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar.

I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an
"answerer".

[0]:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*)

[1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I
played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and
that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of
upfront research).

~~~
bigger_cheese
I have noticed the same thing I do not visit the site all that often I usually
check it once a fortnight or so in my lunch break. I tend to browse the
"Linux" section. Everytime I visit it feels like Deja-Vu the same questions
keep appearing, there will almost always be questions like "How can I get my
program to run as a daemon?", "Why am I seeing Zombie processes?" and some
variation on "How can I get the PID of my running process?".

Quite a lot of questions seem to have a negative score or are locked for
seemingly no good reason and the ones that aren't are questions like the above
that are easily googleable.

A lot of the time it feels like the person asking the question hasn't bothered
to a) read man page or b) do a google search beforehand or they lack basic
knowledge about Linux - such as what the /proc file system is for.

------
Ensorceled
My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an
accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here."

SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming
information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer
the purview of elite.

~~~
jgh
I dunno these days it seems like Google is sending me to Chinese sites that
just scrape SO and repost all the questions/answers.

------
lordnacho
Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the
answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of
comments about why it's closed.

I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked
at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a
certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and
common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.

If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting
stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a
question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is.
If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.

------
jarrettc
I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each
other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say
something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B.

I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user
inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming
question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the
original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming
concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a
programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit
could be problematic.

Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to
have to.

~~~
_kst_
You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your
posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit
wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag
for moderator attention if it comes to that.

~~~
lstamour
I didn't realize how much edit comments (description of changes) mattered
until I saw some of my deleted/unapproved edits. E.g. Editing an answer to add
an environment variable that was actually required was denied. I ended up
writing it as a comment and had someone thank me for it in the comments. Had
the edit been accepted there would have been less comment spam and more "good
answer" on that page...

------
Goronmon
I'm actually struggling to recall the last time I followed a link to a
StackOverflow question where the question wasn't closed for some reason or
another. It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only goal of the
site is curate old content.

------
jrochkind1
I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer,

But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-
formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about --
and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just
want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who
similarly have no idea what they're talking about)

Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to
program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't
actually going to get you very far.

Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain
the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when
I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to
be closed/deleted as inappropriate.

Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's
true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it
doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or
dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off
that it's not even possible.

But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get
fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's
office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?

------
icehawk219
I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its
community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer
ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends
is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the
vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack
Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an
answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had
a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.

------
vorg
> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the
> long-term content of the site is much more important

Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the
programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in
programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid
to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will
inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and
instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered
questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community
for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented
without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to
end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-
sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation
subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the
primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages.

Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy
as an example of this new type of language: " _The endless variety of features
requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially
for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you
jump in today, you 'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to
master_". [http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-
conundrum/240147731](http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-
conundrum/240147731)

~~~
7952
People learn languages from different routes depending on their background. A
complete beginner to programming probably needs tutorials and will not
understand a language reference that is most useful for an experienced coder.
Stack overflow is more like a recipe book that happens to let you list the
ingredients. But that is a poor alternative to tutorials and proper
documentation.

------
PythonicAlpha
One of the "Soup Nazis" here:

I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one
example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!).

The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other
posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as
reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and
answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote
differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I
made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system,
to adhere to the "group standard".

I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is
less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the
rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but
how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers?

I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as
it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered
by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the
more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.

------
mmphosis
SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009
seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing
and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from
contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and
comments, but "no soup for you."

One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is
somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I
would mention it. [http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-
microsoft/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/)

As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new
programming QA site.

~~~
davelnewton
SO-the-infrastructure might be biased towards MS, but the people on it
certainly don't tend to be, at least in the tags I'm involved in.

------
claimstoknow
Oh you have a problem with stack overflow? Sure i could help you with that,
but what's the problem you're _really_ trying to solve?

------
eitland
This comment at the end states it very well:

"Stack overflow has failed to understand it’s mission. Stackoverflow exists to
share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by
indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a
primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary
strategy of ranking good content highest."

------
mmorett
After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try
and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You
know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution.

I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to
users hitting this issue.

Here's that question: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-
generate-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-
report-in-excel-or-pdf-format-in-groovy/28549845#28549845)

I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed
here.

"Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library,
tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they
tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..."

Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the
NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.

Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped
them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In
some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented
that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.

You win StackOverflow.

------
EdSharkey
I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question
is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark
in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a
valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why
is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional!

Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par
question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of
the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add
value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work
with.

~~~
reitanqild
Agreed. As much as I found JSF horrible, BalusC has made it less so for years
it seems.

What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into
being helpful. Same goes for others.

Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems
to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.

------
Falkon1313
Sounds like early Wikipedia. It started out fun - people from all over working
together and helping each other out to create something that was going to
change the world. My contributions may not have been the best quality
possible, but others would edit or offer suggestions for improvement.
Sometimes others would start something and get stuck, and I could offer an
edit or suggestion to get them going again. To see the entries grow and
improve, and be a part of a group helping each other to become better and
achieve more, was one of the great things about it. Together, we made
something from nothing.

Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and
took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to
contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who
contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or
suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions.

It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia
survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.

------
jph
#1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on
answers.

I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried
below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where
technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when
toolchains are moving to new tools.

Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional
information. Some examples: "This older answer is for version 1, and this
newer answer is for version 2", or "This older answer is specifically for
bash, and this newer answer is specifically for zsh".

~~~
Veedrac
What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?

~~~
jph
For example:

* Wiki-style editing of some kind, along with collaboration tooling, and users can annotate particular pieces of information within an answer.

* Ability to combine/collaborate on multiple answers, such as beginning with introductory information relevant to all the answers, then having some kind of sectioning for specific information for each version.

Two small steps can help toward this:

* Mark an answer as applicable to a specific version number, or range, or date, or implementation.

* Enable the question author to accept an additional new answer that is more current, without subtracting points from the original answer.

------
LeoPanthera
I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to
discover that people can edit your questions.

I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which
was then edited to be a _different_ question, so that the answers I got were
entirely useless.

I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to
change the meaning of what you posted.

~~~
Latty
If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the
question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod
should intervene.

~~~
reitanqild
Problem is it is the mods who do it, isn't it.

New users cannot edit questions?

~~~
code_duck
New users can make suggested edits, which are sent into a moderation queue
before being applied. Once you reach a certain level of reputation (2000), you
can edit other users' content without moderation.

[http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit](http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit)

------
elchief
The worst part is the new users who don't have the faintest clue as to what
they're doing, and the annoying duplicates. And sometimes I get shat on for
asking the question not quite right.

1\. Need to incentivize new users to read some real basic FAQs before posting.
Not sure what the best solution is. Fascist Me wants to see them walk through
a wizard, agreeing that they understand basic topic X before continuing, but
that doesn't sound too user friendly.

2\. Need some better text similarity with Latent Semantic Indexing or
something to find duplicates. I'll see new questions that I _know_ are recent
duplicates, but then can't even find an example. Doh.

~~~
hawleyal
I am constantly amazed how mods can find a duplicate I could not, and I
consider myself a fairly savvy googler.

Edit:

Instead of forcing RTFM on every new user, I don't see why new users should
not have immediate tryout without reprocussions and learn the guidelines from
a kindly mod or other user replying with a reason why their question is not
appropriate/duplicate or whatever. That is the point of upvotes/downvotes and
active moderation. This is a learning community, not a cadre of elitists.

------
balls187
Is there a correlation between Atwood leaving, and the eventual take over of
internet community zealotry?

I've yet to participate in a forum where that doesn't occur.

------
dicroce
I agree with everything said and I'd also like to add this:

I used to enjoy visiting the site because quite often there was a nice general
question on the front page that related to me in some way... Well, ALL of the
general CS type questions are answered now... and any new ones are closed as
dups almost immediately.. Which means the questions that survive these days
are hyper specific, and not very useful or enjoyable...

------
jorjordandan
As users of stack overflow, product hunt, & hacker news, we have to subject
ourselves to the tyranny of the upvote. We have effectively banished unpopular
questions and ideas. Or great ideas conveyed in an unpopular manner.

Unfortunately, there is no better way to self-organize and moderate large
masses of user generated information..

------
carc
Sure stack overflow isn't perfect, but shit... Do you know how much
productivity would be lost on a global scale if the site suddenly disappeared?
I still use it in some capacity almost every day. Sure some of the rules might
be nit picky and can be obnoxious sometimes, but nothing is perfect.

~~~
ProAm
We're not saying it's perfect, we are saying its usefulness/quality is going
downhill. It was never perfect.

------
msoad
> 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions.

I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.

~~~
Veedrac
You can only vote to delete closed questions over a certain age.

Eg: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-
rust...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust-
examples)

------
tempestn
Just a thought, but how about letting privileged users vote to keep a question
_open_ , which would negate some number of close votes? (As well as a delay
before closing, even once the votes were obtained.) Also if someone is in the
process of writing an answer, that should count against closing.

I tend to agree with the OP that sorting and filtering are a better solution
to maintaining quality than unnecessarily closing marginal questions. However,
some questions certainly need to be closed. The problem (or at least a
problem) seems to be that with such a large number of privileged users,
hitting a 5 vote threshold is not difficult, even if the question doesn't
deserve to be closed. Increasing the threshold would be one solution, but
would make unnecessary moderation work. A don't-close vote seems like
potentially a better solution.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, looks like I'm not the first one to have this idea:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-
vot...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vote-not-to-
close-option-to-counter-the-vote-to-close)

------
ryan-allen
I reckon about 20% of the things I find on Stack Overflow while searching via
Google are questions that have been closed for being irrelevant.

And my favourite questions are often those ones in the 20%, for example, when
you type "1nf vs 2nf vs 3nf" into Google, the top page, is this StackOverflow
post:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-
are-1nf-2nf-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-
and-3nf-in-database-design)

Despite the fact that the top answer has 218 upvotes, the question has been
closed as 'not constructive' (which is cearly not the damn case, it's the top
hit in Google for fuck sake!).

Stack Overflow should either stop this from happening somehow, or back their
own goddamn policy and deindex or remove this content from the site.

That answer can no longer be improved upon, despite the fact it has such high
search ranking, because some idiot deemed it 'not constructive'. What hogwash.

There is clearly a gap in the market right here that Stack Overflow either
needs to plug, or someone else will (and at their expense).

------
charlieflowers
I can't think of another site that had such a huge gap between its very high
potential and its very low fulfillment of that potential.

~~~
zem
twitter? pre-cesspool twitter had a lot of potential

------
greggman
I really wish there were better options on SO for dealing with "offtopic"
questions

Sometimes a question seems like someone is just asking for an answer, like
posting their homework, and hasn't tried anything or even googled at all for
help. Maybe those questions should be closed and deleted with prejudice but if
I was giving the benefit of the doubt I'd prefer to move them to
"pergatory.stackoverflow.com". I guess that's what they are by closing them
but.

But, often there are noob questions that are similarly frustrating but giving
the person the benefit of the doubt maybe they really don't know where to
start. If wish I could click a button that said [Move to
noob.stackoverflow.com] or something like that where people with more patience
or that just like helping noobs could be more helpful.

I also wish it was easier and required when marking as duplicate to provide a
link to the duplicate.

------
bradleysmith
This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO
and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of
questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a
feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question
adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by
looking at similar questions or documentation. I know that this is partly the
intention of the mods: go do your homework before asking. But, it can swing to
be the flipside: homework of asking is as long or longer than deciphering your
problem. In my experience, much of a questioners research to prepare their
question was UNRELATED to their problem, so the amount of information included
in the question is far above and beyond what is necessary to solve their
variable typo, or whatever.

Where this is a good thing for the long-term usefulness of SO, like the OP
said it takes away from the short-term usefulness of the site for us plebian
self-doubters.

Having said that, previously asked questions on SO answer ~90% of my
programming questions, so they're obviously doing something right.

I've thought before that a 'staging area' for questions might be useful, where
a question gets posted by _anon_idiot_user_ like me asking why thier code
won't run because of something simple. It is marked as 'not useful' for
whatever reason, but can still offer (diminished) reputation to answerers.
After a particular amount of time, the question is removed from the SO 'canon'
(i.e. unpublished and deleted), but the reputation sticks. Nobody's ego is
hurt from having thier stupid question memorialized, and mods would be more
forgiving to stupid questioners knowing it will go away once solved.

just an idea. All in all, I'm eternally grateful to SO and it's 'asshole
mods'. They've taught me more programming than any other entity on the web.

EDIT: Clarity

~~~
chc
The problem of bad questions isn't just "having stupid questions
memorialized." It's that it takes away from good questions.

There is a finite number of people who can answer a question, and these people
have a finite amount of time. They don't necessarily know a question is going
to be bad before they read it, so if a bad question stays, it continues
wasting more and more people's time, and taking time from other people who did
put in the effort to ask a good question. So instead, the question is closed
while you improve it, and the idea is for it to be reopened when you're done.

------
psp
The recent funding news seemed really strange when I have been feeling like
the author for a while. I think SO is going downhill fast and people running
it don't even realize it. Joel, where are you? So sad, used to like SO when it
came around and now the way it's being moderated makes you want to just leave.

------
strangename
SO jumped the shark for me when its scope shifted hard from the original
goals. I remember the original seedling goals that Spolsky posted; for
example, a question is likely inappropriate for SO if its answer couldn't
involve code. That got lost awful fast.

Oh, and remember how it was going to be all Wikipedia of programming, where
really good answers would be zipped together so that SO became the defacto
good-idea repository? And could evolve over time? Such a good idea. Never
materialized.

Proper props for putting in the effort. Better than e-e. Usually, though
definitely not always, better than isolated boards. But now we're in a good-
enemy-of-best world where I still want some site or system addressing the
original problems, but SO is so dominant I don't see how it could germinate.

~~~
danielweber
SO has definitely out-stripped what came before. They were generation 1 and
had gen-1 problems.

SO is generation 2, better than generation 1. But it's having gen-2 problems.
I think a lot of it is because they are so proud of having fixed the gen-1
problems that they refuse to see their gen-2 problems.

Eventually we will see generation 3.

------
MilnerRoute
Hacker News faced some of the same issues when people complained about
excessive down-voting.

I remember some of the solutions proposed were a higher threshold for
downvotes as the site grew, and the requirement that an actual explanation be
typed in with every anonymous downvote or deletion.

------
aaronchall
I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some
friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site.

But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because
it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a
lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have.

But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin and hardened my
resolve, and I'm in the top 3% of users now. I expect my current body of work
on the site to put me in the top 1% within a year or so, with no further work
from me.

The answer to this is to build a better StackOverflow, if you can. But I don't
think you can.

~~~
sergiotapia
At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut
and full of questions and answers for common things.

"Running out of questions." comes to mind.

Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag
about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and
I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!)
and I'm in the top 5%.

~~~
aaronchall
That's a good point, but the top 1% (where I expect to be in a year or two) is
close to the end of a long tail. Not many people get there by asking
questions, and I only started contributing about a year and a half ago.

That percentile rank is a foot in the door in a lot of situations. If someone
who is interested in me finds out it's because I give comprehensive smart
answers with strong communication, in spite of the fact that I wasn't around
when there were lots of easy questions to be had, I think I've got something
pretty good to brag about.

That's not to say that I wouldn't consider someone who asks lots of good
questions too. That requires communication skills as well as technical skills.
I personally find it harder to ask good questions than to give good answers.

------
brudgers
{Based on my recollection of something I heard listening through the
StackOverflow/StackExchange Podcast archive.}

The example of the Python question about angles is from 2011. I believe that
subsequent to that time there were changes to both the close process and the
reopening process. Part of the problem I think was that close votes
accumulated and did not expire, so that they would stick even after a question
was edited or months had passed since the vote was cast.

The most recent podcast...about taking more Venture Capital...discussed some
of the cultural issues that have developed at StackOverflow. There are two
significant pools of users: those like me who know a little or nothing, and
those who know a lot. One of the goals of the funding is to make StackOverflow
work better for both...at least that was my impression from the podcast.

At the top end, the gamification has problems. It doesn't matter how
competitive or smart anyone is, they aren't going to catch John Skeet any time
soon. So people make up things to entertain themselves. Anyone else remember
the popular Meta about deliberately feeding bad algorithms to suspected
homework questions?

It's always been clear [you can listen to six plus years of Joel and Jeff and
the gang yourself] that the longterm purpose of StackOverflow is not helping
the person originally asking the question. It's making the internet better.
It's also always been clear that there was a tension between questions that
are interesting to experts and questions that are so basic that only an
absolute beginner will ask them. The test case was:

    
    
        How do I move the Turtle in Logo? [1][2]
    

It's simple, clear, to the point, and offensive to some programmers.

[1]:
[http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2)

[2]:
[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mov...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=moving+a+turtle+in+logo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

------
kbart
SO is one of the best things that has happened on Internet, but lately it
became really annoying due to all these closed questions by over-zealous
moderators. More often than not, my questions are closed just because they are
not mainstream (for example, embedded related) or _slightly_ reassembles
existing questions, that ask totally different things. One solution, that
comes to my mind could be not to allow _all_ moderators close _all_ questions,
but only these, that are in moderator's area of expertise. For example, if you
want to close a question tagged "Java", you must have >5000 or so reputation
in Java field.

------
erikb
I don't use SO to ask questions any more, but it's really good for searching
stuff you already know but don't like to remember, like if that method used
camelCase() or under_score(), what the annoying workaround for that little
quirk in the framework of your choice was, etc.

I feel beside the new stuff that comes from new FWs and languages most
questions seem to be answered. Therefore starting to focus on long term
quality is not a bad thing.

Most of my recent work in SO was also not asking questions but
correcting/connecting answers that are already there.

------
damian2000
The thing that pisses me off the most is when you put the effort into a
question that doesn't have an existing solution anywhere on the Internet,
including on SO. Within a few seconds of posting, it gets a downvote but no
comment. Getting a downvote results in immediate loss of visibility. It really
puts you off using the site again. Its happened to the last several questions
I've posted.

------
z3t4
About the question about "this" in JavaScript. And how to "get rid of it". I
always give it another name! Like car = this. Then I'll write car.engine
instead of this.engine. It makes life much easier as I do not have to worry
about "car" changing in sub-functions. And it's much easier to search and
replace if I want to change the variable name.

------
phkahler
One of the examples he gives falls under computational geometry even if its a
basic question. Categorically those have become off-topic even though there is
a tag for it. Seriously, go find something that requires some dot or cross
products to compute and ask it - but not anything that resembles a graph,
because they like graph theory.

------
emodendroket
I agree that SO gets overzealous about closing questions but I don't think I
needed a page-long summary of the Market Basket saga (as if I didn't hear
enough about it this summer) and the rest of it to get to that point.

------
stickperson
I've been using IRC to ask questions instead of Stack Overflow for some time
now. Each room has its own character, but I've found people are generally very
helpful.

~~~
code_duck
It depends, I suppose. The last time I used IRC in a technical help channel,
someone asked for a simple way to open a bare X screen. I gave the answer I
knew, which I got from a mandrake system script. It has worked for me for
years on Debian and Ubuntu:

    
    
        xinit -- /usr/bin/X :1
    

And right away, a group of 3-4 clueless people or trolls told the asker that I
was attempting to harm their system and not to listen to me. It wasn't very
productive or fun.

------
rrggrr
Im so grateful for stack overflow. Big thanks to everyone who contributes.
Those of us who need to get stuff done owe you our lives, almost literally.

------
curiously
the key to not getting your answered close is to copy paste large text of
garbage code that these zealous mods won't bother reading through. the large
wall of code allows the question to appear to carry merit and come across as a
coding question, when in reality it has nothing to do with the question.

This is what is happening. the quality of the questions has deteriorated so
much instead of improving.

the people providing quality answers have moved on.

when the chicken leaves and the eggs start rotting, that's when you know, the
decline is the beginning.

------
_almosnow
I used to love SO, but nowadays the proportion of assholes running the site is
so big that it ruins everything.

To give you an example, check out the last question I've asked there:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-
assignment...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment-
overload-for-different-types).

11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the
moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his
gang to downvote me as well, some other guy even threatened to deactivate my
account. That is SO now, and I no longer try to engage into that community.

Edit: Looking at how the votes in my question are evolving as we speak, I see
that some guys still go in and downvote it more. Read out the question, and
check out the really good accepted answer, if you don't think that's valuable
information for many programmers out there then I'm at a loss of words.

~~~
3JPLW
Well, you didn't _just_ ask why it's off topic. You threw around insults and
used very vulgar language.
[http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions)

~~~
_almosnow
Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in
the link you posted.

And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving
like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed
off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life?
Apparently not, lucky you.

~~~
jusben1369
Good Lord. The sense of entitlement it takes to use language like that and
_then_ post it here and expect people will be supportive of your argument.
This is a side topic but one I see often. I think it's very important that
Europeans/UK/Aussie's realize the "c word" is one of the few swear words that
doesn't travel well in the US. It's _never_ used here and is extremely vulgar.
So I would not use it on the web unless you are sure that your audience is
primarily European and specifically the UK. (Grew up in Australia through
University. Lived in Europe. Have lived now in the US a long time)

~~~
sergiotapia
The web is global, deal with it.

~~~
jusben1369
The Web is indeed global which is my point. The word in question has a very
different meaning so best not to use it unless you're prepared for the
fallout.

------
itsbits
Hating this coz of few assholes?? There is no perfect world..

