

 Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of “niceness” on a Q&A site - bussetta
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/08/stack-exchange-is-not-a-forum-the-role-of-niceness-on-a-qa-site/

======
radagaisus
StackOverflow has been overrun by anal people. Internet power attracts this
kind of douchebags like moths to light. If you write 'Hello,' in questions the
system will automatically delete it, if you - god forbid - write 'Thanks!'
other users will edit your question to remove it. I can't explain how fucking
weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website
they don't even own.

StackOverflow is a crazy good system for Q&A. Just like in Wikipedia, the
problem is no longer trolls - but bureaucracy and pedanticism of the
moderators. People are assholes who like power, and I don't think any q&a
software can solve this.

~~~
steve8918
I absolutely LOVE stackoverflow. I've been working on my own for about 9
months, and without SO, there would have been zero chance I would be able to
make any progress.

But I do agree about the criticism of the moderators. I also think that there
is almost a "Stanford Prison Experiment" level of power-wielding amongst some
of the mods. There are examples of someone/me asking a question, and then
someone closing it as a dupe, when in fact the question isn't a dupe. It might
be superficially similar, but the mods don't take enough time to actually read
the question and see if it's a dupe or not. And the rest of us are powerless
to do anything about it.

But this is the minority of cases for me. For the most part, SO is a
completely invaluable tool, and I love it immensely.

I think removing "Thanks" is a bit too abrasive. Maybe 10+ years ago, the NYC
subway system tried getting ticketing agents to stop saying "Thanks" because
they thought it would make things more efficient, and all it did was piss off
the passengers. It's trivial, but there has to be a base level of civility
between participants. I get that upvoting is "Thanks", but we're still humans
(at this point), and trying to make communication more "efficient" by removing
natural human responses makes it too terse, and almost insulting sometimes.
It's a small thing, and I think it's better to just leave it in, because it's
nice to say "thanks".

~~~
cruise02
> There are examples...

Where are these examples? This is the internet. Please provide links.

> And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it.

That's simply not true. Stack Exchange provides a Meta site where you can take
up issues with the entire community. <http://meta.stackoverflow.com/> You can
also email the company. They do read your emails.

As for removing "thanks," we really don't recommend doing that if it's the
_only_ thing you're going to change. However, it's not supposed to be
included, so removing it while making other edits is encouraged.

~~~
steve8918
I didn't know the meta.stackoverflow.com site existed. They should probably
make note of it when someone's question gets closed, so that the person asking
the question knows they can dispute it. There isn't any indication from the
FAQ that you can dispute things like questions being closed by posting to the
meta site.

Here's an example of my question that was closed on serverfault:

[http://serverfault.com/questions/342191/performance-of-
sql-s...](http://serverfault.com/questions/342191/performance-of-sql-server-
decreases-as-i-add-more-vcpus-on-esxi-5)

I specifically asked why my throughout for my database was more than doubling
when I decreased the number of vCPUs from 4 to 1. And it was closed as an
"exact dupe" of a question asking about how to optimize a VM's performance.
There's nothing to optimize in my situation, I had more physical cores than
vCPUs, so there was no over-allocation. I get that obviously there must be
some contention between the vCPUs, but to double the performance by dropping
to a single vCPU? I wouldn't see that type of performance hit on a physical
system otherwise multi-process databases wouldn't exist.

I had another question that was arbitrarily closed as a dupe, but I made a
comment disputing it, and by some small miracle, the mod removed the dupe
status. I can't remember which other question it was at this point since it
was modified to remove my comment and the closing. The point is that there is
no way to flag the question as being under dispute, and if the moderator
decided not to do anything about it, then I couldn't do anything (except post
to meta which I just learned today).

EDIT: I posted the wrong link, and just corrected it now.

~~~
3JPLW
Ha! A user that's not logged in can't even get to your ServerFault link.
They're silently redirected to the duplicate. Even more frustrating (to you, I
imagine) is that your question was closed unilaterally by a moderator -- the
same moderator that asked the question that it's redirecting to.

------
lkrubner
Shameless plug here...

Many times I have found myself needing to know about a technology with which
I’ve had little experience. If I have time to spend learning something new,
and if I think I’ll use the technology in the future, then I will enjoy
learning about it in depth, but often times, working against a deadline, I
have no time to learn, or perhaps I do not expect to ever use that technology
again.

An example of the latter would be my limited experience with the Perl
programming language. I recall when I was working for Danforth Diamond in
2005. I had to modify some of the old Perl scripts they had on their server. I
spent a week working with Perl, and it was the only week that I have ever
worked with Perl. I would have loved to have been able to quickly hire my own
private consultant for all of maybe 20 minutes, to ask some basic questions
about the language. As it was, I wasted days tracking down information via
Google, and reading tutorials that did not quite answer the exact question
that I had in my head.

My brain fought against me – it knew that I was not planning to work with Perl
again, so it was resistant to learning it in the first place. I was stuck in a
situation where I had to read through multiple articles about strings and
escaping and how to handle variables inside of strings – many wasted hours. My
life would have been much easier if I could have turned to someone who had a
lot of experience with Perl, and handed them $20 for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of
their time, to be allowed to fire away with questions like, “How do I put a
variable in a heredoc string?” and gotten instant answers, answers that were
tailored to me, answers that gave me exactly the information that I wanted,
and nothing superfluous.

Hoping to get fast answers to my questions, I started posting on various
forums. I have sometimes gotten fantastic assistance from various programmers
on these forums. One of the greatest things about the Internet is how much
people are generally willing to help one another for free. If you are trying
to learn a programming language such as Java, it is surprising how helpful
people will be on sites such as Java Ranch. And if you are trying to get
answers to your questions about WordPress, it is wonderful how much good
information you can get over at the WordPress forums.

And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I
find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but
someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is
“RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but
sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your
control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that
depended on jQuery for funtionality, and when I posted some of the code to a
forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead
programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have
the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had
been assigned.

We all seem a little stupid when we are learning a new skill. It doesn’t
matter how smart we are. We ask what the experts think of as painfully dumb
questions. Asking those dumb questions is essential to our learning process,
but it is understandable that answering such questions may seem tiring to
those who know a great deal about a given subject.

Hoping to get some high quality answers about Perl, I signed up for Experts
Exchange. At the time it cost $9.99 a month (as I said, this was back in
2005). Nowadays it costs $12 a month. The fact that it costs money seems to
introduce a level of seriousness to the conversations that is often absent on
the free forums. And yet, Experts Exchange suffers a fatal flaw – none of the
money goes to the people who answer the questions! The corporation, Experts
Exchange, keeps all the money to itself! This limits the usefulness of the
site. What I needed was an easy way to hire an expert for all of maybe 20
minutes, and give them some money, so they would take my dumb questions
seriously.

For that reason, we decided to make a site where programmers could pay money
to get fast, high quality help with their questions.

I have found that even small amounts of money radically changes the social
dynamic. Even $1 changes the social dynamic. As long as the advice is free,
those giving the advice feel free to show scorn for what they feel are stupid
questions. And yet, as soon as even a tiny amount of money is offered, the
dynamic changes around: the answers are respectful.

But then, after we launched our first site, we were confronted with another
problem: as soon as the askers are allowed to offer money, they are the ones
who become scornful. The askers can be rude or ignore community norms.

We asked ourselves, how could we balance the power of the askers and the
answerers, to achieve a perfect balance?

Our first thought was, "What if we allow the askers and the answerers to vote
on the money, and we average out everyone's vote?" We could impose the rule
that answerers were not allowed to vote money to themselves. But wait, we
realized, that doesn't work either: the answerers could just simply create a
dozen dummy accounts, and use 11 fake accounts to vote money to their 1 real
account.

So how could this be achieved?

After some careful thought, we decided the way to do this was to restrict
voting to those experts who had earned some money answering lots of questions.
If it took effort to gain the right to vote, then people could not easily
establish fake accounts and vote money to themselves.

We launched our first site, which is narrowly focused on just WordPress:

<http://www.wpquestions.com/>

The site gets moderate action, maybe $500 or $600 in questions a week. Over
the last 2 years it has seen over $50,000 go through it.

Next month we will start offering this software as a hosted service, so anyone
can open up their own site.

~~~
Pfhreak
_I have found that even small amounts of money radically changes the social
dynamic. Even $1 changes the social dynamic. As long as the advice is free,
those giving the advice feel free to show scorn for what they feel are stupid
questions._

Isn't this desirable, at times? Do you believe every question submitted to a
site like SO is value added? Even stuff like obvious calls for homework help
("I need to write a singly linked list in C++. I haven't tried yet, can
someone show me how to do it?")

~~~
lkrubner
>>stuff like obvious calls for homework help

Several people have written to us and asked permission to re-use our software
for sites focused on homework help. There are already many, many sites where
students can hire tutors, but most of those sites involve hiring a tutor for
some hours, and paying some hourly rate. The gamble that some people have
talked to us about is the possibility that some students would be willing to
pay $1 or $2 or $5 or $10 for quick help with specific questions about math,
science, or other subjects. Especially at the college level, it becomes
possible to imagine some students wanting quick help with a specific question,
or possibly needing help with a concept they having trouble understanding, for
instance, perhaps some complicated math problem.

So, certainly, I think homework questions are potentially a great area where
this software might be able to do a great deal of help.

------
Supermighty
I can't count the number of times I've found the perfect StackEschange answer
to my question and it was marked as "closed as not constructive" or closed for
off topic.

The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another
question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they
should change over time based on the changing environment.

~~~
cruise02
Then answer the old question. Or suggest an edit to one of the old answers if
it's out of date. Anyone can do those things, even with only 1 reputation
point. The system was designed specifically so answers _can_ change over time.

~~~
nmcfarl
This has happened to me, I was looking for an answer, and found a blatantly
wrong old answer (as some breaking changes in the toolkit had been made).

What I didn't have was an answer to provide, and so I moved on.

I'm not sure the tools given are effective enough for this problem.

------
melling
Here's what happened to me when I threw out what I thought an interesting
question then had a little debate about it on Meta. My question got extremely
downvoted.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-
elisp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-
function-to-convert-url-to-html-link)

The "rule" is that you must show some sort of effort before you ask a
question. I was honest and said that I didn't do anything, but I did make my
question well-defined, and I thought that it was useful, in general.

Anyway, if that's their rule, that's their rule. Personally, I'm interested in
seeing a "Wikipedia of Programming", where all good questions exist with good
answers.

For example, "How do I do X in Java|Perl|Scala|Haskell|Elisp|...?"

I think a site with enough questions would be the perfect site to take someone
from novice to guru. The big thing missing from StackOverFlow, IMHO, is that
there are lots of questions for popular topics like Java (280k)

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java>

Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected.

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp>

StackOverFlow doesn't want to be the site that connects the dots, which isn't
their business model. I think another site could fill the void.

~~~
eykanal
Your question was downvoted because it basically reads as, "I want to do X.
Please do it for me." The site is supposed to be a replacement for a smart
coworker. You wouldn't ask your coworker to do something like that, you'd ask
him for help with a specific part of it. Asking otherwise just comes across as
freeloading.

~~~
melling
Yes, that's the rule and I disagreed so I left the site. I'm interested in a
site to augment the wizardly elisp or Haskell guy you run into occasionally,
who you know could show you "the way". I don't use elisp in my day job, for
example, but when I get the rare chance to play with it, it would nice to have
a deeper repository of questions from which to learn.

~~~
k3n
The point is, it's not a "do my work/homework for me" site.

It's a "I tried to solve the problem this way, but it doesn't quite work; can
you show me what I'm doing wrong?" or a "I solved the problem this way, but it
seems really bad; is there a better way?"

I agree, asking a question without demonstrating an earnest attempt at solving
or understanding it shows to me that you didn't care enough about it to even
attempt it. Given that, why should _I_ care enough about it to attempt it?

Btw, I added a downvote to your question. It really is in poor form.

~~~
melling
Fair enough. If anyone wants to build the other site, let me know.

------
adaml_623
The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a
site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked.

A very common experience for me is to be searching for a solution to a
problem. Follow a link to Stack Overflow to find a page where somebody has
asked the question and been told they are asking the question in the wrong
place.

~~~
sedev
Contrary anecdote: I've several times had the experience of Googling for a
question and finding my own Stack Overflow question as a result, and using the
answer to solve my problem (again).

~~~
MartinCron
I am reminded of a story about my retired scientist grandfather. When he first
used the Internet, he did some searches about his field of study. A few pages
in, he thought, "this feels familiar" and checked the author of the paper he
was reading.

He had written it, about 30 years earlier.

------
debacle
I like that SE has taken a stance on this, and I like their stance. The
programming community, especially as it pertains to blogging, news, etc, has
been infiltrated by navel-gazing unproductive carebears that insist that you
have to be nice to get things done.

This isn't an MBA program, and HN/SE/reddit/etc are not networking arenas.
They're discussion boards.

~~~
hetman
And yet a major part of his point was that "discussion" is not enough. If
someone presents facts in a way that causes the person they are responding to,
to almost inevitably ignore everything they've said, then they've wasted their
time (aside from generating fleeting feelings of smug superiority).

It's funny how easy it is to lose sight of that (I've certainly done it
before). A discussion is only a discussion when information flows between two
parties, not when it is is broadcast into the void.

~~~
debacle
If you say something, and you're wrong, and I correct you, and you disregard
what I've said because I was abrasive, you're still ignorant. I've lost
nothing but hot air (or a few keystrokes).

~~~
Bootvis
But you also gained very little.

~~~
debacle
I gain nothing in either instance.

~~~
Bootvis
I can't speak for everyone but it seems to me one does gain something. If you
didn't, why bother at all? Whatever you gain may be small and it probably
doesn't have any monetary value but there should be some extrinsic motivation
to answer. There are plenty of alternative uses of your time.

Thus, my greater point is: when you have decided to answer, you should give
the best answer you can reasonably give in the time you want to use. It wont
hurt you and will improve the world a little bit.

------
wturner
I actually like the coldness of StackOverflow. It facilitates a culture that
conditions the participants to look things up before we go typing. From a
first-person perspective I kind of appreciate it.

~~~
Pfhreak
I agree. I want SO to approach reference documentation for common questions.
When I want to know about the syntax for a Python list comprehension, for
example, I want to see a number of examples arguing why they are a best
practice in a concise, no bullshit manner.

------
dinkumthinkum
SO is great, let's get that out of the way. Fine. Whatever. They are getting a
bit ridiculous and taking themselves too seriously. I mean that foolish "graph
of niceness," wow. There is a really good side to SO and a really weird side
and I don't think the good part is made that way because of the weird side.
The weird side is somewhat cultish, to just be honest. Honestly, this probably
because of a culture derived from one of the founders, in fact a particular
one of the founders would aggressively defend this cult of personality
behavior

Also, I found this strange:

>But in the end, this sort of navel-gazing misses the point: we’re not here to
pat each other on the back and hand out gold stars ...

Isn't this basically what SO is?

------
ctdonath
Dumbledore. Gandalf. Yoda. Keep them straight.

/ob pedantic

~~~
melling
It was an intentional geek troll. Geeks love to run into the weeds over stupid
little things. I think that was part of his point.

~~~
Robin_Message
I think the GP made his point for him.

