
Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? - tshepang
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252077/321731
======
jfc
When I first started programming, I could use SO without asking a question
because everything I needed to know was fairly basic. It was great because
many of the answers I came across helped me to understand more of the "broader
universe" of issues I would encounter during development, and so encouraged me
to research and learn more about the language.

Once I started asking questions, I was careful to respond to comments and
accepted and upvoted the best answers. I wanted to be a good citizen of the
community. And reciprocity was a part of that: eventually, I found myself able
to respond to questions and I remember how great it felt to see the first +25
on my profile because someone accepted my answer.

These days, if I ask a question it's because I've spent a good amount of time
on it and haven't been able to resolve it myself. Here's what happens when I
ask a question on SO:

1 - I ask the question, post the code, and the error message I'm getting

2 - Question downvoted

3 - Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it's not, which I
clarify to avoid "closed as duplicate")

4 - Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was
cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear
that the missing semicolon isn't the issue)

5 - Question upvoted

6 - An answer! Says that I need to read the docs and provides a link to a non-
relevant section (I've read the docs)

7 - Finally, a helpful answer! Looks pretty good, so I test it out and it does
the job. I accept and upvote the answer.

8 - Notice a duplicate answer posted less than 1 minute after the accepted
answer. Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I
advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they
reply that it is a time zone bug.

9 - Later I check back and notice this message: "Question closed as vague and
cannot be answered"

10 - Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my question

11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed

~~~
michh
I especially hate having to be so defensive.

E.g. in phrasing my question, specifically having to mention a whole bunch of
things that obviously aren't the problem but people are going to insist on
anyway unless I've already mentioned them myself.

Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not
going to help you with your actual problem".

It can be incredibly helpful to point this out. But often I'm doing things in
a certain way for a reason (constraints that aren't relevant for the question,
like "yeah but our entire codebase").

So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make
it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and
stop commenting. But it often ends up being a massive distracting derail
preventing others from trying to answer the question I was actually asking in
the first place. Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with
upvotes.

For example:

> "I can't connect to my database due to error 110, I have no idea what that
> means"

"Why aren't you using an ORM?"

> "I have good reason not to, besides, I'm just looking to fix error 110 now"

"But a good ORM handles these types of errors for you, it'd be stupid not to
use it"

> "You're probably right, but that'd require a lot of rewriting and
> refactoring and that's simply not an option right now"

"Ok, get back to me when you're actually using an ORM and still having trouble
with your database"

when all I'm looking for is "That's a connection timeout, tried checking your
firewall configuration?"

~~~
stelonix
I couldn't agree more. I've gone on and on endless rants on how people in the
computer science/software engineering field (including but not limited to SO
users) usually avoid "unusual" questions by asking _what is it exactly you 're
trying to do_, instead of _being objective_ and answering.

When I've decided to post on SO, it means I've failed miserably at finding a
solution on the internet and it's usually a very unusual question. I'm sure
there's a nice design pattern I _could_ be using or there's a different, more
standard way to do it, but I do not post on SO as a newbie in the field (or at
least I avoid such questions).

My solution to avoid that kind of answer is to open my post giving all the
reasons why I'm not doing it the usual way (for example, why I'm using plain
WINAPI instead of MFC, .NET or whatever newer technology is out there). I
still get suggestions I'm doing The Wrong Thing ™[0] though.

[0]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9199542/disabling-
visual...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9199542/disabling-visual-
styles-in-manifest-while-retaining-common-controls-
functionalit#comment11591539_9199542)

EDIT: After posting this, the comment linked in [0] seems to be removed, but
it was something along the lines of _" Any reason you want your app to look
old? :)"_

~~~
ryandrake
"What are you trying to do?" is probably the most passive-aggressive, most
infuriating and least helpful answer to any technical question.

It usually translates to "I know the answer to your question, but instead of
just answering it and letting us both get on with our lives, I'd like to show
off my vast intellect by helping you embark on a major re-design that you
neither asked for nor need at the moment."

~~~
chc
I ask questions like this a lot, and that is not at all what it's about. The
motivation for asking what somebody is trying to do is that I don't know a
good answer to the question they asked, but I have a nagging feeling that
their question might actually be reducible to a different question that I can
answer easily. It would be presumptuous to just answer a completely different
question, though, so I ask for clarification whether this is in fact the
context that it looks like. To put it another way, they're asking "How do I
hit glass with stone without breaking it?" but what they actually want to know
is "How do I get the lid off a beer bottle?" The fact that they currently
believe removing a beer lid involves striking the bottle with a rock doesn't
necessarily mean that answers along those lines are the most helpful. But I
can't be sure when I see that question whether they are thinking about a beer
bottle.

For example, yesterday a guy asked a rather complicated question about hacking
the Objective-C runtime to replace a class in the inheritance tree. But from
his question, I was able to infer that what he actually wanted to do was
globally change a class's behavior. So I answered the question that I read
between the lines. His response was, "Oh, yeah, I don't know why I didn't do
that to begin with." In that case I felt sure enough to answer without asking,
but in other cases I'm not as confident whether this is actually a different
question in disguise.

------
captainmuon
Expanded from a comment I left:

I think he is missing a camp, to which I'd count myself: 5. Those users who
visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others.

Like 1 they want to have nice content on the site, but their number one
criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is
objective/it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the
wikipedia-like deletionism of 1. They would enjoy and benefit from even the
"worst cardinal sin" kind of questions, like "What is the best node.js
framework as of early 2014?". (The question would have many answers and would
be a bit messy, but a novice could quickly gauge what frameworks there are,
which ones are popular, and around which ones there is controversy.)

They dont't care much about 2 ("help vampires"), answer the questions if it is
not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't like the term, and
absolutely hate it when 1 accuses them of being one. It is incredibly rude
when one closes your question for supposedly being "homework".

They don't care about 3 ("rep whores") either, and find the grudge of 1
against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and
contributing useful content! Like 3, they enjoy getting rep (or XP), and try
to unlock new features on the site, but isn't that the point of gamification?

Basically, these are the people who also care about the site and the
community, but are less obsessive and deletionist (I'm looking for a less
offensive word for anal-retentive...) than the vocal majority on SO and
Wikipedia.

~~~
gnaffle
Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you
Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions.

Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-
offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview
of the available alternatives.

I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and
create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.

~~~
mlangdon
As is usually mentioned on the "Take my SO, please" discussions on HN, there
is a site for that[1], which I usually forget about when I have that type of
question.

[1] [http://www.slant.co](http://www.slant.co)

~~~
gnaffle
Ah, thanks!

------
everyone
As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game
developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable. I
was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I
didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there.
I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a
lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite
baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be
answering questions there.

Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help
vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most
important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.

I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite
steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays,
there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you
just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.

Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky
comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly
because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns
out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that
this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what
its called I can just search for resources on it. Theres no way I would have
been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-
wa...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wave-steeper)

~~~
TillE
The reason you were given for closing the question is terrible ("lacks
sufficient information", what?), but you were basically asking a simple math
question on a programming site.

This is the trouble with being _too_ specific. It's often better to say:
here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that?
Describe your actual problem first, before getting into your attempted
solution.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Definitely better suited to the math stack exchange site, I would have thought

~~~
dspeyer
IIRC, mathoverflow maintains a "nothing an undergrad could reasonably be
expected to know" policy.

~~~
fabian2k
There are two math sites, Math Overflow is for professional mathematicians
(and started outside the SE network). Math SE is for everyone with math
questions.

------
btilly
I am in a 5th camp. I like going for interesting discussion.

However after having people from group 1 decide that the discussion that I
wanted was happening on off topic questions. There was one particular case
where group 1, the moderation nazis, decided that the question was "off topic"
and should be deleted. After I complained about it here, people went and voted
it back into existence. But I've been pretty close to inactive there since
once I'd had that taste of moderation and realized that, as far as the site
was concerned, the moderation nazis were mostly correct - the kind of
algorithm questions that I found fun were off topic.

See [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-
ex...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-exclusion-of-
numbers/11317787) for the particular question that lead to my getting
frustrated with the site.

~~~
ericb
I left for the same reason. I wish someone would open a competitor where we
could have these discussions.

~~~
LunaSea
Wouldn't Quora be an alternative for subjective / vague questions ?

~~~
hueving
The forced sign-up is so scummy that it drives many users (including myself)
away.

~~~
btilly
Ditto.

------
marcus_holmes
I always wondered if this point would come.

Because there's no method of recycling karma from people who have left the
community, there must be a source of new karma that will allow new members of
the community to take part in the community.

Since the only way of creating karma is to answer questions, this means there
must be a constant stream of new questions sufficient to provide karma for all
the new people.

But new technologies aren't being generated fast enough to provide a constant
stream of new questions that can be answered easily enough to generate the
stream of new karma required.

So we see duplicate questions being answered instead of being marked as
duplicate because answering them creates karma but flagging them as duplicate
doesn't. Only the existing moderators, who have "enough" karma, care about
flagging duplicates.

So we end up here, by design.

~~~
astrobe_
That's an interesting point of view for the "karma economy" angle; I believe
there's always enough karma sources, or rather there's always ways to create
them if the scope of the site is wide enough. I would push the idea a bit
further and introduce karma destruction. To me, the most useful way to destroy
karma points is to introduce a karma-based site subscription; that is, one
subscribes to the site in order to read/write it but there is a constant fee
of N karma points per day. User contributions are tipped with karma points
taken from the upvoter/downvoter's karma pool. Eventually, one may let user
buy free access (but not karma points directly otherwise it becomes a
plutocratic system) in order get some support money.

~~~
marcus_holmes
Or they could award karma for doing things that keep the community as they
want it. Like flagging duplicates, tidying up code examples, etc.

Karma Economics... I like it :)

~~~
ufo
They already award some karma for doing those stuff but its a very small
amount and it sometimes has a cap (IIRC, you only gain karma for your firt 500
edits)

------
andreyf
I don't think "keeping the site clean", as the linked author mentions, should
be the goal of moderators, with the exception of obvious spam or questions so
confusing they don't make sense.

Moderators who close questions they deem as "dirty" questions on SO (e.g. my
question here [1]), remind me of the Wikipedia moderators who delete an
article I'm explicitly looking for as not notable enough to be on the site.

I wonder if their psychological motivations are similar, as well.

1\. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-
change...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-change-the-
font-selection-in-a-gmail-compose-window-from-javascript)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not
suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on
this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions,
or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the
founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.

~~~
userbinator
_That question is clearly not a programming question_

Not programming? When the first and only answer contains _JavaScript code_?
Looks like SO has a rather odd definition of "programming".

I don't use SO myself but often stumble across interesting bits of info on
there from Google, and also a lot of the puzzling "is this really off-topic?"
questions. That's mainly what put me off from registering and participating,
even to answer someone else's question/leave a comment - the community looks
far too rigidly moderated for my taste.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Fair point; you're totally correct. For some reason, I didn't see the 'from
JavaScript' trailing words at first (i've seen a lot of genuine, 'how do I use
this software' questions on SO before, which are definitely not programming)

------
kybernetyk
I found SO to be pretty useless for more complicated questions. Sure, if you
ask something that you could answer by looking into the docs then you are
flooded with answers by dozens of people.

But as soon as it gets to some obscure API maybe a handful people uses
currently you not only get no constructive answers but get downvoted, get
useless but borderline hateful comments and in the end the question gets
closed because of $reasons.

Now if you go and start googling that obscure API it's inevitable that you
will find SO questions about it. "Great, maybe I can find something there in
the comments" you think. But no, that question most likely is closed because
of $reasons and has no comments because comments on closed questions are not
allowed.

In the last few years I had a handful of cases where even discussing with
someone who didn't know the solution to my problem might have brought me a
little nearer to the solution. But you even can't start a discussion in SO
questions because if it's not an answer the question gets closed down - no
matter how helpful the discussion might turn out for people with said problem.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Yeah, SO can be pretty bad for deep knowledge. Actually, the web is bad
overall. It used to be a badge Of pride to stump SO; now it doesn't seem that
hard.

This is a real problem with SO: it seems to prize 'easier' information by
design.

------
buro9
In the linked post, the difference between 1 & 2 emerge in most communities,
it's the September that never ended, the inner circle pulling up the
drawbridge at the sight of the hordes of outer circle people swarming in.
Group 3 belong to group 2 and are hoping to jump to group 1 but just haven't
managed it yet (and don't know what it takes).

The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it
conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was,
which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better
even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or
unrealistic ideal.

I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without
a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both
groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way.

My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of
promotion. That there is progression.

I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit).

I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers.
That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would
organise themselves accordingly.

I mean cliques.

Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic
scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves
and people will continue to organise themselves thus.

I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical
solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that
it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling.

By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups,
should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work.

In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping
everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to
unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow
sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of
those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their
particular set of unanswered questions.

Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would
benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope
to deal with ever more niche interests.

Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-
division to remain highly relevant to their members.

~~~
camus2
> I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical
> solution to a social problem) will always fail.

Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow
at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done
better.

> Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-
> division to remain highly relevant to their members.

Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil
discussions and interesting content.

~~~
buro9
That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer
with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within
the limited Q&A space.

The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of
communication that can exist within a community.

Conversations (forums) are another.

News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another.

Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon
reviews are an example).

Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree
to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest.

I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the
type of division I describe (through subreddits).

Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high
with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of
scope.

Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally
divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of
communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within
each area.

Edit:

You've edited to add another line, but maybe you want to read this:
[http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html](http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html)
(Audiences scale, communities don't) .

Also, I think the Tragedy of the Commons applies
[http://dieoff.org/page95.htm](http://dieoff.org/page95.htm) and on Kuro5hin
back in the day that argument was made fairly well and relates to the problems
of scaling a community:
[http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46](http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46)

~~~
camus2
> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to
> answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger
> within the limited Q&A space.

You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody
has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the
best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that.

And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you
talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as
SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.

~~~
buro9
> you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same
> category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.

They are.

They are all a form of content management system for a community or group.

And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can
certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other
comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've
dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong.

Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by
splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of
the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller
cliques but all with the same capabilities.

You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand
(e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many
smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the
parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population).

Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the
company name in my writing.

------
SeanDav
SO is brilliant for classes of questions that have black/white type answers
and infuriating for almost any question that has an "it depends" somewhere in
the answer. Unfortunately many legitimate and serious programming/technology
questions can only be answered with "it depends" and "this is my opinion".

For example: "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach to my xyz
development issue?" This is the type of issue that is common and without an
explicit answer and is the type of question that will be closed because it
requires an opinion or may lead to arguments.

It is almost unbelievable to me the number of times I have found great
information in SO questions/answers that have been closed by some mod for the
above reasons.

~~~
camus2
It's an interesting question but it has no place on SO,it's open ended and ask
for a recommendation.

It depends on too many factors to encourage an accurate aOnly you knows your
requirements.

a good SO question is accurate,non trivial,with a reproducible test case.

Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm
personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor.

~~~
mlangdon
I love the 'try quora' advice. 'Not enjoying running our gauntlet? Maybe
trying swimming in this rain filled dumpster? I wouldn't.'

------
joeblau
I'm a member of another community that was run almost exactly like that for
musicians called future producers. I moved from a 3 to a 1,4 and now I'm a
pure 4. The thing that the 1's need to come to grips with is that people are
going to keep asking the same questions over and over. SO needs the concept of
a `git merge` so you can take take questions which might be part of another
question and merge them in. By merge i mean a true merge, not just a link to
the other question. SO is beyond the Q&A phase and needs to transition into
the data curation phase, but it's rudimentary vote/mark duplicate/close/delete
system isn't designed to facilitate that.

~~~
sampo
And they should award karma for spotting the duplicates, so people would do
it.

------
erikb
I am also a caretaker (not on SO but in the communities I join) and therefore
I think I can say that caretakers are not really the best of the four. We
often overdo things, get too much involved, too much heated up, which doesn't
decrease the stress and doesn't create a healthy atmosphere at all.

Also there are two more groups Mystikal doesn't see in his ambitions. One is
the group of people who come from time to time to ask or answer some
questions, moderate a little, just have fun and learn something. And there are
also the people who actually work (I mean for money) to keep the community
going. These people often are just interested to calm everything down. I think
these two groups should not be underestimated because often they are the
reason it didn't break completely. They don't need to voice their opinion to
every single post, so they are not as visible. But they also don't have beef
with anybody and they provide actual content most of the time, because that's
the only reason they came in the first place.

------
camus2
Loving SO. One of the best moderated site in the world. Yes it's not perfect
but i've yet to see a site as big as SO with a better moderation,given all the
crap that get posted and fortunatly moderated.

One thing i wish I could do is to star a question in the question listing
without visiting the actual question,so i can pick it up later,like a quick
bookmark.Also i'd like to see more questions per page.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
I second that. I've found SO extremely useful.

I have noticed some of the issues mentioned by others, like the overly zealous
duplicate hunters and brainless comebacks like "You shouldn't do it that way".
That's just line noise to me. I fast forward past it and find answers that
save me hours of time.

It seems that someone out there has already asked nearly every question I come
up with. There's not always an answer that I can use, but at least it's good
to see someone else formulating my question a little differently.

I guess I don't really fit into the OP's 1-4 categories. I'm just a person who
finds SO useful about once a week or so. I don't have the time or the deep
knowledge to be answering questions on a daily basis and racking up huge
karma. Just thankful the service exists, and have put in my 2 cents a few
times when I had something useful to contribute.

------
kijin
Stack Overflow needs to make people slow down.

A lot of the time, how quickly you can post your answer is the single most
important factor in how many upvotes you'll get. It doesn't matter how
thoroughly you research the topic. Too many answerers (#3 "repwhores") are
trying to beat the clock, half of them don't even read the question. If you
waste 30 seconds trying to format your code or making sure that your solution
actually works in jsfiddle, two other people will have already answered the
question and the OP might even have accepted one of them. You know what's even
worse? While you're still writing your answer, a message pops up and helpfully
tells you that this has happened. Thanks a lot! Stop writing and close the
damn tab.

The whole system is rigged to discourage time-consuming research. The front
page above the fold is always reserved for questions from the last 2-3
minutes, which sends a not-so-subtle message that if you can't grab someone's
attention in the next 2-3 minutes, whatever you write will probably be buried
forever.

A few years ago, I used to repwhore. It's addictive, but I quit. Now I prefer
to write long-form, comprehensive, thoroughly researched answers. On HN I feel
confident in doing so, because I know that the community encourages that kind
of behavior. On SO I rarely post any answers anymore, because I'm pretty sure
that nobody will read them if it takes more than a few minutes to read or
write.

~~~
collyw
I usually upvote anyone that takes the time to answer my question reasonably
(unless its obviously wrong, or not answering the question). Seems like
courtesy to me, but I noticed that it doesn't usually get returned.

------
lnanek2
Post seems to be from someone who is in group 1. As someone not in group 1, if
group 1 actually did a good job caretaking I'd have no problem with them.
Really, though, they close the most interesting questions that could actually
be helpful to me and only leave open stupid stuff that could be looking up in
the docs trivially. So they make the site useless for me. Worse they tend to
edit my answers to be incorrect just to make them look nicer. I wouldn't say
they are care taking, I'd just say they've been given power and they enjoy
enforcing rules for the hell of it.

------
akirk
I believe that there should be a higher burden for beginners to ask their
question, before it can go live.

New users need to prove that they have done research, this can be done with a
few questions like "name the three google search terms that you have used to
find a solution", "how much time did you spend on researching?" (easily faked,
but maybe it gives people a hint to step back and try harder).

There could also be a new-user queue where higher reputation users would
review a question (but are unable to answer it) before it can go live, with
the possibility to go back and forth before the question goes online.

In my blog post I have detailed what I'd propose:
[http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-
out-...](http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-of-the-
negativity/)

~~~
captainmuon
I don't know... I'm not bothered at all by new users or dumb questions. What
bothers me are experienced users questioning my intentions, being patronizing
and thinking I am dumb. I have to include a disclaimer with almost every
second question: "Yes, I know what I am doing. No, I am not suffering from the
XY problem. No, I will not treat you answer as legal advice. Yes, I have tried
to solve the problem on my own. Here is a bunch of useless code to prove I am
worthy of getting an answer." If I don't do that, I'll get - within seconds -
comments like "show what you have done" or "don't do that! what are you
actually trying to achive!"

The other thing is that, increasingly, the kind of questions that would a)
help me and b) I could answer with expertise are the kind of questions that
are banned on the various SE sites. SE has ceased being useful to me a while
ago.

~~~
akirk
I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low
quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the
case most of the times.

What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?

~~~
captainmuon
On stackoverflow, it is not so clear-cut and I can't tell you one single kind
of question. But on physics.stackexchange.com, my problem is that apparantly
medium-level questions are frowned upon. We have some very high-level
(research-level) questions, and many very low-level (popular science or below
high-school level) questions. People rightfully complained about the low ratio
of high to low level questions, but one thing they did against it was to ban
"homework" and "homework-like" questions. This does not just include actual
homework, but basically anything where you say "I'd like to calculate x, how
do I do it?", and anything where you have to go through a few steps to find an
answer.

The problem is, after ~10 years at the university, studying and teaching, I'm
basically an expert in "homework". I can answer most university-level
questions. I prefer answering (and asking) questions where the answer is "do
this, then this, and then you get that", maybe with a few formulas, to a few
paragraphs of prose. After all, I personally think that fits better with the
SE model and with physics. But actually, what's welcome at the moment are
mostly "conceptional" questions where an answer explains an abstract concept
with prose. The community has narrowed down the allowed scope a lot out of
fear of 1) low-level questions, and 2) accidentally helping somebody with
their homework (god forbid!). But instead of getting more expert-level
questions, they get less mid-level questions. I've found that I can currently
neither ask nor answer anything there.

~~~
Lapsa
wow. you pretty much summarized that feeling - that last sentence.

------
davidgerard
Clay Shirky summarised _every single discussion of this type_ in "A Group Is
Its Own Worst Enemy":

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

------
NateDad
Where's #5 - moderation nazis? Often have overlap with #3, repwhores, they
repwhore in order to get high enough reputation to get the power to do
moderate as they see fit... note that #5 may think they're in camp #1, but
they err too often on the side of closing posts because they want to exercise
their power.

This is my main problem with all stack exchange sites. It rewards repwhores
with power. I'd prefer that reputation and power were divorced somehow. I
don't know how to determine who would make a good moderator... but just
"someone who posts a lot" is not really a good metric.

------
neurobro
I haven't completely lost interest in participating at SO, but I am mostly
just thankful they don't delete all of the old "closed as not constructive"
questions because they are some of the most helpful content on the site. The
community wiki feature would be a better technical solution for questions that
are a bit too subjective.

But then there's the proliferation of SE sites with ambiguous/overlapping
subject areas and only a handful of users. I'm solidly in the "don't give a
shit" camp for those.

------
jzwinck
It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is
different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions,
and there are plenty. But it's also much, much harder to ask good questions.
To some extent the site is a victim of its own success: whereas I used to ask
a basic question [1] and get several up-votes and a good answer, now I ask a
basic question [2] and get almost as many down-votes as up-votes, plus the
answers themselves get as many down-votes as up-votes, including some answers
I actually liked but the community decided were so bad they couldn't just
leave them at 0, they had to push them down to -1 and into the leper colony.
Tons of comments and answers insist I had an XY problem [3] when I did not.

Some of it is because "The good questions have all been asked and answered,"
and some of it is that the legitimate complaints about absurdly low-quality
questions have gotten people into such a mood that a so-so question from a
veteran user makes them spend their own reputation to down-vote each others'
answers.

Stack Overflow has an XY problem: the real problem is that a lot of questions
are just bad because the barrier to entry has remained too low for too long,
but it thinks the problem is the XY problem.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/](http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/)

[2]
[http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/](http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/)

[3]
[http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem)

------
lyndonh

      Me: I'm trying to do X, I know I need to do Y first but it doesn't work. Can someone
          please go through the basic principles I need to do this thing.
      Comment: Post some code
      Me: (posts summary code but it's a difficult problem and you can't make a trivial example)
      Comment: No idea
      0 answers
    
      Me: I have this problem with X and Y, but it's not working.
      Answer (2 upvotes): You should (onerous and time consuming alternative approach
        suggestion with absolutely no evidence that it would solve the problem)
      My comment: How do I know this is going to solve my problem ?
      Comment: Try it first and come back.
    
      Someone: (difficult and useful question) ?
      0 answers, 5 upvotes
      #1 result in Google; top 10 hits for every search on this and related subjects leads to
      this question on SO or mirror sites
    

Another scenario -

    
    
      Me: (challenging question) ?
      0 answers, 0 upvotes
    
      Another person: Why does j++(++)++++++++++ not give me the answer I expect ?
      110 answers, accepted answer receives 200+ upvotes, question has 1000 upvotes and is
      locked because of too many frivolous answers/comments

~~~
pekk
What makes this worse is that sometimes the alternative approach to #2 really
is much easier, if the asker would do it. And sometimes, the asker really is
wrong to regard it as more onerous. So we can't categorically ban that kind of
response. But it's not automatically valid either. People will generate
instances of both problems all day. So we're back to moderation to solve that
somehow and moderation always has problems.

It's only a community problem when the community takes up a strong bias e.g.
against the asker, and does things like closing questions aggressively. There
is an underlying problem but the community has made it worse and closed off
the natural compensation mechanisms.

As for lack of response to serious/challenging/useful questions (which already
has a 'reputation' incentive) I'm afraid there's no way to solve that unless
cash bounties will work.

------
julie1
Still it reminds me of open source, help chans on IRC, wikipedia...

\- At the beginning it is fun and new you are a pioneer (phase discovery) \-
Then you understand the concept and experiments its power (fun) and you have
grown a culture with your alpha wave of compadres you become a native of the
place; \- then it has success in a brutal fashion triggering a new massive
phase of «new comers» (proportion of new might be bigger than the one of old),
it is the mass immigration/colonization phase \- then there is a «cultural
conflict» between the old and the new regarding the way to use the tool/to be
part of community. This part can last a long time and I call it the Babel
tower effect.

(I vaguely map the state machine described as a chronological effect)

Every community big enough and successful will suffer it. However in the
process the «native» ideas are often killed, and the original success can be
lost. Plus there is never a consensus, so some people will be feeling
unwelcomed.

It can be seen optimistically as stochastic improvements (the pioneers will
seed somewhere else and help discover new territories), or as a process of the
mass integration the pioneers back into the crowd//
normalization/colonization.

Internet may have many virtues but when it comes to human beings it does not
change the eternal problem of «doing something together».

Every time you take part in improving the world and try to propose a worthfull
alternative, there is a chance the culture will evolve in something different
then what you help to build.

My advice is to fight the tendency for bitterness and leave these communities
the same way Odysseus left Nausicaa.

------
menacingly
I'm most frustrated by the fact that their closed questions rank so well. It's
not a good fit for a Q/A format, but it is a food fit for inbound traffic, so
we're leaving it up.

The keyword stuffing in the sidebar often makes the question rank for searches
for which it isn't even relevant.

------
maaaats
What I think is the problem is actually the SE way of never giving
notifications for bad stuff, only for good stuff. Your questions are silently
closed or edited, your bad "suggested edits" are silently discarded etc.. So a
lot of users do, and continue to do, "bad" stuff because they don't know
they're supposed to do differently.

This means that single users act up, directly towards the offenders of the
rules. This creates a lot of drama. I think that shouldn't be necessary, it's
the job of the system, not single users to notify them about bad behavior.

~~~
JeremyBanks
I agree, but you do get notifications for edits to your posts.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
Probably I'm a radical, but I just don't see the point of deleting factual
information in the Internet, as long as it is true information.

Someone creates an article in Wikipedia about a subject that is totally
irrelevant for most people? It's fine. It's not as if I'm ever going to see it
(as I only tend to see articles I search for), and a Wikipedia page doesn't
exactly take a lot of space by today's standards. We have the technology to
build a virtually unlimited repository of all human knowledge, with no
effective physical limits, and some mods keep acting as if it had to fit into
a physical bookshelf.

With SO it's the same, why should I care if a question is considered to be
irrelevant or even a duplicate? If I search for it on Google and it contains
reliable information that solves my problem, it's useful for me. If it's
really irrelevant, I'm not going to search for it, and therefore it's not
going to make me lose any of my time.

We have search tools that keep getting better and better and allow us to
pinpoint what is useful for us among a vast sea of information. There's no
need to spend valuable human time on deleting stuff, the search engine will
filter it for me so that I get what I want, thank you very much!

------
jroseattle
There is a lot of reference material on SO that I find useful, and my own
reputation score continues to increase on its own, but I haven't posted a new
answer on the site in at least 2 years.

To me, the gamification problem has simply led to what's really going on:
users caring more about the score than about the quality of the content. 5
years ago, I can recall a single question eliciting awesome input from the
likes of Jon Skeet, Marc Gravell, etc. While the scores were interesting
(Skeet's rep off-the-charts), the content was fantastic.

Motivations are skewed, now. People are trying to build reputation as a number
rather than content. What I'm surprised at is why anyone would want to drive
up a high rep score backed with completely inane content? What's the point?

The gamification rules for the site seemed to have transitioned it from a
knowledge center to nothing more than a game.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _What 's the point?_

Better job offers? Or maybe just invisible internet points.

~~~
jroseattle
> Better job offers?

A better job offer due to a good Stack Overflow reputation score?

Good grief.

~~~
collyw
There are plenty of jobs descriptions that ask for examples of open source
contributions. In my current job, and every previous one for the last eleven
years, the projects I work on are in house, so I have _nothing_ I can show to
potential employers. If I had a good SO reputation I would see it as a
reasonable alternative to show to potential employers.

(I am working on a side project at the moment mainly to get around the problem
I described, but this is taking a whole lot more time than answering a some SO
questions.)

~~~
jroseattle
> If I had a good SO reputation I would see it as a reasonable alternative to
> show to potential employers.

I get the sentiment, but it holds little value for me. (I'm in the potential
employer category.) I find it pointless as a meter of competency.

> I am working on a side project at the moment mainly to get around the
> problem I described, but this is taking a whole lot more time than answering
> a some SO questions.

Think about this comment for a minute. A side project takes longer to complete
and requires more discipline and concerted effort. SO questions are quick
hits, small scope, and are basically lather-rinse-repeat (find a question,
answer it.)

Care to hazard a guess which one of these choices of time I might find more
appealing in a candidate?

------
LinuxDevOps
I'm more familiar with Server Fault, I started contributing last month (made
top of "new users") and it feels good to have helped a bunch of people that
thanked you, but I'm a Camel's straw away for giving up between some
moderators and how the system works.

------
lispm
I'd like to filter out some people. Currently for example there is someone
asking long and complex, but useless, Common Lisp / C / C++ questions without
knowing the basics. He has also asked the same questions on the mailing list
for this topic (it's about interfacing Common Lisp with C). He uses multiple
accounts on stack overflow and asks multiple questions about similar things.
Whenever he moves, slowly, forward, then something breaks and he asks.

It's like asking about formula one motor electronics, while not capable to
even work on the simplest piece of electronics.

Stackoverflow really needs to adapt to these changing patterns of abuse.

------
dpweb
Wish I knew the economics term when reward is gotten without paying a due
price? Skin in the game, but not crazy about that term.. I think there's a
knee jerk reaction 'hey this is great everything is free', but that can be a
bad thing, and it applies to many other things. Value needs to be compensated
with value.

If the problem is too many bad questions, the thing is there is no barrier to
entry for asking a question. Charge people a dollar or even 50 cents, or even
25 cents - the point is anything but free. You'll see a much better quality of
questions. Easier to whine about it, which is also easy and free.

~~~
jjindev
Are there too many bad questions?

Why not the Google answer, which is that search brings you "good" no matter
how much "bad" there is?

------
mattst88
We know how successful karma/reputation systems are at encouraging users to
contribute good content. The unexpected thing I've learned from Stack Overflow
is that the reputation system, when it doesn't work as expected, can also be
demotivating.

My personal experience has been mixed with regards to how successfully my
answers are accepted. On multiple occasions, I've answered questions first,
only to have another answer accepted that contained the same content as mine
but was posted hours later.

I don't know if this is a common experience or if my sample size is too small.
In any case it's a bit frustrating.

------
glynjackson
When I first started asking questions I learned a lot, the most articulated
answers always came from the same users. It was also these same users that
downvoted me, then upvoted when I corrected my mistakes. I've learned so much
from my mistakes. I now welcome the downvotes just so I can prove myself!

After a year on Stack I started answering questions and still today don't
hesitate to downvote users that don't understand what constitutes a valid
question. I find people 'used' to react well commenting... "what did I do
wrong?". Its the recent reaction to downvotes that changed.

------
jjindev
The striking thing for me was to Google a few questions in a row, to find good
answers on SO, and then to see that each one was also closed/rejected for some
reason. It was strange to see that the answers to these questions all had high
ratings, but the question was closed anyway.

I guess it's a vision opposite of the internet itself. Rather than "find one
of a million pages that work for me" it is "there should only be one."

(In the spirit of the internet, perhaps if a question cannot be found by a
simple search on SO, that IS a reason to ask again, and to fill the search
slot.)

------
k__
In my eyes the problem is pseudonymity and pseudo interaction.

If the system isn't anonymous, people will try to use it for their personal
reputation gains. See Github, Stackexchange, Wikipedia.

If the system promotes pseudo interaction, like votes, it will lead people to
empathise posts, which they _think_ are good, but don't have to be. You don't
have to conduct real interaction with the content and users, like writing and
reading, you just have to click, which leads to easy manipulation from people
who don't know anything real to contribute.

------
justinhj
I think stackoverflow is working just fine, it's just weird. For example a
question I posted recently I got a great answer in minute or so, as well as
grumpy comments and closed.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21889666/facial-
recogniti...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21889666/facial-recognition-
software-that-can-detect-eye-positions)

~~~
sampo
You probably should not have used `linux` and `osx` tags for such a specific
question.

~~~
justinhj
I was looking for a solution that worked on either

~~~
sampo
Yeah, but it injected your question to the feeds of people who follow the
`linux` or `osx` tag, 99.9+% of whom have no idea how to answer your question,
and this resulted in some of them closing your question as off-topic.

Whereas, the people following the `image-processing` and `face-recognition`
would probably (my guess) not have closed your question as off-topic.

------
jjindev
Should karma be an ephemeral thing? Should it age off in a week or so?

There could be a downside to the early entrants benefit. Sure, you can explore
new territory and carve out a huge position, but you become a "Land Barron" in
a sense, and no friend of later "squatters." (Relatedly, Bitcoin)

("sure I've got 20000 points, but they guy just climbing from 100 to 200 is a
repwhore")

------
n1ghtmare_
Well I found lately that asking anything on SO that is not trivial doesn't get
an answer. My last 3 questions were up-voted, but never answered. I'm a
regular SO user, I know the rules, I'm doing my research, my questions are not
subjective, they are "answerable", yet they remain without answers.

------
cookiecaper
Stack Overflow has definitely given better organization to the corpus of data
borne of programmer on-the-fly discovery and for that I and all programmers
are grateful, but SO has made some serious mistakes that have hamstrung it.

First, the reputation system is inadequate and there are many people who game
it. SO tried some interesting things, but "accepted answers" and the push to
accept answers has always sucked. It rewards rapid-fire, crappy responses
instead of thorough ones. You'll often find people just copying the page
summary from Google or some other tiny snippet of text without context so that
they could post first and get the "accepted answer" checkmark and the upvotes
that come from the short time at the top of the page. Someone else will take
20-30 minutes to type out a thorough, good response that considers
ramifications and end up with nothing. There's no way to recognize multiple
answers, so if multiple answers contain valuable information you have to pick
one to favor. There's also no way to deprecate answers if new versions break
things; the best you can hope for is that the OP will know about the change,
remember giving that answer one day, and go back and edit it. You can't change
acceptances once awarded, and some people will accept answers without even
trying them.

Those basic flaws in the contrived reputation system have caused problems on
SO since day one and deterred many good contributors who weren't interested in
racing against amateurs who just wanted to copy and paste answers.

Second-most damaging imo is the aggressive insistence on moving everything to
other StackExchange sites and everything becoming a closed or karmaless
("community wiki") question on SO. A lot of relevant things were killed off on
SO and moved to obscure StackExchanges where they never got a good answer.
This deterred contribution, especially on questions that were cross-
disciplinary as your question would get stuck in a loop where moderators on SO
would say "this should be on SuperUser" and moderators on SU would say "this
should be on StackOverflow". Really it'd work fine on either. I think that
part of why this got so out of hand was another component of the reputation
system, that automatically gave those most likely to race to Google and copy
and paste the first result moderation powers. If you give people shiny new
toys, they'll want to use them, and you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary
infractions being filed and stifling communication.

On top of all of that, a large reason SO even gained any popularity in the
first place was the star power of Joel Spolsky. With such serious flaws in
reputation systems, I'm honestly not sure that it would've gotten off the
ground if not for his association.

I don't know that SO is ever going to grow out of these problems as they
probably now feel their rep system is validated (falsely believing the rep
system caused the site's success instead of acknowledging that the site is
successful despite the rep system), and I think they've just relied on new
people entering the groups outlined in this post. I don't know that they're
going to run out of those people anytime soon, but it'll be interesting to see
what happens.

~~~
erikb
Most of my upvotes come from years old questions and well written answers not
from the first view interactions when the question is still on the top of the
new ones. If you relax more, look for really good questions and take your time
to answer them you will find that the questions aren't googleable, that you
really need to put in time to find a good answer, etc. And you will see that
even years later you still get upvotes for them.

------
joelthelion
Instead of fighting people who ask subjective questions, they should find a
way to accommodate them ( make the questions expire after a year?). All these
question closings are rightly perceived as aggressive and cause a lot of
needless problems.

------
dandare
IM very HO SO has a UX problem, namely the tone they use can sound negative
even if there was a good intention. Something around "Your question was closed
... = because you are bad person"

~~~
pekk
Besides defeating the purpose of posting the question, having a question
closed is inherently deflating regardless of wording. And should be reserved
for genuine need, and should not be the default that every newbie has to fight
tooth and nail just to get valid questions answered.

------
Bahamut
Sometimes I wonder whether people are more interested in making an effort to
help people or badmouth/downvote them on SO.

I help people often on IRC with dev questions (so much so that I was given ops
in a particular channel for a library), and it is kept professional for the
most part - no badmouthing, no matter how simple the question. Just trying to
figure out people's problems and giving them advice. SO seems to fail to do
that often, and that's why I'm not interested in contributing.

------
eternalban
He assumes too much in the arc (1,4).

------
mcgwiz
It's a complex problem, but with a "training/welcome period" (explained below)
for new users, these specific issues can be addressed:

\- experts (users having rep above EXPERT_THRESHOLD, say 5000) want
"interesting" questions

\- most new questions are not interesting

\- "new users" (having rep below some REGULAR_THRESHOLD, say 100) are not
educated and have unrealistic expectations

\- it is expensive for the community to manually educate new users

\- asking questions is inexpensive for the asker, but answering questions is
costly to the community (to research, comment, close, find dupes)

\- it's hard for new users to gain rep by answering questions because rep-
whores are more experienced with the site. thus new users are instead
encouraged to gain rep by asking questions.

Some ideas mentioned on SE would help:

\- require rep for asking questions

\- give rep for finding duplicates (discouraging repwhores from answering
dupes, encouraging dupe linking)

\- give rep for taking a quiz about the 2-Minute Tour or other FAQs

Additionally, a training/welcome period for new users (during which they
interact a slightly more among themselves than directly with experts) would go
a long way toward fixing a lot of deeper issues. New user questions (which
tend to be uninteresting dupes) would be hidden from experts for some period
of time NEW_Q_DUR (say 1 day). During that time, _only_ other new users or
regular users can answer the question. Experts can un-hide them with a Setting
but can only comment, not answer. Benefits:

\- new/regular users (that care about the site) are incentivized to answer
questions, find dupes, work with others at their rep-level and do some of the
(educational) activities that experts see as menial, rather than just ask
questions

\- experts get a higher signal/noise ratio of interesting questions, as bad
questions can be cleaned up by new/regular users and interesting questions
will likely remain unanswered after NEW_Q_DUR (since new users tend to be less
experienced and less able to answer difficult, good questions from other new
users)

\- dupe rep-whoring is mitigated because once a rep-whore becomes an expert,
they cannot answer dupe questions without new/regular users having time
NEW_Q_DUR to flag as dupe

\- new user expectations are made more realistic. until they've participated a
certain amount, they cannot expect to draw immediate attention from experts.
also, they become aware of the dupe problem.

A caveat might be that new user questions with enough upvotes can become
answerable by experts before the normal time limit. Also, if/when new user
question quality improves, NEW_Q_DUR can be reduced.

Some very minor drawbacks:

\- new users would be slightly deterred from asking certain questions because
they do not value answers from non-experts (leading them to do more research
on their own)

\- more class-ful community, potentially creating stronger biases (I don't
think this is too bad because class mobility is clear and feasible)

\- some new users that would care about the site might instead be turned off
by the welcome period on some principal and never participate

------
Uncompetative
4.

------
aaron695
It's interesting, is stackoverflow a Q & A site? I'd say a definite nup.

It's wikipedia, well that's where it's true value lies I think. But it's way
to get content is 'suckering' people in thinking it's a Q&A site.

It's value to the community is amazing. But it is a chameleon.

Relevance. Not sure, perhaps if you dig to deep in anything the matrix spoils
reality.

------
frik
The JavaScript community on StackOverflow is very JQuery centric - quit
annoying if someone prefers modern vanilla JavaScript. And their point system
is not optimal and contributes to _karma whores_.

Beside that, SO is a good resource that pops up in the top Google search
results.

------
spacemanmatt
NAILED. IT.

------
bikamonki
Once I saw a client typing part of her domain in the browser's search to then
click on the first Google result: her site. What? Wait: use the address bar,
you know the domain. My way is 'faster' she said. Not really I said: your way
is type, wait, click. The fast, and correct, way is to type just a few letters
on the address bar and if your browser is remembering: enter. The solution?
Make the address bar and search bar one and be smart enough to know if the
user is searching or just calling a usual site.

So, if I have a question about xyz, type a few kwds and google-it, top 3-5
results are SO, then something else, then the 'official' docs. What? Wait:
aren't the docs the most relevant trust-worthy correct answer? Docs always
suck and SO is faster. Then hire SO wizards to write the docs and pay them
dollars not karma ;)

What? Wait: aren't I way off topic? Did I piss you off? Did you get enough
hugs as a child? Enough beer last night?

Happy weekend you wizards :)

PS: Pardon my typos and grammar. English not my mother tounge. Yes, there are
programmers past the border ;)

