
New StackOverflow code of conduct - ctack
https://stackoverflow.com/conduct
======
ardy42
> “If you bothered to read my question, you’d know it’s not a duplicate.”

2 of the 4 examples of unacceptable behavior are responses to overzealous
moderation. I can't see this helping with any of SO's real problems.

Every SO question I've asked for many years has required _constant_ monitoring
to correct people who don't actually read the question and either 1) try to
answer a totally different, easier question or 2) try to get my question
closed. It's exhausting and really makes me wish it had competition so I could
abandon it entirely.

The first few items in their code of conduct should be:

1\. Carefully read the question before you answer or comment.

2\. _Carefully read the question_ before you answer or comment.

3\. Remember you're not helping the asker if you repeat answers he already
tried or specifically anticipated and said aren't helpful in his question.

~~~
lowken10
Here is an important key to written communication. If someone doesen't
understand your written message, the problem is not with the reader. The
problem is with you (the writer).

I write clear Stack Overflow question and I don't have the problems you
describe.

~~~
raxxorrax
> If someone doesen't understand your written message, the problem is not with
> the reader.

Not necessarily on SO. Pretending to not understand a question has become a
form of mockery on SO in many cases. You see these responses in many questions
that have valid and accepted answers.

There are badly worded questions, sure. But there are also pretentiously
shallow attempts to close some questions as quickly as possible.

~~~
genericid
There is also a difference between people who find it difficult to explain
complex technical questions in a manner that is easy to understand and thos
who probs dont care cuz thei r 2 lzay 2 write and its ur problem

------
klenwell
I like to believe StackOverflow has a financial incentive to solve this issue
with their jobs site. It's my impression that there's a high barrier to being
accepted as part of the community for new users, who I would expect to be on
average younger developers more interested in finding a new job. These are
users who I imagine SO would like to be users of their revenue-generating jobs
platform.

For the last 6 months, my company used both Indeed and SO for recruiting. I
much prefer SO and expected the quality of candidates would blow away Indeed.
And generally there was less chaff on SO, but there were also less applicants
in total and in the end we hired about equally off both platforms. Indeed
proved much cheaper.

The connection the SO Q&A site and the SO jobs site occurred to me after I
created a new profile for the SO Jobs (technically, Talent) platform and then
posted a couple questions as a new user, an exercise I've practiced before.
And as before, even though I am an experienced user who knows how to write a
quality question, my questions were immediately downvoted almost reflexively
by other users. It was enough to almost turn me off the project.

I tried to explain this to our SO sales rep and he said that they were aware
of the problem and trying to address it. I suppose this code is what he was
referring to. My contract recently expired and my company decided not to renew
at this time.

~~~
mangatmodi
Happened to me too. I accidentally asked a question accidentally from my
wife's account, who has low points on SO. The question was also heavily
downvoted, which was clear and according to the site's policy.

------
jwilk
> If you Google it, you’ll find tutorials

Telling people to google something is rarely helpful.

It's great that Google shows noteworthy results for you, but that's not
necessarily true for somebody else, possibly years after you wrote the answer.
Also, unlike you, the other person might not be qualified to separate the
wheat from the chaff.

~~~
corobo
Especially when SO is trying to be the resource that is top result in Google
for the question! I did Google, this answer about "You should just Google
this" is the result!

At least noindex the closed questions, SO :(

~~~
runevault
The downside to this is some closed questions do have great answers on them
from before they closed it.

I always wonder why I get more duplicates as my top hit than the question SO
left open as the "original" because it at least feels like those are what I
hit far, far more.

~~~
Shog9
There are hundreds of duplicates for some questions:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9686/what-is-the-
mo...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9686/what-is-the-most-rampant-
duplicate-on-stack-exchange-sites/168289#168289)

...often, with slightly different terms used. So there's a very good chance a
given search will find one of the duplicates rather than the original. This is
an explicit goal: it helps searches; in fact, if you're not logged in and you
land on an unanswered duplicate, Stack Overflow will redirect to the original.

------
umvi
I agree the people answering the questions and moderators could stand to be a
little more kind.

Can we talk about the elephant in the room though - the tsunami of low effort
questions from 1 rep users who are clearly students looking for help on their
homework?

I didn't use StackOverflow until I was a working professional - while I was in
school I hung out in the labs and talked to TAs or my professor if I was
stuck. Now it seems like SO has become the default TA service for everyone
foreign and domestic. It's exhausting to see question after question of people
essentially asking for hand holding/TA service.

I stopped answering questions for that reason because I felt like I was only
helping one person at a time instead of doing the community a service.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
I completely agree, but on the other hand there's another problem as a
corollary here. Stack overflow's knowledge database is quite immense. And it's
a fraction of the knowledge that's available on the internet. Whenever I get
stuck on a technical type issue it can usually be solved in a matter of
seconds of searching. And I mean that even applies to really quite esoteric
things. Want to have a discussion about converting reflection calls into
cached and strongly typed delegates when the types involved are only known at
runtime, and how to most effectively optimize this? Yip, there's a great
discussion on SO about it.

So when I run into a isolatable technical problem that I can't find a solution
to, it's _incredibly_ obscure and _incredibly_ esoteric. So you end up with
this sort of dichotomy where it becomes more and more difficult to formulate
'good' questions. It's either somebody asking something that's been asked
already, or could otherwise be found in a few seconds of duck-duck-going (
_damn.. that really doesn 't roll off the 'tongue' as well as googling, does
it?_) or something so incredibly obscure that you'd be better off on a
specialized outlet than on a general purpose one like Stack Overflow.

~~~
kangnkodos
Stack Overflow needs some type of beginner area. I should have the ability to
choose to exclude the beginner area from my Google and Stack Overflow
searches.

~~~
megaman22
This used to be a common feature of the type of forums that predated SO... For
example, [https://www.gamedev.net/forums/forum/71-for-
beginners/](https://www.gamedev.net/forums/forum/71-for-beginners/)

------
ndh2
The biggest problems in my opinion are the drive-by downvotes. If you're not
willing to fix the problem, you should not have the right to engage.

Downvotes should be tied to some sort of criterion that the asker/answerer can
meet, like in a code review. If you get downvoted, you should have the ability
to notify the downvoter "alright, I fixed the issue you had with my
question/answer", and get the downvote undone. If the downvoter doesn't
engage, undo the downvote automatically after a certain period. This process
should be completely public, and have a log/history that everyone can see.

Same with flagging as duplicate. As the asker you should have the right to
defend yourself against overzealous flagging, and be able to let the mods know
why some other question is not actually a duplicate. Flagging as duplicate
should be phrased as a question to the asker: Hey, did you see this question?
Does this answer your question? And the asker should then be the one to decide
whether or not it does.

~~~
hirundo
At least force the downvoter to categorize their reason from a dropdown (e.g.
slashdot), with an optional line of description. Hacker News could benefit
from that too.

------
Kagerjay
As a recent user who now has mod status (500+ reputation), I find moderators
don't get any recognition really _maybe my perspective is skewed_. We talk
about how unfriendly SO is, but moderators do keep the quality of SO in check
to some degree, even at the cost of "marking it as duplicate" among other
things. Its almost like stackoverflow has the same issues as subreddit
moderators, perhaps they could learn a thing or two here? I've had to mod my
own subreddits as well

I know recently stackoverflow has started to push fake posts under the "review
queue" to gauge if you are actually moderating correctly.

I still get frustrated as a user asking a question on stackoverflow. I have
had my share of questions marked as duplicates. I tried arguing and fixing the
wording of it after the fact, it still is downvoted (-1) and still marked as
duplicate.

~~~
jjeaff
Wait, so SO is creating trick posts to find out if their completely
uncompensated moderators are doing their job? You'd immediately lose me as a
moderator when that happened.

~~~
Kagerjay
As a new moderator (as of 2 months ago) they threw in about 20% trick posts to
see if I was moderating correctly. They told me when I failed and passed them.

Example, on June 2018.
[https://i.imgur.com/YIVXX87.png](https://i.imgur.com/YIVXX87.png)

------
GordonS
> ...moderators will remove offending content and send a warning... >
> ...moderators will impose a temporary suspension... > ...moderators will
> expel people...

I'm sure all of this helps the mods to deal with naughty users, but I think SO
really has 2 big issuers:

1\. Crappy, zero-effort, badly worded, badly explained questions 2\. Crappy
moderators

The first one seems to be a solved problem - 9 times out of 10 if I see a
question like this appear on SO it is flagged within _seconds_.

The seconds one has been pervasive for years, and is a much harder problem to
solve. Mods flagging unique questions as duplicates is something I've
experienced far too many times - and often as soon as one mod hasn't read the
question and flagged it, other mods see the flag, then don't bother to read
the question and flag it.

I think there should actually be an easier way to flag poor decisions by
moderators (to flag... well, the flags!), and I think there should be a
similar 3-stage disciplinary system (warning, suspension, expulsion) for mods
that repeatedly take shortcuts or make crappy decisions.

------
Bjartr
Best of luck to the SO team trying to improve the culture of its users. I hope
they succeed.

~~~
superflyguy
Yeah, good luck to them but I closed my 15+ accounts (yeah, you have to create
a different account per topic), many of which had 4 figure ratings going back
years, because of this pointless (to me) chasing of new users and bringing in
"be nice" type rules. I spent hours moderating and commenting as well as
answering but it seems like loads of other long-time users just gave up due to
the waves of "plz to give me teh code" muppets.

------
nailer
I don't mind this one: the 'stuff you commonly see and demonstrations of
better ways to handle things' is a little more consutructive than what I was
expecting.

------
whitten
I notice that mediawiki development also has a code of conduct expectation. Is
this following that trend, or is the Stack Overflow code of conduct different?

------
lowry
It's funny how examples of discouraged posts are clear and concise while their
alternatives are verbose and harder to understand.

~~~
habitue
Not being an asshole often requires using a few extra words. It's worth it.

~~~
NullPrefix
A turd in a candy wrapper is still a turd.

