
Saying thanks: testing a new Reactions feature - bprasanna
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/17/saying-thanks-testing-a-new-reactions-feature/
======
throwaway4666
The main issue I've had with SO, which while anecdotal seems to reflect the
sentiment of a lot of people on here whenever the subject is brought up, is
that it's infected with the YX problem.

Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when
you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand,
goes like this:

User: "Hi, how do I do Y?"

SO: "Why do you want to do Y?"

User: "Because I want to do [use case]"

SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?"

User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure
this isn't about X and I really want to do Y."

SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?"

User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same
constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that
specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y."

SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for
a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly
want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to
Y probably doesn't exist anyway."

Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted)

User: "Cool, thanks!"

SO: "This is _bad_ practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or
the accepted answer."

\--------

Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question _does_ get
eventually answered.

~~~
jakear
Fast forward a year...

New Answerer: As of v12,5 this is now supported first class like: [....].

Comments:

\- this should really be the accepted answer

\- OP can you make this the accepted answer?

\- accepted answer is out of date, this should be used now

Accepted answer never changes, remains top result indefinitely

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's because the question has been answered, so it's out of the OP's head I
think; what SO wants to do is turn a question into a wiki / knowledge base,
but right now only the OP can make the edits and change the accepted answer if
applicable. I guess one way to fix this is to relinquish ownership of the
question, change it so that highest upvoted answer becomes the accepted answer
for example, so it becomes an internet-democratic resource (note: internet-
democratic is not real democracy due to brigading, community preferences, etc;
the most popular / upvoted answer may not be correct)

~~~
em-bee
i don't see why that even matters? so what if the accepted answer is not the
highest voted answer. when i look at a problem it's not always the accepted
answer that solves my similar problem. i'll look at the top voted answers, and
others too. those are just guides where to start looking

------
kjhughes
For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way.

Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat
from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed
means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of
incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be
quantified.

Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that
leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than
continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of
contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that
improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such
that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I
believe this was a mistake.

Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed
Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their
own volunteer moderators. They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin
of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner
that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve
this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity
dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have
seen measured.

An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a
sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how
to evolve, the voting system.

~~~
crispyambulance
I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality
crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They
deserve credit for that.

There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for
daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily
persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their
interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry
(which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain
personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the
moderation tasks on SO.

Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an
over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are
PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by
automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem
of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-
police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.

~~~
einpoklum
1\. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a
rectangle with lit-up points...

2\. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or
accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your
upvote with a comment.

~~~
crispyambulance
The way you say "thank you" as a human is by saying "thank you"\-- preferably
with an interesting explanation or side-bar.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. The "be
nice" ethos just means that the nasty is more eloquent.

It's now quite painful to ask questions, there, because someone will pretty
much _always_ ding it. Usually, you have no idea why, or who. In fact, that
happened to me just a day or so ago.

Also, I think that downvoters should be notified when the question/answer is
edited, so they can review if the downvote still applies.

I once trolled a community (not SO) by writing an obviously inflammatory post,
getting a gazillion downvotes, then editing it to be very reasonable, so
everyone was on record as having downvoted a very decent post. Petty, but fun
(They did not have edit records for posts, but you could see what users
up/downvoted).

I like the idea of a "Thank You" reaction, but that's really just porcine lip
gloss.

I think that it would be more valuable to _require_ an explanation for a
downvote, even if anonymously. I would have no problem telling folks why I
downvoted a question or answer (in fact, when I do, I add a comment,
mentioning the reason, unless it is blatantly obvious). As is evident by my HN
profile, I am making a point of standing behind what I post. I got rid of my
last anonymous Internet account months ago.

Standing behind my words has helped me to be a bit more careful about what I
post, and that's a good thing.

~~~
bonoboTP
> My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place.

It's also true of other Stack Exchange sites. Sometimes you feel like in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're sent from one site to the other and none
of them think it's their job to deal with a question.

And I don't mean the low-effort questions, but well written interesting ones
that are deemed to broad, too opinion-based, too whatever.

There is definitely an effect of territorialism, big egos and rule lawyering
going on. As if people were playing a game of spot-the-broken-rule as some
intellectual puzzle and going "heureka, there it is, you broke Rule No. 3,
gotcha!!". Sites like SO and Wikipedia certainly attract people who get
emotionally invested in this role and see themselves as powerful and enjoy
feeling better than others.

That's why the debate is complicated. There is a problem with trigger happy
moderation, but also with low-effort content.

------
IfOnlyYouKnew
I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation,
and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.

I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per
month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I
could not tell you what people are complaining about?

I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is
supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The
imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to
feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care
about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to
complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.

And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of
tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't
something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them
into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously
not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just
came up with, like ethics in game journalism.

Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people
to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem _so much
better_ , compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came
before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-
spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will
forever be thankful for their contribution.

~~~
Kaze404
The part where they try to paint "being nice" as a bad thing pretty much tells
the kind of discourse this person wants to have.

~~~
bonoboTP
It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel
that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down
leadership is dictating how they should interact.

Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers
organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.

It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.

The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The
Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents,
enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible
monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement,
brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up
larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.

You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut
down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse
everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV
but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with
phone and ID confirmation.

This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and
top-down dictates.

~~~
Kaze404
I don't understand what any of this has to do with people not being
insufferable assholes on a platform.

~~~
bonoboTP
I think there are multiple issues and it's hard to point them out because
everyone talks about what they see from their own point of view.

1) There are certainly power-hungry ego-inflated people killing off questions
as duplicates when they aren't duplicate, or labeling things too easily as
opinion-based etc. This is often a problem with community efforts, like Wikis
and other places where people act like they own the place.

2) On the other hand, you have genuinely low-effort questions that are just
pure lazy. Being a novice is normal, everyone started there. But doing at
least a minimum of research is expected. Seriously go to the front page and
browse the questions from <5 minutes ago. Most is very low effort with no
context, just some code from the middle of some software and an error message
without saying what they are even trying to achieve. It's not in any shape of
form a question that should enter a long term question bank.

3) On the third hand, you have the power grab at StackOverflow by business-
minded, MBA type suits, who care more about branding, marketing, and legal CYA
than about programming. The project is no longer community driven. They seem
to forget that SO's value is derived mostly from the unpaid labor of
volunteers and working with the community should be a priority. And this is
also a great lesson for all the contributors that sinking enormous amounts of
time into a private company's proprietary product, it may not be worth it. At
least Wikipedia is guaranteed free and open source and truly community owned.
Maybe something similar needs to be created in place of SO.

~~~
Kaze404
Number 1 and 2 are what I've personally experienced and believe is what the
StackOverflow team means when they say they're working to make the platform
more friendly. I've been helping people with all sorts of programming problems
on Discord for years, and I've encountered my fair share of people who put
absolutely no effort in either their problem or asking a question people can
work with, but at no point I've ever felt it was justified to publicly shame
them or not be kind. If people are going to go around closing / deleting
obviously mediocre questions with copypastas in the comments, is it asking to
much to make the copypastas at the very least welcoming?

I actually followed your advice and browsed the recent page on StackOverflow
to collect some samples of what I mean. To my (pleasant) surprise, it seems to
have changed significantly from when I used the platform regularly. That said,
I found this one that's a good example:

> Asking homework questions without any other detail is simply unacceptable.
> Please put more detail, because we are volunteering our time to help you,
> and if you put in absolutely no effort, then we can't help you.

I wholeheartedly, but why not say "StackOverflow is not a code-writing
service. Please post another question with sample of your work, so we can
direct you to a solution that'll make you learn in the process"? These types
of comments are what made me so anxious to ask back when I started
programming, and I think is something everyone will benefit greatly from
getting rid of.

As for point 3, thanks for clarifying. I agree that dumping knowledge on a
proprietary product isn't exactly a good thing, but the perspective of the
business people can at least be understood now that they're selling it as a
Q&A engine for private teams / companies. I don't think that's necessarily a
good thing, but your previous comments made me think it was some sort of
conspiracy theory :)

------
eugenekolo
The problem with SO is that it tries to be two things. One is a
reference/encyclopedia of questions, and answers. And the other is a welcoming
place to ask for help. Those two don't seem to line up 100%.

It's clear the old school moderators seem to think of SO as a reference, but
the company itself wants to view it as a place to seek help.

~~~
identity0
I think that's the great thing about SO. It's a repository of common
questions, yet also manages to be great for asking questions as well.

A lot of people in this thread seem to hate SO, and I disagree with them. If I
ask a question on SO, no matter how obscure of a library or language I'm
using, I'll get a response back within a day. And if my question gets flagged
for being a duplicate, then I've just been redirected to more resources to
solving my problem. It may not be warm and welcoming, but it's very helpful.

To be useful, SO doesn't need to be welcoming at all. It needs to be
exclusive. If it wasn't elitist, it would be filled with Java programmers
pasting 400 lines of code with little explanation. The elitism has caused me
to write better questions and to really think about the hypothetical person
answering my question. Elitism and helpfulness go hand in hand. If you want to
see the horrors of a non-elitist Q&A forum, go check out the Unity forums or
any popular Github repository.

------
haolez
I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any
more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is
it :)

~~~
maybeOneDay
Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find
the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean
that other people can't benefit from changes like this.

~~~
maire
The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow
an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for
programmers or reddit?

The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want
it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social
community.

~~~
detaro
Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading
articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its
quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.

------
woogley
Some pretty thorough discussion on Meta:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-
test...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test-thank-
you-reaction)

~~~
gortok
Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! —
itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information
here.

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587)

Overall, the biggest complaint against this is:

1\. Not enough people vote on questions or answers.

We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that
vote vs. those that comment.

I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected
moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of
last year:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587)

Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments
left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than
'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but
the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the
issue with not enough people voting.

Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are
rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement
mechanism for people to post more answers).

If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is
Bad™.

The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to
vote?

Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work
(the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from
tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the
issue.

There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack
Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for
much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another
instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the
company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.

~~~
teruakohatu
It seems some basic NLP could detect a "thanks" comment and ask the user to
vote. Or do they already do this?

~~~
shagie
Thanks, but your suggestion doesn't take into account when a comment contains
information that would suggest that an upvote (or emoji) isn't appropriate.

------
aarongray
This is stupid. Why not give people a way to actually say thanks without
cluttering up the comments? A real thank you written by a human is much more
touching and encouraging than a clapping icon with a counter on it. The
article starts with a beautiful image of real thank you’s, and then
immediately turns around and implies that clicking a clap button is the same
thing?

These kind of things are what dehumanizes the internet, they don’t make for
better human connections. It’s also basically the exact same as the current
upvote icon. A way to send a message to the author privately saying thanks
seems much more touching. Or even a hidden “thank you’s” list of grateful
words that can be expanded on the question but that is hidden by default.
Either of those would be better than this weird duplication of robotic thank
you’s.

------
mangatmodi
How is it different from upvoting an answer? People who want to write will
still write thanks, I already found some posts on the home page with thanks
comment and the feature.

Also what about the change in reputation when being thanked? It should be
there in the blog post.

~~~
wodenokoto
My understanding is that these are pure vanity. Doesn't require any reputation
to give, doesn't give any reputation either, nor does it sort your post.

~~~
mangatmodi
I went to meta-discussion and learned more details. Most of the thanks comment
are written by folks who already have upvote powers. Anyways its a fun read.
Grab popkorn and go through it :)

------
fbelzile
I'm more curious about what caused the recent spike in "thank" showing up in
questions and answers. 19% -> 23% in a couple months seems statistically
significant.

Did the pandemic/lock down cause a slew of newer developers that are generally
more appreciative?

~~~
majewsky
Maybe because of home-office they cannot lean to the side and ask their peers,
so they rely more on SO instead for basic questions.

~~~
RMPR
Basic questions which includes writing the whole program for the user
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-
make-a...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a-
reaction-based-menu-in-discord-py)

~~~
mark-r
That's not a new problem at all, there have always been people who look at the
site as a free code-writing service. Kind of the opposite of the "Thanks"
problem are the question askers who complain that you didn't deliver them
production-ready code.

------
soheil
The combination of Google + SO always seemed too good to me compared to most
everything else on the Internet. It just works really well. I think this is
the closest thing we have to mind reading at least when it comes to
programming problems. It'd be shame for it to go away be it SO doing more and
more dumb shit like adding touchy feely bs like "thank you" mechanism or
Google being hit by antitrust into oblivion.

------
einpoklum
Thanks, but no thanks. See my (slightly) longer post here:

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077)

(and the rest of the discussion there.)

------
seph-reed
Perhaps a new user sandbox would make sense. A place where new users can work
together to triage each-others questions into something good enough.

If SO was a video game, it'd make sense to have newbies team up.

~~~
shagie
New users trying to help other new users to triage questions doesn't really
work well.

If someone doesn't grok the way that Stack Overflow works, the information
that new users add (or ask for) may do more harm than good (see examples of
people adding random formatting). Many times this just is reinforcing bad
habits.

If you feel this could be useful, I would encourage you to try helping out by
editing questions in the Help and Improvement queue so that they are good
questions with all the necessary information (and matching the style that
Stack Overflow expects).

There was a mentorship project at Stack Overflow a bit ago - but it didn't
scale and the expectations were mismatched (many new users were expecting help
with their problem /now/ rather than help with trying to make their question
better).

The video game analogy - its not that you need to team up to solve a problem,
its realizing that the quest(ion) has already been solved by someone else _so
you don 't need to do it again_.

------
jp1016
new comment : thanks for adding the 'thanks' button

