
Tired of Stack Overflow - mrzool
https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html
======
waisbrot
Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is,
how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is
dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying.

But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO
version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere
and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm
probably completely out of luck.)

Stack Overflow provides clear guidance on how to ask a good question.
([https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-
ask](https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask)) As someone who occasionally
answers questions there, I do feel annoyed when someone clearly didn't take
any time or effort.

The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they
asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what
they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it
would have been fine.

The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site.
There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are
more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than
the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never
met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?

~~~
krilly
I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO
question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME,
the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a
duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands
of views.

So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it
can never be updated with new info or given a better answer. I don't know
anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the
site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine
results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the
community.

I also think (and have seen) that the community dislikes questions that are
answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet. I often see comments
on questions I arrive at through google saying 'just google it, here's the
first google result it answers your question'. The source given is always
inferior, and the SO question, with a much clearer and more concise format,
has become the first google result. This seems like a good thing to me, but
look, the question's locked. What exactly is the problem with SO being a more
comprehensive knowledge store?

~~~
protomyth
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from
being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's
time when searching for answers.

~~~
kelnos
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually
incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.

~~~
shagie
The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of
this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page
15 of the a thread in the Java community forums.

While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all
of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and
is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with
it.

Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are
interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their
value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep
it useful. Look at [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-
of-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c) and
consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try
to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you
read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else?

Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people
trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well
and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack
overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web"
philosophy.

There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow
doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co
does comparisons. And so on.

~~~
eitland
> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all
> of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and
> is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact
> with it.

The issue I and I guess many of us here is talking about is that it seems the
Stack Overflow community - or rather a vocal minority in the community I guess
- are downvoting and flagging questions that where ok for the format.

~~~
shagie
For example?

~~~
Const-me
Examples:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56843086](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56843086)
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879)
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981)

~~~
shagie
Of those three, only the last one is one that I can view.

Consider the original question:
[https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/57323981/1](https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/57323981/1)
which... really is "design an entire system for me" type question.

The refinement, while better is still getting into discussions in the
comments.

While its from a different site on the SE network, consider:

Green fields, blue skies, and the white board - what is too broad? --
[https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6961/)

The structure of Stack Overflow wants a question that has a problem that has
some code that isn't behaving correctly and can be solved.

The list of "any better ways" is without bound or qualification as to what
"better" is.

That type of question would probably be better suited to a higher density
communication medium such as chat or a true forum (with threads). Stack
Overflow was intentionally designed to make that type of question hard to
answer.

Its not that it isn't a good question - just that it isn't a question that
fits well into the SO format. That should be ok, there are many other places
where such questions can be asked.

~~~
eitland
> That should be ok, there are many other places where such questions can be
> asked.

Won't say "citation needed", but I will say that outside of reddit I do not
frequently visit any such places.

And reddit has its own problems and also hardly counts as "many".

~~~
shagie
Consider then having people ask the questions that are 'interesting' here, on
HN. There's Metafilter. There is IRC, slack and discord channels, twitter,
GitHub issues, mailing lists. People have fairly consistently tried to do spin
offs of Stack Overflow
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876)
is one such example - it didn't work, it is rather challenging to get enough
people active to keep it active - see
[https://www.askquestions.tech](https://www.askquestions.tech) as another).
There are even people still posting on usenet (
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.javascript](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.javascript)
)

There are lots of them out there. They're not as big as Stack Overflow, but
that's part of what allows them to have a less focused mission... and many of
the other formats support the interesting questions better than Stack Overflow
can.

~~~
eitland
I guess part of the problem is Stack Overflow just got too big and now
everything gravitates around it.

Maybe it would help if Stack Overflow would explicitely link to alternatives,
at leadt when they rejected a question?

~~~
shagie
Consider the impact on HN if every time someone asked an opinion question or
recommendation for resources, the people pointed here. Hundreds of posts a day
fall into this bucket... would HN be able to moderate it? Would people stop
looking there when the top 30 were within the past 30 minutes and all by green
names?

I used to be active on another part of the SE network... and we could easily
get overwhelmed when people on SO tried to be helpful and point people with
questions that weren't quite right for SO in our direction. Without that
person being active on our site too, they often failed to realize that it
wasn't a good question there either... and we'd have to try to explain that
they were misdirected and no, we're not being elitist but the question needs
to be closed here too. For a small site, we could easily get half of daily
questions being from "helpful" misdirections. (
[https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7182/)
and
[https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/](https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/)
)

I believe that HN really wants people in the ask question who want to be on
HN... not just the 'herp derp oh look a textbox' syndrome (
[https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2948/3225#comment7479_2950)
). This goes for other online communities too. Trying to be too helpful does
all of them a disservice. Consider the advice from ESR in ask questions the
smart way: [http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-
questions.html#forum](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-
questions.html#forum)

> Choose your forum carefully

> cross-post to too many different newsgroups

> Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try
> to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance.
> You don't want this to happen to you.

> The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and
> other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project
> webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you
> difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked
> Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These
> mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts
> (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution. The
> project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to
> one; if so, follow it.

\---

(edit)

To the "It's too big" \- yes it is. I believe that that is really at the core
of the problem. The avenues where I go for help now tend to be small to the
point where on some of them I know every single person by first (real) name.

Having a small enough stream where I can read the entire day's stuff that
interests me easily along with being in an environment where the "we are
professionals, don't be a jerk" is enough of a moderation pressure that it
isn't even an issue.

I believe that a variation on activity pub (
[https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) ) is
the right way to go in the long term, with small sites that moderate and the
ability to programmatically screen posts. Not sure how... but something in
that nature. And if some other site keeps pushing your site crap, blacklist it
and stop accepting it. And to an extent, I'd even be willing to pay for it
(for someone else to keep the quality standards that I want).

------
el_cujo
I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote
option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really
vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules,
in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't
interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than
voting it down seems like the reasonable response. I also know that since
visibility is based on how your score matches up to others, some people will
just go and vote down every other recent question so theirs stands out more
(unless stack overflow has protection against such things, I know it happens
on similar sites)

I can maybe see an argument for answers to questions being down vote-able,
since people may sometimes give answers that are wrong/misleading but maybe
not to such a degree that they deserve to be expunged by moderators.

~~~
jasode
_> If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to
answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the
reasonable response._

Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote
button, _they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote
mechanism_ to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users
would type _" -1 downvote"_ in the comments. If you think a downvote button is
bad, a UI that encourages a pollution of "-1" meta comments may be even
_worse_.

(Similar examples of users bypassing web UI limitations would be Github users
typing "+1" into issues threads because there's no upvote button.)

Let's say you have 3 rough categories when judging a question such as :

(1) agree / approve --> _upvote_

(2) apathy / don't know answer --> _no vote, do nothing_

(3) disagree / disapprove of low-effort question --> _downvote_

If you architect the web UI to collapse categories (2) and (3) into "no vote"
to minimize "hurt feelings" and thus give voters no outlet to express a
"downvote", don't be surprised if users rebel and invent adhoc ways to do it
anyway.

If you read through the meta thread mentioned in the sibling comment by
vasili111, you'll see the well-respected high-karma SO users like John Skeet,
etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions.

### EDIT reply to those (galaxyLogic, randcraw, etc) suggesting forcing
downvotes into the comments area:

On the surface, it sounds logical and reasonable to force explanation of
downvotes but that doesn't work for _high-traffic_ sites like StackOverflow.
(In 2011, Jeff Atwood tried to explain this.[1][2][3][4])

The issue is the asymmetry of work between bad questions and good questions.
It's _easy_ to ask bad questions. It's _harder_ to ask well-researched and
high-effort questions. This asymmetry inevitably results in the SO site being
flooded with bad questions.

Therefore, forcing a "downvote explanation" just adds friction to the goal of
filtering out the _massive volume_ of bad questions. This was the rationale
why downvotes on _questions_ don't cost any karma. I.e. forcing downvote-
commentary works better for low-traffic sites and small communities but not
for high-traffic sites.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-
pearls-...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-
sand/)

[2] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-
preven...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-
of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system)

[3] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-
peo...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-people-to-
explain-downvotes)

[4] [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-
co...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-comment-
explaining-the-reason-for-the-first-downvote-on-a-question)

~~~
outadoc
Simple alternative: show a downvote button, but make it so that the score must
be >= 0.

~~~
adventured
I use this approach on a service of mine that is built around a community. It
works, I recommend it. When you hit 0 and someone tries to downvote further,
it informs you that that action is impossible (no user supplied content can be
voted into negative territory). I regard negative point voting to be an
unnecessary form of community punishment. If something is spam, abusive, or
otherwise breaks the rules, then it needs removed. If a user persists in
posting that type of content, they get removed.

In a decent community you don't get punched in the face for asking an ignorant
or lazy question. Instead, you do not get any reward or positive feedback for
it (upvotes, attention to the question). The default of decency is a neutral,
respectful treatment to others; a floor of dignity. People can learn how to
better contribute without being either subtly or overtly attacked or bullied.

I also give downvotes an expense, they cost points (they subtract from your
account score), and I increase the cost as it makes sense. So a user must earn
the ability to downvote through contribution. If the system has too much
downvoting, you can gently alter that behavior by ramping the cost overall and
individually (if a given user is prone to downvoting heavily, you increase
their cost beyond the base system cost).

~~~
isodude
Good point and here is some nueance from a book I read right now regarding
parenting and their main point is to neither punish or rate performance (good
nor bad). What you should aim for albeit hard, is to relate to the childrens
feelings instead. This translates well into adults. Rather than saying, "this
report was super good, well done!" say "What a great feeling I get when I read
the report" or "Feels good with the report being complete?"

Thought experiment: You say that reaching below 0 is punishing and getting
more than 0 shows that your question is good. You get feedback that you've
done great work writing the question. How would it look like when the site
relates to your feeling when writing and contributing to the site? Would it
work even if you remove score all together?

Giving rewards result in people seeking awards. Which may seem like a wise
thing but aiming for self confidence is way better. Which is obvious but may
be good to point out anyhow.

------
neves
Children, SO is a blessing for humanity.

Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You
couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or
pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just
would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

~~~
Const-me
I do remember pre-SO times.

Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical
writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft
did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages,
Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for
a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be
productive.

A bit later, many of the vendors created their own Q&A forums, in addition to
writing documentation. Such forums are focused on a single tech, so web
developers don’t come to game dev forums to close other people questions they
don’t understand due to lack of background. Happens every day on modern SO.

~~~
raverbashing
Absolutely

But even with pristine MSDN documentation and lots of (pre-SO) googling some
problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

I think tools also evolved and it's not surprising that "HTML" won, even QT
looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

~~~
Const-me
> some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced).

Modern SO doesn’t help with hard problems either, such questions often closed
as “too broad”.

> even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

C++ is just too low level for GUI. Look at WPF or UWP, both are miles ahead of
HTML even with modern webdev stuff like react, but they work fast.

I think the main reason why HTML won is Apple, and modern mobiles. Building
multiple rich GUI applications for Windows, iOS, Android is too expensive for
many people, the platforms are too different. Even before HTML5 arrived, it
was possible to build a single web app: JS workarounds for cross-browser
compatibility, and different styles/layouts to support both mobile and desktop
browsers.

~~~
raverbashing
> such questions often closed as “too broad”

Oh my questions were very specific usually

(the hardest one I remember was how to put a borderless window inside another
window (because it could change) and making it all work. Think some good
amount of win32 quirkiness was needed for that to work the way I wanted)

~~~
Const-me
It doesn’t matter to the downvoters. Here’s a deleted question closed as “too
broad”:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879)
Copy-pasting below.

 _What is the best way in C++ to calculate the coordinate of a rectangle
(hyper-rectangle) in n-dimension? I have dimensions of the rectangle in a 1d
vector like {1d_min , 1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max, ...., nd_min,nd_max}. For
example, in 2d the dimensions are {1d_min,1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max}. And the
coordinates will be
{1d_min,2d_min},{1d_min,2d_max},{1d_max,2d_min},{1d_max,2d_max}. However, I
want it for n-dimension._

For people with even minimal background in geometry, it’s obvious the OP wants
coordinates of all vertices of an axis aligned hyper-rectangle. A good
question in my book, and it has very simple and elegant answer which I wrote
there (using bits from an integer vertex index to select min or max
coordinates).

~~~
andrewprock
And to prove your point, the question has now been removed.

------
philliphaydon
One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and
their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is
accepted.

There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes
cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer
is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone
with a Low score who get few votes.

Voting should be unbiased and be based on the answer. Not the person who
answered.

~~~
phonebanshee
Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be
removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of
determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that
appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.

~~~
baud147258
Well, the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the
asker, then there are the votes and comments to evaluate whether or not this
is a good answer.

~~~
AlanSE
> the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the asker

That's a fundamental tension in the purpose of the site. If the particular
problem of the asker is the end goal, then duplicates would not be closed. All
other site criteria institute a strong demand for general interest of
questions.

Part of its success may be deftly balancing those two conflicting interests.
On one hand is the role of helping people, and the other hand is a non-
repeating and immediately useful knowledge base. Both of these demands bring
human attention, and satisfying either requires real work by a human. The
challenge is to keep the relevant human around just long enough to do enough
work so that you have plausibly usable content.

Accepted answers are a site design tailored for one use, but it is fantasy to
pretend that it harmoniously exists along side the other use. They are not
separated. Design elements oriented toward one way of use degrades the other
use.

~~~
baud147258
That's a pretty good point.

------
jnovek
This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow.

I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an
extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I _love_ helping people
learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for
SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer.
The ROI for me is nil.

~~~
prepend
Same here, I’ve been a reader for 10 years or however long, but their rules
were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day
and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer. This
didn’t work for me because SO wasn’t something I typically visited every day.
So I just couldn’t get into the habit of being enough of a user to browse and
vote so it was a vicious cycle of apathy.

I appreciate SO and use it many times a year. I remember the world before SO
(experts exchange was very bad), so I’m happy it exists. And it’s obviously
getting along without my comments and moderation.

I always wished it would pair well with something like HN so the reputation
effect from a daily activity would carry over to an infrequent activity.

I also really respected Joel Spoelsky so didn’t really have a constructive
criticism as the site worked pretty well.

~~~
baud147258
> their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to
> visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or
> answer

Has it changed a few years ago? When I started 3 years ago, I could answer
right from the start and I got the ability to vote quickly enough, after a
pair of vote on an answer, without having to do menial tasks every day.
Reputation can also be gained with edits, is that what you are talking about?

~~~
mark-r
Answering questions doesn't help unless those answers get upvotes. As a
newbie, your answers are less likely to get upvotes, especially if you're
slower than the old timers.

~~~
baud147258
It's true. For my part, I started (and continued to) answer on a tag with not
a lot of questions and answers, so most/some of the time I'd write the only
answer. Though I had a professional interest into the tag at the time, I
didn't choose it because it was easy to write the single answer on a question.

~~~
mark-r
And that's an example of the system working at its best. You were incented to
answer questions nobody else could or would answer. In my experience it
doesn't work out that way often.

------
Avamander
> Can people truly not comprehend how downvoting a post to -20 (or more) is
> perceived by the author of that post?

No, Stack Overflow high-rank users certainly do not. (A current community
moderator literally said "Voting is not a friendly or unfriendly activity.")
I've too suggested that the UI should be changed to be less abrasive and that
high-rank people should be more accountable for their actions and been
downvoted for that.

It's worth noting that this phenomenon of lack of empathy exists mostly in
Stack Overflow, much less so in smaller communities where people don't
generally have that much rank. At least that's what I saw with my personal
empirical observation of Arduino SE. Not to mention the high-rank users loathe
the welcoming initiative SO made, because god forbid they can't be snarky
asses without getting flagged any more.

~~~
jodrellblank
The SO guidelines are that voting is about the question, not about the author.
Everyone who has a rant about SO shows that is not universally agreed on, to
say the least. But for you to say "people should be kinder and more empathic",
for downvoting within the rules of the site, while you go on a rant calling
people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

~~~
Avamander
> for downvoting within the rules of the site

Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse.

> rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

Are you a high-rank SO user? Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an
empirical observation.

~~~
jodrellblank
> Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse.

Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who
agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no
research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site rules
and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead, isn't
good for the site either.

> Are you a high-rank SO user?

I've never thought so, but looking at the data[1] everyone with >500 rep is in
the top 5%, so by that standard, yes.

> Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation.

No, it's not. Saying that people "should be held accountable" for their
downvotes on an internet site is not "provable by means of experiment", it's
"people I disagree with should be punished". Calling people "snarky asses" is
not experimental, it's subjective interpretation. Describing downvoting as
lacking empathy, on a site where downvotes are intended to describe the
question not the author, is subjective interpretation.

[1]
[https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/20...](https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/2008-07-31?sort=reputationchange&page=1)
tables on the right hand side

~~~
Avamander
> Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who
> agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no
> research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site
> rules and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead,
> isn't good for the site either.

How many questions that get downvoted actually haven't done any research? I've
seen a ton of those that have done their research and have gotten downvoted.
In addition to those I have personal experience where I list what I've tried
and found, and still get downvoted. I have to say, not listing any research
has ended up better for me.

It's an excuse for just downvoting without really a good, constructive reason.
It's absolutely fallacious to keep iterating over the same "it's a feature,
not a bug" argument, the existence of a guideline is not a good reason for the
guideline to exist, same applies to the Stack Overflow Meta as well.

> Saying that people "should be held accountable" for their downvotes on an
> internet site is not "provable by means of experiment", it's "people I
> disagree with should be punished".

How is "explain why you are downvoting" a punishment if what you're doing is
actually reasonable? If you feel you are punished when you have to explain why
then you shouldn't downvote.

> Calling people "snarky asses" is not experimental, it's subjective
> interpretation.

It's your interpretation of "snarky ass" you can't detect by observation of
comments. I myself can verify by observation that such comments exist.

> Describing downvoting as lacking empathy, on a site where downvotes are
> intended to describe the question not the author, is subjective
> interpretation.

You're definitely lacking empathy right now if you don not see that downvotes
will never have the "intention" you said, at least for most people.

Oh, and let's not forget, it's not a subjective interpretation that people get
negative emotions towards random downvotes being thrown at them, it's very
visibly observable one, might even say it's empirical.

~~~
jodrellblank
> How many questions that get downvoted actually haven't done any research?

The guidelines say "shows research" \- hover over the downvote arrow on
StackOverflow and read the tooltip - so who knows how many? That said, you're
discussing it for you writing a well researched question, but the META
arguments are usually for the thousands of "give me the codez pls" homework
dumps which get filtered out before most people see them, because the
downvotes put them into the review queues and effectively cause them to be
filtered.

> the existence of a guideline is not a good reason for the guideline to exist

SO have not changed this policy, despite lots of feedback, for years and
years. Shouldn't we assume they have good reasons even if we don't know what
they are?

" _we 're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every
question about programming._"

The users of a library are not the book authors. The feeling of the book
authors about the reviews on their books doesn't come into the design of a
library, for one example. So maybe we do know what their reasons are - their
actions say they bring in a 'welcoming' policy before they change the
downvotes.

> How is "explain why you are downvoting" a punishment if what you're doing is
> actually reasonable?

You said "high-rank users will be more accountable for their behaviour [which
is] being snarky asses", that is very different from "every downvote should be
explained".

> You're definitely lacking empathy right now if you don not see that
> downvotes will never have the "intention" you said, at least for most
> people.

I have argued the same thing on HN before, downvotes is a terrible UI design
for SO. But they are the design, and here I'm arguing that should be
respected.

------
mumblemumble
I think that the fundamental problem with the downvote, pretty much anywhere
that has it, is that it's physically structured as being the inverse of an
upvote, and then there are some community guidelines saying, "This isn't
actually the inverse, it has some additional semantics associated with it."

In SO's specific case, the problem it's ostensibly trying to solve is
indicating that the question, as asked, needs work, or should have been asked
elsewhere. But there's nothing in the mechanism to ensure that it's solving
that problem. So, where what they needed was a constructive feedback
mechanism, what they built was a ruler for whacking knuckles.

I think that SO would be greatly improved if they simply took away the
downvote, and replaced it with a more structured mechanism for giving the
question asker feedback on how to improve their question. It would make the
place more friendly, and it would replace a mechanism for brusquely chasing
newcomers away with a mechanism for teaching them the community guidelines in
a positive way.

~~~
caf
Yeah - I mean, there is even a mechanism for giving feedback on how the
question can be improved: the comments.

In my view, if you think a question needs work your _first_ option should be
to leave a comment, and your second should be to edit it yourself to improve
it. If there isn't time in your busy schedule of bludging at work for either
of those then maybe consider just ignoring it?

------
billfruit
I'm tired with their fragmenting their site into airtight topic specific QA
sites, now with many questions one isn't sure where to post it to get max
eyeballs. I feel that is something that could have avoided by design. Topics
could have been managed through tags, instead of walling them off into
separate sites.

And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even
in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and
misleading.

~~~
pytester
>And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even
in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and
misleading.

This is the absolute worst aspect of the site to me. Some answers are version
specific, some stop working overnight one day, some used to be good practice
in 2011 and still work but really aren't any more and there is no sane
mechanism for stack overflow to handle any of these things.

This is quite apart from the multitude of answers which are voted to the top
which are wrong, only partially right or bad answers.

~~~
mLuby
Runnable code snippets are helpful in this regard, but even better would be
runnable _test cases._

Example: How to check for Invalid Date in JS?

```js

function invalidDate (date){return isNaN(date.valueOf())}

console.assert(invalidDate(new Date("foo")) === true)

console.assert(invalidDate(new Date()) === false)

```

But I'd expect if someone noticed an out-of-date answer they'd just comment
and it'd get fixed that way.

------
simias
Sometimes I think that downvoting, including on websites like Hacker News, is
a bad idea. It's easy to see the symmetry with upvotes and think that if you
have one, you should probably have the other but psychologically speaking it's
a very different type of interaction.

In particular, and even on HN, the good old mantra "don't downvote if you
disagree, downvote if the comment doesn't contribute to the discussion" is,
from personal experience, not really followed by a significant chunk of the
userbase. I try not to care about karma but it's always frustrating when you
spend a few minutes of your time carefully composing a comment only to see it
grayed out because people didn't like it. It's really toxic too because you
don't feel welcome to express your point of view, even if it's in a completely
respectful manner. When unchecked this tendency ends up with what you see on
most of Reddit: dumb, content-free comments that go with the popular opinion
raise to the top while insightful but controversial positions are buried under
downvotes. Then you end up with echo chambers.

I wonder how different HN wouldn't be if there were no downvotes at all and
only the "flag" button to tag non-constructive comments. Basically the way it
works for submissions.

Personally I very rarely downvote comments on HN, if I find a comment that I
don't find very insightful but is still technically contributing to the
discussion I prefer to find a sibling comment that I deem more interesting and
upvote that instead. I turn a negative interaction into a positive one.
Instead of focusing on pushing people down you help those you find more
interesting.

------
ubercow13
I feel like HN is turning a bit in this direction too. I feel like I’m seeing
more downvoted comments, and they are more often than not perfectly good
comments, and no one replies explaining why they don’t like the comment. Of
course you can’t talk about it because it’s against the rules.

~~~
herodotus
agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a
reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.

~~~
1_player
It happens, people are a little trigger happy on the Internet, but HN is a
forum utopia compared to StackOverflow or Reddit.

In my experience, on here people downvote when the answer is either off
topic/spam or false with regards to the topic. Sometimes some good comments
are greyed out because the profile has been (wrongly) shadowbanned, but the
"vouch" feature is great for that.

EDIT: is HN so good compared to the rest because of its moderation
tools/upvote system, or because it attracts only a specific niche of people?
Would a Reddit/SO with HN features work better than the current sites?

~~~
ahaferburg
People in this thread downvoted comments that express unpopular opinions. Even
factually wrong posts should not be suppressed but corrected/challenged in a
reply. As the rules state, assume good faith.

Downvotes should be reserved for trolls and low effort posts.

I agree that HN is much nicer than SO or Reddit, but that is largely due to
the moderators here.

------
spapas82
I was a heavy SO user before some years however I have stopped posting
questions nowadays (mainly because of the reasons presented in the article)
and I find answering too time consuming.

What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm
is to use IRC (freenode). I more or less learned Kotlin and Elixir just by
reading some online articles and asking things on the corresponding IRC
channels. The people there are helpful and the most important thing is that
asking a question will start a discussion about being idiomatic, other ways to
solve a problem etc, things that are not possible in a Q/A site like SO.

Also I had asked some very difficult questions about mysql and postgresql in
the corresponding channels (that I expected to get no answer) and they were
answered almost immediately.

I urge you to try it: No walled gardens, no people selling/advertising through
your data, no point system, complete freedom to ask (and answer) whatever you
wish.

~~~
jodrellblank
> use IRC (freenode)

The underlying issue I see here, is the geek desire to answer a question once
and for all, and have beginners just fuck off and read the damn faq and stop
asking. (Everybody is a beginner in a task they don't know how to do, for all
it matters, but experienced people will not stay that way as long as
inexperienced people).

Whereas beginners want to chat, have someone help/mentor/guide through which
bits are relevant, current, idiomatic, easy, hard, tailored to their problem.
Beginners don't know what to read, and can't spot it or make sense of it when
they see it. (Again, everyone is a beginner, for if the seasoned expert knew
what to read to answer their question, they'd be off reading it instead of
posting a question on StackOverflow).

People on realtime chat services are the kind of people who don't mind (or
people in a state of mind where they don't mind) answering the same kinds of
questions, and talking the same things, over and over and over.

StackOverflow mixes people who want "one answer forever" nitpicking question
and answers as if they were encyclopaedia editors to make them 'perfect' to be
a forever-answer, with people who want "realtime help" asking, who don't care
about exactly the right wording and terms and formatting and stuff. NB. that
the people who would be asking, but are on the "one and done" side of things,
are the people off studying the FAQ and documentation and code, and buying
books and courses where they expect to find answers already existing, so they
don't so often show up on the questions side of SO.

------
blt
I think a big cause of SO's unpleasantness is the directive to eliminate
duplicate questions. Judging whether two questions are duplicate has a lot of
gray area, and most people seem too eager to hit the button. It's frustrating
when someone marks your question as duplicate based on their own flawed
understanding of what you asked.

What is the harm in having multiple similar questions on the site? As the
passive reader, it's no big deal to look through two or three similar pages. A
massive academic field, Information Retrieval, gives us many sophisticated
tools to rank similar chunks of information by relevance.

As the number of duplicates increases, all possible ways of asking the
question will be covered. When someone new comes to ask the same question,
they'll see at least one duplicate in the real time results for "possible
duplicates" as they type. So I don't think we need to worry about hundreds of
duplicates.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The problem, as I see it, with duplicates is it leaves questions with poor
answers when better answers already exist for the same question.

For example I've recently been looking at a problem with /boot on the
AskUbuntu SO site. There are multiple answers for the question of what to do
when one has a lot of old kernels filling up your /boot (not the actual
problem I had); one question is relatively well handled and has several
"answers" including good answers (IMO). But other questions that aren't linked
up to this particular one have some of the poorer answers, or lack the breadth
of the canonical question page and so might lead people to do things that
aren't optimal or leave them unable to boot their system.

The problem with that is that often questions fall in to a looser grouping
where the same answers apply, or very nearly to a group of questions but the
questions aren't really identical.

SO's current system is maybe a least worst approach? I'm not sure one can tell
with out trying alternatives.

~~~
blt
When duplicate is detected/flagged, let the author of the newer question know,
and they can decide whether or not to delete it?

------
abacadaba
Anecdotal: Searching github issues has long since surpassed the usefulness of
stackoverflow for me.

Possibly the types of questions I need answered has changed, but I think it's
more that everything on stackoverflow is out of date or off topic. Or the
people who could answer are also the people who are too busy and/or don't care
enough to play the karma game.

~~~
slig
This has been my experience recently as well, specially with fast-moving JS
frameworks and libraries.

~~~
Avamander
Yep, the time dimension is seriously overlooked by people flagging questions
closed. IMO the duplicate close reason shouldn't accept questions older than a
year.

~~~
baud147258
It depends on the tag, for some languages/framework that aren't moving that
fast, you'd find a lot of older answer that are still valid

~~~
Avamander
Too hard to determine which questions expire or not. Most do.

------
rossdavidh
So, in "real life", we tend to automatically calibrate our response to
somebody saying "I don't like that", depending on how often we've heard the
same person say they don't like stuff. If they say it a lot, we don't give it
much weight. If they rarely if ever say it, we give it more weight.

Also, if two or three other people have already told someone (in "real life")
that they don't like something, we tend to regard somebody else who jumps in
to say it, negatively. It seems not too hard to implement on SO that
downvoting a question that is already negative, should either be disabled or
else weighted less.

Lastly, in "real life" we are more tolerant of piling on, when the same person
has been given modest negative feedback before, and keeps doing it. If a
person has several questions with negative score, it might make sense to allow
more downvotes. For example, with only one question with negative score (e.g.
a newbie), it cannot go below -1. If you have two questions with negative
score, it can go to -2, etc.

All seems totally doable, but everything turns out to be more complicated than
it looks from the outside, so I suppose they have reasons for not doing it.

------
falsedan
I remember posting an answer to a CGI question with some grody, idiomatic
solution, and getting scolded/downvoted by a high-rep dev (who montiored the
subject tags) who responded with... a solution that didin't work! When the
original asker responded, they directed them to file a bug.

That contempt and disregard for the actual day-to-day tediousness of writing
commercial code is an attitude I can do without.

Also: [https://imgur.com/C22vPFV](https://imgur.com/C22vPFV)

~~~
mplanchard
Wow! That screenshot is unbelievable. I’ve never seen his book before, but I
went and looked it up so that I can be sure to never buy it and to recommend
against it, due to the author, if it comes up in conversation.

------
nv-vn
I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as
much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to
the same conclusions as I did. Between the "why would you want to do this?"
answers and the downvoting beginner's questions and the "THIS IS A DUPLICATE"
answers when the "duplicate" question is totally different and the "deleted as
off-topic" on every interesting question, I find it really painful to support
the site at all. The site has so much potential, but I find it less and less
useful these days to the point where I can't justify ever checking the site
out.

~~~
Ensorceled
> Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers

This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE.

Also, duplicates that not only are a completely different question but THIS
question is ranked #1 by both DDG and Google.

~~~
umvi
> This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE.

Because of X/Y problems. People want to make sure the person asking the
question is asking the _right_ question (often, they are not). You see newbies
a lot asking suspicious questions like "How do I extract the string between
the carets in '>I want this string<'?".

Of course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why
they are doing this. They might respond "I'm trying to extract a string from a
webpage HTML". In which case you would give a completely different answer.

I've seen suspicious questions before where the asker didn't know what they
_really_ wanted was "JSON parsing" and were basically asking how to extract
JSON fields using regex (but it wasn't completely obvious because they only
pasted a small snippet of the JSON). You are saying I should've just given
them what they wanted and not even questioned why they was doing it this way?

Well, I'm sorry. I asked "is there a particular reason you need regex to
extract these fields? Because this data looks very similar to JSON and there
are better ways of extracting JSON fields"

They replied that if there was a better way than regex, they were open to it,
and I introduced the concept of JSON parsing.

I personally think it's kind of conceited to believe that you know _exactly_
what you are doing at all times and that it is an insult for people to
question your methods. I only ask questions on SO extremely rarely, but when I
do, I'm always open to such "why are you do it this way" questions because it
indicates they believe there is a better way I could be doing it.

~~~
Ensorceled
But the other half of the time the question descends into chaos. I'm there
because the question is the same as I asked, 9/10 the digression is not
useful.

Also, if you suspect that the user is doing something wrong or there is a
better approach, a better way to do this is to ask "are you parsing JSON?
because Python has a builtin JSON library" instead of "Why would you even want
to do this?".

I guess what I _really_ want is for people to update the question if it no
longer applies because a different question was answered and accepted.

------
juped
Pretty much every time I search for Stack Overflow type questions online I
find a good answer on Stack Overflow.

And pretty much every time I find a good answer on Stack Overflow, it's
_heaped_ with derision from Stack Overflow users and the system. I can't
remember the last time I landed on a question that wasn't "closed" for "low
quality" or whatever the various negative treatments are there, and piled with
negative comments and possibly a snarky answer.

This doesn't give me a good impression of Stack Overflow, a site I've never
signed up for or felt interested in signing up for.

------
jonathaneunice
Yes, yes, and more YES.

Some of my best SO experiences have been answering questions that got
ridiculous downvotes (more -1 and -3 than -75, but still). If SO has already
answered this particular question, then great—do a better job of leading
questioners to it. If not, get out of the way and let's answer the question
here.

------
moron4hire
I've found the only way to maintain a nice, helpful community is to be liberal
with the ban hammer. If you are early and consistent with it, you don't have
to use it that often. But people in general fear conflict, fear taking a
position of authority, and exercising that authority.

I have a weekend Meetup that I have been running for 5 years. I've had to ban
three people. The first two were three years ago, after a spat of incidents.
The last one was a month ago, and it was an easy and quick decision with
little impact on the group. The activity in the group now conveys what sort of
behavior is acceptable, so it takes a real, honest to goodness troll before we
get any trouble.

Being nice is a component of the quality of a community. If "quality" is so
important to defend, being nice is important to defend.

------
commandersaki
Minus blog post I came to a similar conclusion; asking on StackOverflow is a
waste of time. I asked a question about how to do X - which turned out wasn't
possible or I misunderstood how the system worked, and rather get an answer, I
was told to reformulate the question or have it closed. Then eventually I was
told in the comments of the question that this question doesn't make much
sense. It was still a valid question, deserved a simple response, at least to
add to the knowledge base.

Whatever, SO is a waste of time.

~~~
kwhitefoot
I don't ask many questions, well almost never any more, partly because very
often when I search I find almost exactly the question I want answered only to
find closed as off topic yet it has a half a dozen well reasoned answers and
three dozen well reasoned comments.

I think SO and Wikipedia have both suffered the same fate: they started with
everyone on the same footing but now there is a core of 'professional' or at
least habitual editors who enforce their own narrow view of what is right. I
gave up editing Wikibooks after one too many deletes of perfectly valid
graphics for nit picking reasons.

------
klausjensen
I have used SO since they opened.

These days, at least half of my questions get closed as off topic or marked as
duplicate - and I always do a lot of research first - but sometimes I just do
not know the right keyword to search for - or do not understand the deeply
obscure limitations to what is considered on or off topic...

I will ask my question, hope to get an answer before it is closed.

------
zxcvbn4038
I think you can argue the psychology and the merits of various ranking systems
all day every day. I don’t think there is one correct answer and might work
one moment on one population might not work for another population for even
the same population at a later date.

The OP might just be getting burned out on stack overflow -maybe time to take
a break, scale back, or just do something new.

I think stack overflow is a great resource and has a lot of life left in it.
Long ago when I first started out there was no resource like Google, Stack
Overflow, Experts Exchange, or Wikis. When I had a question I usually had to
find a more knowledgeable peer, explain in excruciating detail exactly what I
was doing, and then only if they agreed with me one hundred percent would they
answer my question. If I deviated from the way they would do something then my
question would go unanswered. Real PITA. But it was a great motivator to
develop deep knowledge so that I wasn’t limited to replicating what my peers
had done.

Today when I have questions it’s all too easy to get an answer without all of
the overhead I mentioned. Though I’ve noticed my younger peers often lack deep
knowledge and instead have various aptitudes for finding relevant information
and deriving a solution from similiar circumstances.

------
lovelearning
I avoid SO too.

However, I didn't understand this:

[...]

There is no pass by reference, so I’m not sure where you got that. You’re
simply passing the value, which is a copy and not going to change the
original.

...is parading that they’re stupid and wrong, while beating your chest about
how much smarter you are.

[...]

It sounds neutrally worded to me. Can somebody here point out what part of it
is considered hostile and how it can be improved?

~~~
rgoulter
Sometimes 'explaining what you said was wrong' is interpreted as showing
you're a smarter/better person, rather than information sharing. I liked this
blog post about it. [https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-
me/](https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/)

Yes, that comment could just be trying to be helpful / clarifying.

I think it's not much of a stretch to say the upvotes incentivise the
"popularity seeking" behaviour over "information sharing" behaviour.

~~~
lovelearning
As a non-native speaker, I have to admit I find it very very subtle, the kind
of sentence I might speak / write / hear without even realizing something is
off. Thank you for the link - the author's done a great job explaining it.

------
lordnacho
At this stage SO is a reference work. The kind of things it's useful for are
things like "what's the syntax for [algo] in [language]". There's specific
answers people are looking for, and they stay that way.

It also means everything(tm) is there. It's been ages since I've needed to ask
anything at all there. Someone has had the problem before, and gotten the
answer.

Individual reputation might not matter much in this context. If the answer to
your question has 100 upvotes, why does it matter who they fell to? If someone
answers a question, does it matter how many other upvotes they got? Does it
make them more authoritative?

You'll find loads of simple answers with loads of upvotes, and deep dives with
just a few.

My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner
that says "untick this box". That time I found an actual error in a Swift lib,
I spent ages detailing it, and got barely any votes.

~~~
einpoklum
> At this stage SO is a reference work.

That's absolutely not the case:

* Not for the most upvoted questions. * Not for which questions get upvoted nowadays. * Not for what influential/highly-active users expect.

> Individual reputation might not matter much in this context.

It shouldn't matter all that much anyway. People tend to assign to much merit
to these gamifications.

> My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner
> that says "untick this box".

Yes, that's one of the anomalies. The most interesting and imaginative
questions, and their answers, rarely get upvoted much because people don't
look for them or find them.

------
rsp1984
I find the described phenomena not only apply to SO but also to other internet
forums, sometimes even to real life (e.g. work place) situations

 _There is no “quality control” in downvoting a question to double-digits. The
simple truth is that you’re just being a gigantic twat if you keep piling on
votes like that._

Not sure if there's an official name for this phenomenon in psychology but
whenever it becomes "safe" to bash on someone or someone's opinion you can bet
that more people are going to do it, even though the "marginal utiliy"
diminishes very quickly.

I think it's a variation of deriving some kind of satisfaction by "pushing
yourself up by pushing others down". Personally, when I see people do this I
know it's someone I definitely do _not_ want to hang out or be friends with.

------
scrame
Stack Overflow did a competent job at a community Q&A site, and marketed it
well. I think the downside of it was that it was developed in the age of
'gamification', so it has a ton of badges and incentives for participating,
but it incentivizes the wrong things.

It's still miles better than expertsexchange.com (the hyphen site), but is
very biased towards first answers for doing kids homework.

The majority of questions I've asked there are when I seriously can't get to
the bottom of a bug, and generally the answers aren't helpful like "you need
to restructure your application".

Its value is really in simple, dumb answers, which as the author points out,
is very useful when you have to jump between languages and don't quite
remember the right idiom for pushing something onto an "array" in PHP vs using
a stack elsewhere.

Like a lot of other web2.0 sites from the era, the incentive with reputation
and badges is very effective at creating a community of people who want those
points, but also offers a perverse incentive of racing to answer the easiest
questions quickly.

Unless that question has been determined by the community to be low quality
(in the case of the infinite loop homework question referenced in the
article).

Like a lot of community sites where engagement gives you more privileges,
there ends up being a meta-community of people with power dictating the tone
and direction of the site, even if that is orthogonal to the actual goal of
the site.

The other issue is that for a software dev Q&A site, it can be very hard to
find / suss out current info. If I'm looking for an issue migrating to
Hibernate 5, and the most popular answers are something using the XML configs
and migrating to hibernate 3 from 2012, that's not really helpful, and I don't
think the tagging/search combo from 2008 can filter for that.

I will say this, it seems to have avoided the tech forum pitfall of:

"I'm getting this error, can anyone help?

Edit: nm, figured it out."

------
dave1999x
I joined Stack Overflow on day 1 and I've found it very useful. You could
argue that despite its flaws it has successfully achieved its goals. Stack
Overflow is a great example of gamification.

The reason for fatigue is not because of downvotes, but because it is no
longer "fun". It's done. There is nothing left to add unless you want to jump
on new technologies.

------
KajMagnus
If you want your own StackOverflow like community for your project, at your
own website, maybe Talkyard could be interesting:

[https://github.com/debiki/talkyard](https://github.com/debiki/talkyard) (I'm
developing it)

There're no downvotes. Instead: Like, and Disagree votes, and it's fine to
both Like and Disagree with something at the same time (they work in separate
"dimensions"). (You have any thoughts or feedback?)

------
unlinkr
Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting _highly_
upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here:
[https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-
regex/](https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/)

In short, the question here:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-
except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) is complete legitimately and
answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question
for trying to do something "impossible".

In general I do like SO quite a lot and find it very useful. But this is one
example where SO spread wrong and misleading information. But when I wrote a
post on meta.stackoverflow to point out this particular problem, it was
quickly downvoted to -25 before getting deleted.

~~~
banana_giraffe
The Zalgo response drives me slightly crazy.

Most of the time I've actually seen people asking about regex's and HTML are
asking for a very small subset of both, they generally just want to parse a
bunch of pages generated by a small number of tools, and yet they get told
it's impossible to use Regex to do it.

The second answer is spot on, actually answers the question, yet the first one
is the one that gets treated as gospel.

------
nullc
> and just had to add their own downvote

On the Internet you don't exist unless you act, there are no points just for
showing up. Thus the plethora of useless votes and comments (such as my
comment here :) ).

------
elchief
My solution is to give enormous bounties. Then the haters stfu

I have lots of points to give away though

~~~
umvi
I think you are on to something here... maybe rep could be purchased for $$$.
Then you can literally put your money where your mouth is.

------
gumby
I mentally substituted HN for SO when reading these comments.

I see a similar pathology here, though far less extreme. I read HN both for
the links and the commentary. Over the past couple of years I've noticed an
increase in downvotes appearing to be used as "I disagree" which is a shame.
I've disagreed with commentators whose comments have made me think, or even
change my mind.

Downvotes also get used on trivial or off topic comments, which seems what
they are intended for. And I hardly consider it any sort of cesspool of social
pathology (as seemed be be described in the recent article about HN
moderating). But downvote use does seem to be trending the wrong way IMO.

The result, of course, would be as described by the OP: self-deporting.

------
jon889
Stack Overflow started going downhill when they stopped allowing "fun"
questions. used to be that I'd go there, ask a question and browse through the
questions, seeing which I could answer and also fun ones I could just read for
interest and pick up sometimes useful sometimes not bits of information which
would lead to other topics and so on. Since then it's just a constant stream
of "noob" questions with basically no answers. There's nothing wrong with
"noob" questions, the questions I've asked on there are pretty much all "noob"
questions as I was first learning about programming. The problem is only
having those types of questions and nothing to attract people capable of
answering to the site.

------
mlthoughts2018
What kind of culture do you expect for a subject matter that is heavily tied
to Google-style whiteboard algorithm trivia / Wall Street brainteasers as ways
in which freshly minted Ivy brogrammer grads are made to feel more valuable or
important than people with diverse perspectives & years of actual experience.

The social behavior of Stack Overflow is just an extension of tech culture.
You can change message board formats, add community guidelines, add
moderators, etc., not going to change anything until the capricious (& often
socially harmful) cultures of tech are forced to change through significant
legal accountability and through candidates simply saying “no” to touted jobs
to punish the malignant culture.

------
sergiotapia
The way forward isn't a global website like SO, it's niche forums from people
you get to know in a weekly basis.

For elixir we have a public forum specific to Elixir.

For crystal, there's a crystal forum as well.

For react, I'm still looking for one that's good.

------
makecheck
Online activities shouldn’t have such a huge effort imbalance:

\- If I spend an hour writing and rewriting a question or answer, there
shouldn’t be any “2-second torpedo” option where someone can ruin all that
effort. Instead, they should have to spend some similar invested time, e.g.
minimum length reasoning, peer review before posting or other hurdle.

\- Exactly the same problem with other sites, even online product searches.
The “1 star” people seem to have infinite power, which has always been
ridiculous. All this does is discourage actually useful contributions from
appearing in the future, toward lowest common denominator.

------
runarberg
I had this meta effect happen to me on one of my answer[1]. I mistakenly
accused a downvote on my answer as retaliatory and asked on meta if there were
any actions available. The meta effect came in full swing, the meta tread
quickly became quite toxic (I suggested closing it for that reason but was
refused) and my answer got even more downvotes.

This experience really caught me off guard. My experience with online
communities has never been so hostile before. At the time I was taking a
conscious effort and try to contribute back to SO, however this experience
pushed me back. I’ve made a few contributions since then, but they probably
would have been far more if people wouldn’t have been so hostile towards me in
that meta thread.

[1]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385061/retaliatory-...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385061/retaliatory-
downvote?noredirect=1#comment697118_385061)

PS. I suspect the first downvote on my answer was because my answer was posted
with a modern CSS, and I feel like (without having any evidence for) there are
some people that actively downvote good HTML/CSS/JavaScript answers that use
new syntax and features, while never explaining why the answer is “bad” in any
way.

------
beardedProgmr
This author should avoid Reddit at all costs. I got time -40 karma for saying
I personally didn't care about screen refresh rates this week.

Also as a stack overflow mod my group doesn't have such issues. Nor have I
experienced these issues. Worst I've had was a few extremely technical
questions require a bounty the get an answer. However my group spends a lot of
time helping new users. The ones on the main group might have issues as there
are more posts and less mods.

~~~
non-entity
I've quit reddit multiple times over getting to heated in arguments

~~~
beardedProgmr
A student reporter once left a mic with my ma. She posted on Reddit hoping to
find them. She still talks about the horrible replies she got. I really cannot
fathom what's wrong with those people.

------
ilaksh
I just usually try to avoid participating in Stack Overflow now because it's
not worth it. If there is any way for people to abuse you passive
aggressively, they will.

If you try to answer a question there is a good chance someone will come along
and invalidate your effort somehow. Either pointing out a subtle issue that
isn't really important, or copying your answer into a comment and voting the
original question closed, or they will write a long-winded answer with a bunch
of custom code that technically does what the original poster asked but is
actually an outdated approach. Or any way to make your answer less important
so they can get the points.

The other problem I have with Stack Overflow is that a lot of times the answer
to a question is to use an existing module or library but if you write that
someone will come after you reinventing the wheel with some custom code they
are supposed to copy paste and then nail you to the wall for not including
code. I mean part of the concept of Stack Overflow is actually outdated
because it is based on the idea that we should reuse a ton of code by copying
and pasting snippets. And I know people love to hate on dependencies but
copying and pasting a hundred functions is not a better solution.

------
d--b
The basic problem is that downvotes attract downvotes.

> Hiding downvotes slightly increases the vote score of comments and
> substantially reduces the percentage of comments that receive a negative
> vote score, on average

(from
[https://civilservant.io/do_downvotes_cause_bad_behavior_jan_...](https://civilservant.io/do_downvotes_cause_bad_behavior_jan_2018.html))

------
thekyle
This isn't directly related to the article, but I've noticed lots of Stack
Overflow answers now contain outdated information in the highest voted answer.

I wonder if moving to a velocity based ranking system (like HN and Reddit)
instead of pure sorting by net votes would help with that. That way answers
with more velocity (attracted more upvotes recently) would be ranked higher.

------
RickJWagner
Thank God for Stack Overflow.

Whenever I Google up some difficult question (which is often), SO has a good
answer almost right away. Ah, the kindness of strangers!

As for the downvoting, IMHO Hacker News suffers from this. It seem good
comments are regularly downvoted if they don't adhere to other's social views.
I think we should operate at a level higher than that.

------
jshowa3
If I was just starting out and I asked a question about how to loop a greeting
message and it got downvoted almost 50 times, I'd feel like a piece of crap.

So congrats, SO. You finally got your community. I'm honestly disappointed
myself because I remember, fondly, how difficult it was for me to figure this
stuff out on my own before SO even existed.

------
javaJake
From my experience, this behavior is common when volunteers answer questions.
Personally, I think this behavior that the author is seeing is because
volunteer work is thankless and tiring (even with karma) and when you've seen
a hundred questions and answered 20 of them the same way, it's easy to fall
into the trap of feeling lazy or angry, and get aggressive either way.

This is the behavior I quickly learned to expect and brace myself against
whenever I asked a question on IRC in the 2000's. I'd be mocked, the reasons
behind my questions would be probed, and eventually I'd get an answer. I
realized that If I asked an extremely specific question and, if someone
probed, immediately provided full background, the mocking and probing would
end, and I'd either get a shrug, or an answer.

This is not intended to excuse the behavior. I have just stopped being
surprised when I see it.

------
rgovostes
Now that I have a few hundred reputation points the site is much more usable,
but the privilege system drove me crazy for a while. If you are an expert in
something, you cannot even _comment_ (50 pts) to explain why an answer is
wrong. And there are editing minimums so fixing bugs in broken code can be
tedious sometimes.

------
dlandis
It's kind of baffling to me that SO hasn't made further significant attempts
at improving the site's culture after identifying and documenting the problems
over a year ago in their blog posts. I agree that nothing much has changed on
the site since then.

The pattern I see nowadays is that someone asks a reasonable (albeit basic)
question and, even if it's not downvoted, people start immediately attempting
to undermine it in the comments. Many people's goal seems not to be to answer
the question (whatever the question may be) but to explain why the question is
invalid and shouldn't have been asked in the first place. In my experience the
top reputation users are not the problem either -- they are actually more
likely to answer the question as asked and not simply try to undermine the
questioners.

~~~
einpoklum
Over a year ago? It's been this way for at least 5 years and probably more.
And it was a well-known fact.

However! Remember that the primary goal of SO is not to answer your individual
question, but to curate a collection of publicly-useful Q&A. That's why it's
reasonable to "undermine" many newbie question. The trick is to do it in a way
that's positive, friendly, and condusive to the asker getting an answer to
what they want to know.

------
0xmohit
As per this meta question [0], the one you've linked to doesn't appear worthy
of downvotes. However, when I was active on the site, it appeared that (some)
users active in a tag tend to downvote questions when they didn't have an
answer to it.

That said, the reputation model also encourages low quality answers [1].

Overall, I found the site to be somewhat toxic and stopped visiting it several
years back.

[0] [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252677/when-is-
it-j...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252677/when-is-it-
justifiable-to-downvote-a-question)

[1] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-
in...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-
problem)

------
yakubin
I get that people can take being downvoted personally. (I sometimes do.) And
sure, downvoting something that already has -10 points is mean and doesn't
serve anything. But being so protective of others in this regard, trying to
protect them from receiving negative evaluations from people (random people
from the internet you don't care about, no less!) is too much.

I think that thick skin is something to be cultivated. Sure the other guy is
mean, but if you feel so bad about it, then you should work on where your
self-worth comes from. I'm not saying it's easy. From personal experience, I
would say that it may very well be the case that you spend too much time
focused on just this one thing (let's say computers) and so lack distance.
Perhaps something else. Find out. Work on it.

------
greyhair
This rant reminds me of how I felt at the end times of usenet in the mid-late
90s'. Usenet groups were awesome, until they were overrun by spammers and
angry egos. Then I had to go.

The problem that others have pointed out, if reasonable people fatigue out and
leave, it self-sorts for the people that love to show how smart they are, or
what big angry egos they have, and it spirals down from there.

On one of your points, I have had the grand blessing of working with a number
of people way smarter than me. And the nearly universal quality of really
smart people is that they never point out how smart they are. Oh there are
outliers that will constantly remind people of that fact, but by and large,
the really (really) smart people never bring that up.

------
toadi
Sometimes I just have a feeling it's about language. I see it a lot in the
software community (and Agile). You should say it that way because the other
way is too (passive) aggressive or not PC.

SE is a worldwide profession and the internet makes this true. For some people
English is a second or even third language. Not always constructing the right
sentences, not understanding subtleness all the time.

As long as SO is useful for me I will use it. I want to solve problems. I'm
not there for the warm community. If SO fails because there is no warm
community and this is needed to succeed. I assume another site will get
popular where people will contribute to answers that are useful for they
community in general.

------
luckydata
I can't imagine a worse place to be than a site that encourages the tedious
(and most times irrelevant) nitpicking engineers are already usually guilty
of.

I asked a question a couple times on SO and quickly determined I don't need
that kind of toxicity in my life.

------
arkh
> As if you need to be a dick to maintain “quality”.

Maybe you can't. Being nice does not scale: being nice mean you take more time
to answer and try to make people not offended. With an internationnal
audience, good luck not finding something which won't offend someone (hint:
not everyone shares the USA values).

You can be nice in the PR and issue and wiki of your small projects with
limited number of people around. If you want quality on a site serving
millions of people? You'll have to cut to the chase. And some people (the
author being one) will take it as being a dick. Some other people would take
offense to the use of the expression "being a dick" for something negative.

~~~
tahoemph999
You have this backwards. Being mean doesn't scale. A small number of mean
people can poison a large part of the community. That drives off future
contributors at a high rate. Being reasonable does scale. When somebody isn't
following reasonable guidelines it takes one person to point them at the FAQ,
help them understand what they did wrong and why it could be done better next
time, etc. One response[1] to point back in the right direction. Low
investment for a good outcome. If more people decide to add like reasoning for
why the question/comment/answer was off then more energy was spent to convince
the original person that this is a hostile forum to use. Now you end up with
more energy being spent to achieve a lesser effect. That is a lower ROI.

There is a difference between being concise (cut to the chase) and being rude.
And yea, language differences can blur that line. But it is a spectrum. Just
'cuz not everybody will think you are being NICE doesn't mean it is fine to be
a jerk.

[1] Due to the distributed nature of these platforms you can end up with a
small multiple of simultaneous responses. Fine, most people get this is a
possibility. One good way some people deal with this is to not knee jerk
response to everything. Sadly that has a the effect of having the jerks do
more of the responding.

~~~
arkh
> When somebody isn't following reasonable guidelines it takes one person to
> point them at the FAQ, help them understand what they did wrong and why it
> could be done better next time, etc.

If you haven't I encourage you doing that for some "low skill" tags on SO 1 or
2 hours per day. Php, js, css, java should be good examples.

------
einpoklum
FYI: Some (most?) sites on the StackExchange network don't have this culture
of violent downvoting and put-downs. Instead, the veterans use comments which
are mostly constructive, and are much more likely to reward newbie efforts
with upvotes.

------
tenebrisalietum
Maybe hide downvotes and effects thereof of new questions for a certain
limited duration, unless the downvoter comments. The downvoter would see a
warning, possibly an encouragement to post and be friendly, and the downvote
would eventually count.

The exact duration that's best would be unique per site and question. It
should depend on how many active users the stack exchange has, the length of
the posters account exists, and how many "quick downvoters" attack the
question within the first X minutes.

Quick downvoters could be defined as users that downvote more than X questions
that have appeared on the site for less than X minutes.

------
mnd999
Slashdot’s moderation with reasons / meta moderation worked pretty well for
me. Despite it coping pretty well with the fully spectrum of posts that site
solicited it doesn’t seem to have ever been copied - I’m not sure why.

------
didibus
Okay, I read the meta page about the question the author says is responsible
for them being very disappointed in SO here:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318482/is-there-
a-b...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318482/is-there-a-better-way-
to-deal-with-low-quality-questions-that-have-a-bounty-atta)

And if you look at the 3rd answers, it mentions a bounty fraud ring. Woa! Is
that a thing? If it is, this is a hard problem to tackle. Relax the rules,
increase fraud, strengthen the rules, impact normal users. Good luck SO

------
cwyers
Stack Overflow announced changes to the site intended to help combat these
issues less than a week ago:

[https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-s-in-the-works-at-stack-
ov...](https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-s-in-the-works-at-stack-overflow-
improving-feedback-for-all-users-2ik3)

I think the criticisms of Stack Overflow in general capture real problems, but
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to enact solutions to these
problems at scale, and they also underestimate the magnitude of the problems
that led Stack Overflow to this place to begin with.

------
riazrizvi
On Stackoverflow it costs you to downvote. Ask an ill-formed question with
more than one easy to find good response, then you get downvoted at those
users’ own expense.

> “Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages
> and I want to figure out if this is a standard package”

‘A list of packages ... if this is a standard package’, is ambiguous. What
‘this’? The list? Are you asking if there are standard ‘package lists’? And if
I search ‘list standard go packages stackoverflow’ on duckduckgo I get answers
with 25 and 50 upvotes already. In this situation I think Stackoverflow works.

~~~
mumblemumble
Downvoting costs newcomers. For old timers, it's basically free.

I've been on SO more-or-less since the beginning. I rarely log in, probably
haven't in over a year, but I know that, every time I do, my karma's taken
another big jump. I was lucky enough to get in early on and get in a few good
questions and answers on some thorny technical issues, and now I just keep on
getting karma for free because some fixed percentage of people who run into
these problems will get sent to my SO answer on Google, and some fixed
percentage of those will upvote. Sometimes I even get double points when I
answered my own question.

So, insofar as I'm getting my karma for free, I don't value it much, and
downvoting costs me basically nothing. I probably wouldn't start noticing the
price unless the cost of a single downvote were at least 1% of my current
karma.

------
sireat
What's worse is the hypocrisy of these active SO moderators.

I spent time double checking my answer and answered a question on difference
between 2 different web architectures only to see it closed for being too
"broad" and the "right" answer being already on Google #1.

The person who closed the question had a top rated SO answer for a trivial C#
declaration which already had a perfect #2 answer on MSDN.

[https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm](https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm)
comes to mind here

------
nimblegorilla
Their reputation system is the worst. I'm by no means a power user, but I've
asked and answered some questions on the main overflow site. If I go to any of
the subforums I have to start over with a reputation of zero and "re-earn"
privileges. No thanks.

Another problem is their aggressive pruning of questions. There have been
dozens of times where I've found something relevant via google and found the
question was locked for being off-topic or opinion based.

------
tony2016
Stackoverflow is an awesome place to get help for programming questions.
Except for the morons who roam in it downvoting all kinds of questions and
they never leave a comment to as why they are downvoting. Even when requested
to.

Just recently I posted a question in meta for why one of my questions was
being downvoted. That question in meta got a flurry of downvotes! Stupid
moronic downvoters. It is a hostile place but I will use it as long as I get
answers.

------
qwerty456127
I agree 1000%. I'd even donate money to support an initiative to fight this
bullshit. Valid questions downvoted, interesting questions with very useful
and highly-upvoted answers closed and deleted (thanks to my karma I can see
them an I'm amazed) for stupid reasons. I never donwvote anything but spam and
offence, I don't care about what do the rules say when reason says the
opposite and I usually upvote just to oppose downvotes.

------
JustSomeNobody
> I’m also wondering what went through the head of the person who saw the
> question at a score of -3 and just had to add their own downvote, because
> “fuck this question just a bit more”.

This is _exactly_ what went through their mind. This is group think. You get
people who have to follow the heard and the next thing you know programmers
are getting pulled out into the streets and beat because they use JavaScript.

------
gerbilly
Because SO rewards you for answering questions, there is an incentive to
convince the person to change the question to something that is easier to
answer.

This is why you see posters being badgered to change or recast their question
so much.

Sure many questions are ill posed, but there is a lot of pedantic meta
discussion¹ on the site centred on the precise form of the question.

1: The word pettifogging comes to mind.

------
wrd83
I wonder if the social bubble so often blamed for bias could be used for stack
overflow.

Imagine every user would only see the relevant questions rather than all of
them.

I guess this would remove the need for administration to a certain degree and
perhaps then the frustrations and maybe in the long run the hostility.

Of course this is a bit of a unicorn wish. Heading towards that could safe the
community a bit.

------
hgoel
SO is great as long as the answers aren't some form of "Why are you even
trying to solve this problem?" Or "Just use this library instead of doing it
yourself" without any actual answer included. They should atleast be something
like "this is what you can do/look into, BUT ...".

------
kzrdude
One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who do everything to write up an
answer to a question according to the rules and standards, and want upvotes,
while refusing to upvote the question they are answering because "it's not up
to standard", basically not good enough.

~~~
umvi
One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who ask low effort questions, get
upvotes and high quality answers, and don't reciprocate. They say "thanks" as
a comment and disappear without upvoting or accepting any of the answers.

------
jitbit
I've been a SO moderator for years, but I'm 100% with the OP :(

And it's even more frustrating when people downvote _answers_.

Come on, someone made an effort, came up with a solution and tried to help
out. This deserves some recognition even if the solution is not 100% right.
Definitely not dowvoting.

------
simonblack
Why do SO proponents feel it's smart to answer questions with 'this question
is closed because dupe' or some other useless bullshit answer.

It's no harder to say 'this question is closed. You will find that the best
answer can be found at <Stack Overflow link>'

------
nerf_javascript
I understand closing questions as duplicates from a quality POV, but SO
doesn't function as a high quality forum of expert users. The plain use case
and majority perception of it is as a Q&A site where you can ask questions
you're confused about and get the answer; in this case, closing questions as
duplicates because they share a premise with another question is purely
counter-intuitive.

Let's take for example the Java Infinite Loop question from the article. The
asker was an introductory user to Java who made it clear, and asked multiple
questions with relation to how to make the program ask the question in an
infinite loop. The duplicate marked was purely a "how to do infinite loops in
java" question. While for a more comfortable software engineer this suffices
since they can use the method for accomplishing the larger concept of an
infinite loop in their specific use case, the user was clearly so new that the
question should have been approached from a beginner's perspective, i.e.
"You'll need to wrap your main question asking code in an infinite while loop
like this so that it continues forever." Besides, the secondary question the
user asked wasn't answered in the duplicate.

While it makes sense to mark a question that was just "How to do infinite
loops in Java" at a high level as a duplicate, this more specific question
also requires the answer to identify where the loop should be placed and why
it should be placed there. For a site that's supposed to be about helping the
community, most of its high reputation users seem to be awfully focused on
removing questions, discouraging askers, and the most minor of revisions (i.e.
why so many questions I see on SO have been edited by a high rep user to add a
line break or the most minor of cosmetic changes).

Moreover, the actual mission they're supposed to accomplish by being a trusted
member of the community goes largely unfulfilled. In most SO threads I browse
now, the accepted answer is just plainly incorrect or outdated. There's no
enforcement at all here, and often times it's been edited in the last couple
months as just a cosmetic change instead of actually fixing the glaringly
wrong issue. The correct answer usually lies further down below, ironically
posted by low rep users who struggle with the incorrect answer, find a better
working solution, and then post it with the pure intention of helping others
who came across the issue.

An obvious example is in many JS questions nowadays. The OP asks something
very simple and direct, and most of the answers either:

\- solve the question using jQuery, which is usually unnecessary nowadays and
adds bloat to a relatively simple task \- use some random library or module,
i.e. "simple, just learn the API for this open source lib instead and use it!"
\- contain a solution that doesn't work or works in a very small number of
cases (i.e. with most regex questions where there are 10 competing regex
answers and you've got to find the right one) \- contain a correct solution
but use extremely outdated methods to get there; i.e. using a giant
XMLHttpRequest with a callback instead of just using async/await and Fetch, or
lacking any sort of ES6 convention (using `var` everywhere) \- contain an
almost correct solution except for a few typos, but no one who has spotted the
typo and has the right answer also has enough reputation to edit the answer,
and so the resolution of the mistake is a buried comment

\----

In my honest but probably worthless opinion, Stack Overflow is a Q&A forum
with the extremely strict and overbearing rules of a high quality expert's
forum, and just encourages this sort of behaviour on the platform to the point
that it really just fails to serve its core purpose on many occasions.

------
Trias11
My concern is more about moderators nazis closing relevant and interesting
questions for their own reasons.

It's been countless times i derived value from closed questions, luckily too
late for moderators to do their own power round tantrum trip to disable it.

------
dirtylowprofile
Was an avid contributor to the site way back (I even won there contest back
then with tumbler and shirt swag) but the site is very hostile now. SO took a
very long time to address this one but now it is too little too late. Very
arrogant of them.

------
bradenb
I think it's interesting that a lot of people are complaining about SO and
saying how other systems would be more effective, yet nobody is trying to
create a better SO.

Maybe it's actually just a much harder problem than people realize.

------
HeavyStorm
This looks like a tantrum. Sure, given time any web community becomes (at
least a bit) toxic.

But the idea is to have more good people than evil trolls, and that's how it
works, questions that are good get more upvotes than down, eventually.

------
TooCleverByHalf
Oddly I realize that I rarely find a reason to end up on Stack Overflow these
days.

------
lordleft
Why does there need to be a downvote system at all? Why not just flag a
question if you think it's a poor fit for SO? I don't get why anyone would
want to pile onto a poorly expressed question.

------
surfsvammel
I love SO. Believe I have been using it my entire career (10+ years). But even
after all these years and all this experience I am hesitant to ask questions
at SO. It can be quite terrifying.

------
isu
Can confirm such issues, but I noticed it's the problem of some particular
users/moderators who sit on Go channel. I haven't seen so many negative
questions on other channels.

------
sumanthvepa
I stopped attempting to post questions to stack overflow after the first
couple years of attempts. It is a strictly read only site for me. Don’t waste
time asking questions there.

------
ioconnor
Quit posting to stackoverflow perhaps a decade ago. Same is true with github.
I'll use information from both sources but no way will I ever contribute
anything to them.

------
ykevinator
So has a snob problem. People elevate themselves by over zealous downvoting.
It's toxic. The site is 50% of what it could be but the a-hole factor sucks so
much value.

------
afapx
When you have these types of issues, you should post about them on Meta Stack
Overflow. That's where improvements for the site are discussed.

------
iandanforth
Is there a max down level here on HN? I feel like if comments didn't fade out
I would have lost a _lot_ more points a couple times.

------
praptak
There's "Stack Overflow isn't very welcoming" blog post on stackoverflow.blog
from Apr 2018, so they at least did notice.

------
sankalp_sans
This made me visit SO and respond to a "noob" query right now. I hadn't
answered any SO questions in probably over a year.

------
meerita
What kind of replacement, Stack Overflow has? I never saw something similar,
more curated that would please these people...

------
wuliwong
>Way forward

I didn't see any mention of a way forward, just commentary on past changes and
past articles citing a dislike of SO.

------
timwaagh
The question sounds a bit nonsensical to me tbh.

> I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard
> package.

He wants to figure out if his list of packages is a standard package? Doesn't
sound logical.

I don't like to downvote. I know what it's like to harvest 80 downvotes on
reddit. But in this case, yeah. I approve downvoting nonsense.

------
Annatar
He calls it "Meta effect", I call it "Hacker" "News" effect.

So he's had it, he picked up his toys and he's going home. Good on him. I
cannot think of a better thing to do, because this is the eternal September.

------
throwawayjimjam
Throwaway for reasons that will become obvious in this comment.

Stack Overflow could easily be exchanged with HN for some of the OP’s points.

I posted my first HN comment ever this morning after years of reading. I saw
an interesting Show HN and decided to chip in my two cents. Suffice it to say
that the content of the comment was on-topic and conscientious (if the tone of
this post may serve as any indication).

Checking back within minutes, I had a karma of -1. Seeing as how new members
start with a karma of 1, and posting gives you 1, this means I had been
downvoted three times within those few minutes. This affected me much deeper
than I could have imagined.

Having lurked on HN threads for a matter of years now upvoting insightful or
illuminating comments, I found it jarring for my thoughts to be disqualified
so quickly and thoroughly. My karma was not just rendered inert, but actively
negative, draining.

This activated in me all manner of imposter syndrome and shame. Worse, though,
was this total sense of helplessness, this feeling that as even a noob I have
to be in on the secret handshake lest I be branded as someone who doesn’t _get
it_.

I later combed through HN looking for general patterns in downvoting, and for
every off-topic, non-contributory post was one like “depression is just the
natural response to oppression” or any of the variations of “me too” that were
spared a downvote. This helped me shift my thinking on this. I realized it was
less about being on the outside of the exclusive club, and more about having
been caught in the gears of the machinery that allows beginners to have
experiences like this. It doesn’t make me feel better having reached a
conclusion like this, and only makes me less likely to try again, but for the
hope that the smattering of comments in this thread forming a connection
between OP’s SO experience with HN starts a real conversation about this.

------
harry8
view source

    
    
        <!--
        If large amounts of people find you hostile and abrasive then you almost
        certainly are. 
        -->

------
TCR19
Wholeheartedly agree with this article.

------
NobodyNada
Many of the culture problems with SO are a result of poor or outdated site
design and moderation tooling -- and the high-rep users are aware of this and
have been pushing for better tools for years. Unfortunately, the company has
been neglecting the Q&A site and focusing instead on money-making products
like Jobs and Teams. Over the past few years, Stack Overflow has launched
several new products (Documentation, Developer Stories, Teams, etc.) and UI
redesigns (which were often usability disasters, see [0] and [1]).

Meanwhile, the moderation tools (downvotes, close votes, etc.) have not scaled
well and are now woefully inadequate and inefficient. Requests for improved
tooling have been silently ignored for years (see [2]) -- for example, an
absolutely trivial request to re-word one sentence in the review queue
guidance ([3]) was unimplemented for several years (and its eventual
implementation was really just a token effort from the staff when tensions
between the staff and the community were at an all-time high).

Believe me: SO users know the site is not functioning well, and we've been
doing everything we can to try to fix it (some users even create bots and
userscripts to work around the site's deficiecies). However, there's only so
much we can do without the cooperation of the staff. Tensions have been
escalating over the past few years, and there's a lot of mistrust and cynicism
on all sides between the company, the site's "power users," and new users. At
this point, many of the power users are tired of fighting an uphill battle and
have reached the point of giving up ([4]).

Fortunately, there have been some encouraging signs recently: over the past
few months, the company has finally started to implement some of the much-
needed features we've been requesting for years ([5]). Hopefully these efforts
will continue -- we'll just have to wait and see.

If you're interested in reading some more of the history behind this, there's
an excellent analysis at
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777).

[0]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/349118/3476191](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/349118/3476191)
[1]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191)

[2]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/258777)
[3]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/332546/3476191](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/332546/3476191)

[4]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386324/3476191](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386324/3476191)

[5]: [https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/upcoming-on-stack-
over...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/upcoming-on-stack-overflow/)

------
dlphn___xyz
i like how SO takes moderating so seriously- you need to keep a certain
standard otherwise you turn into quora or reddit.

------
verisimilitudes
_Downvotes are useful for quality control, but there is no real difference
between -3 and -4._

This and many others comprise examples of precisely how _downvotes_ aren't
useful for much of anything.

 _“How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”,
or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts
of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of
stuff._

You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall
trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you
must have an Internet connection to program.

I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't
know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question
or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all
real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have
real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack
Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented
language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing.

The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and
stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to
anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the
only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply
instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for
stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help
someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a _Thank
You._ out of it.

 _The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator
there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending
prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever
since._

That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of _Oh, you 're not
violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have
accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided
you're banned just because._; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of
having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous
messages by any other means.

So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you
don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If
your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If
your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be
a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to
avoid the garbage standard to start with.

I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm
not the only one here who thinks similarly.

~~~
dang
Please don't post flamebait or call names in HN comments. It breaks the site
guidelines and evokes worse from others.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
verisimilitudes
That message may have been inflammatory, based on my opinions concerning Stack
Overflow, but I don't see where I called names; I called some systems _stupid_
, but I can't name call a system as I would an individual.

Anyway, sure, I could've made the message a tad nicer, and I really shouldn't
have bothered commenting in the overcrowded discussion anyway, but some of the
points in the discussion, from this author I've read before, compelled me to
write it as I did. There was value, I think, in countering this faux-niceness
presented in the submitted writing with a more genuine and plainly-phrased
critique of the ideas.

~~~
dang
It was a flamewar-style comment. Those are not allowed here because of the
degrading effect they have on discussion, and we ban accounts that persist in
posting them. Edit: it looks like you've done it before as well, e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827595)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660007).
That's definitely not what we're going for here.

Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them from now on? They
explain many things, including what I meant by calling names above.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
enriquto
the site jumped the shark when they removed the question "new programming
jargon you coined" which was easily the best one they ever had

~~~
faitswulff
For the curious, the top 30 responses were reblogged by Jeff Atwood:
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-
jargon/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/)

Archive.org link to the original question here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120210110752/https://stackover...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120210110752/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-
programming-jargon-you-coined)

~~~
enriquto
I refuse to look at this. Basically the guy stole the work of many people for
himself.

~~~
sowbug
The Creative Commons license disagrees with your characterization. Plus Jeff
founded Stack Overflow, so it's odd to single him out if republishing works
legally is stealing.

~~~
andrewl
Exactly. Atwood's post says "Unfortunately, we don't have a good designated
place for deleted "too fun" questions to live, but _all Stack Exchange content
is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity_. Which means, with proper
attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our own blogs.

And he does link each term to the StackOverflow user who posted it.

~~~
enriquto
> all Stack Exchange content is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity.
> Which means, with proper attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our
> own blogs.

But can we, in practice? Where can I find all the answers to that question,
including the comments?

------
GnarfGnarf
Here's a suggestion:

Whenever you encounter a question that has been unfairly downvoted, you, in
turn, should have an option to "downvote the downvoters" .

By clicking on a button, Stack Overflow will flag all the downvoters as
"persona non grata" to yourself. When you view other questions, these people's
downvotes will be subtracted or eliminated from your view of the question.

Complicated? Yes, but SO's long-term viability may be at stake.

