

Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow - ksajadi
http://blog.thecloudblocks.com/post/14016289180/trouble-in-the-house-of-stackoverflow
The lag between question and answers are getting longer in Stackoverflow and this was long coming.
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larsberg
I wonder if this increased responsed time is uniform across all tags. I work
on ML implementations (SML/NJ and Manticore), and I've basically given up on
answering questions on SO because every time I go there every question has
been answered within a few hours. Even the difficult questions, and --
especially on SML/NJ -- often by people with no relationship to the
implementation team who have clearly spent serious time spleunking the depths
of our source tree to answer it.

Hard to tell without some statistical data. My tags may also be odd because I
suspect our user base is skewed towards a mass of novices (intro to CS
students) and a small number of experts, with very few people in the middle.

~~~
cruise02
There probably has been an increase over most tags, but I strongly doubt that
it's uniform. If you're at all interested, there's a SEDE query that shows
which tags have the most unanswered questions (by raw count and proportion of
questions asked) that you can use to find tags to follow that need more
attention.

[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1320/unanswere...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1320/unanswered-
questions-by-tag)

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watmough
At least one problem is that overzealous moderators seem to be clamping down
on every tiny little deviation from perfection.

A thread, an old thread on Stackoverflow, was linked from HN the other day,
and was in fact now dead, but it was closed as not appropriate, two or so
years after being opened, closed by a flock of moderators, for some utterly
spurious reason. I believe it was marked (my paraphrase) as 'may cause
discussion, closed as not appropriate'.

I can't speak for other people, but since the rise and rise of moderation like
this, I am much less motivated to post or answer questions on Stackoverflow.

~~~
cruise02
How is this even slightly related to the problem of hard questions not getting
answered? Stack Overflow isn't designed for the kind of questions that
frequently get closed as "not constructive." There are plenty of other places
on the internet to have discussions.

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ZitchDog
Solution: The longer a question goes unanswered, the more points you aught to
get for answering it.

~~~
cruise02
That would incentivize _waiting_ to post an answer. That's definitely not
desirable.

~~~
ZitchDog
Except that someone else could answer while you are waiting.

~~~
cruise02
Now it's a dilemma. I can just write up my answer and wait to post it until
someone else posts, maximizing the amount of reputation I'd get for the same
answer. If everyone does the same, the net outcome is a longer waiting period
to get answers to questions. I'd rather keep game theory out of it.

~~~
ZitchDog
A possible solution: When someone answers, the karma clock is "reset", so it
is then based on the time since the last answer given.

~~~
cruise02
Snap! That's a good idea. :)

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aplusbi
My problem with Stackoverflow has been that for the majority of the questions
I've asked, I'm more of an expert in the subject matter than the people
answering the question. Most of the answers I receive are to the wrong
question, or are an answer that I specifically mentioned in the question as
not being viable.

~~~
cruise02
Examples? I'm a moderator and can delete non-answers. I also have a lot of rep
to burn, so I can place bounties on good questions that aren't adequately
answered.

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derpapst
The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching
from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user
attention. That is, if I spend some of my attention on your problem, the
system will remember it the next time I have a question.

This is what I am doing with <http://www.TwoToReal.com>: Unlike SO/Quora/etc.
it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on
the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a
real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off
between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate)
and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are
allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation
the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of
your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one
expert. Thus the currency of attention.

~~~
gbelote
I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a
lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the
quality/speed of answering my question.

Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden
to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask
better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a
system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting
my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this
output when trying to use node in this way".

~~~
derpapst
That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be
questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having
searched around for a while.

E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you
are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min.
And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at
<http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/>

I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.

~~~
gbelote
That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO,
but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!

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rohit89
Well, SO does have a way of dealing with it through the use of bounties. As
far as I'm aware, it requires the person asking the question to give up some
rep though. Maybe there should be some internal bounty on all unanswered
questions after a period of time.

~~~
cruise02
Most questions that don't get answered are just poorly phrased questions that
either don't get enough attention or aren't really answerable. These
eventually get deleted. I like the current bounty system because any user with
enough reputation can put a bounty on any other user's question. That means a
human has to look at it and deem it worthy of a bounty, which I think is
better than automatically bumping questions based on age.

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zem
what I really like about stackoverflow is that it is very well designed to be
a permanent, constantly accreting repository of useful information. I've even
managed to answer one of my own questions by posting it, and then noticing a
useful fact in an answer to one of the "related questions" in the sidebar (and
this was after a lot of unsuccessful googling first).

