
Ask HN: Anyone feel Stack Overflow is becoming less helpful and more snarky? - justaguyhere
Immediate downvote instead of helping, snarky comments - there was a time when it was awesome, not so anymore. Anyone else feel the same?
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Someone1234
Stackoverflow is stuck in time.

They wanted to create an "encyclopedia" using a Q&A site. To do that they
banned duplicate questions (and therefore answers). That means that if you
search for a topic you're going to time-travel back to the oldest point when
that was first asked, get ten year old answers, and that's it.

But technology changes, so an answer from ten years ago might be very
different from an answer today. But SO is a really bad version of Wikipedia,
so once something is "the solution" it is now that forever. Sure, you can tack
on a comment or additional non-solution answers, but the site actively
penalises you for doing so.

So, yeah, in answer to your question. Between SO's wildly out-of-date content,
toxic community, and Google search results also becoming worse year upon year,
it is a difficult site to use, or even want to use.

~~~
Buttons840
Ran across this gem the other day:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-
value...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value-of-n-
choose-k)

The question is: how can I calculate "n choose k" (aka, the binomial
coefficient)? It's an interesting problem because there are some big
factorials to calculate if you just naively program the mathematical
definition.

So someone asked that good question, and then a mod came along and closed the
question as a duplicate of the question "how can I _enumerate_ n choose k?",
ridiculous! As though we cannot count things in computer science without
counting one thing at a time. As though the only way to know the answer to
"2000 choose 1000" is to enumerate all (approximately) 10^600 possible
answers.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
> a mod came along and closed the question

It wasn't closed by a mod, but by the community:
[https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9...](https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9d75f00-f169-4a29-8d50-dda62ce96c62)

The way close voting works is that a question will be closed as long as there
are five (now three!) random people from the community who feel a question
should be closed. This is good since there really _are_ many duplicates that
should be marked as such, but some people are not very good in carefully
judging questions, and the system doesn't recover from these kind of mistakes
well and includes almost no punishments for clearly erroneous close votes.

Like I mentioned in my other comment, there are a few comparatively minor
fixes that could be done to improve the experience here too, but nothing gets
done. Sigh...

------
muzani
Definitely. The old feel was more like a wiki, where everyone contributed both
questions and answers together. It was like a giant crowdsourced
documentation.

But I feel like there's a lot of 'bullying' now. Bullying as in people who try
to make themselves feel in control by downvoting things. There was one case
where someone decided to downvote one of my questions, then ran around my
profile downvoting every question that wasn't upvoted.

HN also feels a lot like this. People who sort of try to prop themselves up by
pushing others down. They seem to target the ones that have the least
retribution - the protection of anonymity and not losing points off their
downvote.

It's different to the old days, where if someone posted a bad question or
answer, we would give them advice, or edit their post to be clearer and more
polite. The goal was to help people up, not push them down.

The other Stack Exchanges are nice, though. So it has little to do with the
model itself.

~~~
aitchnyu
That's news: they removed downvote penalties? 8 years back I asked a question
to make a poc virus for college, it received 2 downvotes, then a high rep guy
quoted a Meta post saying it's consensus to answer such questions and I got a
good answer.

~~~
muzani
There is a downvote penalty to a bad question, but no cost to the downvoter
(unlike with downvoting answers)

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

It was an unpopular decision, partly because it could lead to people
downvoting questions trivially. But there was user trust at the time, and the
main issue was low quality questions.

A few years later, they reincreased the question bonus to +10 but never
removed the downvote cost, but I think they should have done the opposite.

~~~
busymom0
Do you think a downvote penalty system works better than one which doesn't
have one?

I am trying to figure out which system works best -

1\. Reddit's where you can upvote or downvote a post

2\. HN's where you can only upvote a post and both up and down vote a comment

3\. Stackoverflow's where you can downvote but with downvote penalty

I think a combination of HN's and SO's would be best - posts can only be
upvotes, comments can both be up and downvotes but downvotes come with a
penalty.

Are there any studies on this subject?

~~~
muzani
It seems like the sample size is too low/varied and data is too closed to have
studies. And Stack Overflow 2012 and Stack Overflow 2020 are different
communities, even though they are structured the same.

I think what matters more is the goal of the system.

SO has a downvoting penalty on answers but not questions, because asking
questions is a privilege, but answers are rare. HN has a similar attitude with
comments - be careful what you say as you will be judged for it and it can't
be taken back.

The downside of cost-free downvoting is that it allows people to throw punches
without any repercussions. Someone saying something unpopular will just get
downvoted. If it were good, the upvotes would balance it out, but downvotes do
hurt feelings and discourage people with a particular slant. I think HN and SO
has attracted a certain niche of people and discouraged others.

On the other hand, without downvoting, you'll still get hostile comments, like
you would on Tumblr or Daily Mail.

I'd say if you want to encourage downvoting as a form of decentralized
moderation, then it should be without penalty.

But I'm not sure if you even need karma in the first place. In almost every
system, quantity matters more than quality, and the kind of people who should
be discouraged by downvotes aren't.

------
bjourne
I asked about it on their meta site
([https://meta.stackexchange.com/](https://meta.stackexchange.com/)) but was
immediately attacked by the snark brigade... Parts of the site is still good,
but some tags (c++ in particular) is overtaken by snark people and RTFM:ers.
The smaller stack exchange sites are much more worthwhile.

Fwiw, hn has become very snarky too. So maybe it's a sign of the times.

~~~
muzani
I think as communities age, they attract unpleasant people who eventually
scare off all the pleasant people if they're not dealt with promptly.
Eventually it becomes all unpleasant people.

Stack Overflow's is as clear as it gets - you can practically watch the
process over the months on the meta sidebar.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
This effect is perhaps most pronounced in comments sections of local news
papers, where stories about pretty much anything seem to attract rantings
about Muslims, gays, socialists/leftists, SJWs, what-have-you. A lot of the
more reasonable nope'd out of there many years ago.

I wrote a somewhat related article about this a while ago:
[https://www.arp242.net/censorship.html](https://www.arp242.net/censorship.html)

------
EnderMB
IMO, Stack Overflow has already achieved its initial mission, but not the
mission they set out for.

Stack Overflow wanted to create a wiki of questions and answers, when in
reality all initial users wanted was a dedicated programming Q&A site that
would answer their questions. The wiki aspect was a side goal of this.

Today, Stack Overflow has the answers to many questions, and due to the
similarity in many questions already out there it is incredibly difficult to
get an answer without some level of gatekeeping - whether it's from the
users/moderators, or from the system itself trying to stop duplication.

IMO, Stack Overflow has failed at being a wiki, because they refuse to allow
duplicates. If I were in charge of Stack Overflow, I would actively encourage
duplicates, and build the Q&A system around merging duplicates over having one
definitive answer. Sure, maybe the world doesn't need 50 different
perspectives on how to get a Mongo collection out of Meteor, but a smart
system would turn those individual contributions into one master question,
asked by 50 people, with numerous answers that work in certain situations, or
specific versions. Until SO consider this approach, I can only see the
distrust towards them growing.

~~~
Psyladine
Joel agreed with you. Better community management should have merged the Q&As,
and perhaps had a better system for branching or sub-discussions.

------
karmakaze
I've rarely had any issues with user posts/comments. Often the question will
start out vague or lacking necessary details, but gets refined after comments.

The closed as duplicate or off-topic is very annoying. I do put in some time
into moderating the moderation with reopen votes or edit suggestions.

I especially love discussions in less popular topics where they can run more
deep and insightful at times.

------
catacombs
Not really? I've always found what I needed.

The worst kind of answers are those who just post a code snippet without any
context.

~~~
avgDev
I also find everything I need even if it is outdated, usually I can make it
work and use it as helpful resource.

I have to GOOGLE a lot, as I am a solo dev working for medium sized business.
Recently, I switched to .NET Core, but sometimes I search for answers using
the older .NET framework MVC5. Some things are different, some are the same.
However, stackoverflow delivers 80% of the time for me. Other times I just go
read books, try to find blogs with example etc.

------
JoeMayoBot
They've appeared to have put a lot of effort into being more polite and
respectful recently, which I feel is admirable. However, that sometimes
results in a "Please" prefix to the snark. As one commenter alluded to,
comments in meta that go against what the majority or agree with an act of
kindness get piled on and downvoted. It sometimes feels like there's a built-
in culture that is likely to persist. I think that times are changing and
there might be an opening for new ways to think about Q&A communities.

------
Yhippa
Stack Overflow was and is still useful. I will say that it's becoming less
relevant over time for me. When I used Google to find answers to questions,
other sources of answers are popping up now.

I tried contributing but it seems like everything is answered now except for
the most corner-case things. I feel bad for people asking questions because
they almost all get downvoted.

There was a time when it was useful but I agree with what another poster said:
it's stuck in time and it shows.

------
JohnFen
Yes, I feel the same. It's a large part of why I've given up on SO.

------
hellwd
I think everything will be better if they implement their guidelines in actual
input forms to force users to provide more information and more context - not
only in questions but also in answers. It's so easy right now to comment and
pollute the thread and that's what they have to tackle as well. Besides that,
more moderators and people reviewing what is posted can also help. Comments
like "thanks" or "can you provide more context" should be on 1 to 1 basis,
more like a messages.

SO is a very helpful website and companies are not even aware enough how much
it helps them and how much money it saves globally.

------
olliej
Yes, for years now. Coupled with the almost automatic “this has been asked
before” duping to different questions that have some of the same words.

I loved SO when it first started - now it’s mostly just annoying whenever SO
answers show up in search results.

------
psv1
SO has had a very similar trajectory to Google search - getting worse over
time because of some fundamental product decisions, no real hope for
improvement in sight and somehow still the best product in their category.

------
twoquestions
I for one am glad other smaller, more focused StackOverflows exist, like they
do for Unity3d and Unreal.

Anecdotally, I've lost count the number of Closed or Duplicate answers were
better and more helpful than the canonical one.

~~~
asfarley
I had some bad luck with this one. SQA StackExchange suggested re-posting my
question to DSP, and DSP suggested reposting my question to SQA.

------
mrvenkman
I see a lot of questions down-voted due to insecure code: PHP & MySQL
injections for example. It's a site for asking a question and learning, a
down-vote is so discouraging to a new programmer.

