
Stack Overflow Culture - mayankkaizen
https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-culture/amp/
======
SCdF
I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore.

Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking
feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still
active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to
find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.

You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith,
so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about
how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways
you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various
reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time
defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing
the question in the first place[4]

I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't
really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum
posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same
user interface.

Which I suppose is something.

[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction

[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show
the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data
structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code

[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you
want to achieve X, that's stupid"

[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as
you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question
asking

~~~
sleavey
It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great
a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack
Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable
submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been
taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness.
Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The
top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no
justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an
advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification.
Repeat ad absurdum.

It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users
to take part, but in completely different ways.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-
to-...](https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-send-new-
post-notification-to-subscribers)

~~~
kleiba
Seconding the impression of SO. More than once I saw a question where it was
kinda obvious that it was a beginner who was facing a very specific issue.
Let's say it's a question that's not very difficult to solve for a seasoned
programmer because even if you don't know it right off the batch, your
experience can guide you pretty quickly to a solution. So, I spend the five to
ten minutes to come up with a solution that works reasonably well -- in parts
because I'd like to help out someone but in parts also because it's
informative for me as well to learn something I didn't know before -- but just
as I'm typing up my findings, the question gets closed. And it's not possible
to answer closed questions (the rationale for which does not reveal itself to
me immediately).

I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming _resource_ (as in "archive")
where people with a problem should find a solution - not by _asking_ but
through _googling_. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of
_general_ value, not an individual answer to just one person.

But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific
question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question
again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed
to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please,
come on.

In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned
something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a
very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific
problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I
wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic
reasons. Way to go.

~~~
zoul
_Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on._

Is this really so hard to believe? I have been a member of the community for
ten years now ([https://goo.gl/JZkqSP](https://goo.gl/JZkqSP)) and have seen
the number of low-quality questions rise to the point where I honestly don’t
enjoy answering any more. People don’t care to ask well, they just want to get
over their personal issue as quickly as possible and be done with it.

~~~
mlonkibjuyhv
I have countless examples of me googling for a very specific issue, and the
only relevant hit I can find is a closed SO question.

~~~
kleiba
Exactly. We have sophisticated search algorithms, noise is no problem.

~~~
gnulinux
Rather, noise is not a problem for SO, but it is a problem of someone else.

------
jpatokal
Meh. Stack Overflow is suffering from the same "problem" as Wikipedia: the
quality & quantity of existing content is now so high that it's becoming
really hard to contribute new content. However, while this is indeed a real
problem for "askers" trying to get heard in all the noise, and there's
diminishing returns for the "answerer" who has less fun questions to tackle,
it's also completely irrelevant to the 99% of us whose questions have _already
been asked & answered_, and those answers can be pulled up in seconds by your
favorite search engine.

Also, in case the blog author's name (Jon Skeet) didn't ring a bell, he's
Stack Overflow's #1 contributor. If you've ever searched for anything related
to C#, you've probably seen his answers, which have racked up over a million
reputation points: [https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-
skeet](https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet)

~~~
psyc
I was going to say the same exact thing, that it has the same problems as
wikipedia. But then I was going to say "hard to contribute ... because
control-freak insiders who've managed to take political control of what should
have been an Internet-wide mass-community don't want you to."

~~~
gbacon
Sounds like another case of geeks versus wonks. In Tucker’s “A Political
Theory of Geeks and Wonks,” he delineates the latter with

 _Political wonks are fascinated by process. They love the game. They get as
much satisfaction from observing as changing. They want to be players above
all else. Ideals bore them. History is mere data. Intellectuals seem
irrelevant. What matters to the wonk are the hard realities of the ongoing
political struggle. They defer to title and rank. They thrive on meetings,
small victories, administrative details, and gossip about these matters.
Knowing who is who and what is what is the very pith of life._

Geeks, on the other hand:

 _They are no less fascinated by detail but are drawn to ideals. Observation
alone bores them. They are drawn to the prospect of change. They don 't want
to be players as such; they question the very rules of the game and want to
change them. They are happy to make a difference in the ideological
infrastructure, whether big or small. They tend to work alone and totally
disregard caste distinctions._

As to your frustration with Wikipedia’s political elite

 _The wonks are the ones who consolidate, stabilize, and entrench the status
quo; the geeks are the ones who prepare revolutionary change. The wonks freeze
it into place and make it work more efficiently; the geeks imagine and work
toward a future that no one thought was possible. The wonks rule out drastic
and extreme measures as imprudent and reckless; they geeks think these paths
are the only ones worth pursing, and have confidence that the unknown future
will somehow work itself out. The wonks try to bring the king around to their
point of view; the geeks kill the king._

Tucker describes the conflict between the two camps.

 _The geeks and wonks can work together but there will always be a natural
tensions between the two. The wonks think the geeks are hopeless, powerless,
reckless outsiders whose heads are full of useless and unrealistic fantasies.
The geeks think that the wonks are part of the system and, therefore, more
than likely corrupted by it, and increasingly so._

 _Broadening the view, the struggle to control history is a battle between the
wonks and the geeks …_

According to his view, Julius Caesar represented the wonks and Brutus the
geeks in Ancient Rome. In the America’s revolutionary generation, they were
Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

~~~
dragonwriter
It's a nice story, but it's got a few problems:

(1) the terminology adopted is hostile to the pre-established usage—in
politics, the term “wonk” is almost exactly equivalent to the general use term
“geek” and occurs most frequently in the phrase “policy wonk”, which it is
taken to refer to when used alone. It almost means the opposite of a person
obsessed with process but unconcerned with ideals and output. (“Almost”
because policy wonks often extend their concern with policy to the mechanisms
by which policy proposals are implemented, so they aren't necessarily
unconcerned with process.) It's publicly visible uses have been about
politicians who are perceived get into the tiny details of policy rather than
confining themselves to the process lane the way people expect politicians to
(Bill Clinton was a notable example.) And while “geeks” is rarely used about
any obsession with a political subject matter, where I have seen it used, it's
been consistently about people who are obsessed with polling and process
dynamics, very commonly media analysts or hired-gun political consultants,
whose only concern with policy is can it pass and what votes will it win or
cost for the people visibly supporting or opposing it.

(2) The specific examples are not so good; most notably, the idea that
Hamilton was concerned only with process and not ideals (or that Jefferson was
focussed on ideals and not process) is ludicrous.

The battle to control history isn't between people focussed on process and
those focussed on ideals, its between different ideals. The people focussed
only on process are observers or mercenaries, not a side of the battle of
their own.

------
vadimberman
I do hope that Stack Overflow will become usable again. In my opinion, the
problem is mostly the answerers.

I went all the way from a simple coder to management, and now I'm doing both,
running my second startup. I talk to people of different walks of life, and I
always do my homework.

But on Stack Overflow, it's like I'm back to the early years of my career, a
stupid newbie whose questions get randomly downvoted. I delete it, tweak the
wording a little bit, and now it's suddenly accepted. I say something like, "a
solution or a 3rd party library", an idiot downvotes me saying that "requests
to recommend 3rd party libraries are offtopic". I change it to "a solution
(3rd party library is OK)", and now it's suddenly fine.

It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as
their role model.

As a side effect, the good answerers are gone, and the really tricky questions
are left unanswered, so I often answer them myself. Although, the way Stack
Overflow is, my desire to contribute to the community is diminishing.

~~~
klez
It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call
someone that downvoted you an idiot.

I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to
close. Your example is a bit borderline and it's something I wouldn't close,
but I can see how someone might think it warrants to be closed. Consider that
the rule about external tools is meant to avoid a deluge of answers about
libraries. They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can
cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't
like and massively upvoting their favorite library.

If we can avoid this by being strict, I think it's a good thing. But hey, I'm
just one of hundreds of thousands users, so it's not like my opinion is
somehow more valuable than yours.

~~~
jcelerier
> I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote
> to close

why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that
does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO
answer or in a github project ?

~~~
shagie
The code is ideally a "this is the code that fixes the problem" and its done.
Once there's an answer, you don't often get a dozen more answers with slightly
different code.

Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone
recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends
Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between
Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments
about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the
equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on.

And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post,
doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a
different site for Struts.

The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is
worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++
book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far
too much moderation time across the community.

On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in
mind. [https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-
frameworks](https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks) does it
much better than Stack Overflow can.

~~~
Can_Not
But there are times where I want to see everyone vouch for their frameworks in
that exact manor in the stack overflow format by the stack overflow crowd.

~~~
shagie
That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate
it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.

------
bjourne
Anyone who complains about stackoverflow should visit their sister site about
math:

[https://math.stackexchange.com/](https://math.stackexchange.com/)

Because the difference is night and day. No pedantry (no pedantry on a math
site! Impossible!), no assumption that askers are throwing their homework on
them. In fact, my experience with mathematicians have had me question whether
I choose the right career or if I should have become a mathematician. They all
seem damn chill in comparison to most of us developers.

Anyway, the idea behind that site appears to be to help people learn math. Not
to build the world's most polished question repository. I very much prefer the
former approach.

~~~
maxxxxx
I wonder if this has to do with the people who are entering a field. I suspect
that people who post on a math forum really want to do math, have an interest
in it and don't want to just get a job that pays the bills. In software you
have more and more people who got into programming because it's a good job but
don't really care for it.

This may diminish the quality of forums because a lot of people just want
somebody to solve their problem so they can move on without doing any work. I
see that also in a lot of new hires who don't seem to care about actually
learning programming but just want to do the bare minimum.

~~~
nyxxie
I think there's also a level of cultural gatekeeping in play as well.
Programming (and many of its sub-focuses) are considered a fashionable career
path, and there are many people who want the reputation that being a
_programmer /hacker/etc_ conveys more than they actually want to do the work
to learn.

The Security Stack Exchange is full of a similar sort of people. Almost all of
the new questions at any given time are either tech support "I think I have a
virus!!" or low-effort handholding questions "how do I use kali linux to hack
server". I think folks who spend a lot of time on these sorts of websites have
adjusted to be more jaded towards questions that look similar. I've learned to
ignore it and be thankful that (in general), questions that I ask on stack
exchange tend to receive helpful answers.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think people should think about the saying "if you have nothing good to say,
say nothing". Instead of letting people know that they they think they are an
idiot, just ignore them and don't post petty comments.

------
weinzierl
> A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer
> without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one with a timebox of one
> hour, and then I’ll post whatever I’ve got. (I may then reformat it later.)

While this is meta it pretty much sums up the situation regarding my feelings
regarding Stack Overflow.

I was an early user of Stack Overflow, not quite beta but almost. At one point
I even received a snail mail letter from Jeff Atwood, thanking me for my
contributions. I read most of the early discussions about policy and, being a
veteran of various internet forums at that time, it seemed to me the most
sensible, most reasonable approach you could take to running a question-answer
site. I went to CodeKen in London in 2011 where I met Jon and a lot of other
excellent folks that made Stack Overflow happen as a community back then.

Today, I rarely consult Stack Overflow, and when I sometimes find a useful
answer via DuckDuckGo it's almost certainly closed. I even joked that closing
is a sign of quality at Stack Overflow. My last contribution is probably years
ago.

The strange thing is that there is no point I "left", nothing I could point at
and say, that's when Stack Overflow took the wrong turn. I think we just
drifted apart. And for the conclusion I guess for me it's mostly: "The way to
hell is paved with good intentions".

~~~
codinghorror
We hadn’t quite figured out that opinions and discussion questions were not a
good fit in the early days.

~~~
mickronome
I don't really have an opinion on the fit.

But people still ask those questions and the questions apparently get indexed.
In my experience the result is that when coming from a search engine, even for
non-fit topics, it is quite common that closed Stackoverflow posts occurr
several times on the first result page.

It could be that I search for strange things, but at least for me the
combination of closed but still indexed posts are not helpful, especially when
the question didn't get any useful answers at all before being closed.

I don't mind closing topics, but I would prefer that closed questions with no
even remotely useful answers wasn't indexed at all. Now, that might not be
entirely under your control, but the issue remains, or so it seems to me.

------
ordinaryperson
The underlying problem to me is the fundamental flaws in crowd-sourcing and
blacklisting as models to produce and manage content.

Websites like StackOverflow, Yelp, Wikipedia start off by being fantastically
useful by using crowd-sourcing to quickly generate a large volume of content
that covers topics too wide for a small group of humans by themselves.

But then crowd-sourcing becomes an albatross because an unpaid army of
moderators have almost no oversight. They inconsistently apply (or don’t
apply) standards, and blacklisting vitriol is a Sisyphean task.

Valid questions get blitzed and jerks proliferate because it’s seemingly
impossible to police them all in real time. I saw a stat that said only 7% of
SO users ever ask a second question - that means 93% probably had a bad
experience.

While the problems are structural IMO they can do a few things. Downvoting
should be temporarily disabled until Joel et al figure out a better model to
surface important/good questions and answers; I personally now visit the
forums of whatever framework or language I’m working in to seek advice because
the downvoting on SO seems so inconsistently applied. Insults I can ignore but
the DV makes it hard to have your issue seen.

~~~
alkonaut
Perhaps a multi-tier system where questions aren’t posted “at the top” for
answering directly and moderated down, but instead a first step where the
_question_ is treated and discussed without possibility to answer. The
community can suggest edits, and _upvote_ it, but not close it. If it’s a
duplicate the asker can get some time to explain why it isn’t, or retract it
if it is.

If it gets a thumbs up, it qualifies for the regular Q/A where people can
answer - and expect a certain quality (and don’t risk spending 20 min writing
an answer to a perfectly good question that was closed while the answer was
written).

~~~
ordinaryperson
Makes sense to me.

No open platform, as far as I can tell, has solved the problems of vitriol,
but the down-voting is absurd (as attested by some of the experiences
described in this comment thread) and can absolutely by addressed by changes
like the one you propose or some other system.

~~~
alkonaut
Imagine if Facebook had a “dislike” button.

Now imagine if that thumbs down was _anonymous_ and what that would do to the
atmosphere. That’s SO.

~~~
Erlangolem
Isn’t that also HN? I don’t think the existence of the down button is a factor
as much as the moderation. FB is a nightmare without a downvote, SO is like a
dysfunctional family, and HN seems to mostly work.

~~~
alkonaut
In a way it is. But I think it works much better for comments/discussion as on
HN, than getting downvotes for your cat picture or SO questions. Perhaps it's
because even though HN downvotes should be on quality not content - that's not
what the majority of downvotes are, they are disagreement. And people accept
disagreement.

------
ajnin
I think SO has 2 problems :

1) it want to be a repository of canonical knowledge, a giant FAQ and wiki of
everything. The problem is, that it does not fit the way the site actually
works: people will write imperfect questions, precisely because they don't
know the answer, and ask the opinions of their peers about things. But they
are not domain experts writing documentation so they often get down-voted or
their questions closed.

2) There is a karma system in which more karma gets you more power. Inevitably
such system attracts people in search of fame or power, and this kind of
people get off by telling others that they are smarter than them, or that they
know this little site rule better and consequently censor their question. As
regular users become fed up with the state of things and leave the site, the
position of high-karma users become more entrenched. Then, those users obtain
total control over the meta board to veto all fix proposals, make up even more
draconian rules, and entrench their position even more.

Problem 1) causes inadequate meta rules, and 2) zealous enforcement of these
rules. Some combination of 1) and 2) prevent the site owners from changing the
rules.

~~~
jxramos
good incentives analysis, pretty interesting, I'll have to meditate on this
one.

------
sampo
If one operates outside of the mainstream, then SO still works like in the
"good old days". Mainstream and the main volume of action is about the
relatively basic questions about the popular programming languages and
platforms.

But if one asks or answers questions about, for example, more advanced
features of git, more advanced algorithms, numerical mathematics, GIS,
anything that is not interesting to "the masses", then you still get genuine
helpful answers, but you might have to wait hours or days, and there will not
be a large number of answers.

~~~
bhaak
I once answered a question that was 4 years old.

Although still relevant as I ran into the same problem as the OP but as nobody
else answered I had to come up with an answer myself.

------
guilhas
To many "career stackoverflowers" I think. And no way to report moderators.

The other day I had a problem, and fund a SO question related, solved the
problem in a different way, and answered to the question, to help someone with
same problem. A guy comes gives me -1 and makes a completely useless comment.

PsExec requirements on local computer - Super User –
[https://superuser.com/questions/1158722/psexec-
requirements-...](https://superuser.com/questions/1158722/psexec-requirements-
on-local-computer)

Edit: thanks to someone who upvoted my SO answer

~~~
alkonaut
Nothing ticks me off more than the drive by downvoters, ninja downvoting
anything that _could_ be considered an answer (or question) that violates some
meta requirement.

If a downvote cost 10 rep and also took a while to take effect (with any edits
in the meantime canceling the downvote effect) I think the site would be a
better place.

Especially - when you see a question you should be able to extrapolate _what
the asker was trying to do_.

The idea of a “questions and answers” site is broken to begin with. No one has
a question, what we have is a problem, and what the person with a problem
needs is a solution not an “answer”.

The best answer to a question (which might be initially best posted as a
comment to get clarification if it’s not obvious) is this:

“You are asking how to do X. In this situation I think it would be best to
avoid doing X alltogether and to solve your problem which I _assume_ is Y -
you should probably try doing Z”

This type of answer invariably gets two things

1\. Thank you comment from the asker, for solving the problem

2\. Downvotes from nitpicking drive-by moderators for not answering the
question

~~~
Avamander
Attaching an username to every downvote could also fix the situation, makes it
impossible to just be negative without any consequence, the very least it
allows people who actually want an answer to ping the user(s) downvoting for a
reason.

~~~
alkonaut
Agree. And a mandatory suggestion could also be required.

“I think you should clarify in more detail why this is NOT a dupe of question
xyz”

“It’s not clear what you tried and what problems you encountered”

A nitpick could give a time frame to address and fix, and the _downvoter_
would have to review and accept reject the changes in order for the downvote
to apply.

------
bhauer
Meta: Can we please not link to AMP versions of pages on HN? Yes, it's easy
enough to remove the amp/ suffix from the URL [1], but linking to AMP version
directly is even more annoying than linking to mobile versions directly.

[1] [https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-
cultu...](https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-culture/)

------
bluedino
What drives me nuts are askers who either never choose a correct answer, or
choose an incorrect answer (which also gets upvotes) so the first correct
answer is buried 3-4 deep.

So many times I have read the most-voted and accepted answer thinking, “this
is completely wrong”

~~~
Rotareti
_> What drives me nuts are askers who either never choose a correct answer,_

I _sometimes_ do this when I'm not satisfied with the solutions that pop up in
the first couple of days. From my experience the best (in-depth) answers often
come from "necromancers". In such cases I want to leave some room for them.
Your question will be there for a long time and it might attract people
decades from now, I'm not in a hurry with this.

------
nickjj
I think SO does more harm than good now. A lot of answers are just people
parroting documentation without any additional information.

Back in the day you would search for a problem and find a nice juicy blog post
written by someone who has experienced and solved your problem. They would
also add a ton of ancillary context around the problem which makes it
interesting to read and a "better" answer than just a dry code snippet.

You can still find those blog posts today but since SO is so popular, you
often get multiple SO results engulfing the front page of search results.

------
lkrubner
What's become common for me, when I ask a question, is to have it marked
redundant. The response is:

"Your question is a repeat of this earlier question."

So then I try to point out that I already read that earlier question, and I
tried the solution suggested in that earlier solution, but it didn't work for
me. All of which I explained in my original post, but the moderators don't
seem to read all of what I've written, or they'd already know that. I think
they just scan the opening sentences, and if it seems to them to be similar to
something else, then my question gets marked redundant.

But when I clarify the situation, no one sees my clarification, because once
my question is marked redundant, people stop reading it.

~~~
jxramos
I remember first getting a question marked duplicate and me plugging in
differentiating factors. After time I've come to not view duplicate answer as
a pejorative thing but rather as a good catchall structure to bring a locus of
related content close together to effectively play the role of "here's an
alternate way of asking the same question". This basically expands the
keywords and tags that could successfully land a questioner to the answer they
seek. After all people oftentimes think of things differently, and to have
multiple slightly different means of asking the same question lumped together
in some coherent scope, that's a good thing.

------
jancsika
> The goal of Stack Overflow is to create a repository of high-quality
> questions, and high-quality answers to those questions.

That's confirmed by Jon Skeet's responses to Rob Conery's tweet. Skeet keeps
focusing on downsides of what he calls "'bad' questions."

To be precise I'd say SO is about generating high-quality answers that people
can actually find. _One_ way that SO does this is by trying to incentivize
high-quality questions.

Another way SO achieves this is by having questions that use the same or
similar words to the ones most people use to construct a search engine query.

Yet another way is by having _any question at all_ that induces or references
a high-quality answer that shares keywords with common search queries.

Of those two additional categories, a large number of SO questions can be and
are low-quality questions.

A significant number of my routes into SO high-quality answers come from what
I'd consider low-quality questions. Sometimes the high-quality answers are
inline. Sometimes I arrive at them through a mod message about duplicates or
another hyperlink.

Especially when someone is first learning a topic, they need those low quality
routes more than ever. After all, they don't yet know how to ask high-quality
questions!

At least in my experience, those routes from low quality questions to high-
quality answers are the one thing that makes SO unique. Those routes are
essentially the skeleton bones of the scary, sometimes humiliating process of
asking a noob question. (And now I learn it's also the exhausting and soul
crushing experience of experts submitting their high-quality answers.)

So on the one hand, it'd be great if SO had figured out that when herding
problem solvers it's a good idea to _minimize_ their propensity for being
obtuse and condescending.

On the other, it's a testament to the hacker spirit that SO instead caches the
results of all that humiliation and sniping so that others don't have to go
through it to find _their_ answers. That's actually a big step for the
subculture that came up with the error message, "You don't exist. Go away."

~~~
mark-r
It's not just noob questions that get roasted though. Last week I had a C++
Windows API problem where something was working when compiled in 32 bit mode
and not working in 64 bits. I have over 100K points so I know what I'm doing -
I knew it had to be condensed into a toy example that could be examined
carefully, or I'd get the same treatment any noob would get. The problem was I
couldn't get the toy example to work in 32 bits either. Finally a coworker
found a hint somewhere on the web ( _not_ StackOverflow) that pointed to a
problem with the manifest in the 64-bit version (and both versions of my toy
example). I couldn't craft a good question because I didn't know the answer
yet!

~~~
zbentley
> I couldn't craft a good question because I didn't know the answer yet!

This might be what you meant originally, but either way, I think there's an
important moral there: sometimes, the SO rules encourage people to ask good
questions, and sometimes, in formulating a good question, the rules encourage
good debugging/distillation skills, and askers end up solving their problem on
the way!

~~~
mark-r
But in this case the vital clue still came from the internet, just not SO. And
I wasn't able to find it on my own - I generally consider my search skills
among the best. I hope that's not just the Dunning-Kruger talking.

------
twic
> On Stack Overflow, the most common disconnect is between these two goals:

I wonder if you could serve both these goals. What if the basic Q&A machinery
was used to explicitly help solve asker's problems, but there was a mechanism
to elevate a question and its answers into the site's library of long-term
knowledge? The site could then do standard SEO-fu to only include the latter
questions in search results, emphasise them more in search, etc. The mechanism
could be something like the current close vote mechanism - if four users with
sufficient rep vote to elevate, it gets elevated, plus mods can do it
directly, de-elevate, etc.

You could end up with lots of "low-quality" questions and answers whose
turnover is still helping people in concrete ways, but also build up a
repository of knowledge.

------
cletus
So I was an early contributor to SO. At one point the top users was Jon Skeet,
Marc Gravelli then me [1].

I pretty much came to this conclusion 6-7 years ago (the one in the tweet Jon
is responding to). Two things were already happening then:

1\. The low hanging fruit (of questions and answers) was gone. Questions were
by necessity becoming more specialized. These attracted less attention (and
votes). This is a common problem on online forums. Back when HN had public
vote totals I'd often see someone put together a thoughtful comment and get a
single upvote. Someone else would correct a typo or say the year in question
was 1995 not 1996 and then 11.

2\. And this is the one I had and have a real problem with: the toxic
moderators took over. Those who can, answer. Those who can't, question. Those
who can't do either, moderate. So many useful questions I saw getting closed
as "not constructive". Useful things like "what are the benefits of A vs B?"
The de facto standard became if it didn't have an objective, definitive answer
a cadre of mods had decided it didn't belong on SO. Thing is, you can provide
a really useful answer to the question of "should I use Python or Ruby?" with
some relative pros and cons without saying one or the other.

The argument against those questions was they might be fine questions but they
didn't belong on SO (eg maybe on the programmers Stack Exchange). While that
might be true for some questions (particularly those career related) I found
that ever shifting standard was actually detrimental to the site.

Basically it seemed like the threshold for moderating content on SO was too
low.

Answerers provide the most value (IMHO). Good questions matter too. The
problem seems to lie in moderators who think they provide as much value as
answerers and what they do is super-important. It's useful, no argument, but
it's just not on the same level.

Some of my answers have been edited 30+ times over the years for, in many
cases, no good reason. Someone decides something should be capitalized.
Someone else disagrees. Some of these have actually changed the meaning of the
answer and I've had to go and correct the answer.

Don't get me wrong: SO is a fantastic resource. It just has its own Wikipedia
editor problem.

[1]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus](https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus)

------
bluedino
Stack Overflow has a few issues, but have you ever tried using other Q&A sites
like those from Apple, Microsoft, or HP?

They're _terrible_. Ten times worse. Someone came up with the idea that the
top answer should be listed again in the list of other answers, it's so
confusing. Not to mention nobody comes along to purge all the useless answers.
Many of the 'answers' are really just comments, more questions, 'me too', etc.

------
clan
For me it has distilled into something much simpler: Enlightenment or Fix It.

Those who seek enlightenment want to ask good questions and learn. They want
to be educated and be a part of the community. You need to give some to get
some.

And then there are the fixers. The least effort they can put in getting their
immediate problem solved. Long term value and learning something is not a
priority.

Unfortunately there are a number of "fixers" who answers too. They give short
extremely to the point answers without much depth. Some because it is a quick
way to handle ”easy" questions. And others simply hunting for points.

As everybody else I have my own view on how to solve this. Raise the bar to
ask a question. Spend more effort on actually build a well founded and good
question before allowing answers. With the current system the churn is too
high and there is too much focus on fixing rather than learning.

How cool would it be if people started to ask "What questions do I need to ask
to try fixing this problem?”

With all its flaws SO is still one of the best resources out there. But I am
afraid that it is considered "good enough" for anyone willing to make greater
changes. Or it has reached a size with too much inertia to make such changes
viable.

~~~
mulvya
> _They give short extremely to the point answers without much depth._

Typically, this is because these questions are a minor (cosmetic or trivial)
variation* of an question asked many times already, and usually addressed in
the docs. Search results aren't likely to put _this_ question at the top of
results, so the aim is to resolve the OP's need.

*so technically not a duplicate.

~~~
Avamander
> Typically, this is because these questions are a minor (cosmetic or trivial)
> variation* of an question asked many times already, and usually addressed in
> the docs.

Maybe it's time SO adopted the concept of duplicate answers, not duplicate
questions?

~~~
shagie
They do... barely. From [https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-
answers](https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-answers)

> Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This
> includes answers that are: > exact duplicates of other answers

However, this is left up to the community moderation rather than the diamond
moderation. For the community moderation to delete an answer it must have a
negative score and multiple 20k rep users have to see it and delete it. It
takes a lot of work on Stack Overflow to muster that - especially when there
are people up vote everything.

Consider
[https://stackoverflow.com/q/187587](https://stackoverflow.com/q/187587) and
how many posts have the same content. Having experienced this in the past,
flagging duplicate answers for deletion isn't something that diamond mods will
act on... and as the answers have a positive score, the community can't act on
without a concerted down vote brigade.

------
jasode
I understand that Jon Skeet was just doing a quick "brain dump" of his
thoughts on Stackoverflow triggered by Rob Conery's tweet but his comments
about "low quality" questions don't seem to actually address what Rob was
complaining about. (Because Rob wasn't the one asking the "low quality"
questions.)

I wish I could see the _actual comments_ from others that irritated Rob but it
seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO
profile?[1])

Even if Jon Skeet's essay doesn't apply to RC, I think his assessment of "low
quality" questions needs more dissection and it is missing a key psychology.
He writes:

 _> This is a low-quality question, in my view. (I’ll talk more about that
later.)

>[...]

>– but I think it’s important to accept that there are such things as low-
quality questions, _

Yes, Jon is correct that low-quality questions are a real problem but he's
missing why they persist... the "askers" _don 't know enough_ to run their
question through a self-diagnostic test to _determine_ they are asking a low
quality question. To beginners, it's a "high quality" question by one
criteria: _" I don't know the answer."_

If they knew the answer -- they wouldn't be asking it! <\-- _That is the
psychology that 's very difficult to solve._

The SO experts want interesting and high quality questions to answer. If no
questions were filtered out (closed), there would be too much crap to wade
through and the site becomes a waste of their volunteer time. On the other
hand, the beginners want their questions answered. Their questions being
closed is a "toxic" environment and "unwelcoming."

I've given a lot of thought about what the optimal Q&A website would look like
and I've determined you always have an unresolved tension between naive
beginners and experts.

I would challenge anybody to come up with a Q&A system that filters questions
in a way that the majority of askers who got their questions closed/deleted
will _agree_ that it was "fair".

To get a usable site, you have to favor the answerers over the askers because
the experts are the ones _contributing_ the valuable content.

[1]
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5BLgYwJ:https://stackoverflow.com/users/1151/rob-
conery+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
codinghorror
> I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it
> seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO
> profile?[1])

You and me both. Rob emailed me about this and I asked him the same thing.

Criticism without actual examples is not actionable. Also one person’s pot-ah-
to is often another person’s poh-tah-to if you know what I mean.

------
didymospl
I don't really understand these complaints about being downvoted on Stack
Overflow. The vast majority of downvoted questions are either off-topic or too
vague. SO has clear guidelines on the questions' topics
[https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic](https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-
topic) Even its name implies what types of questions you may ask there, yet
apparently some (highly respected - like Rob) people still want it to be a
general programming forum.

Personally, I think the most of downvotes on stackoverflow are quite objective
and therefore better justified than here where they are generally used to
express a personal judgement about a comment.

------
duxup
As a n00b just learning programming Stack Overflow is both super helpful, and
not so much.

My biggest issue is the votes for best answer are based on what is most
technically correct. Their code is correct... but their helpfulness isn't
necessary helpful for someone who might not know WHY the code in the answer is
a good answer. I'm searching for answers because often I really don't know
that code, and then someone posts a blob of code with little to no answer and
everyone who already knows the answer votes it up....

They're not wrong, just not necessarily helpful.

Granted I don't expect anyone to bust into a full blown class to explain it,
but often it's not explained all that well for someone who might be looking.

------
epx
In Portuguese version of SO, most of the questions are very basic programming
and smell as course homework that the student is asking SO to answer. Whoever
does this kind of question is not simply naive: he is lazy and gives the
profession a bad name. No point in being helpful and forthcoming.

~~~
jochung
I'm somewhat surprised the term "help vampire" didn't appear in the original
post. It's not just that some people ask for homework help. It's that some
people's entire repertoire of problem solving skills well into adulthood only
consists of asking others.

Good questions ought to lead to better problem solving skills. Often they
don't.

------
hysan
I've been writing my own blog post about my experience as an "answerer" on
StackOverflow for the past year (first time I've spent significant time on the
website). This puts to words a lot of the problem feelings I had that I
couldn't quite explain. What I find interesting is his point on diagnostics:

> In my case, I have often have a sub-goal of “try to help improve the
> diagnostic skill of software engineers so that they’re in a better position
> to solve their own problems.”

There was a recent discussion on Meta that went over whether or not basic
debugging was a required skill. [1] My reading of the general consensus was
that StackOverflow isn't a place for such users. Anyone who cannot debug or do
basic diagnostics before posting doesn't appear welcome. However, there have
been efforts of trying implement mentoring to help do exactly what Jon Skeet
is doing. [2] This all leaves me wondering what the true purpose of
StackOverflow is now.

One last problem that I didn't see mentioned that I think is compounding the
issue of "askers" looking for quick answers is the trend for larger open
source projects to tell users to submit all questions to StackOverflow instead
of on the issue tracker. So projects with significant churn and poor
documentation end up flooding StackOverflow with extremely low quality
questions. StackOverflow was never meant to be used this way. [3][4] However,
they haven't done anything to curb this behavior and it's starting to become
the norm. I feel that this issue will make the "improve the diagnostic skill"
approach to answering impossible in the future.

[1] [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-
suppo...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-support-
users-who-do-not-understand-how-to-debug-their-code)

[2]
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring)

[3] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-
to-...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-use-stack-
overflow-as-the-support-forum-for-a-product-or-project)

[4] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-
ove...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-overflow-as-
the-official-support-site-of-an-open-source-project)

------
msl09
I think that the author have made a mistake in writing the goal of the
answerer:

> Answerer: maximize the value to the site of any given post, treating the
> site as a long-lasting resource

That's rarely the case, usually the answerer wants answer the question as fast
as possible to move on to the next question and accumulate karma.

Honestly I can't really blame stackoverflow's karma system on that since I've
seen that behavior everywhere even in person to person conversations.

My point is, If you don't have time to think about my question, don't bother
answering cause if you do, you will waste your time asking garbage questions
("are you sure you really need your operations to be async") or giving garbage
answers ("stop using postgres and use mongodb") and then I'll have to waste my
time replying to what you said to clarify why this is not a thing that can be
"bargained around".

Talking in person I have the advantage that my facial expressions convey my
desire to murder, so my coworkers are used to only offer answers when they are
super sure about it or when I directly ask them, in the internet I still have
no idea on how to fix that.

~~~
mark-r
The goal of the answerer is likely to be highly individual. My own motivation
is that I like helping people and solving puzzles. Probing the questioner to
make sure they haven't discarded the easy solution needlessly is part of that.
But I too have seen it taken to an extreme.

------
catchmeifyoucan
I agree with the author. SO culture definitely exists. His final points are
great. However, I think that the author didn't explore the idea of rewards on
StackOverflow and how they might influence the quality of an answer too
deeply.

For example, things like most upvoted answer and best liked questions are
things that definitely fall under my radar when answering questions. In an
ideal world, it shouldn't matter whether my answer is the best, or the
"selected" answer, but it does. Of course, that might not be the case for
everyone.It's like this good feeling; like you've achieved something and
you're getting validation of your knowledge.I know that when I used to answer
questions, some people would comment saying, "Don't just post a link to the
answer, explain it". It helped make me a better answerer. There are also times
when I tend to ignore questions that are downvoted.

TLDR; I think the rewards system plays a significant role in determining the
outcome of the quality of answers and questions on SO.

------
eastern
Like so much on the internet, SO is not what one would ideally want, but is
definitely the least bad way of asking for and getting answers.

And maybe it's something about software people. Other parts of the
Stackexchange network that I use, like photography, English language and
travel, are quite pleasant.

------
coleifer
I regularly check so for questions about the libraries I've written and try to
provide good answers that will hopefully get indexed and be discoverable. It's
both a short-term desire to help and in the long-term reduce time for other
people struggling with something.

Very often I can just include a few lines of sample code and provide a link to
the docs.

Occasionally a bug or deficiency is revealed and I can make my library better.

Despite these benefits, there are clearly some ridiculous questions... and
incorrect answers given by others. The tension between high and low quality
can make for some frustrating experiences. But it's still worth the small
amount of time it takes me, I believe, to try and help.

------
outsidetheparty
I wonder if a lot of this problem would go away if SO questions could be
officially split into a "I'm a novice / learning developer" site and a "I
mostly know what I'm doing" site. This is impossible, of course, not least
because of the Dunning-Kruger effect... but those two categories of people
have very different needs, and most of the friction I see on the site seem to
be a result of them being lumped together. (As many people have pointed out,
the problem's a lot worse in tags that tend to have a lot of beginners --
HTML, CSS, jQuery, regex...)

I get where the rudeness, pedantry, and rules-lawyering is coming from. It's
frustrating to wade through a dozen daily iterations of "how do I vertically
center this div," "why doesn't my async code work when I try to treat it like
synchronous code", or "why didn't this jQuery event handler bind to the DOM
element that didn't exist when I tried to bind it," or "here's a screenshot
and a vague complaint that something doesn't work right, fix plz". And when
you've been through a bunch of those you end up primed to assume the worst of
_every_ question.

Those are all perfectly reasonable questions to the person asking them. (well
except for the last one maybe.) But to the people treating the site as an
Encyclopedic Repository of Coding Knowledge, they're just repetitive noise.

Possibly I'm outing myself as part of the problem, here. (I do try to keep a
level head, or at least keep my mouth shut while I mark as duplicate.) But I
think the rules-lawyering is a necessary defense against the site turning into
Yahoo Answers or Quora or Experts-exchange. (Remember them? They've added the
hyphen since last time I looked. Good call.) It could be done more politely
than it often is, but it does need to be done somehow.

Which is why I wonder if it were possible to reframe those "beginner"
questions as mentoring, rather than walling off or shutting out the noobs; and
to make marking a question as a duplicate feel less adversarial and more "your
answers are over here!" then it all might be a little less angry-making on
both sides.

(Not that I know how. The Documentation beta seemed a good attempt; I was
disappointed that it didn't work out.)

------
kidsil
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that the Stack Exchange
ecosystem is alive and well, with some super nice and helpful communities like
DIY or English

------
martin1b
I've been with SO since the very early days when Joel and Jeff were very
involved. In the first few years, I visited daily because it was like a
community of developers working together to help each other in a professional
yet cheerful fashion. Now that Joel and Jeff aren't as involved (if at all),
its like the focus of the site has changed. As many have said, moderators
appear too stringent. So much to the point of removing value from the site.
Removing value removes users. I now rarely visit SO because it doesn't feel
like a group of developers wanting to help it's community. Asking a question
has almost become a provocation of hostility from either moderators or
'answerers'. There are many controls to limit the asker. Perhaps controls
should be put in place to limit negative answerer sentiment or moderator
dominance or SO could lose it's place in the developer community.

------
nicoburns
I have 10k+ rep on stackoverflow. IMO a lot of the 'low-quality' questions are
some of the most valuable. Often the question contains not a clear description
of the problem (which the asker doesn't have), but a seemingly nondescriptive
error message, which happens to be commonly causes by maybe 1, 2 or 3
different things. The brilliant thing about stackoverflow is that it can
capture someone else's hard won (e.g. throughba detailed debugging session)
knowledge about the issue.

I agree with the moderation being overzealous, although with the caveat that
this is difficult problem solely due to the size of thw community.

------
deviationblue
Most times I posted on stack overflow, my question got downvoted and/or there
were snide comments (sometimes). But I got the answer I needed, and my work
got done. I don't really care about anything else- why would culture matter
for me when I get the results I want?

Also, the problem with a lot of beginner questions is that there are often a
lot of similar such questions out there already. I don't blame others, or hold
it against them, for getting miffed about the umpteenth such question. But
really, they should just ignore it, and/or post the duplicate post(s).

------
mycentstoo
One thing I've learned to do is pre-empt typical moderator responses and
answers. For example, I will find things that they might consider to be
duplicates and then I will differentiate my post from each. I also outline
every solution I've tried. I've had that hit 17 or so and the post was almost
comically large.

Moderators are great but when they're bad, they're predictably bad. Use that
against them and pre-empt the normal responses they might have. Since I've
done this, I've never had a post closed or otherwise reprimanded.

------
dsr12
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608029)

------
jordanpg
I've always thought that one of the reasons SO was so successful is that they
were an early adopter of easy to use markdown for code snippets, with a fairly
snappy, simple UI.

Compare this with the alternatives around the same time, like Google
Groups/Discussions or phpBB, which are still painful to look at to this day,
IMHO. Is there anyone who wince when have to scroll through nested threads,
and unformatted raw text in code to understand something?

------
el_cid
My main gripe with it - are the closed questions. I think half the time I end
up on SO - the questions is unanswered and closed. Delete the thread at least,
why waste time of people searching for an answer to get frustrated by your
over-zealous mods. Damn I hate when that happens. There were instances where
the closed-unanswered question was the only place in the entire www where this
was asked... :/

------
itwy
To a certain extent, I actually appreciate their strict question asking rules.
People complained and sometimes moderators closed some of my questions which
made me learn how to formulate my questions better.

However, I go out of my way to punish users who want to look smart and post
comments (not answers) so they cannot be downvoted by going to their profiles
and randomly downvote some of their questions/answers.

------
truedatt
The half dozen times that I've corrected blatantly incorrect answers my posts
have been deleted for some inane pedantic reason or another - while leaving
the wrong answer intact. I'm done with StackOverflow. It's not worth the
hassle. The answer quality has decreased exponentially over the years to the
point when googling for the solution to a problem I will click on only non-SO
links.

------
gor-d
stockoverflow inherently enables and supports the absolute worst elements of
the tech industry.

the correct answer for a novice just starting is not the same as the correct
answer for a total expert, the novice wont even know what you are talking
about.

It panders to those that think there is a right and wrong way to do things and
that they know the right what and the correct way to educate someone is with a
public humiliation.

The whole site is totally un-inclsive, its great for like the 50-100 people
who prefer elitism over education, and also already know what they are talking
about.

IMHO they should split the site and create a new one for professional
programmers, that does exactly what SO says it wants to do now, but be very
clear its not for hobbists. then vet first questions to ensure they understand
the rules etc. before interacting.

But honestly i think this vision that some have of it being a perfect data
store of problems and solutions has an over simplistic idea about how the
world works.

~~~
gor-d
also blocking opinion questions and open-ended ones is silly, just have a tag
for it and let people filter them out.

i have learned a lot for the discursive and open-ended questions, meh its just
trying to apply to many rules.. huge communities are not going to be that
aligned

------
PaulHoule
What this post does not talk about is a different customer: the person who is
searching for programming advice.

SO is useful, but it is often awful. For instance, most Python examples on SO
were written for Python 2, thus you need to add parenthesis if you want to cut
and paste them into the Python 3 REPLs.

Many coders will accept the excuse that having to manually insert parenthesis
"keeps you own the ball" or "helps you learn", etc. No, it's the kind of
machine stupidity that we have to dispense with to achieve artificial
intelligence.

Often I get five or six competing answers. Sometimes the best one is at the
top. Sometimes the one at the top has a comment that says the author of the
post and the original poster both agree it is wrong and that you should ignore
it and scroll down to the one below.

Meanwhile, the Q&A format means that I may have to scroll through a large
amount of incorrect source code before finally finding the two or three lines
I really need.

Those small things add up because I am juggling a number of balls in the air
as I work, and I just don't need any cognitive trash.

If you program in Python, Java, Ruby, Rust, Javascript, etc. you may find that
your biggest head scratchers have do with integration with and the choice of
third-party libraries -- discussion of which is severely curtailed on SO.

I am fascinated with the discussion about "People asking insufficiently
detailed questions" because that is one of the great unresolved problems of
Hacker News -- "Ask HN:" is choked with many cries for help which can only be
replied to with "We need to know more about this to give you a real answer"
that frequently don't get answered.

------
deostroll
I happen to have a SO profile that tries to capture the essence of what Jon
wrote.

When I "do" respond to posts asking the "asker" to elaborate on that question
with more details, I imagine the asker visiting my profile and, probably
squishing my avatar with bare hands...

If there are people out there that feel that way I am sorry...I am only trying
to help.

But that is the problem. There is frustration on the asker's part. Always.
There is also frustration on the "answerers" part too. But this is a perennial
problem. And its not going to go away soon.

But at least the stuff Jon mentions in points...for both "askers" and
"answerers"...they help. They are like commandments. Abide by them.

------
gor-d
the questions are THE MOST VALUABLE PART of stack overflow. I think the issue
is that the answerers refuse to accept this -> they are worthless without a
question first :D

------
always_good
Honestly, a lot of people's opinions on HN just seem like people getting more
experienced with programming and not needing SO like they used to.

How many times is "I rarely even go there anymore" going to be part of
someone's criticism? I barely go there, too. You should see the questions I
used to ask though. I was a beginner.

Also, each time I learn a new language, I'm back on SO. Lately it's been Rust.
I'm googling questions like how to concat strings and convert a byte array to
base10 all over again.

I have no doubt that SO has problems. But I wonder how much of the piling on I
see in comments is just people who aren't serviced by it as much as they used
to be, and then backsplaining it with "because it sucks."

Also, a lot of the criticism I read here is extremely petty. People who got
way too absorbed by SO and then blamed SO for their own kinda toxic behavior.

~~~
dcow
Have you tried to ask a more finessed question on SO lately? It's neigh
impossible. Someone (likely with less experience than you in the domain you're
asking about) will fail to fully process your question and flag it as not
relevant to the site, too broad, primarily opinion based, etc. because they
didn't quite understand it or didn't take the time to, etc. It takes hours of
arguing (worse: in public--where people don't want to be wrong) with people to
make any progress and by that point people who could have helped answer your
question skipped it because it's been sitting at -2 and flagged.

And so SO has regressed to the mean.

You're not wrong that SO is probably more useful in a DAU/MAU sense to a new
programmer askers than seasoned askers. But what you're mistaking for
"backsplaining" is experienced users saying it's hard to get meaningful help
anymore because they have to fight the mob on the more rare occasions that
they do ask a question. That is something SO can correct, but hasn't done a
good job with, IMHO. The primary goal of SO should be to provide utility to
its users. But many of us feel like it's only providing utility to well
behaved newbs.

~~~
always_good
As you gain experience, your questions are naturally going to have an
increasingly niche market. By the time I'm asking something on SO, it's pretty
damn esoteric and it's going to take some thought on the part of the answerer.

I've never dealt with negative ratings nor does that sound like something I'd
complain about. I've also never had to "fight the mob" \-- that doesn't sound
like nontoxic behavior to me, btw. What I've done is set a bounty on my
question and hope someone with the experience can answer it.

If so, awesome. If not, well, I'll have to find a free answer another way. I
don't see how that's a community's fault unless I entitle myself to the time
and expertise of others.

It seems pretty natural to me that SO is going to have diminishing returns as
your questions have finer and finer points on them. That's how it works in the
real world, too.

~~~
dcow
I don't think that SO has to sacrifice the ends of the bell curve in order to
cater to the middle. My point is not that SO should be equally useful to
people asking more esoteric questions, but that it currently effectively
discourages them as a byproduct of the drive-by moderation that is suitable
for most of the questions resting around the center of the bell curve.

------
matte_black
Do you think there might be a demand for a bropages equivalent of stack
overflow? Answers to questions with little to no explanation, just straight to
the point?

