My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone.
What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.
>What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing.
This is incorrect and a misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the unpaid volunteer answerers who scan the queue of questions to look for interesting things to answer. The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time.[1][2]
>Search engines will filter them for us.
The volunteer answerers don't interface with the list of new SO questions queue via de-duped Google search results.
An analogy with this site (HN) is applicable: Yes Google searches will return some old archived HN threads and filter out some dupes but we (the HN participants) don't look for new & interesting HN threads to add our comments via Google. Instead, we interact directly on this website and rely on moderators (dang/sctb) to mark posts as [dupe] and filter them out.
(When I started typing this comment, the sibling comment by setr was grayed out. That downvote was unwarranted because he was correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. I made a previous comment explaining this same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621)
> The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions.
I disagree.
I’m relatively high-rep. I don’t have any issues with stupid or duplicate questions, they don’t waste my time. Nobody forces me to answer every question asked on SO.
You know what is a waste of my time? When I wrote a good answer to a question which I think is fine, which then goes to oblivion because some other people, who often have absolutely no clue what’s asked, decide the question is not good enough.
First of all, there's often a subtle difference in the questions despite being flagged as duplicate. And pretty much as soon as it's flagged, other people are all to eager to use their vote close power, taking a disproportionate amount of energy to try to convince them otherwise. Frankly, the few times I've tried it feels like trying to argue with someone that thinks the earth is flat or the moon landings were faked.
Secondly, sometimes I like answering questions. It's a form of teaching, which is really a form of learning, and writing a good answer gives me a chance to learn something in more depth in order to be able to explain it. I don't really care that a similar question has been answered before, I'm happy to focus on the subtle differences and specifics of this question and try to make a good answer.
However, too often your reward for this is a closed and then deleted question, which is kind of like a punch to the gut.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ has over a million subscribers and they get repetitive questions all the time without making anybody feel bad about it.
It would be pretty weird if a small group really "need" the "right" to suppress a larger group of their co-users just because the questions are programming-related. It makes sense they'd defend such a right vigorously to keep it though.
Regarding your 4 examples: /r/NoStupidQuestions/, /r/AskHistorians/, /r/legaladvice/, /r/personalfinance/
I see why those 4 subreddits influence your thinking in how StackOverflow should work so it seems like it could adopt the same (social) mechanisms and it would only improve the site and not degrade it.
However, notice that there is no reddit.com/r/ProgrammersAskAnyQuestion/ comparable subreddit that has more traffic and/or better answers than StackOverflow even though Reddit is older (2005) than StackOverflow (2008). Why is that?
Here's my pet theory on why I think technical programmers' Q&A won't have the same dynamics as your 4 example sites based on observations of programmers asking questions for decades on USENET, Experts-Exchange, etc:
- the questions on the 4 non-tech sites you mention are often "entertainment" in and of themselves. Whether it's the compelling drama of a girlfriend asking LegalAdvice about a boyfriend emptying her bank account or somebody on AskHistorians asking about Hitler (for the 100th time), the tolerance for dupes or silly questions is much more relaxed.
- In contrast, programmers have less patience for answering someone else's "homework questions", or doing free consulting work for incompetent developers, or encountering poorly researched questions, etc. Programmers (in general) definitely have more of a smartass "lmgtfy"[0] type of defense against people wasting their time on a question forum. Yes, developers do want to help but they also have a lower threshold for annoying questions than the 4 sites you listed. (If you haven't read through the 2 meta stackexchange threads I cited in my comment you replied to, please do so to get a glimpse of this collective psychology. Also a recent 3rd thread to read to understand how some SO veterans feel.[1])
- Since a tech question like "What's the regex to extract an email address?" doesn't have the same entertainment value as "Do sighted people really look at the toilet paper after they wipe?"[2] ... the programmers volunteering their efforts don't want to see that duplicate regex question 10000 times.
I might be wrong with my analysis. Perhaps somebody can start a new subreddit dedicated to answering any programmers questions. Specifically advertise the subreddit as having no moderation, no deletion of dupe questions, no closing of questions, no downvote buttons[3] to prevent anyone's feelings from getting hurt, etc. Basically, take all the social dynamic complaints about SO and make that subreddit do the opposite. We can then see if it attracts questioners (and good answers) like your 4 example subreddits.
(I'm serious about that subreddit suggestion; it would be a fascinating experiment.)
I tend to think the person who can truly identify that the question is a dupe is the questioner. The moderators who are insufficiently annoyed by a duplicate question that they want to link it can surely propose a link, but just like answers are accepted, a duplicate closure should be accepted.
It is always so frustrating to me when I find exactly the question I need an answer to on SO, but it's closed as a dupe of a question it's clearly not a duplicate of.
I tend to think the person who can truly identify that the question is a dupe is the questioner.
Not IME. It depends on whether the Q is a XY problem or if the asker is acquainted with the problem-domain. I engage with Qs on the use of a specific set of tools, and I see users pose the same problem (with incidental variation) with imprecise/vague terms or phrasing.
Also, there are a couple of novice pain points for which I regularly see duplicates with similar description and terminology. I tend to think the users just didn't spend a lot of time looking through search results, if at all.
There are most definitely programming-help subreddits on Reddit so I'm not sure what you're on about, besides insisting that we need the toxicity of StackOverflow due to "reasons".
>There are most definitely programming-help subreddits on Reddit so I'm not sure what you're on about,
Yes, I know there are already programming help subreddits.
E.g. I regularly visit /r/cpp/ but the Q&A there isn't as big as the StackOverflow questions tagged [cpp]. (Even though that C++ subreddit started May 2008 is older than StackOverflow.)
What am I on about?! Please carefully note that I was talking about a _comparable_ subreddit that has similar-or-higher traffic and equal-or-higher quality of answers than StackOverflow. (I know such a subreddit doesn't exist because if it did, all the complainers about SO could simply go to that superior subreddit to get their questions answered.)
>, besides insisting that we need the toxicity of StackOverflow due to "reasons".
Nobody has to insist. For anyone who is convinced that the users with bad questions should have higher priority than the experts with answers, you can put that philosophy to a real world test.
Since StackOverflow is "toxic", I suggested making a programming help subreddit (or even make a whole new Q&A website) that removes all toxic mechanisms (no downvotes, etc, etc). You can then see if the subreddit questions attracts the quality experts -- and therefore builds up a repository of quality answers.
It's not an empty suggestion for people who think StackOverflow's social mechanisms are fundamentally wrong. Back in 2008, Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood though the old Q&A website Experts-Exchange was fundamentally flawed. Therefore, they made StackOverflow with different mechanisms. Users were disgusted with experts-exchange.com and everybody migrated en masse to StackOverflow.
So, make a new Q&A website that allows 10000 duplicates and see what happens. Maybe the new website will flourish and you will be proven correct. StackOverflow will be fade away because of the superior competition.
If the problem is just repetitive, boring questions how about the power users just use the API to filter them out? Or improve the UI. The power to ruin someone else's experience is a heavy-handed alternative to some basic filtering.
If so, there's no obvious API call where one can put a "not boring" filter as a parameter. Do you have source code examples of what you're suggesting?
>The power to ruin someone else's experience is a heavy-handed
Right but there are 2 groups ... not just 1 group representing the question askers. There's also the other group of desirable experts providing answers.
If you tune the site's rules to avoid ruining the experience of the question askers', you've now ruined the experience for the answerers. (Again, refer to the cited threads of answerers' complaining about their experience being ruined because of bad quality questions.)
Create a "beginner" tag and then let people annoyed by beginner questions filter them out. Or allow people to filter out questions from askers with less than N reputation.
These solutions probably have their own flaws, but if there was an appetite to be more beginner friendly geberally you could probably road test them a bit more.
Without the tag "enforcement" means censoring a co-user and the problem manifests as "who can wield this authority fairly and justly against their co-users"?
With the tag enforcement means who can triage new posts to tag them appropriately when a co-user does not. They're not the same problems and I think objectively this is a better problem to have.
> who can wield this authority fairly and justly against their co-users
Not brand new users who don't appreciate how the site works and without moderation will make more work for users who are capable of answering question.
I don't have a code example but I think even if the API is inadequate it doesn't really matter - filtering content can be solved in many ways. The browser extension "Reddit Enhancement Suite" I think literally just parses the page you're on to remove undesired content. Reddit's /r/worldnews has content filtering I think might be done with CSS. SO could obviously make a minimal effort to empower such functionality too or build it into their UI. There's search services like the one HN uses that make the content a flexible API.
> correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners.
yep. The answerers are definitly more valuable, because it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place, and there's only the reward of intellectual stimulation for doing so.
The questioner are not as valuable, because asking questions is easy. Asking a good question is hard, but the majority of questions aren't hard to ask.
By making the site completely biased towards the answerer, stackoverflow gets good answers, at the cost of turning away some questioners. I believe the site maintainers have chosen correctly, because questioners are more desperate to ask their question than answerers are to answer.
Sure, but it should be measured against the impact of greater redundant questions. The filter is not perfect, and no perfect filter is known — reducing false negatives increases false positives, and vice versa.
Reducing false positives (closed for dupe, but not actually a dupe) favors the answerers; reducing false negatives (open, but in fact a dupe) favors the questioners.
The filter should likely favor the former — an emotionally injured questioner must go where the answerers are, and will come back. An emotionally injured answerer is more fragile — he has no commitment to this place.
Of course, to a limit, but “inclusivity” of questioners, at the cost of all else, is a game that has been played before, and has failed many times before (pretty much every online Q&A before SO)
Perhaps SO has gone too far, but its goals seem to me much more reasonable than the commonly suggested alternatives. Beginners have places to go — SO need not be their haven, and need not optimize for them.
For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering.
And in a Q&A site, the answerers are far more important than the questioners — if the questions will be answered, the questioners will flock there out of need, regardless of want. Answerers are however not so constrained.
People complain about SO because, I think, it does the correct thing (unlike most Q&A sites) — it tries to optimize usage and rules for those who answer questions. Most people, however, only ask questions, or search for answers.
>For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering.
Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precious email in fifteen pages of spam junk. I don’t really have too much time for that. With that in mind, it’s still unclear if my contribution was really unique and helpful, because out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. Statistics-wise it’s not worth it.
It is no doubt that SO may be toxic or pushing ego. But being on constructive side is a burden. ‘They’ always outweigh you even with draconian regulation. Relax a little and you’ll drown at the same instant.
I suggest every complaining guy to answer a couple of questions a day first, for some time. Not just random two, but find two really worth their time to see real costs. SO is social, and in a society every participant should play nice and take their part on a problem. We help each other, but no one has spare change for hordes.
^ not an upvote junkie, I’m mostly indifferent to community scores
> out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge.
I regularly come across helpful answers on SO with 0 or 1 upvotes, so I wouldn't judge your contributions' impact solely on that. You've likely helped many people with your answers, even if there's no proof of it.
My answers usually did have some upvotes, and I’m only speaking of up-per-year here (passive accumulation after “hot” period, which kind of must show the real usefulness against initial “hey okay cool +5” phase), i.e. not 0->1->2 transitions.
But I see what you mean. Maybe I’m self-biased since I’m usually logged in and do upvote low-voted answers when they obviously help me. Majority may simply not do that for old answers and/or others questions. Still, lack of feedback makes things foggy.
But doesn't that just mean the closure of duplicates is irrelevant? You're already getting a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. So the two possibilities are - filter them or go away.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with your "ergo", but I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo answers told you to throw water on a grease fire(as the selected answer).
When i was taking freshman CS classes, this was a running joke with my classmates. Wed take to google for helping fixing an error, and 90-95% of C++ 101 questions have at least one answer in the form: "why are you trying to do this? Unless you know what you're doing (which by your question you probably dont), you should by using different methods entirely."
Friend having a coding problem? Give 'em the SO special:
"Have you tried using vectors?"
My favorite anecdote, and the one I trot out every time this comes up, was the time I was asking for help in golang-nuts and on the IRC figuring out a few things about unsafe/uintptr. I was participating in a code competition with performance as a primary metric and learning Go at the same time. Trying to get somebody to answer very straightforward questions about casting was worse than pulling teeth; everyone wanted to work their way into a back-seat architect role on my "real goal".
"Hey, here is this task/problem I'm solving. Is this solution okay or is there a better solution?" is a very different question than "I'm trying to cast this pointer back to this slice of types but I'm seeing this error; what am I missing?".
A somewhat related pet-peeve of mine is when software authors bake assumptions about how somebody "should" be doing something into their projects at a low level causing it to become unnecessarily inflexible and often time inconsistent with what you would expect. I've run into this with a lot of Gradle and gradle plugins.. My first big experience was perhaps trying to convince NTFS3G to allow the user to clear or override the dirty bit for certain resize operations. It can take a lot of convincing to get people to expand their concept of a "valid use case" and create escape hatches and flexibility for those atypical situations.
Opinionated frameworks are much, much easier to write. Abstraction and generalization are hard, and a lot to ask of people who are likely creating something for free. The fact that a framework doesn't make the choices you would have made doesn't make it wrong, or unnecessarily inflexible. They're necessarily inflexible to keep the burden on maintainers and new contributors as low as possible. Just because one person has an edge case isn't a good reason to write a bunch of new code.
Never mind the people who think you shouldn't do something, it seems like most of the time when I look up something on SO these days, the solution is terrible or everybody agrees there is no solution, and after spending maybe 20 minutes more searching, it turns out that, yes, there is a way to do it that is infinitely better.
One of the most important things that is needed for finding a solution to any problem is a sense of what a good solution would look like, and a certainty that it exists even before you have seen it, and even if you can't invent it yourself. Not knowing when to settle is the reason people usually go with terrible approaches to a problem.
That is certainly one of my pet peeves about that site. It is also a behavior frequently seen on IRC as well.
I got a good amount of points by answering the actual questions.
Since hitting moderator status based on the number of points many years ago I've stopped using it though. It gets tiring fighting against people like this who often have >50-100k points.
Occasionally I'll land on the website again after googling a question, but it seems like Quora is starting to weaken Stack Overflow's google rankings.
It might even be the XY problem, but even if it is. Answer their question, and explain why maybe they should be considering something else after you answered the question.
At that point, one is being extra helpful by adding context. Which is in stark contrast to 'that is probably the wrong question, and here is why'. Which is hard to distinguish from being willfully obtuse.
As a question answerer, that’s why I prefer Reddit. It’s much less formal, more conversational and you can actually have a discussion.
I’ve never had the need to ask a question on SO, I have found a few answers on it of course.
Luckily, I’ve had plenty of complicated questions about AWS, but for those, our AWS Business support plan where we can talk to live support who can look at your environment has been invaluable.
Maybe after working some time and helping juniors people tend to develop this reflex: if you're trying to do something really crazy with your tool you may have fucked up 2 or 3 steps before that. It's like if someone asks how to use their screwdriver to nail something: you'll ask some questions back.
Arrghh, this one drives me absolutely nuts sometimes! It's like someone doesn't know the answer to your question, but does know the answer to some alternative (that is unlikely to work for your situation) and just wants SO points.
Sometimes I think it's more that they don't understand trying to understand something. They see someone trying to do something and genuinely want to help. They don't realise that for the one who is asking the question, their goal is not necessarily simply to do something, but to understand something.
It's a little like the difference between an idealist and a pragmatist, except not.
As someone who's spent a lot of time answering questions both on stackoverflow and in similar environments, often you really do need to get more context on what the person is actually trying to do in order to give the best answer.
I try hard to avoid turning it into an interrogation, but answering the question as asked is often either impossible or a disservice to the person asking.
