Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

I completely agree that anonymous downvotes are an unfettered negative _in systems of discussion and opinion_.

I remember a friend's grown adult brother was learning Python and just entering into programming and I was commending him and encouraging him and what not as a professional software developer. I did a mental dump of resources to use that could help him out in his first months of struggle and what not. At one point I told him to post questions to SO and I literally watched his body language become perturbed and he cringed with a tinge of fear at being brutalized over there. He immediately said something along the lines of "no thanks those guys seem pretty brutal over there", something like that. I thought he may have been a bit too sensitive but over time I've seen some harsh things on the site and could see where he was coming from.

a first step where the question is treated and discussed without possibility to answer.

How would you enforce this - would you try to enforce it? If there's any kind of comment box, you'll get people posting answers in there, if it's amenable to a short answer.

I'm not sure. But suppose you did it another way then: Questions that are poor are (instead of closed) moved to a holding area from where they will either never return, OR they are improved upon, will be reviewed, and can return - at which point they don't have the baggage of multiple downvotes and close votes. Because they are now "reborn".

The only thing I'm trying achieve is that the people trying to HELP the asker, and the people who are trying to close questions now work as quick as they can, simultaneously, but towards opposite goals.

Have you seen the "closed" messages? From the bottom of here:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

Closed "low quality" questions are marked "on hold" for five days, when they can be commented on and edited to be improved upon, and go into a review queue. From memory that message is in the big yellow close box on the question - that it is on hold pending improvement and review - but I can't google any to see.

What you describe sounds like that, but in a separate area and without downvotes. Or, it sounds like they've tried to implement what you describe.

Would it work if downvotes were reset when it got put on hold?

It would be enough if the downvotes and close votes were reset when it’s taken from hold. As per the other answer there are apparently tons of functionality in this area that I didn’t even know of - perhaps this already works!

> I saw a stat that said only 7% of SO users ever ask a second question - that means 93% probably had a bad experience.

That doesn't follow. The one-question-askers may be using throwaway accounts, or be confused about what SO is for; they might be in completely the wrong place, and have a low likelihood of ever needing to ask another SO question. They might also just not run into questions that are only answerable by asking the open internet that often.

> The one-question-askers may be using throwaway accounts

Why would you use a throw-away account? There something personal about a compiler error?

> they might be in completely the wrong place

I assumed mods moved questions to the right place or directed users to correct board.

> have a low likelihood of ever needing to ask another SO question

I can understand not asking 50 questions. But never asking a second question? Your entire programming career you only have one technical problem you need help with?

> They might also just not run into questions that are only answerable by asking the open internet that often

Yes, a lot of the technical problems I encounter at work are too specific to our implementation for SO.

No retention rate will be 100%, whatever the product. And there are plenty of legit reasons why you may not need to ask a lot of questions.

But 7%? They can't all be "noobs" asking dumb questions since plenty of HN devs here complain of similar problems: arbitrary downvoting, questions being marked as duplicate when they're not, unaccountable mods, etc.

To me the fact that 93% of SO askers don't bother with the site after their first experience signals a deeper problem with how SO is structured. As one of other comments in this thread argues, their setup was designed for its initial phase of growth but it's not ideal for the "mature" phase its in now.

> Why would you use a throw-away account?

Mostly because they know the question they're asking is a bad one, and don't want the inevitable negative karma to accrue to their "real" account (if they even have one); or they're otherwise abusing the site.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13496399

In that example, he's (diabolically) using multiple accounts to upvote his own questions.

Genius, in a way.

But I doubt everyone has the time and energy though to maintain a stable of fake accounts to boost your own stats.

I can understand fear of negative karma but the throw-away account will still receive just as much hostility (maybe more), you just don't keep the record of it attached to you.

Is that better? I guess, a little bit, maybe.

Yeah, that guy's an outlier -- I hope! -- but the "throwaway account for sub-par questions" thing seems to be pretty common. Either that or there are an awful lot of brand-new users with an oddly intimate understanding of site jargon...

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