Comment by TravelTechGuy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TravelTechGuy | Hacker News Reader

It's funny reading this article after seeing one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom.

I've been on SO since 2009. I can confirm the community is getting harsher, less patient, and more exact. HOWEVER, I can see the other side. I see tons of questions that are not fit to be on the site: one-liners, opinions, "help me with my homework", and utter spam. Not to mention people who clearly did not search the site, or even Google (many of Google's results come from SO), and ask a simple question asked a thousand times before. Bad questions and answers will stay online indefinitely, coming up in your future Google searches.

There has to be a balance. Comments should be less hostile, but posters should vet their questions before asking.

Perhaps the suggested structured form is the right way to go. If people will take some time to document their effort, and code, they'll gain appreciation for the time spent by someone reading their question and providing an answer.

PS: +1 on using Zuckerbot in an article not about Facebook :)

In order to have any privileges whatsoever on SO, you need some rep points. You're supposed to get points by writing good questions and answers, but that's hard - and gets harder every day, as the good questions have mostly been asked already. One of the easiest ways to get rep points is to propose edits that later get accepted. "Cleaning up the site" is thus encouraged. That's probably how your "Thanks" got removed.

Here's the relevant Meta SO post about that [0] and the main meta SE discussion about it [1]. The guy posting [0] has 145k in reputation and writes comments along these lines:

> So I started to remove "Thanks in advanced", which in addition to being inappropriate for Stack Exchange, is a corruption of the English language, and needs to be stamped out before too many people decide that it's correct English (thus making it into correct English).

Basically hostile combined with lots of power in SO.

Edit: I've just seen that an answer to the Meta SO question above [0] got 12 down votes [2] is specifically suggesting what the Stack Overflow blog is - that we have to be more inclusive

If SO does want to be inclusive the pedants with power are going to get pretty annoyed.

But they're the ones that do a ton of the work so I'm interested to see how it works out.

I still think that I should defend SO, it's the most transparent place I know on the internet. They've done a good job trying to keep it inclusive but it's a ridiculously hard job especially on the scale of Stack Exchange.

[0]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160/no-thanks-da...

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-than...

[2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/288204/327074

I like how your [1] has 2 opposing opinions as the top comments, both at exactly 147 points.

> Whats wrong with hi or thanks? Boy what is this world coming to. Mundane mutes who just want answers.

> Kill it with fire. You want to do social you get on Facebook. :) I like the questions just to be questions (without any noise).

The idea of removing noise came from Jeff Atwood. He really took it to an extreme, and I think the site is worse for it.

You're quite right - here's the link to his answer [0].

He's talking about removing 'Hi ya' rather than 'thanks'.

But it is disheartening when someone edit's your post to make it less friendly.

Edit: plus there's an answer from Jon Skeet too [1] who also agrees with removing thanks

[0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/93989

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/2960

I think they want to discourage people begging for answers, along the lines of ‘please help or I’ll get fired and my wife will leave me and my kids will starve.’

And to some people, saying ‘thanks’ before anyone has agreed to help sounds passive-aggressive. Like those notes in the workplace kitchen that feign gratitude for ordering you to do something.

> one of my questions from 2011 edited today, to remove the word "Thanks!" from the bottom.

A successful edit is a way to gain reputation, which is hard to get these days for new users.

I know it feels a bit odd when someone else edits your question: you could roll it back, but then again why should you be bothered? It's the same question, with one less word.

I guess that explains why literally almost every single question and answer has been edited by a high ranking user to add a comma or change one word usually

No, not at all. Once you have earned enough reputation to have the right to edit a question without moderation, you don't gain any reputation from doing so. It's only given to editors under that threshold.

as someone who can edit posts freely, you've got to change a minimum amount of stuff. you can't just add a comma or change one word.

(also as the sibling comment points out, once you can do that, you don't get anything for it.)

With sufficient reputation (2000), one can make changes to any post on Stack Overflow without review or reward - no longer does one get reputation from having an edit approved.

Those who subscribe to the "the information in this post should be available to everyone in the most readable way" will make changes to curate the material. Reading a post where the wrong 'their' or 'they're' or 'there' is used by someone can be very distracting and these edits serve to make that post more useful to more people as well as helping the OP become more proficient at English through correction.

Its not for the reputation (which they don't get) but rather the "this is good, but can be better" and trying to make Stack Overflow the best place it can be.

Ratings already take care of curating. Why do you need assholes to curate?

Same reason why HN has both up/down votes, and actual moderators.

And the reason is ... ?

What's wrong with comments just being grayed out, collapsed and moved to the bottom if they are downvoted for being (too) stupid / trolling / fascist etc?

Moderators could just have more voting power.

OK reading the Medium post [0] I see that toxic comments were the starting points here, not the rampant practice of closing questions for dubious reasons.

[0] https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-overflow-c4641...

I believe that these comments exist when the other tools of moderation of that content have run out and the individuals are using the social moderation tools of comments (that are nearly unlimited) to do that moderation. I further believe that this rudeness could be reduced by improving the encoded moderation tools (votes, close, delete) so that such questionsget up front mentoring or guidance on how to search for the material before they are posted.

It should also be noted that the author of the post has a consulting service for improving diversity in the workplace (second paragraph) - there is a promotional aspect to this post. Stack Overflow, as a very central and large place that people perceive as being jerks is an easy and large target to push against.

It is also interesting that while this is being held up as an example (from the post):

> I used vivid imagery, sure, but you’ll notice that in all my criticism of Stack Overflow, I avoid name-calling, personal attacks, and profanity. For the record, I do not endorse any criticism of Stack Overflow that resorts to these tactics, though I do feel compassion for the pain that leads to this kind of response.

that posts on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936221 ) are not being held up to the same standard of avoiding name calling, personal attacks and profanity.

My guess is that your being grayed out us a response to your question. Either in cheek or earnest.

> HN has both up/down votes

This separates the good from the bad

> and actual moderators

This stops the trolling and spammy pump and dump comments/posts

It works pretty well. I've never felt unwelcome on HN, even when something I've posted gets downvoted. I come away with a more "ehhh, yeah I get it" feel rather than anything resembling the bitterness I feel whenever StackOverflow is the only option in search results.

Give people powers based on how much they use a site and they'll just start pushing people out of the site. It happened a lot back in the day in IRC, happens all over Wikipedia, happens all over StackOverflow. There's a pattern.

As you have correctly observed, people will start pushing out other people from the site. But who is doing the pushing?

On HN, there is a very heavy liberal and left-leaning bias in this pushing (not accusing, this is imply observational data), Reddit is more of a mixed bag for example with some places having a much more strong push from the right and conservatives. People on HN would likely not feel welcome there.

If you give power to the people you ultimately end up having a site that reflects how the majority of it's users think. If that is good or bad is another discussion.

The mechanisms of a downvote play heavily into this too. Downvotes on HN are rare and only enabled for the elite (+500 karma elite to be specific, this is the exact 'give people power based on how much they use the site'), IIRC SO has a similar policy for some actions, not sure on downvotes.

I don't think that is inherently bad, people who are long-time contributors to a community should usually have a better idea on how to improve it than a newcomer. The crucial point might be that on HN there is a limit of power you can achieve. After you get your downvotes, that's it. It only filters out young and inactive (or controversial) accounts but not people who engage in the community.

SO might benefit from implementing a similar power ceiling to HN, so that users can't abuse their amount of reputation over others.

To reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

Disclaimer: apparently I'm an asshole

Edit: not moderator

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