Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's a bit of "5 Whys" going on here.

Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.

Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem.

Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.

View on HN

>(as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes

Its not untrue though, is it? Its really easy for such communities to really rapidly degrade.

That SO and wikipedia have both retained quality for so long, while also having strict moderators hunting a strong ideal, in areas where so many of their peers have fallen prey to the unwashed hordes, implies that it may not be so easy to discard the strategy.

It might even be necessary at such large volumes. The particulars of their activity might be maleable, but just approaching the problem (very) defensively might bot be.

You do realize that much of wikipedia's success came at a time when the moderation standards were much lower than they are today, right? Indeed, I would suggest that the current high moderation standards at both Wikipedia and SO are not causes of success, but simply a manifestation of the iron law of bureaucracy [1].

People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a terrific asset. It helps search-ability to have the same question phrased several different ways; especially when the ultimate goal is to funnel the searchers into the discussion page with the highest quality version of the question and answer. In my mind, the issue ISN'T that the mods are holding the gates against the barbarians, it is that the culture and SO itself has not given the mods the tools to convert what the "barbarians" are contributing into a valuable resource.

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I'm thinking strict moderation goes hand in hand with size of the population; in low population environments, little to no moderation is sufficient. The people govern their own culture, and with sufficiently low immigration rates, they can adequately teach newcomers the culture.

But as the population increases, driveby-posting becomes the norm rather than the outlier, and large swathes of newcomers can join at once, the culture cannot be taught at a rapid enough pace to survive. It either degrades, or enforces itself by means of an iron fist.

My thinking essentially stems from eternal september. Wikipedia's early success did not require heavy moderation, but once it became the predominant wiki, it's survival, I think, neccitated it.

The details may have issues, but the overarching idea, defending the culture from the unwashed masses, might still be correct.

No, SO has not retained quality. It’s a wasteland of promising questions that moderators turned into dead ends, to the point that finding an SO link relevant to your issue in a Google searches is practically guaranteed to leave you more frustrated than before. It pollutes the troubleshooting process with false hope.

Yeah, a haystack full of needles is better than a single needle in a haystack. That is to say: having the same information repeated tons of times is better than not being able to find the one canonical place the information is written.

Are those the only two options? How about a haystack full of maybe-needles, where each answer is subtly wrong because no one has the willingness to go through and vet all of them?

Simplest thing would be to delist closed questions from search (including Google).

>Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.

Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them.

Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?

Sometimes it's helpful to have a question that's worded differently so that there's multiple ways of finding the answer. And sometimes a duplicate question gets an even better answer than the original before it gets locked.

Also the timing helps a lot in some cases. Not every old and correct answers are updated constantly.

I haven't been active for a long time now so this may have changed.

Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.

I often come across questions that are closed as being duplicates but are different in some important way that whoever closed it obviously doesn't understand.

I was not thinking of malice / incompetence but simply of laziness. Whatever the problem is it is easier to have people search for you.

The article addresses this nicely. Users not having significant knowledge of the community rules— including but not limited to how close another question must be to your question to be considered a duplicate, how specific the question must be, or how to effectively search for prior questions (“didn’t come up in a google search is probably most people’s standards”)— is not laziness. Even being inexperienced enough to not know how to properly ask a question isn’t laziness, it’s inexperience. Assuming people’s inexperience or unfamiliarity with community norms is laziness is a huge part of the problem.

Is it laziness if a novice has spent hours trying to figure something out and doesn't even know how to ask the question properly because of some fundamental misunderstanding or hole in their knowledge? I see and answer this sort of question on reddit occasionally. I'm sure there are times where I've dashed out "You're totally barking up the wrong tree, try ..." while I'm waiting for my code to build and saved somebody several(more) hours of hair pulling frustration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com