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Comment by PudgePacket | Hacker News Reader

I've used stackoverflow for years and have never heard it put like that.

"Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time."

Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung expecting an answer to their question.

In reality the user is contributing their question to the community, not asking a question in the traditional sense. That's my take anyway.

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A version of that is published in the Help Center and The Tour--both which everyone is directed to but nobody reads--and then everyone argues with us about.

If no one reads it then perhaps they need a better mechanism to explain this stuff.

I think this is a good observation, but I still don't think it completely explains the hostility on SO, which quite often seems like an even more hostile and juvenile version of certain Linux distro mailing lists. It honestly seems like most of SO is people screaming "RTFM n00b!" and downvoting questions into oblivion.

Yeah, it's a big turn-off.

I think the game-ification of SO (in the form of badges, scores, privileges and rules) attracts personalities who crave that shit and don't see any problem with being harsh and dismissive to others that don't follow the rules (as they see them).

Regardless of how much SO may say that it's about "the community" rather than the individual, it BECOMES personal when an individual has a genuine problem and gets treated like crap.

The whole stack-exchange scene has become an incredibly weird place to ask a question. I find value in it and use it everyday, but I dread asking a question there.

that don't follow the rules (as they see them

The rules are exactly what is gamified via the points and badges system. You can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when explicitly set out by the site owners via that system.

The personalities attracted by it are the ones that made it successful, by design. Otherwise it would be just another Yahoo Answers. The “rules” only changed after those contributors had made it a success. Some of those people apparently feel it was a “bait and switch”.

    > You can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when explicitly set out by the site owners...

Oh yes you can!

I remember stackoverflow in the early days and it was useful from the beginning. Sure, there were always some persnickety zealots who acted as self-appointed police "protecting" the community from subjectivity and duplicate questions with all the sensitivity of a clock-maker wearing oven mitts.

In the last 5-6 years, however, it has been overrun with such strange behavior. One can't simply ask a question unless it meets an unreasonably high standard-- and even then perfectly good questions get slapped down for no reason at all.

SO loves those "click-bait" questions. I.e., "why does this weird thing happen in C++." 99% of the time, these questions are nothing more than trivia, AND they are posted by a person who already knows the answer and is just gaming for 10k+ upvotes.

All while asking or answering a legitimate question is likely to be worth maybe 2-3 upvotes and risks getting down voted into oblivion.

SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for editing... The root cause for all these behaviours lies with whoever dreamt up those badges and chose what to award them for.

Worse than the badges is that the more points you have, the more features you get on SO.

Which could be a positive (it certainly makes sense that the most engaged people should be the community moderators), but when combined with how points are earned, it would naturally lead to weirdness like the swaths of downvoting, reporting and totally unnecessary grammar edits.

There's a (fairly low) lifetime limit on receiving points for edits. Once you've earned the editing privilege, you no longer earn points. And you lose a point if you downvote an answer.

How many people use badges as incentives? I completely ignore mine, except for the gold ones that let me mark a duplicate without waiting for anybody else. And I'm always careful to be 100% sure before I do.

In the heat of the moment I’ve had to delete comments because I got so upset at that kind of over the top rules lawyering. I’m not quite ready to burn my SO bridges, even if 90% of my usage is read only.

Agreed. I've seen this position before, with the attendant "SO isn't hostile, the users are just wrong", and I don't buy it any more now than I have in the past.

It's way too common to see exchanges like "The manual for X is factually wrong, so how do I really do it?" "RFTM!" or "I want to Y, which is not covered by similar question X for reasons A, B, C." "Closed, dupe of X!" Or for that matter, "How can I X?" and "I'd like to X, help please?" each closed unanswered as a dupe of the other.

Building for the future, not solving for the moment, is a perfectly reasonable sentiment. I can understand using that argument to close "what's the bug in my code?" questions, or for that matter "how do I X under these self-imposed restrictions?" But in practice, it's frequently wielded like it would be on a nasty mailing list or Usenet group, to tell people that they shouldn't do what they're doing and therefore don't deserve an answer.

> Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung expecting an answer to their question.

My gut feeling is that this worked better in the past because Stack Overflow was at a smaller scale, and the audience was a bit more insular and willing to read stuff about how the systems work on Stack Overflow (programmers love understanding rule systems; it's literally their job most of the time). Now that SO has achieved permanent world scale, the constant influx of new people who don't take the time to learn the ambient norms before posting, and thus cut themselves on what they perceive to be unnecessary sharp edges, is getting .. large.

Most of this could be solved by a very detailed, educational multi-step /ask page in my opinion.

I admire your optimistic view of how many users would read such a manual when all they want to know is why doesn't this code do what it's supposed to and can you hurry I need this by 5 pm?

But... I do agree that a detailed, educational multi-step page (with examples!) would be an improvement over the current here-are-the-8-rules-for-asking-ok-now-have-fun page.

Given this though, is the question / answer format really suiting the purpose?

It did but there aren't enough mods and knowledgeable users to monitor and police the tremendous inflow of off topic questions and answers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is by either adding features or moving to a different model, they could reduce the flow of duplicate/bad questions and lackluster/mismatch answers.

One area I wish there were more support in is to aggregate all the knowledge that is split across multiple questions. I think this could be helpful for beginners, but also is extremely specific areas as well.

For example, I imagine that a lot of these bad questions come from beginners. So, aggregating answers about common beginner misunderstandings with a library or system into a wiki page. Or, there could be a "getting started" type page that goes over the basic steps and concepts.

This is obviously getting into the business of writing docs for projects that either don't have them or don't have good ones, but it seems from the existence of stack overflow that this is actually necessary.

Then again, there seems to be tons of questions on projects with really good docs and tutorials. So, maybe you're right and it's just that the people asking bad questions / giving bad answers don't read docs.

They tried that[1], and it didn't work out for them.

[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

> Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung expecting an answer to their question.

What do you mean here? Why does a separate answer to unknown future readers take precedence over the answer the poster (and other future readers) was looking for?

Why is probably explained somewhere on codinghorror.com. Probably in many places.

The issue isn't why that is, but the very fact that it is so. It's not obvious, and it's not really how people use StackOverflow, in the same way Kickstarter used to believe (probably still does) it was about investing in indie creators, whereas people really used it as a preorder store and a marketing platform.

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