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Comment by waisbrot | Hacker News Reader

Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying.

But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.)

Stack Overflow provides clear guidance on how to ask a good question. (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) As someone who occasionally answers questions there, I do feel annoyed when someone clearly didn't take any time or effort.

The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine.

The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?

View on HN

"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?"

This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package."

From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want to get a list of packages. So yes, the question is perfectly reasonable, and you're jumping on the least likely interpretation in order to have something negative to say. And you're not alone; this is a very common behavior on SO.

"There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?"

More needless negativity. Once again, it's easier to attack, and makes one feel important to do so.

We're unfortunately dealing with human nature, and people really do seem blind to their own abuse. Without proper guidance and moderation, we see the worst come to light on public forums.

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.

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.

If a question is really easy many other people can answer it which in itself is also more inclusive.

If a question is really hard few other people can answer it, so no matter what there is a level exclusively for very smart people.

Nobody needs to take offense a question was asked or be hurt their question was removed. It's totally superfluous.

There are no such problems on /r/nostupidquestions.

>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.

Thats what closing is, isn’t it? One answerer recognizes it as closable, so no future answerer has to deal with it.

Such a site already exists, it’s called Yahoo Answers. You can judge for yourself the quality of content it attracts.

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).

>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)

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven...

[2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep...

> 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.

> it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place

Only if it's a hard question, and answered correctly.

There is negative value in, say, closing a question as a dupe, that is not a dupe.

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.

> 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.

Examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56843086 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981

I've experienced the same thing before.

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/NoStupidQuestions/ has over a million subscribers and nobody gets upset if a neurosurgeon explains why washing your hands is important.

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.

https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/ has almost a million subscribers and have no problem answering the same question again and again.

https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/ has almost 14 million users and a mandate to respect each other.

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.)

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lmgtfy

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/386584/why-is-the-p...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/cxurmr/d...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4ir1qg/why_ha...

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 the problem is just repetitive, boring questions how about the power users just use the API to filter them out?

Are you talking about the JSON api? (https://api.stackexchange.com/docs)

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.)

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.

https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite

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.

Who enforces the beginner tag? Will people be offended by the beginner tag, too? Just seems like it's the same problem but with a different name.

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 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.

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.

Ever since someone posted an article on “The XY Problem” nerds on all mediums have been assuming it’s always an XY problem

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.

After this came up elsewhere here within 5 days of this comment thread I’m giving it the name “The XYZ Problem”

https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/

I don’t answer questions on SO, but I occasionally answer questions on r/aws. Half the time after further digging, it is an XYProblem.

That means the other half the time, with the same further digging, it is not.

That's the problem.

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.

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.

> ...unnecessarily inflexible...

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.

See also, yagni.

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.

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.

I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views.

So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new info or given a better answer. I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community.

I also think (and have seen) that the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet. I often see comments on questions I arrive at through google saying 'just google it, here's the first google result it answers your question'. The source given is always inferior, and the SO question, with a much clearer and more concise format, has become the first google result. This seems like a good thing to me, but look, the question's locked. What exactly is the problem with SO being a more comprehensive knowledge store?

I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.

Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked.

Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.

Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.

Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.

This is the thing we are pointing out:

Again and again we found that Stack Overflow would try to get rid of some of the most helpful ages I had found.

For a while, more often than not it seemed, if you found a helpful answer it was locked or somehow on its way to destruction.

I don't see this as often anymore but I also don't see that many good results in my search engine anymore and I don't know if it is because search engines has become more and more useless or if it is because Stack Overflow deleted a good chunk of the most useful questions they had.

Possibly a combination if I had to guess :-/

Here is what OP wrote :

> I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.

Something completely different in my opinion.

The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.

As mentat pointed out, it shouldn't be locked.

"Shouldn't" is irrelevant; I run into plenty that are, and it's a shame.

The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums.

While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.

Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep it useful. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-... and consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else?

Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web" philosophy.

There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co does comparisons. And so on.

> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.

The issue I and I guess many of us here is talking about is that it seems the Stack Overflow community - or rather a vocal minority in the community I guess - are downvoting and flagging questions that where ok for the format.

For example?

Examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56843086 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981

Of those three, only the last one is one that I can view.

Consider the original question: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/57323981/1 which... really is "design an entire system for me" type question.

The refinement, while better is still getting into discussions in the comments.

While its from a different site on the SE network, consider:

Green fields, blue skies, and the white board - what is too broad? -- https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...

The structure of Stack Overflow wants a question that has a problem that has some code that isn't behaving correctly and can be solved.

The list of "any better ways" is without bound or qualification as to what "better" is.

That type of question would probably be better suited to a higher density communication medium such as chat or a true forum (with threads). Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that type of question hard to answer.

Its not that it isn't a good question - just that it isn't a question that fits well into the SO format. That should be ok, there are many other places where such questions can be asked.

> only the last one is one that I can view.

That’s the point. The site automatically deletes question with negative score. They disappear for most users, they even disappear from “my answers” section of my profile, despite I have enough reputation to view them if I have a link.

> which... really is "design an entire system for me" type question.

For a professional working with multimedia stack on Windows, the original question is clear. The question received two good answers before these edits. The 4 web developers who closevoted the question are obviously incompetent in the domain, but for some reason unclear to me they decided to closevote.

> is still getting into discussions in the comments.

No it’s not. All the comments were written before I’ve edited the question.

> The structure of Stack Overflow wants a question that has a problem that has some code that isn't behaving correctly and can be solved.

Only a minority of the highest voted questions have some code: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes

> That should be ok, there are many other places where such questions can be asked.

Won't say "citation needed", but I will say that outside of reddit I do not frequently visit any such places.

And reddit has its own problems and also hardly counts as "many".

Consider then having people ask the questions that are 'interesting' here, on HN. There's Metafilter. There is IRC, slack and discord channels, twitter, GitHub issues, mailing lists. People have fairly consistently tried to do spin offs of Stack Overflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 is one such example - it didn't work, it is rather challenging to get enough people active to keep it active - see https://www.askquestions.tech as another). There are even people still posting on usenet ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.javascript )

There are lots of them out there. They're not as big as Stack Overflow, but that's part of what allows them to have a less focused mission... and many of the other formats support the interesting questions better than Stack Overflow can.

I guess part of the problem is Stack Overflow just got too big and now everything gravitates around it.

Maybe it would help if Stack Overflow would explicitely link to alternatives, at leadt when they rejected a question?

Consider the impact on HN if every time someone asked an opinion question or recommendation for resources, the people pointed here. Hundreds of posts a day fall into this bucket... would HN be able to moderate it? Would people stop looking there when the top 30 were within the past 30 minutes and all by green names?

I used to be active on another part of the SE network... and we could easily get overwhelmed when people on SO tried to be helpful and point people with questions that weren't quite right for SO in our direction. Without that person being active on our site too, they often failed to realize that it wasn't a good question there either... and we'd have to try to explain that they were misdirected and no, we're not being elitist but the question needs to be closed here too. For a small site, we could easily get half of daily questions being from "helpful" misdirections. ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/ )

I believe that HN really wants people in the ask question who want to be on HN... not just the 'herp derp oh look a textbox' syndrome ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... ). This goes for other online communities too. Trying to be too helpful does all of them a disservice. Consider the advice from ESR in ask questions the smart way: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#forum

> Choose your forum carefully

> cross-post to too many different newsgroups

> Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.

> The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.

---

(edit)

To the "It's too big" - yes it is. I believe that that is really at the core of the problem. The avenues where I go for help now tend to be small to the point where on some of them I know every single person by first (real) name.

Having a small enough stream where I can read the entire day's stuff that interests me easily along with being in an environment where the "we are professionals, don't be a jerk" is enough of a moderation pressure that it isn't even an issue.

I believe that a variation on activity pub ( https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ) is the right way to go in the long term, with small sites that moderate and the ability to programmatically screen posts. Not sure how... but something in that nature. And if some other site keeps pushing your site crap, blacklist it and stop accepting it. And to an extent, I'd even be willing to pay for it (for someone else to keep the quality standards that I want).

I think they were talking about very useful locked questions that have 0 answers, not 296.

> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format.

The way I look at it is this: if I have a question about something, and do a search, and end up on a SO page, and the contents of that page usefully answer my question, then by definition, the question was fit for the format.

Too often I run into a "locked as off topic" question that fits the above description, and I worry that someday someone is going to go through and delete all the supposedly off-topic questions. Or, just as bad, discourage people from asking questions like that in the future and make the site overall less useful.

I mostly hit this locked question thing with recommendations like 'what graph database should I use'. I've found that for simpler straight up programming questions, there is much less locked questions.

> I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results

And yet this is what the creators of the site explicitly wanted it to become.

Love it when you find someone who asked the same question you have, it was locked as a duplicate so no-one could help, and the question it's a "duplicate" of isn't the same.

You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).

I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand.

Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account.

I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote many more messages in chats, edited the question so I’m 100% sure it fits the site.

It got reopened, then closed within days, with the exact same reason “too broad”. https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981

This discouraged me from answering questions on that site. I don’t do web development, I don’t program Java, JS or Python. But the majority of SO community are web developers. The questions I find good and interesting, they find too broad and unclear what’s asked.

> I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community.

Actually, that's _exactly_ how you change the attitude of the community, by making your voice heard. Sure you as an individual aren't going to override everyone else, but if you don't voice your opinion then your complaint about other folks loses some of its ground.

I answer questions on SO mostly for fun. I find it entertaining to answer hard questions. Sometimes I learn interesting things while I write an answer. Other times people post interesting comments to my answers. Flagging, appealing closes, and other BS politics is not fun at all.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer.

I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.

Man, that's a super interesting and very specific question! Wish I had enough rep to apply to reopen it.

I suspect the "too broad" closers wanted it to ask re a specific programming language. But of course in this case the asker didn't care what language they'd have to write it in (although they helpfully tagged the most likely C++ and C#).

Indeed, very interesting question. That’s why I spent some time trying to reopen.

I happen to have experience DLL injecting into dwm.exe’s swap chains. AFAIK it’s the only way to get frames in VRAM for hardware encoding of desktop video on Win7. Desktop duplication which provides same data through officially supported API was only introduced in Win8, while desktop compositor runs on GPU since Vista (usually, i.e. when Aero is enabled). I didn’t need to process frames, just copy to another texture in VRAM shared with my capture process, which encodes them with media foundation. But the same DLL injection approach can be used to process frames in real time like OP wanted, by rendering extra pass[es] before each IDXGISwapChain::Present().

> I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community.

Why do you think that? I guess I'm a member of that community and really don't care how people reach SO. The site is also saturated to some extent now... There's a good chance that your question's already been asked, so I don't expect the site will get many new active users really. Maybe with some new languages/frameworks becoming popular - but if you're writing C for example, you're very unlikely to get actively involved in SO at all. It's still a good reference place for C.

> the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet

"the community" is not an uniform blob. On one hand side it's tiring - if someone didn't bother to do a single obvious search, why should I spend time writing the answer. On the other, if you do answer that, the are rules about including actual answer and not just linking to a document which may disappear in the future.

> the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever

You can vote to reopen. Or if you can't, you can flag for moderator attention and say why it should be reopened.

>why should I spend time writing the answer

There's a world of difference between über (rare and awesome) active users ignoring "tiring" questions and actively downvoting and closing them, which is what the parent comment is complaining about.

Yes, Stack Overflow is a success, but that's in spite of all of this, and not because of it. And "Stack Overflow is successful, therefore your complaints are invalid" doesn't strike me as a great argument to start with to be honest.

> The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine.

You can poke holes in any question like this, and for most practical purposes all of this is pretty darn pedantic. either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications, so the OP is left with nothing but a bunch of downvotes and a feeling of frustration.

> The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site.

Whether or not it's a good question is besides the point; the point is that piling on downvotes like that is just a dick move, regardless of how off-topic or "stupid" the question may be.

> either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications

Which is actually contrary to SO guidelines. You are urged to leave explanatory comments when downvoting. It makes me wonder if adding some kind of free-form or multiple choice "Why did you downvote?" questionnaire would be productive.

Agreed 100%. Wikipedia is similar, in that both SO and Wikipedia have clearly defined goals, and policies based on achieving those goals. But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions.

I'm sure both SO and Wikipedia have their own dysfunction even within the constraints of their stated policies, which I'm sure is a constant struggle to deal with. But that's inevitable, communities always have issues to deal with. Those are different issues than users wishing a site had different goals. I'm all in favor of sites like SO or Wikipedia (or Reddit, or HN) having all sorts of constraints on what types of content they want and how they operate. Maybe it's frustrating sometimes for people who are set on relying on one of those sites for everything (and therefore want them to be all things to all people), but overall I think those types of self-imposed constraints are exactly what makes them useful and interesting, and allows them to grow in ways that are unique to the mission of the site.

> But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be

Problem is those sites used to be better.

A number of us where fighting to keep good resources good.

It feels we were steamrolled by people who enjoyed playing admins instead of actually asking or answering questions.

If you look into S.O. you'll find a abandoned accounts with a large number of points. People who made tbe site work.

I think a number of them gave up after trying to fight the bureaucracy.

The opposite is true - the most common complaint from high-rep users, by far[0][1][2], is that there are too many garbage questions and not enough moderation.

[0] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep...

[1] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-...

[2] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-...

As I tried to point out elsewhere: when everyone on the Internet can make accounts instantly and gain the privilege to post instantly then it isn't a moderation problem but a deeper problem in how the site is run.

My guess is if the bar to posting was increased slightly it would help a lot.

> And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions.

That is most certainly NOT what I argued. This is really frustrating in all these discussions because every time you try to make any argument that even vaguely smells of "hey, let's be a bit nicer?" the massive "zomg you want to allow all the shitty questions from the idiots who can't sit the right way on the toilet!!11!"-strawman gets pulled out. I've been trying to make this argument for years and it's the same strawman every single time.

As I already said in the article, on the Vi Stack Exchange we're nice and have good quality. I'm sure there are other sites where this is the case, too. It's proof that it's possible.

I think the kind of people who take forums/SE/wikis very seriously and have a strong belief in the Platonic ideal of their respective forum are exactly the kind of people who should be completely excluded from having any kind of status on that site. There is such a thing as taking something too seriously.

The puzzle is: how do you sustain a site with unpaid "user contributed" content while you actively discourage the most prolific (and also likely most problematic) users?

> But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions.

This is a straightforward downside of gameification. You've attached badges to being assholes to people who are part of your content creation process, what you get is people who are assholes. Then you end up in a spiral where your community is so toxic that everyone normal leaves, and the only people you are left with are the toxic assholes.

The problem is that Wikipedia and SO are both classic examples of Sayre's Law in action: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake". It's such a meaningless argument that any reasonable person comes to the conclusion that it's not worth the trouble and leaves, so you are left with only the unreasonable people.

In reality, the type of person who takes pleasure in being a Wikipedia moderator or Stack Overflow badgeguy is the last person in the world who you would actually want to be a moderator. But everyone who's not toxic has left.

> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.)

This is the false dichotomy the article is referring to. Having good answers is not necessarily the result of the users being hostile.

And in your last 2 paragraphs you're being condescending and dismissive in the exact same way the author is describing. You're making a lot of baseless assumptions about the person who asked the question even though they have adhered to the posting guidelines. Just because they don't fit your personal criteria of effort or importance doesn't mean that the question is invalid in some way.

If people dislike answering basic questions so much maybe they shouldn't hang out at a Q&A forum.

You say that you search for info and Stack Overflow usually gets you the best answer. That's fair. That's your legit experience.

My experience is very different. I'd guess 50% of the time if I get a Stack Overflow result I click it and it is closed as off-topic or dup or whatever. If it's a dup, there's a 10% chance the link to the question it dups actually answers the question. If I'm very lucky, someone answered the question before the closure.

It's very frustrating for me. When it's good, it's soooo good.

I agree, so many people complain about SO. But the complainers are actually a percentage of the small percentage of askers/answerers. A huge amount of SO is the silent consumers. I started in the beginning of SO, have good rep, with a reach in the millions. I still contribute these days.

SO does a good job of getting people to collaborate and produce useful results. There is no system that will be perfect and not be subject to the whims of emotive humans. I notice a lot of people saying what might work better with conviction about what results they'd get. Sorry, but I'm very skeptical of your convictions of the results you will get by changing the dynamics of collaboration. From what I've seen a lot of the complaints stem from confirmation bias, a few questions where it seemed to go wrong (which will happen). But if you looked across the many many questions on SO it mostly just works as intended. However its not without problems and the dynamics change over time, SO trys to adapt to these shifts, but it has to be careful on what levers it pulls.

#python on freenode is my go-to alternative if I can't find an answer on SO or if I'm more interested in a brainstorming session and can't really ask for one in SO

but then again not every problem I have involves Python, in which case I do feel I'm out of luck...

Do they still have a NO LOL policy?

(For those that don't know, #python used to have a bot that would sternly warn you if your messages contained "lol". Ten years later I still think it's unintentionally funny.)

#python on Freenode is probably the most high-quality IRC channel I join on a regular basis.

time and again when I search for an answer online the stack overflow is the best answer when -

I have an error text about a popular tool - I would say about 50% of the time SO is the best, the rest of the time is either some blog post or more likely an issues thread on github for the tool.

I really know a lot about the subject I am asking about so I know exactly how to ask to get a really good example bit of code doing what I want to do. - about 90% of the time SO gives the best answer. Of course it probably also gives a couple crap answers, almost always the answer I consider best in the response is not the one that is up highest. Actually maybe it does not give the best answer, but it definitely gives an adequate enough answer that I don't try to look any further.

The question is really pretty simple - on the level of how do you concatenate strings in Language X - this happens when I need to ask something simple about something I don't know or again when I just want a simple syntax lookup.

The problem is very complicated and it takes a lot of code even to provide a simple example of what you are trying to do - generally in such a case your problem is somewhat unique and anyway you are not going to provide an example code because doing so will be too much work to put up with SO. Instead you just keep on going trying to fix it yourself.

The question is very complicated and I know very little about the subject or problem domain. In such a case one is unlikely to produce an example code and as such SO is the wrong place to get help.

So as a general rule SO is really useful for something that you pretty much know how to do but you need a little refresher or help with some of the trickier bits, so sort of like reading the documentation but quicker. If you really need help with something however SO is pretty much useless because when you really need help you need something like a forum where you can ask some high level no code questions on the issue to get some guidance and SO by design does not do that. Maybe you might even need to ask for that SO hobgoblin, an opinion as to which methods are best to use when trying to achieve your goal!

Two different perspectives: on the search engine end being a consumer... that's a pretty easy-going experience, Google filters out the large amount of noise because it's a good search engine, you get your answer, you're on your way.

The other end of things, the users sitting on SO, weeding through the influx of questions, looking to grab bounties, etc. that is where working with SO is really rough. That is where we deal with a huge amount of garbage coming in.

Also as someone that has written answers for esoteric questions before, it can be hugely frustrating when the moderation-by-community ends up causing you grief because they don't understand the subject material enough to do anything other than to rule-lawyer your post to death (I started ripping my answers off the site and posting them to my own instead, which yay, I guess nice traffic boost?).

I stopped answering questions long ago unless it was referenced in a Github issue.

---

On the more esoteric side of things, the duplicates can be really rough, if you have an error that is caused by something non-trivial but the same error can be caused by a trivial mistake you'll be fishing through hundreds of posts trying to find alternative answers and underlying causes, this is pretty much the only time that you find the trash heap bubbling up on the consumer side of things.

> Why do I want to help someone

If you don't want to help - just don't help, nobody forces you to do anything.

> . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying.

But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.

and it seems to work somewhat :

Lately I've seen less abuse and I've even seen people corrected when they tried to abuse people who answered questions in good faith or similar.

    > ...which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.

I've noticed that. Unfortunately, there's a sizeable contingent that actively rejects any attempt at softening the hard edges for new users (or effectively anyone that dares ask a question, really).

They're so tightly wound-up about what they perceive as "the rules" that they can't bring themselves to have any empathy for anyone who violates the rules, as they inflexibly interpret them. You can sometimes see them take it out on meta with harsh rhetoric.

SO as resource is so huge and influential. I expect its community dynamics to someday be researched at length by social scientists. There's a lot of interesting things going on in there. Maybe we can learn something from it.

There have been times when I've commented on someone's question but more to interact.

I like collaboration I find I learn better asking people questions.

That gets shut down immediately on Stack Exchange sites. Often by an unprofessional, terse, personal reply by a mod "This isn't your own IRC channel" or something to that effect.

>> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer.

You are not searching for questions that may not be answered by reading documentation, then.

I agree. It's got it's warts, but it's still the best out there. I think a lot of people get their feelings hurt there though, especially younger coders and coders with thin skins and big egos. It's a service, no one is forcing them to use it. They should just RTFM.

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