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Comment by ldigas | Hacker News Reader

While, in the beginning, a very active user, I've long now given up on that network. I can't remember when was the last time I asked a question without being forced to defend it for a period of at least a few hours, why it shouldn't be closed as a duplicate, offtopic or ... It used to be an excellent network, but nowadays it's just script-kiddies-playing-admins/editors playground. It is no longer a productive technical community, so I've gone back to specialized forums. Pity, I really liked the sites in the beginning.

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I think much of what feels bad about StackOverflow now stems from the surprisingly braindead way it treats duplicate questions.

Currently, moderators close the question with a link to the question they think it's a dupe of. Why not instead let people answer the question with a link to the answer that they think solves the poster's problem? If they're right then the asker can just accept that answer, and if not then people can add comments, post alternate answers, etc.

I've come across so many questions closed as dupes for answers that are years old. The tech has changed, the answer is not the same. The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

The mods are ignorant and quick to act poorly. StackExchange has sucked for several years at least.

> The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

Also, often I see newer and better answers under the 'original' question, but they never get the upvotes or the 'correct answer' badge. Sometimes I completely overlook them because they are just not as visible.

This is because the original asker has moved on with their life and doesn't care anymore. Maybe after a few years the accepted answer should be switched the one with the most upvotes? (Maybe with some margin, say, it must have at least 20% more votes than the next best one)

The answer with the most upvotes still gets shown. The problem is that much later answers that are more correct with later technologies, don't gather enough upvotes to make it to the front of the pack, so they get ignored.

Allowing duplicate questions, at least after some time, could fix this problem.

Yep - in fact it would make more sense to me if SO not only allowed duplicate questions, but also added a decay such that even highly-rated Q/A pairs would eventually get overtaken by newer content.

Questions and answers just aren't evergreen things that one can expect to last through the ages. And even if they were, treating them as such means that SO's new users generally can't contribute anything.

I find SO's current model really bizarre.

Maybe something like what HN does. From what I understand, recent things get shown higher here than older things. Older things need more upvotes to keep up. Probably something like votes/age or something.

But that diminishes their Power. That’s it.

I don't understand this cry against moderators. These people are volunteerily giving their time to keep quality bar high without any payment. If these people weren't there then SO will be full of duplicates, off-topic and opinion based Q&A just like Quora. A general tendency I have seen is just to ask (often poorly stated) questions without doing simple search to see if it is already answered. Someone needs to respect those people picking up garbage on the street.

But my experience of the site (as an experienced long time user) is much more negatively affected by the “active moderation” than it is positively affected by it. I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question, than a race to ninja-downvote or close anything that is tangentially related to an existing question. The struggle to maintain quality in the content of the site appears to be destroying the quality of the experience of the site. In the end, if the experience is not good, nor will the content be if people stop visiting. I’m sure 99% of the negativity is coming from non-admins. The ninja downvotes and closevotes are coming from regular users.

I still visit but I basically stopped asking and answering because it’s just not worth the stress of having to defend my question or answer. I have a 10k rep account and I’m an experienced dev with a decent grip of English as a second language but I still never felt once that my answer was welcome or my question was good enough for the site. I can only imagine what a novice must feel when using SO.

> I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question

Sure, unless it really happens. I'd been burned by over-moderation as well but when I look at the process I think it's not arbitrary. There are controls and voting by more than one person. Remember, there is nothing a moderator gains by doing any of this.

Yes, I think moderators aren't to blame for the poor quality of the experience (mostly).

But I think this recipe is a disaster: users downvote and close-vote. Moderators look at votes and clean up accordingly. I think the problem is that the algorithms allow a small group of drive-by downvoters to destroy the experience. I'd be more than willing to accept a somewhat lower content quality for a more friendly experience.

Well, what is the downside to having duplicate* questions?

I would guess the vast majority of traffic to any specific question page is search, followed by specific links people have posted (on or offsite), and relatively little will come from browsing through lists of questions (tags pages) or something like that.

Search is going to surface the most up-voted and linked questions. Links people have posted are obviously very specific (no chance of confusion following the link).

I would say the upsides are that you end up with more opportunities to have nuanced differences in question handled, give more people a chance to answer questions, naturally refresh questions/answers over the years (eg: "How do I minify CSS in <stack>?" will have very different answers in 2019 than it did in 2009).

* I'm not necessarily suggesting exact duplicates, but allowing for questions to be re-asked after a year or two, and allowing any subtle difference in the situation, stack, etc.

I think SO is poorly designed as a system. It certainly does encourage people to ask not-so-great questions. It doesn't handle them particularly well. And then expects people to clean up the mess for free. Those people of course feel stressed and overwhelmed, so are inclined to be rude, aggressive, and hasty in their decisions.

Like ldigas, I long ago gave up on SO because of bad moderation experiences. I'm grudgingly willing to respect those mods as humans, but I certainly won't as moderators. They do a poor job, needlessly offending and discouraging contributors. They could quit any time. They could go on strike at any time. But no, they just kept on.

I can definitely muster up some sympathy when people trapped in bad jobs are jerks. They are doing it to survive. But people who volunteer to be jerks? That's on them.

SO is marvelously designed and I often discuss this with friends and colleagues. First imagine this: Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason. The quality of content is very high when you compare with any other Q&A or even general social media website. I often find 50% of my programming answers at SO. If there is an accepted highly voted answer for a technical question, I would probably have better than 80% of chance that it works for me. I have saved enormous amount of time because of SO. It has accelerated my learning by 2X or 3X on specific language or framework. In many ways, general productivity of developers and in some cases their entire professional careers hinges on quality and content of SO. Now think about it: Why these highly paid people coming over to answer your questions? Why SO has not already became trash like many of its other predecessors and contemporaries? What is the magic resisting power it has?

The answer lies in its magnificent design. SO has community based voting for almost everything. Almost everything is gamified. There are people literally writing essays on why everyone should vote them to be an "officer" for X and how they will work hard on keeping quality bar high. There is an extra-ordinary passion in what they do. Its HN on steroids but with much better mechanics. It is almost completely decentralized and operates without needing people blessed with special dictatorial powers 99.9% of the times. Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe. They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. This is much harder than dishing out fact-free opinions on non-technical websites as armchair expert. Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO. This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme. Its almost magical to me and I haven't found any other website on Internet achieve it at same scale and importance.

> Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason.

They do so for the same reason they did that before SO and SE existed. A good chunk of people like to help each other. Another (partially overlapping) chunk likes to have their knowledge challenged, another (also partially overlapping) like to show off their knowledge in front of their peers. This was what made the Internet tick since the earliest days.

SO happened to come from within the community (Jeff and Joel were known experts), and had the right features to eventually channel most of the drive I described above through itself. But it's not like SO created it. SO is also accumulating some anti-features these days (like well-known propensity for closing 90% of interesting questions as duplicates or off-topic, or the recent moderator dramas, or targeted advertising they snuck in), so their future is somewhat uncertain.

> Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe.

A lot of "8chan Joes" are highly paid IT/tech folks. Or at least I'd assume so, given that it's true for 4chan.

> They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. (...) Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO.

People also answer SO question on their employeers' time.

> This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme.

SO wasn't a "big design up front". It evolved over time. Gamification helps a bit, but I question it's critical to get highly-trained professionals to answer complex technical questions for free. Again, a lot of highly-trained professionals do that simply because they like it. On SO, or on HN (one of the big points of this site), or on old-school forums, or on conferences, etc. etd.

Honestly, this is typical of what I can't stand about Stack Overflow. Actual person reports actual problem with SO. The response? "WRONG! Actually it's marvelous! Magnificent! Magical!" I'm only surprised you didn't mark my comment as a duplicate.

Even if I were 100% wrong, this would be offputting. But I don't think I am. I'm in the top 100 users here; I was a Quora Top Writer; I was a Wikipedia admin; I've worked on community sites, including a Webby winner. I know something about online contribution. Yes, SO's design got them where they are. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. And until SO's fans can start seeing those issues, they stand no chance of getting fixed.

As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win! There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine, but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data, etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-ba...

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-...

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5 hours had passed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus...

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-pe...

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

> As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

This person[1] was getting unexpected results when calling is_integer. According to the duplicate, the solution is that they should call is_integer... which is what they were doing. The original close voter commented 'sorry I didn't read your question properly before suggesting the dupe', but it remains closed.

The question was answered in the comments: this surprising result was due to floating point error and rounding done by the print function. However, it could not be posted as an answer, because the question was closed. I voted to reopen, but the vote failed.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041

EDIT: The share link I posted takes me to a different question when I'm logged in than it does when I open in an incognito window. WTF.

EDIT2: Apparently serving completely different pages to logged-in users and logged-out users is by design. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271077/

Here's a link to question [1] that should work for everybody: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041?noredirect=1

EDIT3: It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried my best, but only logged-in users will get the correct page from the links I posted.

>The question was answered in the comments

It's lucky that the person who answered had enough carma to write comments. SO's job seems to be to prevent users from answering questions.

Follow-up: Somebody started another reopen vote shortly after I linked the question here. It slowly accumulated four votes to reopen. However, those votes have now expired, so the question will remain closed.

> I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

Before answering questions in future give them a bit of a Googling. Find the ones someone like yourself didnt spend time on, the ones that instantly got closed as off topic or duplicate or moderator was grumpy today so closed.

I get it, wealth of free information and that, sure. But these are the top results in Google. The top results, not a /new queue where you’re hiding. The pages that someone having this problem will visit.

From the visitor’s point of view, SO is a cesspool of power tripping mods who love to close questions.

The solution? SO should noindex closed questions and add canonical links for duplicates. Simple enough, tell the damn search engines things are closed/redirected as well as the user. It would improve the end user experience infinitely to stop arriving on what they perceive as unnecessarily closed questions.

isn't that what a closed as duplicate question does ? it has a link to the answer. noindex doesn't help. we don't know how to word all questions so leaving the duplicate question indexable gives search more chances to connect a questioner with an existing answer

In theory yes, in reality it just serves to surface the duplicates that aren’t duplicates of the question at all.

In the absolute ideal these questions would be answered instead of closed as dupe but right now it just means following a trail of dupes and closures to maybe find the answer before giving up and going back to the search results.

Instead of that, give the user the wrong answer straight away so they can just back up one to the search to continue digging

> in reality it just serves to surface the duplicates that aren’t duplicates of the question at all.

Or the questions that are duplicate questions, but with an answer five years out of date that will never get updated because new people interested in the topic don't have enough magic beans to actually do anything.

> I just don't run into it myself.

I think the reason for that is you’re a web developer. The majority of the admins too. For less popular domain areas, the experience is very different. I run into the issue all the time. The experience became so disappointing that I stopped writing answers there. Here’s a couple examples where downvoters destroyed, or almost destroyed, good questions with my answers to them: https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981/ https://stackoverflow.com/q/57064879/

It drives me nuts that you need 10k rep to view deleted questions. I can't see your second question because I only have ~3k reputation.

I don't understand why it's a privilege in the first place. What's so dangerous about allowing me to read a 'bad' question?

> As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system

Slashdot had this as well, it was called meta-mod.

So are the users (giving their time), both more and less experienced ones. But I would rather have a forum with a duplicate or two, than a forum where you cannot ask (a different question) because it is constantly closed off as a duplicate - sometimes in the time while you are writing an explanation of how it is different than the other one - by a mod who hasn't taken the time to understand the difference. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

And while I agree that some amount of moderation is necessary, it has long ago crossed that limit.

Mods should moderate in moderation, not to the extreme.

Just the other day I asked a question regarding Windows and Android around 12h (midday), and spend until 23h that day discussing with a mod, whether it should be moved to a site that deals exclusively with Android questions (and where it would be closed/offtopic because of the Windows part), or closed on the site where it was asked for being offtopic, because of the Android part.

That they - the mods - haven't understood the question became obvious only when we settled that discussion, and when they attempted to answer it themselves.

This is just a trivial example. But it shows the current state of affairs.

I don't understand why people would volunteer to do work for a for profit entity. Especially one that will, apparently, fire you on a whim.

You work as an unpaid content author for ycombinator.

That's such twisted logic. Are you saying I'm doing unpaid work for my social group when we have a conversation? Jesus Christ not everything needs a dollar symbol attached even if it benefits a company.

I think that was the point - that answering questions on SO is like having a conversation, and feels pleasant to some people, not like work.

At least it feels pleasant until a moderator or community manager starts interfering with it.

The ratio of value (or entertainment) provided to oneself versus value provided to another entity clearly differs significantly between a user of a site and an (unpaid) moderator of it.

Have you ever answered a question on stackoverflow? Or upvoted something? That's the same thing, just to a lesser degree.

When you say 'given up', do you mean you don't ask/answer anymore yourself or also that you don't use it at all?

Anyway, would be interesting to know which part of SE exactly you talk about. I've been sort of active for years on e.g. C++ tag on SO and never had any of those problems for any answer given or question I asked. On the contrary, I got a proper answer within hours. I admit that it happened more than once though that while typing a question I did some extra research and while doing so found the answer, on SO itself, and didn't have to post the question anymore so that rules out duplicates.

Just curious, by saying specialized forums did you mean the sub stack exchanges? Like dba or gamedev, or something else?

Which forums?

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