We’re Rewarding the Question Askers
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
Question askers get the reward of having their question answered. I think votes on questions should be done away with entirely. Questions that should be exemplified can have some other metric (stars for "this is well written and generalizes easily for other users"), and low-quality questions should be flagged or closed, which at least gives some sort of reason. Downvotes aren't useful to askers because they have no idea what they're doing wrong when they receive them.
Also nothing is stopping a downvoter from leaving a comment explaining why the question needs improvement, other than lack of reputation (you need a minimum reputation for your downvotes to be visible anyway). People who care to explain their downvotes can already use the existing process. Since comments can be upvoted (but not downvoted), there is already an incentive in place for that as well.
I don't really get the point of the vigilance toward bad but not intentionally spam questions. The question # has been used, derank it and call it a day until someone sees a reason to revive it.or the asker ASKS for help improving their question.
I think a rule could be "if someone with a decent track record (for some definition of decent, maybe 100 points? 1000?) felt the need to ask it, it's not a duplicate." The bar could be raised in other ways as well, but this one I think would reward people who have done the work to be a positive part of the community.
We all have varying degrees of ability to generalize the principle of one answer to another. The other part of this is that you get better at asking questions through practice, which is hard to get early on. At this point, most problems I can't answer are good questions or too specific, but it took a while and I don't want SO to be the place where only those with 5-10 years in can get help.
SE spends half the time saying an overlapping diversity makes it easy to find a question and answer that fits and the other half eliminating that diversity (and bringing non-adept people to dead ends in their searches that land on SO.)
I see it as a way to meet in the middle.
Answered questions would be fine having their vote button disabled.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-wo...
Unfortunately, the moderators and I had a disagreement about the importance of asking questions without attempting to first solve the problem.
Well written (and well-defined) questions are the key StackOverflow. From the questions, you could extract a Rosetta Stone of programming. An experienced programmer could learn most languages on the job.
questioners: 24035
answerers: 10888
To curb race to first asker, SO should implement exponentially discounting reward. This makes final commulative reward finite.
A far more meaningful way to reward askers would be to simply change how dupes are handled. Instead of closing questions with a link to a related question, give users a mechanism to answer questions with a link to a related answer. Then if the link really does solve the problem the asker can accept that answer, and if not the original question can stay open.
I get why SO chose their current aggressive stance on dupes, but it's probably time to try something else.
Work is under way here and elsewhere: https://forum.codidact.org/
Based on my past actions I guess I would be happy to donate a few dollars to anyone who makes a better q/a site and makes me aware of it.
By better I mean:
- important current database (allowed with current licensing)
- rewrites the meta game to make helping (answering) more valuable than administering (deleting).
- raises bar to asking questions (stack overflow seems to always be crying over all the stupid questions they get yet the thought of raising the bar for asking questions never seen to get any traction)
- have a karma tax or something on questions and contributors: just because someone was the most valuable contributor or something was the best question two years ago doesn't mean they still are.
- don't split into many subsites for every topic, if people want to ask it and other people want to answer it and it isn't illegal or scary or anything, bust leave it alone. Karma tax will take care of it in the long run.
Since most questions will not be "high-quality" (for any reasonable definition of "high-quality"), most new participants' experience will be of asking a question and being told "that's a bad question" either explicitly (downvotes) or implicitly (editing their question to "improve" it).
It gets worse as time goes on because of the "no duplicates" policy; the more questions that are in the system, the harder it is to come up with a question that isn't marked (correctly or incorrectly) as a dupe.
Banning all politeness words (hello/goodbye/please/thank you/you're welcome) from questions/answers because they're "noise" is just the cherry on top that makes people who aren't already immersed in SO culture think that everybody there is rude/mean, no matter how many times they put "be nice" in the CoC.
Not saying these are _bad_ policies per se - SO has a stated goal of being a "curated resource of high quality questions and answers", and they need to separate the wheat from the chaff somehow, but the policies _will_ be perceived as hostile by most new users.
Giving the questioners an extra +5 fake internet points will not fix any of that.
I wasn’t aware that politeness was banned but I avoid asking questions there even if it means joining free node channels and waiting hours in hopes that someone answers my question.
S/O has some very high quality responses but I actively avoid asking questions there because it feels over policed.
I'm curious why they don't have a no duplicate answers policy.
They often differ slightly in their assumptions or implementation, which can help in grokking the core concept of the answer and not getting distracted by implementation details, especially for languages and domains I'm not very familiar with.
This describes the problem with SO remarkably well - how it constantly trends towards being even less nice than it was two months beore. I've gotten SO points and even been congratulated over some questions and some answer. But I'm still angry, seven years on, over having one particular question being deleted - it was my question and it was a question I wanted an answer to it.
Newbies should help newbies.
There are lots of ways to incentivize this, but the basic gist is that users who are just growing out of the newbie phase are in the best position to be indoctrinating new arrivals. They'll have the most patience and understanding, and it's an easy job that shouldn't be done by super experienced users.
Most of this could easily be isolated to a newbie pre-stage too. Basically, a tutorial area in which new users work together to make their questions better so they can move on to the non-tutorial experience.
Personally, I'd filter these posts out by default, but on days where I was feeling nice I might go in and help out.
Worst case scenario: it takes some extra work from a newbie to get their first bits of rep.
People who see a question as relevant and interesting to them, would add points or monetary incentives. Thereby increasing the speed and quality of the answers.
This mechanism has already been tested out and actually works only with crypto currency due to low transaction costs.
Better explained 2 mins video: https://youtu.be/lcsgx_5c7D0
Here is an example: What makes you nostalgic? Answer with #Obyte Know-it-all and earn up to 410,172,272 Bytes : https://t.co/EaVFrscFC7 (enough Bytes to make > 700,000 transactions whenever you want in the future thanks to obytes' tiny predictable fees)
Downvoting is toxic.
A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.
> Downvoting is toxic.
I disagree. Ignoring SO's dubious classifications of what's on/off-topic. The last couple questions I've posted have been shit-shows of off-topic comments and answers.
If you ask a hard question, a lot of people seem to only want to uselessly question what you're doing then answer a different, easier question. Those are totally worthless, and force me to waste a lot of time writing really defensive questions that try to nip the derails in the bud.
Honestly, SO should have some feature where the asker can just delete responses as off-topic.
> A better change would have been to make any downvote COST 10 points. Or at least 1 point or 2.
IIRC, it already costs 1 karma point to downvote an answer. I would guess it's the same for a question.
- https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down - https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
Once you see a constant flood of "I made app, here my 1000 lines of code (screenshot), I get error, where bug?" that the moderators have to defend the site against - you might just change your opinion about the value of downvotes.
BUT on StackOverflow it is entirely normal, even expected, that you post a well thought out and reasoned question and its instantly downvoted because, well, who knows why? Drive-by downvoting is simply negative.
A different mechanism could be used for the sorts of issues you identify.
Would the new proposed mechanism require more volunteer work or the same effort as now?
Btw, many people forget that back in 2011, Jeff Atwood was concerned that there was too much crap and the community was not downvoting enough. Therefore, he removed the points penalty to encourage the community to aggressively downvote more:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
In my experience, that just doesn't happen. Most questions sit at a score of 0, and those which do receive votes are almost always upvoted. (The data supports this[1].) Questions rarely end up with a negative score, and when they do it's usually because there are obvious problems with their formatting or content. (Usually low effort, off topic, or an obvious duplicate.)
[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1096887/q...
Hmm, not my experience, at all. Though I heard this more than once, so I see a couple of possible reasons (or combinations thereof):
- depends on the community/tag; I've mainly asked questions tagged with the languages starting with a C, some git stuff and some more obscure things
- depends on the poster's reputation points i.e. maybe there's a bias to not downvoting/closing questions asked by people with 10k+ points?
- the questions were not actually well thought out/reasoned even though you think they are
Any ideas?
Let time, and lack of up votes, sink them? Have moderators hide them with a FRIENDLY "Hey, we've hidden your post because it doesn't meet 'these requirements', once you've edited, we'll review it and show it again." message. If they don't improve, keep it hidden, tell them to do better. If they still don't improve, delete it, and require any new questions they post to be moderated first. If another question ends up deleted, don't let them post any more.
Basically, give feedback in a positive manner with the goal of getting that person to do better. It may seem like more work, but I think it would be much more rewarding than what I've seen on Stack Overflow and other support forums.
From my experience - big part of new users asking questions do not even care if they get any upvotes or downvotes, or if someone is friendly. They don't even bother to accept/upvote the answer when it's given. They simply want to get their question answered and then move on, forget their username and create a new account for the new question next time.
A better system is surely possible. But my main message would be - please spend some time doing it all: 1) asking questions; 2) answering questions; 3) volunteering for moderation; before starting to think about how to change the site.
They don't tell the person what they did wrong. Its incredibly frustrating to get downvoted and not have any idea why. For example, here on HN, I generally couldn't care less about what my score is, but when I write something based on my personal experience (ie something completely subjective from my life) and I get downvoted (it has happened!), I find find that incredibly frustrating because I don't understand why someone found my experience worthy of a downvote.
I imagine its similar on SO. If you're new and don't yet know the finer points of the rules, getting downvoted without an explanation is a surefire way of turning that person off the site.
> please spend some time doing it all: 1) asking questions; 2) answering questions; 3) volunteering for moderation
I have. At least, I've done the review queue a ton of times.
Nothing is inherently wrong with them, but downvotes without an explanation are without value.
My favorite is always when they dont get a response and then get angry at the community -- "i asked three days ago, STILL NO ANSWER, ANSWER NOW"
Then you ask them a question to get more specific info and they just reword the same info from the question again.
Cherry on the top is when someone new comes in the comments and they yet again ask the same thing, I loved that.
Make accounts cost something:
- limited number of invites per year for existing valuable members
- small payment
- hassle (send us a post card or something like that, a "proof of work for humans")
Stack Overflow seems to want:
1. asking to be frictionless even for complete strangers
2. yet to be taken seriously when they continue to complain that this is going on.
if it's really that bad of a question, why are there 20 answers for it?
of far greater concern are the outdated and incorrect answers with the coveted green check mark next to them.
one sees that green check mark and believes all manner of drivel written next to it.
As small as it is, a down vote is a public action saying that the person posting what you are voting on has less value. At least that what they said has less value. That is never a fun experience, even if you have very thick skin.
Why do I downvote? I downvote when an answer is wrong or outdated.
That's the point of downvotes, to push incorrect or outdated answers to the bottom.
In polite society, when you reprimand someone publicly, you only do so when private discussions have failed.
I'd also argue using down votes for outdated information is very inefficient. Wouldn't it make sense to just have a "this is out dated" flag, and list how many people have used it? Then, the author of the answer could update their post and ask that the flag be cleared.
For wrong answers, I'd say a comment "this is wrong because" first, then something other than down voting.
I guess its just as much a signal to people looking for an answer as it is for the person who wrote the answer. At least with a downvoted answer, its easy to see "ok, maybe not this one" and you can check the comments to see why. Not that I'm a fan of downvoting, I think a flagging system would achieve the same thing while being more helpful to all involved than an opaque downvote.
I don't know about you, but I find when I'm on a poorly-moderated forum, it's just the same questions asked over and over again every day.
Do you really need to explain Search to every noob who you downvote?
(Note that I never look at new Stackoverflow questions. I always find the site through Google, because someone's always asked the question first. I do improve answers when needed.)
SO heavily encourages leaving constructive feedback rather than simply downvoting.
At the same time it's a great tool for assessing the quality of posts. It's the same reason HN allows downvotes.
However the dynamic of SO is different. Users are coming to the site to get help and solve problems, not to have open-ended discussions.
SO should have a grace period for new questions. No downvotes during the first 1-2 hours. Aside from being less discouraging for new users it would also mitigate cases of incorrect downvoting. A negative score is a signal to other users that a question is not worth consideration, and dissuades possible answerers from providing a solution.
To someone who has spent a ton of time answering questions, it means "this is not a well-written question and I do not have the time to explain to the poster why that is; I would rather spend my time on answering well-written questions, which is what I came to this site to do."
To a question asker, it means "you suck and I hate your question, and I'm not going to tell you why."
The problem is that there are a couple of mechanisms for getting rid of questions - downvoting, or flagging / voting to close. Some questions are clearly on the wrong site - just close them. Some questions are not good questions (screenshots of code, no explanation of desired behavior, no research done into error message) but they are not closeable according to the options provided. The downvote is just to send a message.
Answerers who downvote are people who genuinely want to help - they are spending their free time answering questions on the internet for no gain other than extremely localized imaginary internet points.
The solution is providing one method of feedback to the question poster, and couching it in a less negative way. Maybe all methods have the asker's feedback get hit, maybe none of them. Maybe the asker should be protected from feedback until they learn the site.
Asking technical questions properly is hard. I got downvoted and closed and duplicate questions on my first 5 attempts, and even my recent questions have 0-1 upvotes (my answers fare better, for whatever reason).
I think it's more accurate to say that answerers who downvote want to give answers (vs genuinely want to help). Because explaining to someone why their question is problematic is part of helping.
For the longest time everyone on the site believed it to be the "database" model. And helping individual users with their questions is not part of it. Under this framework answerers who downvote are simply doing what they are expected to do - weeding out poor entries from the encyclopedia. And the person who asks a question has no right to expect an answer, as stated in their 2011 blog entry:
> We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. [1]
However recently they seem to be moving away from that model and only time will tell what it morphs in to.
[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
The database model has never seemed right to me, but I do think SO is making progress moving away from it. Ironically, I believe they will be better able to achieve the database goal once they let it be an emergent property of Q&A rather than grudgingly allowing Q&A to get the database.
For a great many tags, it seems like there is a sport to show that a question doesn't apply to a specific tag, that it is a duplicate, or that the user should be doing something a different way than what they are asking for. There seems to be so much effort put into deliberately not answering the question that trying to participate is truly deflating.
Can you elaborate? It's difficult to agree or disagree since I can't tell what you have in mind. What does 'Toxic' mean to you in this context?
I have. They say her behavior from start to finish was incredibly rude and explicit in stating her plans to ignore the policy.
Months ago, well before the current Stack Exchange pronoun policy was a thing, she said (yes, explicitly) that she wasn't willing to use singular "they" because it feels so wrong and confusing to her. This wasn't a "plan to ignore the policy" because at that time there was no policy.
(It also doesn't appear to have been motivated by sexism, transphobia, etc., although people who say such things sometimes are; she is explicitly willing to use neopronouns -- "xe" and the like -- for people who find that "he" and "she" don't fit them.)
Then, much more recently, the upcoming change to the Code of Conduct was announced in the moderators' chatroom. M.C. asked some questions about that, very definitely did not state any plan to ignore the policy, and promptly got de-moderator-ated.
It's possible that she isn't telling the truth about what has happened in private, away from the view of other moderators. Maybe she sent an email to SE management saying "I'm not going to abide by this; fire me if you dare" or something. But as far as externally-visible things are concerned, her account of things matches up better with reality than SE's statements do.
There are, indeed, moderators who think M.C. should have been canned long ago, but my impression is that there's something close to unanimity that SE should not have canned her the way they did, and that the majority of those with any opinion on the matter think that they shouldn't have canned her at all.
(Source: am a moderator on a Stack Exchange site, have read all the relevant transcripts from said chatroom. Note that discussions there are confidential, so the above is about as specific as I am prepared to be about who said what.)
Because she at least offered a very detailed breakdown of events that can be fact-checked, critiqued, etc. StackOverflow has offered basically nothing more than vague PR BS.
https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2019/10/05/stack-overflow-fias...
And a ton of them.
Net value loss.
I might be pessimists but I think they knew exactly what they were doing and are happy with results.
And I am guessing new SO leadership wants the same.
Getting at great contributions is now much harder. I use Quora much less now.
Churn 'n burn for traffic dollars is a strategy.
Suppose it opens a door somewhere too. Do that enough, and there is clearly room for a less noise filled source.
IMHO, the difference here is Quora has a plausible, casual user case that makes sense. The people who helped to build Quora content won't give two shits and will move on, but Quora itself may do just fine. Meh.
Degrading the value to current users of SO to attract more in general, leads where for SO?
It took them 7 years to change their minds on it. Sigh.
---
Side rant: This whole piss people off/break things and expect people to stick around is a dumb idea. Company does stupid things, I'm going to find an alternative company and not return.
And I notice a lot of female employees or managers being mentioned which might be a coincidence but it also might be deliberate and somehow be related to the idea that females might have more empathy? Which could just be my own prejudice and not true but I dunno.
But anyway, if they are going for nicer/more empathetic employees and policies, that's great, but its not going to stop all of the (mostly male) super-critical narcissistic arrogant shaming-happy vote-whores who are eagerly waiting to get in another passive-aggressive veiled hint that I am an idiot while they downvote my question.
Not planning to ask another question on Stack Overflow anytime soon, thanks though.
But also, less than 10% of Stack Overflow users are women.
It is beyond me why they would want to award spammers for creating more spam.
Who decided that software developers should have the final say over how people interact? I feel like there's probably a field or two of experts on that that should be being consulted.
I've never asked or answered a question on SO (I wouldn't dare!) because I can plainly see the horrorshow that is likely to come with doing that by reading other questions. Over time, I've come to simply ignoring SO for the most part.
I think I may check in from time to time to see if the place actually improves.