Done Answering Questions Stack Overflow
games.greggman.com
games.greggman.com
There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments).
Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.
So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.
StackOverflow powered GPT-3 haha.
A lot of people visiting Stack Overflow think that the purpose of a Stack Overflow question is to solve the OP's problem. They write "Dear Libby" style letter templates into the question box, and often provide very opinionated answers that try to give way more advice than was strictly asked for by trying to infer what's "really going on" based on the subtext of the question. And there's a lot of UI in there that encourages seeing it as an advice column.
But the Stack Overflow people themselves don't want it to be a place to seek general advice. They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
It is not a surprise that people feel cheated.
I've been lambasted here in the past for saying this, but I'll say it again now and see if I get a different response; it's no longer helpful to search for "javascript" related questions and get mostly answers for jQuery. These days I'm able to solve a lot of problems just reading MDN, but sometimes I click on a Stack Overflow article and it turns out to be 12 answers that are all jQuery-specific even when the question itself doesn't call for it. jQuery isn't bad, but the world has changed around it and we can't keep pretending like everyone is using it for the same reasons we did back in 2011.
This not only does new developers a general disservice, but it can do a disservice to projects that have less-than-average momentum. For instance, I use Ember JS every day, and it's a framework that has really changed a lot since its inception, but you'd never know it if you looked up questions for it on Stack Overflow. The Ember questions on there are so woefully outdated that I believe it gives potential new users the complete wrong impression of it. There are outdated React questions on there as well, but at least there's enough inertia behind React that new activity helps overcome this to a degree. On the other hand, people almost certainly have given up on Ember because none of the Stack Overflow answers work at all. Sure, we could all submit updated answers, but they'll be below the fold and they will never be reselected as the accepted answer. There are other reasons why Ember has been in decline, but I do blame the mechanics of SO as a big detractor.
Preventing duplicate questions is fine, the overzealousness not withstanding, but if there's no mechanism to correct existing information as time goes on in a meaningful way, the only result can be rot.
jQuery is used on 83% of all websites; React is used on 4% [1]. You’re right that people are probably using it differently than they were a decade ago, but even in 2021 your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one.
There are a lot of websites I made in the past and they are still online and many of them use jQuery, but I don't need to check Stackoverflow in relation to those websites, because I'm no longer working on them (and in most cases no one else does either, they just happily keep running unmodified). All of those are part of that 83% that you mention.
Stackoverflow is a Q&A websites for developers so IMHO it should focus on tech that is currently in use on actively developed systems.
50/10 vs 4*(unmaintained rate) + undercounting (possibly a large majority, possibly small) is probably React winning out
PS from your comment it sounds like you could be interested in Vue, specifically using Vue standalone without npm/webpack e.g. https://v3.vuejs.org/guide/installation.html#cdn
First, number of websites != number of platforms. If you go to the source of the number, they even point out as much:
> WordPress, which is used in more than 30% of sites, includes jQuery by default.
So right off the bat, you're looking at 50% or so, maybe plus a few for people who actually make a point to write jQuery + for wordpress specifically.
Secondly, that study has detection issues [0] that seem to not pick up a good deal of bundlers/etc, which makes it really hard to say how many of React/Vue sites are missed.
Thirdly, jQuery being used as a dependency of a library will still count it in that 83%. They show a few combination options specifically, and show it's at least 1.7% [1]. With others, say 2.5% in total. Think about how many bundlers hide React/Vue and how many common dependencies could use jQuery, and you're probably much higher.
Given all that, I'd bet that number is closer to 17% than 83%, though I'd wager around 33%.
Even with that 33% being jQuery without a framework or not being wordpress, you have to remember this is published. How many of those have had code significantly changed in the past 5 years? This is what's relevant in this context. All of this long winded nuance to say that I don't think "your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one" holds up, at least not like you might think that cited number shows. That's not to say it's irrelevant, just less relevant.
[0] https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/issues/2450
[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2020/javascript#framework...
The broader point is, we should be cognizant of our selection bias here. SPA frameworks are overrepresented on HN because we tend to be programmers building applications in the tech industry. But there are a ton of people who don't consider themselves "in tech" that still need to make a portfolio for their photos/figure out a WordPress plugin for their e-commerce site/etc.
Today, so many things are possible and easier with plain JavaScript and/or CSS.
I'd even go further and say there's lots of new sites using jQuery unnecessarily because the accepted, highly-upvoted, but 10-year-old SO answer said that was the way.
No one should be recommending the introduction of jquery (to solve some discrete issue) unless it’s already part of the stack.
But that’s exactly the opposite of how the current state of JS answers appears.
[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...
Of course, that doesn't really matter — we're talking about Stack Overflow users, and you're right that this is a way better source of data on what Stack Overflow users care about. Not sure why I didn't think to check their developer survey.
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"
I think there should be a place for this kind of stuff, some place hackers can do these "prohibited" sorts of things...
Oh my, not the dreaded extended discussion!! When will people learn that our tech overlords have found the most optimized means of communicating? We mustn’t revert to the dark times when conversing was openly practiced by the barbarians.
I think they need to work on communicating that much more clearly, but ultimately they don't want to (primarily) be a place of extended discussion, debate, and so on, and I'm not sure it's fair to say "no, they're wrong" to that.
I was kind of referring to the very nice platform I'm typing on right now... :)
Or they don't want to understand the issue at hand, so they put in a hack, when obtaining a complete understanding of the issue which might take 5 minutes of their time reading the docs, would provide a better solution.
I love reading docs too, so I can get a deeper understanding. But sometimes I just need an answer in a hurry.
I think there should be some nuance in how those rules are applied. The author of this post appears to be one of the authorities on webgl. If they've written helpful posts on the topic, and those can be referenced from SO answers, they should be able to do that. Heck, even if they sell something on their blog, it's still highly relevant. It's same the problem Google, Youtube, Apple, and basically every other service right now is having with attempting to moderate what can be shared on their platforms, without losing the quality content. Incredibly often, they end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't have a solution; the problem is in promoting quality content while preventing spam. It's not all-or-nothing, we need to strike the right balance with moderation.
In both cases, it was bad moderation that pushed me into quitting. A trick I learned from working on Wikipedia is that you can think of these systems as MMORPGs where you get a useful product out the end. I think all of these platforms have game-design problems, where people with power can find satisfaction in moves that end up harming the reader experience and frustrating contributors.
Both companies seem to be doing fine without my help, so I guess they can afford to burn contributors out after a while. But like you, I think it's sad how much these things fall short of their potential. I'll never do anything for SO or Quora again, but I do miss the chance to help people.
Totally agree. Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to learn, too.
That was my experience on early SO, and it was great. I'd just browse a tag I knew, and pick questions where I knew most of the answer, and the act of explaining it would be useful to me, too.
Now I find doing so neither fun nor fulfilling. First there's lots of garbage questions that are impossible to answer. When you do finally find something good, it's hard to get it before it gets closed as dupe or someone else answers. And if it's from a new user, there's still a good chance they'll never come back to accept the answer and awards your fake internet points.
I'd love to see a SO that encourages more new users to actually answer those "dupe" questions (instead: hide them from search and older users)
Indeed - I've become an expert at several systems by hanging out in support forums and answering other peoples questions. the harder, the better! Who needs video games when you can still solve problems, help others and increase your value/skill set too?
Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!
Closing of duplicates is the least of Stack Overflow's problems IMHO; it's done for a very real reason: if I search "how to do foo in bar?" then it's really great to have one question with all answers, instead of having to trawl through several questions. Also, as someone who spent quite a lot of time writing in-depth answers over the years, I'd rather not repeat that every month.
I have a lot of criticism of Stack Overflow, and I mostly stopped answering because I got fed up as well, but this isn't a problem IMO.
> Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
Generally those comments should be integrated in the answer; usually if I come upon an answer with helpful comments I will edit the answer to include that information.
I do wish the entire "accepted answer" feature would be removed though, or at the very least stop pinning them to the top.
Although, this can lead to its own weird problems.
I've been learning Objective C, and I've come across a lot of Stack Overflow questions which ask how to do a thing in Objective C, but where all the top answers are in Swift. Sometimes an older Objective C answer is just buried; sometimes it isn't there at all.
I realize that Swift is the newer language, but it's not the one I'm using, and the question was about Objective C.
To be clear, it's the other way around—someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.
From the perspective of "it's good to post updated answers to older questions" this makes sense, because there's a decent chance the asker would have requested Swift if the question was asked today. But as it stands, the question lists Objective C.
Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
Well, then this is a wrong answer haha.
> Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
I think it probably depends on the exact question and details; there isn't really a good one-size-fits-all solution.
A question is considered a duplicate only when it's an exact duplicate. Sometimes question get closed as duplicates erroneously as they're not exact duplicates, just very similar, and this can be an issue, but I don't think that's the biggest problem on Stack Overflow, and a lot of questions really are exact duplicates.
A lot of these issues are kind of scaling issues: with about 7,000 questions every day, many of whom are not exactly stellar, it's pretty hard to deal with them all. For year I've argued that improvements in messaging and such would make a big improvement, and Stack Overflow is finally doing some work on that now. For example the comment was changed from "Possible duplicate of [other question]" to "Does this answer your question: [other question]". The latter is much more friendly and helpful. People don't mark questions as dupes to be mean, but just as the easiest way to guide you to an answer (hopefully...)
> They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
Easy to look at an old question and think "There's no point posting another answer here, the asker is long gone." If we thought about it more like a wiki page and less like Yahoo Answers that wouldn't be the case.
Some of my most successful answers have been to old questions by the way: I try to solve a problem, the Stack Overflow question doesn't contain a solution I like, I figure it out, and I post it as an answer.
I've always been a little surprised that that they don't have a formal system of 'recycling' popular questions where they have a new 'edition' every 1/2/3/whatever years and they just prune the ones that don't get new answers.
It's valuable to get the latest answer to questions, but lots of us operate in past technological climates, so it's good to keep old answers accessible.
Once every question has been asked and answered every new question is a duplicate and no new information can appear in StackOverflow.
I am seeing more and more often that you look for a solution to an issue in StackOverflow and all you get is fixes that only work on obsolete software. For instance for operating systems a lot is for Windows 7 and before and doesn’t work on Windows 10 anymore.
There's a term in Russian "синдром вахтёра" which I think should be translated as "a doorkeeper/janitor syndrome". It's a phenomena when a not very smart person who doesn't understand the big picture of things gains a little bit of power against his fellow mates. While generally not intending to bring a harm, they begin to implement some weird but strict policies that reflects their very poor understanding of how things should work (metaphorically they think that every line should either be parallel or perpendicular to each other and no deviations should ever exist). Given that at least some of them might just enjoy having and exercising that little bit of power they have, the result could be just ugly and destructive.
Unfortunately, in many cases I've ever seen over the Internet communities (that's not to stretch the idea further), those who want to become a moderator are very prone to this syndrome.
I think to create a healthy community some extra special measures should be implemented to prevent this phenomena. Unfortunately StackOverflow is not doing it enough (if doing anything at all).
This is a great point. And it also relates to abuse of power.
Recently I raised a question without precedent on Stack Overflow. A person had given a detailed answer, which pointed to issues not available in documentation. His answer was in fact an expanded analysis of the overall language specs - without it, I had no idea how to debug my code.
One megalomaniacal moderator marked my question as 'duplicate', and then pointed to another question -- where he claimed to have answered the question 'definitively' (he had not) and wanted me to upvote his answer.
There was no way for me to challenge his 'duplicate' mark, which is a real loss for anyone else encountering the same issue as I did.
The quality of questions is abysmal and getting worse at an exponential rate. It used to be a site where experienced developers ask focused, well-written questions, after doing some work to solve the problems on their own. Sure, there have always been crappy questions, but as recently as three years ago, the bulk of the questions on the front page were decent.
A huge portion of questions now are homework assignments where the student just wants a canned answer and hasn't made an attempt to solve the problem; are written by people with such a poor grasp of English that they're worthless; endless repeats because no one has searched for existing answers; etc.
I also used to moderate on a daily basis. The flood of low-quality content wore me out, but what really ended my moderation was constantly being challenged by the fake entries they shove at you to "make sure you're paying attention" while moderating. The bot suspended me from moderating a few times because, when presented with posts that required moderator attention, I didn't pick the exact category it thought needed fixing. I'm doing free labor for you and you're going to be a dick about it? No thanks. It's no wonder the quality has gone to shit.
At one point I was "top 1%" in a number of topics, moderated, voted in elections, etc. Now I barely use the site. As much as I dislike Reddit, I increasingly click on Reddit links when I'm looking for answers.
Stack Overflow is still a valuable resource but it's all downhill from here.
The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough.
So is always walking a tightrope. Moderation of so much content and trying to make sure only the good stuff sticks is hard, and it burns people out having to deal with the same annoying low-effort things all the time, which leads to them being harsh when people make genuine errors.
They're both right. SO is moderating on the wrong things.
1. I am attempting to solve problem X
2. I took steps A, B, C
3. I expected result Y
4. I instead encountered result Z
I'm not familiar enough with Stack Overflow to know whether this is already a feature, but I'd love to see an enforced question format like the above, or something in the ballpark. Like a multi-input form that doesn't allow you to submit unless you fill in each field.
And if I'm attempting to solve a different problem, but have to ask the same question, will answers tailored to the problem that you're solving be helpful to me? If not, can I ask the same question without it being closed as a duplicate?
The format is good enough, but I really dislike the idea of enforcing it for every question. As a top comment suggested, some of the most interesting questions in SO are sort of open-ended. Most of my questions and answers there (~3.5k reputation) violate your format.
OP is complaining (not without merit) about the typical X Y questions, that are hard to answer, because there's a very specific question, but very little actual context that would help creative solutions. This leads to boring brute-force hackish answers. At best.
2. I found out that algorithm Y solves X
3. I expected to find an implementation of Y in langauge Z on stackoverflow
4. I encountered no usefull implementations and posted my implementation instead
Reddit picks up the slack of SO for those who want to discuss issues and better understanding. Still though, the flood of bad questions happens on Reddit too.
I really wonder how fixable this is. From your SO experience, do you think it's inherent to the model? E.g., does the ratio between types of the work people are willing to do mean moderators will always be outgunned? Or are there perhaps technical or social solutions that you think would have fixed it?
That said... There were and are a lot of things that could make it less frustrating. Once again, we can look at physical societies: if 99% of people litter and .001% of people sweep up after them, the latter are gonna have a rough time. If we can increase the size of the latter group that'll help somewhat - but so will reducing the size of the former, and if there's less of a crushing workload then increasing the number of workers may get easier too.
Stack Overflow is entirely moderated by volunteers, and their numbers haven't exactly scaled with the volume of casual users. I find it interesting to look at how moderation changes around major holidays - especially Christmas and New Years Day: suddenly there is much less work to do, and more of it gets done - but not only done, done well! Folks are happier, more relaxed, more... Friendly and helpful.
For years, Stack Overflow's management has looked at discussions like this one and said to themselves, "those damned volunteers are making us look bad, we've gotta make their work harder so they stop screwing this up". And... It has had precisely the opposite effect: more litter, fewer sweepers == increasingly hostile interactions with those who remain to push the brooms.
I strongly suspect a campaign to encourage a bit more... Civic pride... "This site belongs to all of us, pick up after yourself", etc. Might've done more good.
SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.
I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power?
When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.
It's funny, I actually think that this is true for most of the mods we see online, be it Reddit, SO and the whole SE network, or any other forum.
Comparing SO to Yahoo! Answers is a bit much, though.
Aaron Swartz is spinning in his grave I'm sure.
Sadly, your comment perfectly describes what happened to Wikipedia about five to ten years ago, and also exactly what is happening more and more every day on Reddit.
Recently a post of mine on Reddit hit the front page and got a ton of awards (i.e. revenue for Reddit). Quickly the majority of my comments were deleted and I was given a temporary ban from the subreddit. The rules say "Only one link to social media per submission", and I was linking to websites that were extremely helpful and relevant to the questions I was being asked.
My takeaway is that Reddit doesn't want me to submit content that garners a massive amount of attention (119k upvotes), over 4700 comments and 357 awards.
Just a perfect illustration of how "синдром вахтёра" works in mods/admins.
My favorite answer I made on SO is explaining how to fix using two python libraries that aren't often used together that break in a confusing way when both are loaded, along with a discussion on how I solved it. That one is the only answer for the question, but not marked as the accepted answer despite a comment from the asker saying "thanks! that fixed it!". It's currently at -2 for reasons I can't quite fathom.
At some point answering SO became a game of seeing if I could answer questions before the third close vote would kill discussion, and I realized I'm just there to prove some point to someone, not actually help people.
It's a pity too. I see great value in a website where people can ask questions and get help. SO isn't that, it's some RPG now, with perverse incentives.
It's trivial, but I like to think I made some people a tiny bit more productive for the rest of their working lives.
The original question asked for a regex.
Initially the answer was simple, but the more traction it got I added some more details to it and kept it up to date over time.
Also: I recognized the name immediately because gman helped me out with a WebGL question* last year.
* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fas...
Every once in awhile I go through the queue of things that people have proposed should be deleted and I almost always vote against deletion. Even most of the lower quality stuff has some merit. A comment asking to rephrase is much more constructive than just deleting their post!
It's not an easy problem to solve. SO could simply let community moderators vote out the jerks from among them. That would work great, if only the vast majority of community moderators were kind, considerate, thoughtful people. However, just like with certain other professions, the moderator role tends to appeal either to super-altruists, or to power hungry fanatics. Sadly, the world has a lot more of the latter than the former.
And even more so than with reddit (where at least there's some competition between different communitiies), there's only one SO. Also, the intrinsic importance of historical content on SO is a huge barrier to any competiition. So it's not like users can vote with their feet.
So even if SO management wanted to fix the problem, what could they do? (That's assuming the SO management isn't happy with the current moderation style in the first place!)
(Community moderators = diamond moderators are the only ones, besides SO employees of course, who can delete user comments.)
I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value.
Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...
this is the perfect idea: make each moderation step transparent and attributable. allow voting down every wrong 'duplicate' decision and every moderator that closed questions for no good reason.
Close votes tend to have a pile on effect, and many close votes are irrelevant. Just let me help the poster. Remove the question from searches so it doesn't bother future users, I don't care... don't prevent me from interacting with a person I can help. But it stings when things get removed by third parties that don't fully appreciate what was asked.
Most juniors I work with find stack overflow flat out too hostile/intimidating to use.
But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen.
At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.
Worse yet, you ask a question and it gets closed as a "duplicate" and the original is several years old regarding a different version and not even remotely the same. (think Angualar1 VS Angular 6)
SO has its place, but it isn't for me.
SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.
> People will find your information using search engines.
This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
I would also encourage people to contribute to original project documentation, bug trackers, or mailing lists.
It’s unfortunate that Stack Overflow is the first destination people end up going to. I guess it’s to be expected since many projects only offer static pages and offer minimalist code examples.
The original poster is lucky that they have a blog and their own platform to voice their opinions.
EDIT: anyone can have their own platform, you don’t need to be lucky. It only costs a few bucks to register a domain, and hosting starts at $0.
Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.
How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way.
Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it.
Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.
I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.
Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages
I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem
Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it
At least I learned about https://webglfundamentals.org/ and https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ from this, they look fantastic.
I long ago stopped investing significant time and emotional energy contributing to knowledge resources for similar reasons, though it should be remembered that there definitely are positives to contributors beyond the altruistic (I never improved as much in my technical skills as when sweating under the public spotlight after foolishly committing to answer a "simple" question that turned into significant unpaid work).
It's internet culture (and tribal and other social gatherings before that), not StackOverflow particularly; the toxicity and crappy behaviour have been with the net since the get-go and will continue as long as the socially undeveloped see an opportunity to display their "power" or suck the energy out of those more publicly-spirited.
That site is a dumpster fire.
This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.
Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.
I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter.
Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.
...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond.
There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.
But the consequence is that sites like Reddit now are rife with stolen unattributed content, while original content is largely frowned upon - Reddit's own guildelines[0] suggest you should be posting a >9:1 ratio of other people's content to your own.
Frankly this is something the newer generation gets right. Zoomers "shamelessly" plug their own original creations - post their soundclouds under their own viral tweets, link to their own onlyfans in their bios, plug their etsy accounts on insta. If you're a creator (a tiny fraction of internet users qualify) you god damn deserve to promote your own stuff!
[0] https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...
The author comments (no pun intended) on why it does have a vote system then, but I'd go further: If comments have no value, why do they even exist? They wouldn't need to be implemented and they're just taking up space.
In many answers I found in SO, comments have been very valuable, sometimes more than the answer.
I also have answered hundreds of questions via tech communities but most of questioners do not thank me and they do not respond to my answers at all. I do not know whether they checked my solution or not.
But I can keep this job as a hobby for many years because I do not expect that questioners thank me at all. I just do it for myself. Actually I do not think that I am helping people online. I consider myself that I am doing this just for fun.
I can learn some lessons even from the silly questions written by the ignorant who do not have any background knowledge. I also have my answering history and I can use it for self promotion when I introduce myself to others.
I even participate in developing some open source projects, but I also do not expect that somebody who like my code offer me a great job or help me improve my code. No one will give me a food on the table.
No devotion, no pain. I just do something online that is fun for me, meaningful and additionally helpful to others.
In one case, the answer was specific to Windows and a range of releases of the language. I posted my comment, it got deleted, I reposted, and it got deleted again.
In another case, the answer marked correct didn't work and wasn't even a full answer - the provided code showed how to start the solution and left the rest as an exercise for the reader. When I commented that the answer was wrong (even the part that was given) my comment simply disappeared without explanation.
I was well rewarded with internet points which was somewhat appealing at the time. But that got old pretty quickly. What got old even faster was how cold and unkind other users could be.
Over time I noticed I would always be second or later in answering questions; people would hurriedly toss up something hoping for that green check mark, and their answers would be pretty mediocre in most cases. However, speed was key and my answers would end up passed over.
I continued doing it for a while because I enjoyed the exercise of it, but watching the overall quality of the site decline so rapidly absolutely killed it for me.
I lasted around 2 years in total, maybe 6 months of that spent as a very active user.
These days I actually filter it from my search results, like medium, many git repository mirrors, and content-farmy sites which hit on all major popular topics with the thinnest and least professional content possible.
Seems like cooperative editing platforms always attract the "moderator" personalities, who will learn and internalize all rules and guidelines, especially those that contradict each other or reality (as the one quoted above), and use them as weapons in their semantic games.
See also: Wikipedia.
There should be a straight up solid answer for 80% of those questions in the relevant docs.
Docs should have walk-throughs / overviews, common examples, and good reference with links to examples.
And then a ton of secondary examples related to every corner, explaining everything.
If it's not clear, then guess what? We all have to figure it out!. Every one of us has to labour through APIs to make those 1-5 a day mini-insights, when, if the docs were clear, we should not have to.
If I 'owned' Java I would consider every common question about Java that wasn't made clear in the docs a failure of some kind.
Not only that - why on earth do people think that publishing an API is good enough? Why doesn't Oracle/MS have respectable team of people literally just answering SE questions all day on Java/C#/TS etc. giving fairly definitive answers? I can only imagine this would have spectacular ROI. (I mean, aside from getting the free labour of volunteers, but MS can affordit)
Not sure SO should be a place for the likes of Oracle/MS to answer questions about "their" language stacks. AFAICS, Oracle has pretty much pulled out of pushing Java years ago anyway. In contrast, MS is all over the place to advertise .net and TS. Don't need more of that on SO, with staged questions and distortion of public reception by sheer volume and SO stats.
1) Stack Overflow caters to millions of users and hundreds of thousands of answer-writers (if not millions). This means that no matter what moderation rules you have, including removing the rules you don't like and yes -- also changing the rules the way you might be thinking right now -- _will_ have unintended side effects, _will_ leave some user disgruntled or puzzled, _will_ lead to some niche minority feeling offended or possibly discriminated. That's unavoidable and most suggestions usually given to SO are well intended, but completely off the mark. Leave that comment? What about the other thousands of self promoting garbage comments that were deleted?
2) It's amazing how someone with so much participation does not know one of the basic rules of SO: put all relevant information in the answer; comments are meant to improve the answer, not as a side note to it. It's not difficult, it's a trivial concept.
I mean, a guy who spent hours on every answer just left the site. That should give you a clue.
I referred to it a lot when I first starting out with webgl.
Even simple questions like how to resize the canvas with correct pixel ratio is so disgustingly complicated, I don't understand why anyone would want to be restricted to the space of a single stackoverflow answer: https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-resizing-t...
I've also been driven away, but there seem pockets of goodness, e.g. bash people are super insightful and helpful. Perhaps a kind of society of affliction.
I can see why, prima facie, linking your own site looks like spam. Seems there could be a way to facilitate this (e.g. authorise/whitelist legit sites; or even host them on SO), but probably out of scope - like "closed as "interesting".
And links lose eyeballs, undermining SO's business model... hmmm... revenue-distortion sunk expertsexchange... perhaps soon time for another change?
So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope.
The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard.
Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.
What does this mean?
It would be interesting to get an economist’s take on how to improve these sites.
In particular I’ve found it strange that the karma community on various sites doesn’t “charge” you to do more things. For example on this site it would make sense if it costed you karma to up vote and downvote - this would create an emphasis to not spend too much so to speak.
Slashdot comments are pretty garbage these days though so maybe not.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35877
Which in turn gave us Bion's Group Dynamics
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://tpocambodi...
Which was the basis for Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
And of course we can trace many of these observations and questions of group dynamics such as membership and leadership qualifications, rules making and enforcement, moderation, identity, cohesion, conflict resolution, growth and decay, prestige and influence, etc back further, to Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Avicenna, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Le Bon ...
So it has ever been. Group dynamics are hard, film at eleven :)
- Easy stuff, the kind the some proper digging within the docs or the logs would give the answer. This always seemed like the majority, even more within the last few years. I don't think I should spend my time answering those. I used to ask questions on forums before and got schooled a couple of times from people telling me to look it up in the docs or from other questions, it was more valuable than a direct answer itself.
- Stuff that require digging, like 1-hour or more. Those are interesting, but again, I have my own issues that require 1+ hour research that I could spend my time on. I know not everyone is doing it for the points, but I didn't feel like the transaction is worth it. The knowledge I'd gain from researching a topic I don't currently care about to answer a random question might seem valuable (and it may be), but I think it's somewhat similar to the value of watching those short "educational" youtube videos, you feel like you learned something, but 2 days later you basically forget the whole thing. Maybe it's just me.
- Stuff that you're the/a authority on, like if it's your language/library/framework/toolkit. I'm not either of those, but if I was, I don't think I'd be able to spend time answering random questions on a site I don't control. I'd probably feel much more compelled to give lengthy answers on the tracker/forum/qa site of the project itself.
There's no room in these interpretations for someone selflessly spending their own time and effort to help just for the sake of helping. Reddit mods are particularly exacting on this subject.
All too often the answer to a question was :"this question doesn't suit our website" or "this question has been answered before" or "this question is below our prestige level".
If the system was smart enough to answer that a question had been answered before, it should have been smart enough to merge the current question with the old question, or at a minimum, to just link the current question to the older question's answers.
If a question wasn't relevant to the website, then a blanket 'offshoring' of the question to something like 'Let me Google that for you' would be better than a plain blank wall.
As nicolas_t said above, "I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site.". My sentiments exactly.
1. Wikipedia
2. Stackoverflow and the Stackexchange network
Stackoverflow has it's problems (often similar to Wikipedia) and everyone might have been treated unfair sometimes. But despite these issues the content makes it still the second most valuable webpage on the web. I donate regularly for Wikipedia and if it would be possible I would also donate for Stackoverflow.
I've had questions answered by them myself and it was a good help.
What's stopping people from making up a new site? Call it heappointer, simple markdown editor and tagging system. Cache the heck out of it through cloudflare and your operating costs wouldn't be very large.
And still, when I ask a question, someone sometimes either requires a working example or show effort done to solve the problem myself.
Even when I explained in the question why I cannot show an example, or that I simply do not know where to go.
And then it gets closed because opinion based or whatever.
This is when I wish the closer to always, for his all life, need to get up to get the remote after having comfortably installed themselves in the couch with all their food on the knees.
I like answers such as "look up jhhyhgffg" (the concept that explains my question), ideally with a short comment. It does not always need to be working code.
Normal programming often can be kind of "figured out" piecemeal, most often even complex APIs can be figured out with a small introduction and some examples. Graphics is much more conceptually heavy. If you don't know the basics, you will be flailing. IMO that makes posting a link to a basic tutorial a very good thing when it's clear the user is flailing. Even if they get this one thing working, it's not reallyhelpong if they still don't "get it".
What? Purely anecdotal I suppose, but I have found immensely helpful information in comments on SO.
Now I when I see high rep users I instantly think they are out-of-touch power users who are completely unaware of how average developers use the site.
Not all true things are without conflict. This isn't maths. This is sociology. What people want is sometimes in conflict.
The mods wanted "no spam" and they lost a content provider because they hung up on the issue. I think both sides lost, but I'd do what the submitter did.
When something becomes big enough the quality starts degrading rapidly as a function of complacency.
The people who actually want to be moderators are the people you don't want to be moderators. And so it goes. I wonder where greener pastures are. I miss SO as well.
I barely used it a handful of times last year, compared to it's christening year when I was on there asking/answering about 5 times a day.
What's really nuts is I'd wager the majority of the "moderators" have contributed zero technical knowledge to the conversation.
Content moderation is very hard to do, and if you try to outsource it to the crowd this is what you get.
It was the gamification that got me: watching that score grow, and getting reward tags.. But at some point I just got "saturated" by it and quit cold turkey.
HELLO I make them open ended because I don't want the answerers to be restricted.
If they can do that, your answer should be deleted and not because you are LGTB. Because it probably has nothing to do with the question.
Not the top guys (Oleg is awesome, if grumpy at times), but folks with points in the mid thousands.
"Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood cited Experts-Exchange's poor reputation and paywall as a motivation for creating Stack Overflow." [1]
Seems like these things follow a natural life cycle. Maybe 2021 is the year a new hope emerges? :-) By the way, are there any lesser known contenders already?