Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow | Hacker News Reader

Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow

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46 pointsksajadi26 comments

The lag between question and answers are getting longer in Stackoverflow and this was long coming.

I wonder if this increased responsed time is uniform across all tags. I work on ML implementations (SML/NJ and Manticore), and I've basically given up on answering questions on SO because every time I go there every question has been answered within a few hours. Even the difficult questions, and -- especially on SML/NJ -- often by people with no relationship to the implementation team who have clearly spent serious time spleunking the depths of our source tree to answer it.

Hard to tell without some statistical data. My tags may also be odd because I suspect our user base is skewed towards a mass of novices (intro to CS students) and a small number of experts, with very few people in the middle.

That was my same experience with F#. Not too many questions, but several folks that answered right away (some from the F# team itself).

There probably has been an increase over most tags, but I strongly doubt that it's uniform. If you're at all interested, there's a SEDE query that shows which tags have the most unanswered questions (by raw count and proportion of questions asked) that you can use to find tags to follow that need more attention.

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1320/unanswere...

At least one problem is that overzealous moderators seem to be clamping down on every tiny little deviation from perfection.

A thread, an old thread on Stackoverflow, was linked from HN the other day, and was in fact now dead, but it was closed as not appropriate, two or so years after being opened, closed by a flock of moderators, for some utterly spurious reason. I believe it was marked (my paraphrase) as 'may cause discussion, closed as not appropriate'.

I can't speak for other people, but since the rise and rise of moderation like this, I am much less motivated to post or answer questions on Stackoverflow.

How is this even slightly related to the problem of hard questions not getting answered? Stack Overflow isn't designed for the kind of questions that frequently get closed as "not constructive." There are plenty of other places on the internet to have discussions.

Interesting, seeing that these /overzealous/ moderators do not actually browse the 2M+ questions. They respond to flags that are brought to their attention. Alot of these old questions are not bumped to the front page unless they get heavy traffic and when they do, new users take it upon themselves to answer the question. Thus resurfacing an old historic question which will be closed, but not deleted. The information is still there.

These are users flagging questions. Whether they are overzealous or not is a next question altogether. Moderators respond to flags not perfection. If 10 users flag a question as not constructive because of the new scope, then the moderators must listen to the community. The community at one time accepted these questions, now based on discussion in meta.stackoverflow.com , they don't. Communities change over time.

Also a flock of moderators cannot close a question. Ideally one. What you may have seen as a flock could be one of the following options

* 1 moderator (his/her vote is binding) * 1-4 users + 1 moderator (remember a moderator vote is binding) * 5 users

These users are ordinary community users not moderators. If their decision was wrong to close a question, it will be reopened by 5 other /regular/ users.

Additionally it would help to show these example questions that you feel were closed justly so that a /community/ user not a mod can tell you why it was closed or what chance it has to be opened.

So if you can reply with the question that was closed wrongly, maybe some of us /ordinary/ users can help you.

Otherwise I feel your accusations towards moderators are misdirected as most times these questions are closed by regular users just like you and me.

Solution: The longer a question goes unanswered, the more points you aught to get for answering it.

It needs to be coupled with question votes, as it would be too easy to game by writing a terrible question with a false account, letting it sit for a long time, then answering it with your real account.

That would incentivize waiting to post an answer. That's definitely not desirable.

Except that someone else could answer while you are waiting.

Now it's a dilemma. I can just write up my answer and wait to post it until someone else posts, maximizing the amount of reputation I'd get for the same answer. If everyone does the same, the net outcome is a longer waiting period to get answers to questions. I'd rather keep game theory out of it.

A possible solution: When someone answers, the karma clock is "reset", so it is then based on the time since the last answer given.

Snap! That's a good idea. :)

My problem with Stackoverflow has been that for the majority of the questions I've asked, I'm more of an expert in the subject matter than the people answering the question. Most of the answers I receive are to the wrong question, or are an answer that I specifically mentioned in the question as not being viable.

Examples? I'm a moderator and can delete non-answers. I also have a lot of rep to burn, so I can place bounties on good questions that aren't adequately answered.

The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user attention. That is, if I spend some of my attention on your problem, the system will remember it the next time I have a question.

This is what I am doing with http://www.TwoToReal.com: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.

I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.

Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".

That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while.

E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/

I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.

That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO, but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!

Well, SO does have a way of dealing with it through the use of bounties. As far as I'm aware, it requires the person asking the question to give up some rep though. Maybe there should be some internal bounty on all unanswered questions after a period of time.

Most questions that don't get answered are just poorly phrased questions that either don't get enough attention or aren't really answerable. These eventually get deleted. I like the current bounty system because any user with enough reputation can put a bounty on any other user's question. That means a human has to look at it and deem it worthy of a bounty, which I think is better than automatically bumping questions based on age.

what I really like about stackoverflow is that it is very well designed to be a permanent, constantly accreting repository of useful information. I've even managed to answer one of my own questions by posting it, and then noticing a useful fact in an answer to one of the "related questions" in the sidebar (and this was after a lot of unsuccessful googling first).

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