Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of “niceness” on a Q&A site
blog.stackoverflow.com
blog.stackoverflow.com
StackOverflow is a crazy good system for Q&A. Just like in Wikipedia, the problem is no longer trolls - but bureaucracy and pedanticism of the moderators. People are assholes who like power, and I don't think any q&a software can solve this.
Thanks
Also, it seems like mindless rule-following is the definition of etiquette :D
"Etiquette: noun a set of rules for behaving correctly in social situations"
But I do agree about the criticism of the moderators. I also think that there is almost a "Stanford Prison Experiment" level of power-wielding amongst some of the mods. There are examples of someone/me asking a question, and then someone closing it as a dupe, when in fact the question isn't a dupe. It might be superficially similar, but the mods don't take enough time to actually read the question and see if it's a dupe or not. And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it.
But this is the minority of cases for me. For the most part, SO is a completely invaluable tool, and I love it immensely.
I think removing "Thanks" is a bit too abrasive. Maybe 10+ years ago, the NYC subway system tried getting ticketing agents to stop saying "Thanks" because they thought it would make things more efficient, and all it did was piss off the passengers. It's trivial, but there has to be a base level of civility between participants. I get that upvoting is "Thanks", but we're still humans (at this point), and trying to make communication more "efficient" by removing natural human responses makes it too terse, and almost insulting sometimes. It's a small thing, and I think it's better to just leave it in, because it's nice to say "thanks".
Where are these examples? This is the internet. Please provide links.
> And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it.
That's simply not true. Stack Exchange provides a Meta site where you can take up issues with the entire community. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ You can also email the company. They do read your emails.
As for removing "thanks," we really don't recommend doing that if it's the only thing you're going to change. However, it's not supposed to be included, so removing it while making other edits is encouraged.
Here's an example of my question that was closed on serverfault:
http://serverfault.com/questions/342191/performance-of-sql-s...
I specifically asked why my throughout for my database was more than doubling when I decreased the number of vCPUs from 4 to 1. And it was closed as an "exact dupe" of a question asking about how to optimize a VM's performance. There's nothing to optimize in my situation, I had more physical cores than vCPUs, so there was no over-allocation. I get that obviously there must be some contention between the vCPUs, but to double the performance by dropping to a single vCPU? I wouldn't see that type of performance hit on a physical system otherwise multi-process databases wouldn't exist.
I had another question that was arbitrarily closed as a dupe, but I made a comment disputing it, and by some small miracle, the mod removed the dupe status. I can't remember which other question it was at this point since it was modified to remove my comment and the closing. The point is that there is no way to flag the question as being under dispute, and if the moderator decided not to do anything about it, then I couldn't do anything (except post to meta which I just learned today).
EDIT: I posted the wrong link, and just corrected it now.
And then promptly ignore them. Yes, that's beneficial.
Stack Overflow is a great site in very many ways, but these criticism are well founded and they do make it less than what it could be. But face it, Joel and Jeff, et al. have their minds made up about how things work and they aren't terribly interested in what any of us think.
That is, of course, their right, since it's their site. But let's not pretend that they're actually interested in, or responsive to, community feedback.
Your argument that they're not responsive to community feedback would appear to be invalid.
Neither am I. Nor do I particularly care. You're free to believe what you want to believe. This isn't a formal debate and I don't owe you, or anybody else, links, citations or anything else.
I tried to merely ask why an item that was very much in a gray area was closed without a reason given more than a year after I posted it and accepted an answer. The Meta "police" were mostly unhelpful, provided answers without actually reading the item in question, and did down-vote driveby's on the question even though it was already closed at that point!
A couple mods were nice, but overall it was like trying to ask for a complaint form in a police office:
>>It will leave even less room in the question preview so that we have more difficulty gauging what a question consists of by reading the preview.<<
Sounds like it can be easily solved by changing the preview algorithm to filter out words like "Hello" and "Thanks".
>>It takes time to read and parse through those questions when I am trying to spend my time more efficiently reading through the actual question and figuring out how to appropriately answer it. If I have to start reading all the little side comments and snarky humor inserted in there it detracts from the overall message.<<
I can understand about the side comments and snarky humor. But how long does it take to read the word "thanks," exactly?
>>If this is supposed to be a website which is servicing more than just the primary author, we need to think about how we construct messages so that they appear more clearly to those searching on google for questions that match their own. If I am looking for a solution for question X, I want to find someone who had the same problem, not their short autobiography and formalities before getting to that actual question.<<
Again, editing autobiographies and pitiful attempts at rumor is totally fine. Editing out "thanks" however changes the tone of the post, and the tone of the site in general. When reading a question, it is important to keep in mind that there is a human on the other hand. Having salutations and thanks in there helps convey this.
But SO isn't that; don't treat it like that. SO questions may well be read by thousands of people. The "thanks" is useless to 99% of them. It's like signatures. Sure it seems neat when you do it once. But when literally thousands of people have to read it on thousands of posts...please stop!
SO is powered by people and people appreciate appreciation.
This is what I often do. It is a tolerated behaviour, even if some people aren't thrilled with it.
And I can't explain how fucking weird it is that some people collect thimbles or attend dog shows.
pedantry.
It was edited (not by me, just to be clear) to fix some minor typos, not for content. Here is the diff: http://superuser.com/posts/419167/revisions.
I guess having "hz" edited into "Hz" might strike some people as being "anal", but I think it's a very decent improvement. Of course, I'm not trying to imply anything about Mr Carmack's knowledge about unit symbols, I just think he wrote his answer too quickly to care.
I consider it a feature that someone else can step in and clean it up a bit.
It wasn't on SO, but in any case, all the edits did were fix spelling/capitalization; why would that be bad?
> why would that be bad?
Because I don't want some bozo messing around with something I wrote. If he wants to add something he should write a comment but not change my original contribution. I see this as a personal attack.
"All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit and help us make it so! [..] If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you"
If someone is fixing spelling and grammar and other things like formatting for linking to keywords etc., I think it is very useful. I don't know why you would think that such edits are personal attack. This is the Internet, you need to relax a bit.
SO is mostly information-based. They are not so interested in friendly civilities, greeting each other, asking "how do you do", and so on. Neither is SO a substitute for regular conversation, where topics meander, talk goes in all directions, and new ideas spark, among so many other qualities/possibilities. It is question, answer, and building up respect. So I don't see the problem with removing the personal component. If you really wanted to, you can just contact another SO-er for thanking them.
Now that you've stopped using SO, what do you use instead, franzus? SO is a really impressive site, pedantic mods be damned. Same with Wikipedia. You'll be hard-pressed to find alternatives that try to maintain the same level of quality across as wide a berth of topics (anything, really) as SO.
Many times I have found myself needing to know about a technology with which I’ve had little experience. If I have time to spend learning something new, and if I think I’ll use the technology in the future, then I will enjoy learning about it in depth, but often times, working against a deadline, I have no time to learn, or perhaps I do not expect to ever use that technology again.
An example of the latter would be my limited experience with the Perl programming language. I recall when I was working for Danforth Diamond in 2005. I had to modify some of the old Perl scripts they had on their server. I spent a week working with Perl, and it was the only week that I have ever worked with Perl. I would have loved to have been able to quickly hire my own private consultant for all of maybe 20 minutes, to ask some basic questions about the language. As it was, I wasted days tracking down information via Google, and reading tutorials that did not quite answer the exact question that I had in my head.
My brain fought against me – it knew that I was not planning to work with Perl again, so it was resistant to learning it in the first place. I was stuck in a situation where I had to read through multiple articles about strings and escaping and how to handle variables inside of strings – many wasted hours. My life would have been much easier if I could have turned to someone who had a lot of experience with Perl, and handed them $20 for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of their time, to be allowed to fire away with questions like, “How do I put a variable in a heredoc string?” and gotten instant answers, answers that were tailored to me, answers that gave me exactly the information that I wanted, and nothing superfluous.
Hoping to get fast answers to my questions, I started posting on various forums. I have sometimes gotten fantastic assistance from various programmers on these forums. One of the greatest things about the Internet is how much people are generally willing to help one another for free. If you are trying to learn a programming language such as Java, it is surprising how helpful people will be on sites such as Java Ranch. And if you are trying to get answers to your questions about WordPress, it is wonderful how much good information you can get over at the WordPress forums.
And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for funtionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned.
We all seem a little stupid when we are learning a new skill. It doesn’t matter how smart we are. We ask what the experts think of as painfully dumb questions. Asking those dumb questions is essential to our learning process, but it is understandable that answering such questions may seem tiring to those who know a great deal about a given subject.
Hoping to get some high quality answers about Perl, I signed up for Experts Exchange. At the time it cost $9.99 a month (as I said, this was back in 2005). Nowadays it costs $12 a month. The fact that it costs money seems to introduce a level of seriousness to the conversations that is often absent on the free forums. And yet, Experts Exchange suffers a fatal flaw – none of the money goes to the people who answer the questions! The corporation, Experts Exchange, keeps all the money to itself! This limits the usefulness of the site. What I needed was an easy way to hire an expert for all of maybe 20 minutes, and give them some money, so they would take my dumb questions seriously.
For that reason, we decided to make a site where programmers could pay money to get fast, high quality help with their questions.
I have found that even small amounts of money radically changes the social dynamic. Even $1 changes the social dynamic. As long as the advice is free, those giving the advice feel free to show scorn for what they feel are stupid questions. And yet, as soon as even a tiny amount of money is offered, the dynamic changes around: the answers are respectful.
But then, after we launched our first site, we were confronted with another problem: as soon as the askers are allowed to offer money, they are the ones who become scornful. The askers can be rude or ignore community norms.
We asked ourselves, how could we balance the power of the askers and the answerers, to achieve a perfect balance?
Our first thought was, "What if we allow the askers and the answerers to vote on the money, and we average out everyone's vote?" We could impose the rule that answerers were not allowed to vote money to themselves. But wait, we realized, that doesn't work either: the answerers could just simply create a dozen dummy accounts, and use 11 fake accounts to vote money to their 1 real account.
So how could this be achieved?
After some careful thought, we decided the way to do this was to restrict voting to those experts who had earned some money answering lots of questions. If it took effort to gain the right to vote, then people could not easily establish fake accounts and vote money to themselves.
We launched our first site, which is narrowly focused on just WordPress:
The site gets moderate action, maybe $500 or $600 in questions a week. Over the last 2 years it has seen over $50,000 go through it.
Next month we will start offering this software as a hosted service, so anyone can open up their own site.
Isn't this desirable, at times? Do you believe every question submitted to a site like SO is value added? Even stuff like obvious calls for homework help ("I need to write a singly linked list in C++. I haven't tried yet, can someone show me how to do it?")
Several people have written to us and asked permission to re-use our software for sites focused on homework help. There are already many, many sites where students can hire tutors, but most of those sites involve hiring a tutor for some hours, and paying some hourly rate. The gamble that some people have talked to us about is the possibility that some students would be willing to pay $1 or $2 or $5 or $10 for quick help with specific questions about math, science, or other subjects. Especially at the college level, it becomes possible to imagine some students wanting quick help with a specific question, or possibly needing help with a concept they having trouble understanding, for instance, perhaps some complicated math problem.
So, certainly, I think homework questions are potentially a great area where this software might be able to do a great deal of help.
The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they should change over time based on the changing environment.
What I didn't have was an answer to provide, and so I moved on.
I'm not sure the tools given are effective enough for this problem.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp...
The "rule" is that you must show some sort of effort before you ask a question. I was honest and said that I didn't do anything, but I did make my question well-defined, and I thought that it was useful, in general.
Anyway, if that's their rule, that's their rule. Personally, I'm interested in seeing a "Wikipedia of Programming", where all good questions exist with good answers.
For example, "How do I do X in Java|Perl|Scala|Haskell|Elisp|...?"
I think a site with enough questions would be the perfect site to take someone from novice to guru. The big thing missing from StackOverFlow, IMHO, is that there are lots of questions for popular topics like Java (280k)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java
Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp
StackOverFlow doesn't want to be the site that connects the dots, which isn't their business model. I think another site could fill the void.
It's a "I tried to solve the problem this way, but it doesn't quite work; can you show me what I'm doing wrong?" or a "I solved the problem this way, but it seems really bad; is there a better way?"
I agree, asking a question without demonstrating an earnest attempt at solving or understanding it shows to me that you didn't care enough about it to even attempt it. Given that, why should I care enough about it to attempt it?
Btw, I added a downvote to your question. It really is in poor form.
I don't know what good this rule brings to the site. Sure in a lot of cases it's better for the person who asks the question to try and solve the problem themselves, but for the site itself it's better the more questions and answers there are to read.
The original question could be changed to be more generic, such as: How can I write elisp code that transforms a selected region of text? or something similar.
What I would like to see instead of questions being closed is just a banner at the top of the question saying: Warning: This question may not meet the standards of the site due to [which rule it broke] and let the people searching decide what weight to give it.
All this said, I think the way the question was handled was quite polite and proper given the rules.
Not sure what is your complaint here. Of course there are few elisp questions compared to Java questions: there are so many fewer elisp programmers! And from what I see most of the elisp questions do get answers, i.e. they aren't neglected. In my experience the same holds for Haskell questions.
That said, I don't think your question should have been downvoted and blocked, and I upvoted it just in case.
I am definitely surprised that you're still whining after that. If you want the reputation points instead of the answer to your question, you are the problem!
A very common experience for me is to be searching for a solution to a problem. Follow a link to Stack Overflow to find a page where somebody has asked the question and been told they are asking the question in the wrong place.
Considering that before "Stack Exchange" it was a useless site called "Experts Exchange," it's an improvement.
He had written it, about 30 years earlier.
This isn't an MBA program, and HN/SE/reddit/etc are not networking arenas. They're discussion boards.
It's funny how easy it is to lose sight of that (I've certainly done it before). A discussion is only a discussion when information flows between two parties, not when it is is broadcast into the void.
The worst part is that since the other person didn't actually listen to you, they have no reason to believe they are ignorant.
Thus, my greater point is: when you have decided to answer, you should give the best answer you can reasonably give in the time you want to use. It wont hurt you and will improve the world a little bit.
And it's not like being "nice" precludes one from being direct, honest, or straightforward. I'm really not seeing the advantage of failing to show at least a baseline level of common courtesy and kindness to people, even if it is just a discussion board.
It sort of depends on how you view the dick<->nice spectrum. I see 'nice' as friendlier than 'baseline common courtesy'. And if that type of nice is what you are trying to achieve, it's going to take a few extra words here and there.
I haven't heard that sort of insult since I disconnected from the online gaming community. It's not appropriate in most any context, including this one.
Just because you're happy with terse robotic communication doesn't mean you should make everyone talk robotically, especially when you're changing their payment for an answer (which was likely upvotes, selected answers and sincere appreciation) for what was perhaps a protracted effort on the part of the answerer.
It's rudeness equivalent of yelling "IRRELEVANT" over people small-talking at a technical talk.
You can be human and still not be nice.
Also, I found this strange:
>But in the end, this sort of navel-gazing misses the point: we’re not here to pat each other on the back and hand out gold stars ...
Isn't this basically what SO is?
/ob pedantic