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Comment by radagaisus | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow has been overrun by anal people. Internet power attracts this kind of douchebags like moths to light. If you write 'Hello,' in questions the system will automatically delete it, if you - god forbid - write 'Thanks!' other users will edit your question to remove it. I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own.

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.

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Actually, that makes sense to me.. SO tries very hard not to be a forum and therefore everything that resembles footers, signatures etc. should be left out. On SO you thank people by up-voting and accepting answers, not commenting. Questions should be as "clean" as possible, they are not emails or letters. They should be free of that type of "social etiquette". Or, actually, when I think about it, the social etiquette on SO is to leave all those niceties out.

Thanks

But does that really qualify as social etiquette or is it just mindless rule following? Honest question.

I think it is.. Remember reading about it (lost the link) and thinking that it made a lot of sense.

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"

No etiquette is not mindless there are reasons that go beyond, "StackOverflow founder said and it was so."

I absolutely LOVE stackoverflow. I've been working on my own for about 9 months, and without SO, there would have been zero chance I would be able to make any progress.

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".

> There are examples...

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.

Enforced rudeness is weird.

I've heard this complaint before, and I kind of understand where it comes from, but removing politeness isn't the same as rudeness. I'm not replacing "thanks" with "suck it." I'm just removing "thanks." It really doesn't belong where most people put it (as part of a question or posted separately as an answer).

I didn't know the meta.stackoverflow.com site existed. They should probably make note of it when someone's question gets closed, so that the person asking the question knows they can dispute it. There isn't any indication from the FAQ that you can dispute things like questions being closed by posting to the meta site.

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.

Ha! A user that's not logged in can't even get to your ServerFault link. They're silently redirected to the duplicate. Even more frustrating (to you, I imagine) is that your question was closed unilaterally by a moderator -- the same moderator that asked the question that it's redirecting to.

> They do read your emails.

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.

There are over 5000 status-completed posts on Meta. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/status-comple...

Your argument that they're not responsive to community feedback would appear to be invalid.

Those are mostly bug-fixes and feature requests, though. That's not really what I was talking about. When it comes to policy issues (like this whole point about "enforced rudeness") or anything procedural, they really seem to have their minds pretty well made up from what I've seen. I'm not going to waste time chasing up links and what-not, but when I've seen Joel or Jeff respond to that sort of thing, the tone has universally been something like "this is the way we do things here, deal with it." And that's if they decide to grace one with a reply at all.

I'm not sure why anyone would listen to you when you make a sweeping accusation and refuse to back it up with a link or evidence of any kind.

I'm not sure why anyone would listen to you when you make a sweeping accusation and refuse to back it up with a link or evidence of any kind.

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.

Of course, this ends up very similar to wikipedia, where you have to learn how to complain correctly, or the Meta post also gets closed as a duplicate.

Yes, that's going to be true anywhere. There are 30,000 posts on Meta already, so it's a good idea to search first. Valid complaints are paid attention though.

It's a hard problem though. Your average user is going to use the "meta" site very rarely, while the power users are going to live in it.

> Stack Exchange provides a Meta site where you can take up issues with the entire community.

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8v7lF5ttlQ

You still have not provided a rational explanation as to why removing "thanks" is encouraged.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/2950/1288

Those reasons are terrible, and are easily refuted. From reading the discussion as a whole, theLet's go over them one by one.

>>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.

Taking "thanks" out of a conversation between exactly two people is very different. It's very personal and can easily be seen as rude.

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!

When someone takes the time to help me with a problem. I will thank them.

SO is powered by people and people appreciate appreciation.

And the mechanism for appreciation on Stack Overflow is not thanks. It's +1 votes and selected answers. Those appreciate mechanisms drive the site and ensure the person who helped you helps many other people.

And there is no reason to remove that social lubrication because you're of a different opinion. If they're not doing the +1 and selected answer, then tell them to, but don't stop them from being decent human beings as well, even if you'd prefer the world that way.

I give my thanks through comments. I think that makes sense given their model -- the question and answer are the straightforward facts about the problem intended for future googlers and posterity. The comments are little meta-data intended for the asker and answerers.

If someone posts a helpful answer to your question, it's fine to say "thanks" in a comment (and the mods will not remove that.)

Leave a comment, then delete it after you're confident the recipient will have seen it. (A few hours or days depending on activity.) You and they get to feel good, but the clutter isn't left around for other users.

This is what I often do. It is a tolerated behaviour, even if some people aren't thrilled with it.

I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own.

And I can't explain how fucking weird it is that some people collect thimbles or attend dog shows.

> pedanticism of the moderators.

pedantry.

The best thing was a post by John Carmack. It had a "edited by <some SO poweruser>" next to it ...

You mean this one? http://superuser.com/a/419167

It wasn't on SO, but in any case, all the edits did were fix spelling/capitalization; why would that be bad?

Disclaimer: I stopped using SO a while ago because of the uber pedantic mods and the overall unfriendly atmosphere there.

> 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.

If someone re-writes an entire sentence, I can see how you may feel it as a personal attack.

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.

Yeah, franzus is certainly taking it a bit too personal. SO is interested in the preservation of knowledge for future visitors. I don't know why this isn't in your best interest, but it is certainly what SO focuses on and gets, to a good degree.

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.

Then you're right to stay off SO:

"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"

http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing

Pull requests for edits, perhaps?

It is actually like that. Any new comer cand edit and "submit a pull request" that people with more rep can accept.

And the original poster can always roll back the edit too. There's a standing order to respect the original poster's edit if it comes down to an edit war, even if it sucks.

This is (probably) the answer in question: http://superuser.com/a/419167.

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.

The funny thing is that you can't just fix typos like hz to Hz because it's under the update character count, so people end up making other changes just to get around the rule. A bit silly, that.

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