Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow | Hacker News Reader

Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow

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37 pointsdlp21145 comments

SO aims at a simple Q&A format. I wonder why people expect it to yield "great" questions. A lot of actually fruitful topics are closed for provoking discussion.

   "... as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.   Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."

Stackoverflow is not an intellectual forum, its a simple question-and-answer database with debate being discouraged, and a very limited space for the kind of questions allowed. This is by design and its great, because finally when asking a question on XML, you are NOT bothered with people starting to discuss whether XML is actually a thing worth considering. But its the same _beneficial_ rules, that in the long run lead to a plattform where people just paste in their error messages and expect other people to dive through those.

I don't see how "not a forum for debate" means "a forum for 'plz email teh codez' posts" in your reckoning. There are many fine questions with right answers that are not open-ended navel-gazing.

The point is that if debate isn't allowed you aren't likely to have higher quality posters than the average for programmers. And the reality is that there are tons of lazy/stupid programmers out there that just want "plz email teh codez".

The forums that I have seen work best at maintaining abnormally high levels of quality posters are ones where the Q&A is effectively secondary to the debate. The reason is that the fun of debating keeps the high quality posters around and answering shitty/repetitive questions.

I think your first conclusion is wrong. From what I have seen, Stack Overflow appears to be fairly well-supplied with quality posters, but they just don't have as many questions as the "plz email teh codez" crowd. The problem isn't that good questions are generally going unanswered, and it isn't even that good and novel questions are in short supply, but that there aren't as many good questions and they're having trouble stemming the tide of bad questions. The disproportionate rise of bad questions is the core problem.

I think So is being overrun with "Help Vampires" ( http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ )

However, the twist with SO is that people looking to inflate their rep actually like help vampires to a certain extent because their questions are usually quick and easy to answer which increases speed at which they can buff their scores.

Combine these two and you get a community where posting hard, reaching, questions with in-depth answers becomes the exception rather than the norm.

The solution to fixing Stack Overflow is ultimately to hide karma points and prevent the distortions it causes. If you take away the external incentives you will hopefully be left with a community who simply help each other.

I've been a StackOverflow user since it started, I've been a member for over 3 years, and I can't comment on an answer because I only have 46 rep. I'm sure I hit the site everyday finding value in it, when I started at my last job they gave me a tour of their Android work and joked it was made by StackOverflow. The site is difficult to use, everywhere I click it says I need n more rep to use a piece of functionality.

If you've been "active" for 3 years then it should have been trivial to build up enough points to do anything you want to do. You have to contribute, not just consume.

When I try to comment I am trying to contribute though. When I've thought I can add value is when I'm blocked by my rep.

I built up 1k in 6 months. Why do you only have 46 rep?...

I think you've inadvertently explained part of the problem here.

The people who have the most influence on SO are not the ones most interested in using it for questions, but the ones most interested in improving their "score". It should be obvious that this outcome is both perverse and extremely difficult to avoid.

Yes, those who run SO need to tune the scoring so that good answers get good scores. But it is hard to beat those who game the system.

1. If you are developer, i recommend you to earn more reputation.

2. Once you gain some reputation, you will understand why `points` are an important factor to use functionality. It is a good step.

3. Not to forget, since the quality of the question is degrading it also means that it is easy to answer questions on these days since the questions are asked in a different way but usually have same answer.

I'm in the same boat. Been a member for years but can't really figure out how to contribute.

All of a sudden I find myself having something of value to add, and I want to post a comment, and it says I can't. So I have to wonder, how do I even get rep if it won't let me add value?

Why not let EVERYONE comment but it hides comments from people with low rep by default. Anyone can view those comments, but people with enough rep can also add points to us low-reppers who just wanted to add a comment.

Just a thought.

It is intentional that new users are steered towards answers instead of comments. SO is a question & answers site and comments are mostly meant for clarifications, not for discussion. This is something that new users that are used to how forums work are not expecting. The hope is that by the time they have 50 reputation, they understand a bit more how comments should be used on the site.

There are additional reasons, the existing moderator tools would not be sufficient to deal with the kind of abuse that would be possible if anyone could post comments, there is simply no meaningful review of new comments on old posts.

And acquiring 50 reputation is generally not hard, that is 10 upvotes on questions, 5 upvotes on answers or 25 suggested edits that improve other posts. You could also earn 200 reputation on any other Stack Exchange site and be able to comment on all of them.

That makes sense, it would be nice if there was a linked site for discussion though. As a lurker my first instinct to dip my toes in the water is to comment on something first.

> everywhere I click it says I need n more rep to use a piece of functionality.

Sorta like HN.

You need to ask questions to earn reputation. When somebody answers, you earn a good chunk. The more engagement your question earns, the more rep you earn. Then you can branch out.

The root cause is the same as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650799 "Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?"

SO has become the go-to site for everyone who thinks they might want to solve a problem using a computer, and really lame, poorly researched questions get asked by people with few incentives to ask good ones.

Seems like instead of rate limiting users ability to ask bad questions, you should rate limit the viewing of bad questions by good answerers. In order to keep up the effort of answering questions, maybe some automation is in order to do best-effort auto answering or collapsing of questions into related ones.

I agree with your first sentence for sure. Another way to implement it would be to avoid showing new questions with no upvotes to many users--only show them to a small sample of users and see if in the first ten minutes the question gets voted up or down to gauge its quality. That way we'd limit the "shotgun" effect of sending crappy questions to thousands of people all at once (we sometimes see 6 or 8 downvotes on a single question before it gets closed or deleted, which implies a ton of people saw it despite that it was crap).

I like it! Would be sorta like A/B testing the questions...

This pattern is so common I'm not sure why it's not implemented more often. It's just like feature flags with incremental rollout except for content.

yeah,like this one : just spotted a few mins ago :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509912/flash-player-err...

I find many super lame questions in the new section "Hot Network Questions" on the right side. When looking for "Related", I'm accidently confronted with banalities such as "How does a piano go out of tune" and lots of stuff from Dungeons & Dragons.

I can see how these specific questions could set a bad precedent for "how to deal with stuff you don't know". The omnipresent cross-promotion could lead to more lameness in general.

I've been using a tampermonkey script [1] to hide "Hot Network Questions". I find them utterly distracting.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/amrtn/3ec581e356a94ef3fa0f

I think Stack Overflow needs to enter a curation phase. There's still lots of gems popping up ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13134825/how-do-functors-... ), but they're so drowned out in the noise. A weekly "best of" for tags I subscribe to - perhaps with bonus points for being featured - would do a bit to boost quality. How would it work though? Have a "curator" role you could gain after a certain point threshold, which allows you to vote for best ofs. . and gain points for consistently accurately suggesting best ofs? If you suggest too much which is never voted for, that counts against you... but if you constantly suggest answers / questions which are featured that counts towards your rep.

Perhaps have a separate "exchange" to achieve this?

100% agree, I even tweeted(https://twitter.com/ppiplewar/status/460199400610856961) this thing few days ago.

On this days, I only answer questions which are worthful and most of the time it falls under `featured` category.

Well, how many "good" questions are there really?

I asked several "good" questions a couple years ago, but it's now been probably 1.5+ years since I've even needed to post a question at all because everything I've needed to know is there (and sometimes in 3 different variations).

Yes and if this is true for most of the knowledgeable users most of the time it's not a mystery if fewer good questions are asked. I suppose a large quantity of bad questions could be due to increased exposure.

Is it really that the volume of poor questions is increasing, or that the volume of good questions is decreasing? I know I gave up on asking questions there a while ago, and I'd like to believe that the questions I did ask were fairly high-quality.

Both, I think. But the curves were somewhat different. The really good questions started trailing off quite some time ago (presumably the low-hanging fruit got picked), but the flood of crap didn't really swell until relatively recently. There are fewer good questions, but there really didn't use to be five or more instances of "How do I make one object talk to another?" every single day. That is a new development.

It's really just a geometric growth problem. I've been a member for 5 years and I feel like it hit it's "Eternal September" a couple years ago. And I'm sure the people who have been a member since the beginning feel like it went to hell around about the time I joined! I've often wished they had an option to filter questions by asker's rep score.

That’s the logical end to "everyone should learn to code". Imagine the same fever happening to painting and we have a paintersoverflow site where people would be asking how to mix primary colors.

I wonder if there might not be some currency buy-in model that would work. Instead of your in-site "cred" getting bumped, maybe that cred is worth something tangible. Maybe in order to buy into the site you have deposit $5 worth of cryptocurrency X and to ask a question you have to "pay" a dollar worth of that currency and those dollars are "credited" based on how the answer/upvote pool decides.

I can think of at least 10 problems with this approach, but I think it might be feasible.

I guess that's the other side of being mainstream - people, who are not perfect users, are using your product too.

Those not perfect users are not only the ones who post questions but also the ones who answer them just for the points. So closing questions which are just copy pasted error messages is solving only half of the problem.

But the other problem is much more subtle. You can't ban (or whatever) someone, who answers questions... Or can you?

I have my gripes with SO but I can't imagine a day without it. The number of views on trivial questions says that finding an answer on SO is easier than the way we document code. If there's supplementary documentation done in a Q&A or FAQ fashion, with the right tweaks to rank up in Google, people would not use SO to ask things like ' how to iterate through a list'.

My theory is that the help vampires have a certain geographic distribution, and they come from cultures where this kind of behavior is accepted.

give us your insight,dont be shy,where you do you think they come from?

Conversely, I've found the answers to be less and less helpful and more rude. Just yesterday I asked a question as I thought my web server was spawning a new port for each request. The response was:

"You are just wrong. There is no port shown in the URLs as the slash after the domain."

He was right, but what is with the need to phrase it that way?

SO saves time, but drives away the expertise: If I need a help in a bigger, complex and not so trivial questions such as what framework to choose (e.g. angular vs backbone), chances are that question will be closed as not relevant. That leave very technical specific questions which are easily answered by references book.

Perhaps, after all this time, there are fewer questions left to ask.

That's my thought.

People who care to do the research probably can find the answer in most cases because it has been asked before.

Leaving the new questions to (generally) be asked by people too lazy to do basic research.

Occasionally I come across a problem that I cannot find an answer to. I post a question that meets SO criteria.

Lately I find that people answer less and less. And those that do take the time, often don't follow up if I come up with additional information.

I dont think "crappy questions" are a problem so much than the inability to filter the crap. With SO being that popular there will always be loads of crap, the issue is as a user i dont have the tools right now to filter crap(questions being downvoted for instance).SO doesnt want to finish like Quora,does it?

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