StackOverflow is full of children | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow is full of children

sethvargo.com

8 pointssethvargo4 comments

StackOverflow - like many popular forums - is a place where a lot of inexperienced people end up spending their time. This is almost a tautology: "pop-forums full people that act inexperienced" end up that way because... inexperienced people end to flock towards popular sites full of like-minded people.

Given that most people will at least try to helpful, you end up with a lot of people re-distributing the bits of knowledge they've learned. This often starts as cargo-cult behavior, and - if left to grow in isolation - it can turn into groupthink[1].

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that some form of moderation or judicial process is needed; if the greater resource is to be saved, the trolls/n00bs/"children" need to restrained so they can't make a mess that pollutes the community. I think this approach fails to address the actual problem: that some people need a lot more education before they can progress past the "inexperienced n00b"/"child" stage.

The mechanics in place at StackOverflow - even with its flaws - can be a very useful tool. If enough people who are experienced (in technical or social areas) spent some time there regularly, the extra role models would help this greater social problem a lot. Answer the same n00b questions over and over is annoying, but that's the kind of effort it takes to maintain a community across generations.

[1] Regardless of what you think of the language itself (or this well-known rant against it), the article "PHP: a fractal of bad design"[2] is a good case-study of what happens if that groupthink is left in isolation far too long.

[2] http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I see this on Reddit, StackOverflow, Youtube, and pretty much every other community site. I'm not sure if it's because there are actual kids posting or socially inept and immature adults.

Either way, the mob mentality is startling and shows me why we need a proper judicial system.

Definitely. I see this a lot, but this one affected me personally, which is why I felt the need to talk about it. I'm not sure where the level of immaturity happens. Maybe it's because we aren't interacting with humans directly?

I suspect a similar hypothesis.

The analogy I like to use is traffic. Imagine any other setting where if you make a minor mistake or go too slowly for someone else, people start yelling and cussing at you.

When in traffic, you can just drive away and odds are you will never interact with the same person again. The whole time your interaction was machine-to-machine rather than human-to-human.

Large, public web sites are quite similar. We don't interact on a human scale, but with a machine. Most of the people we interact with we'll never interact with again.

When you remove face-to-face communication and add a sense of anonymity, you remove a lot of the subtle social forces that normally keep people in check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com