We joke about "Copying & Pasting from Stack Overflow". We commiserate with the countless hordes who have been shunned by the high-rep elites fo...
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Regardless that I've got down votes on valid questions like this, this, and this
Marking duplicate questions is a good thing (the idea itself).
Down voting questions that are literally asking for nothing but "do my work for me" is a good thing too.
Commenting on questions to get more info before answering is another good thing.
The problem is not in these features, maybe the problem is merely with people abusing those features.
I certainly agree with all three of those points, at least for the most part.
I don't think commenting should go away.
I think flagging a duplicate needs to NOT close the question. Often, further conversation or additional answers are justified.
Downvoting can be useful in theory, but again, there's no accountability. We should have flags for things that are provably bad, and simply withhold upvotes for the rest.
The problem with downvotes is basically...
They're anonymous signs of disapproval, which tend to bring out the worst in people. (Mob mentality)
They have no attached explanation, so no one can learn from them. (Accompanying comments are not required, and are even vehemently discouraged by some elite factions on StackOverflow.)
There is no way to implement accountability. They can be habitually misused, and nothing can be done.
A flag, on the other hand, is not anonymous, has full accountability (it can be rejected), and has accompanying helpful explanation.
As for the duplicate question thing. If questions could be merged somehow into some kind of subject umbrella that would help.
I hate having a question marked duplicate and go the the linked question and it doesn't have the answer needed.
So do you follow the advice on SO for that circumstance? Which is to ask a new question, in which you can explain that the duplicate to your previous question didn't provide an answer because...
Unfortunately, sometimes that's when your new question is marked as a dupe of your previous question, and you get flagged for spam.
Not making it up.
Those 3 question have only upvotes.. just saying :)
...which begs the question, were the downvoters removed from the network? I know they're always having to break up illegal voting rings.
So, this is a good thing that SO takes care about unfair downvotes, right? Or am I missing you?
It's a good, but it's not enough. The only time they care about downvotes is when there is a provably organized effort by a group of people to attack (or support) targeted individuals through voting. The daily, individual abuses of the system have always been altogether ignored.
BTW, this is just the aurora of DEV community... Meaning the upvotes came from here since I posted the links here.
So...we've become an accidental voting ring? o.O
(JK)
Yeah 😆
One thing that SO desperately needs is a way to "update" an answer. The correct (or best-practice) way to center a
<div>10 years ago is not the best way to do it now. An easy way to accomplish this would be to weigh upvotes based on how recent they are. More recent = more weight. An answer that's been receiving more votes lately should appear nearer the top than an old answer that received more votes a long time ago.They already had that feature. Just some questions were only valid at that time, so that the answer doesn't need to update, just leave them there as a historical reference. Some other questions, if you found an other answer recently, be nice and give your answer. If the question's author is still active, he will update the answer flag. Otherwise, users will upvote your answer when they find it useful for them and moderator will base on that to update the answer flag.
That's why, when searching SO for answers, I always look at the dates, and take that into account. A mechanism automatically downgrading outdated answers will be either very sophisticated, or very inaccurate.
And, regrettably, sometimes we have to keep the code compatible with MSIE...
That's what I've always believed, but that exact proposal was shot down multiple times by the Meta community, to the tune of "We have the RIGHT [waving angry fist] to downvote whomever we want, whenever we want, without having to give an accounting for it." Someone said almost exactly that to me in one such conversation on Meta, minus the angry fist. He got a lot of upvotes on that response, too. That's when I concluded the core SO community actually values downvoting as a harassment tool, and doesn't want to lose that power. Any other use of DVs would fit in nicely with some simple accountability.
As someone whose job description is CEO (as in "responsibilities", not "paycheck), it's not as easy as it sounds. People think management is the easiest thing in the world: like you said, "just hear people," but the difficulty comes when everyone has different views, and they're all shouting over each other...which is exactly what StackOverflow Meta is most of the time.
Running something as big as StackOverflow takes a solid understanding of programmer culture, human psychology and sociology, and communication. None of those subjects are particularly cut-and-dry. You try things, discover they don't work, and then adjust your approach. Over and over.
DEV is amazing, and I've been incredibly blessed to have been involved pretty deeply as a member somewhat early on. I was invited to be one of the first community moderators (an honor I still haven't wrapped my head around), so I've been a part of a number of discussions about site policies. It isn't simple. The tremendous amount of discussion, consideration, and experimentation that has gone into getting DEV to this point is mind-boggling. I have massive respect for @ben, @jess, and @michaeltharrington! Their jobs are not easy.
With all that said, I think the fact StackOverflow got this bad shows that Spolsky and the rest of the leadership missed some major red flags. I don't know why, nor will I try to guess. But I can understand why Spolsky stepped down. He has no idea how to dig them out of the hole they're in, and in fact, doing so may be utterly impossible at this point.
Seems like you and me are using different StackOverflows. I don't see the community "dumping on" questions that "aren't puzzling to an expert". Questions where the greatest puzzle is what the author is actually asking, however, or the "do me homework for me" kind, however... well, that's a different story. Your observation on the comments being "nothing but trash can fire half the time", can be reconciled with my own experience of SO only by introducing the auxiliary theorem: "the Python community is waaay more vicious than the JS community".
As for downvoting - it isn't free (at least on the answers). When I downvote your answer, we both lose rep points. That mechanism in itself discourages downvoting on a whim. I don't get downvotes often, but when I do, it's a rare occurence when I have reasons to think "It's a perfectly valid solution and someone's being a jerk".
Upvoting of the "elite" and downvoting of the "peons" even if their answers are correct? Again, not my observation. I see, however, technically correct answers with negative votes when they're third or fifth copy of the same exact solution. If you're about to post an answer to a question that already has one, yours should bring something original - otherwise, what's the point?
Many a time I saw someone post exactly what I was about to post (and what I'd even started typing) - a little frustrating, yes, but the reasonable thing to do was to click on "Discard", upvote their answer, and move on.
As I said to another commenter, I'm glad you've had a different experience. This is based on about ten years of being a part of that community, as well as the experiences of many people I've mentored and worked with.
As someone who spent a lot of time in the review queues, I regularly flagged to close those sorts of questions. I'm not even remotely referring to those. I'm talking about good, well-structured questions that some of the "cool kids" decided was just "too obvious" (to them) to be worthy of existing, and so they attacked by all means possible. You'll notice in the comments on this article, I'm not the only one who has seen that.
As I already mentioned in another comment, JS is indeed different, partially because you haven't "run out of questions" in that ecosystem yet, and TMTOWTDI is unavoidable. Yet, interestingly, the Python community as a whole all but disavows StackOverflow, both for the rampant inaccuracy and the unhealthy social dynamics.
Meanwhile, I've encountered the same first-hand in relation to C++, C, and ActionScript, not counting the typical patterns of behavior I observed in many other tags through my helping to clear the review queues. At one point, I was spending 1-3 hours a day in the queues. I was actually watching these behaviors become a norm.
When you have tens of thousands of reputation points,
-1means absolutely nothing. So, in effect, it is free if you're an elite. It only costs something if you have little reputation to spend.Downvoting questions, of course, is always free, so it provides a convenient, anonymous way to harass newcomers. And yes, it happens regularly. I lost count of the "first post" instances I encountered in the queues which were fully qualified as good questions (well structured, clear, not a duplicate), but it was downvoted heavily anyway.
Agreed, but again, not what I'm talking about. What's further, sometimes the non-popular user posts first, but when the elite user comes along and posts the same content, the less-popular user is downvoted. This was something I, again, saw happening more and more via my work in the review queues. That phenomenon was half of the reason I stopped ever trying to answer anything.
So, I'm glad your experience has been better. StackOverflow is a big place, and as I said in my other comment, it's perfectly possible not to notice the bullies on the jungle gym from the swings.
As I agree with part of this, I think you are only complaining and alternative is a joke. I cannot find anything literally on dev.to even now. Amount of questions in the stack overflow is so humongous that it is not even possible that such tool like dev.to can be any alternative. For the argument that you cannot just start on StackOverflow because you loose as a new user is also a false statement. I had start to play with it about 3 years ago, and I just pushed hard on the beginning ( like 3k in the first year), now I have 8k+, not a big thing, but for sure it proves that you can start there and literally help a lot of devs. Also never felt that there are votes for users with better reputation.
Next point, no duplicated questions - this is a problem, but I dont see a way to maintain 1000+ questions like - how to convert number to string in JS.
No Down votes - this is a good point, and I agree, I had this situation few times, that for no reason I was knocked out by some minuses.
Stack has many problems, but they are social not technical ones. Yes, people answer mostly because of gamification, because they want to have nice scores. But this is normal, human are like that, they need some reward for the effort. Sorry I don't believe system without gamification will have any engagement from the community.
You should check out this website called DEV.to. Somehow they have regular engagement from the community without any form of a gamification. :P
(Excuse the sarcasm...that was too hilarious to pass up. You have to admit it's an ironic statement considering.)
I think you're exaggerating quite a bit. While all you describe happens to some extent as expected (many people on the internet are impolite d**** and the SO community is big enough to make matters worse), in my perception it's not as bad, as you describe it to be.
What I personally don't like is that they don't allow for opinion based questions about best practises (e.g. what's the best approach to ...) even though many of those still existing are very popular. I think this is an area, despite all the flaws of a voting system used by humans introduces, the system could really shine.
I'm just describing my own decade of experiences on the platform, combined with the experiences of people I've mentored and helped over the years. It hasn't been pretty, no exaggeration.
Maybe for someone frequenting different tags than I did, it would look different? StackOverflow is certainly big enough that one can't necessarily see all the bullies on the jungle gym from the swings. ;)
You make an interesting point. I mostly spend my time with JavaScript/TypeScript. Maybe it's less bad for those?
You know, that would actually make sense! JavaScript is a very wibbly-wobbly language (so many subtleties), and the frameworks are constantly shifting around, so y'all haven't run out of questions yet. And maybe y'all never will! There's also likely to be more respect for alternative solutions, since There's More Than One Way To Do It (because everyone is using a different stack).
I spent a lot of time in C++, C, Python, and ActionScript 3.0, among others. The problem definitely seems more acute over there.
A troll is someone who breaks site rules habitually, often just for the sheer thrill of doing so. A sockpuppet is a fake account created with the express purpose of bypassing a ban or performing malicious actions repeatedly. Serious trolls often create multiple sockpuppet accounts.
Also, a greenhorn is a newbie.
reputation is a tool trying to address low quality inputs
but most of time it also punishes hard newbies to same levels as grieffers
in the end, creating some kind of closed "circle-jerking" communities
for that aspect, it is not specific to stackoverflow
but that sad because thoses issues are 20 years old... ^
One might argue that's a major reason why Reddit is what it is.
That's why I'd like to see ranked-choice upvoting instead of typical upvote/downvote. You can pick one best answer, one second best, etc, and anything that isn't correct or useful, you just don't vote on at all! (And then use flags for objectively bad content.)
You forget, Spolsky and Atwood were having fun too. They didn't want war, they wanted a healthy, fun, vibrant community. But they failed to recognize that if they automatically linked "smart" and "powerful" in this industry, they'd wind up with all the antisocial egotists having the moderator tools. They forgot everything Weinberg ever taught us!
You can have fun, but that doesn't nullify the fact you're still doing hard work. It's not a matter of complaining. Coding is hard, but I love it. Making a decent apple pie is hard, but I love it (just made one this afternoon). To pretend it's easy doesn't help anyone. Everything is easy to the person who isn't doing it.
I think @ben and @jess would say that, yes, running DEV is hard work. Nothing saying it isn't fun most of the time.
This is a good article. I have never contributed to StackOverflow because I feel like just about every question has been asked, and any question I could answer has been answered. I personally like don't want to reinvent the wheel and if I can gain insight on how to tackle a common problem with easy then I'm all for it. Sometimes the solutions are things I would've never come up with by myself or any sort of documentation reading or tutorials would have got me to. I personally like that duplicates are marked and just have links to another discussion because there's a defacto discussion for a problem instead of me trying to find out if all the 10 discussions on the topic say the same thing. To me a downvote signals it's not a quality answer and I feel like to me it isn't abused. Ever answer I've seen severely downvoted is because the person answering didn't read the question or isn't providing any value. I do feel that I've seen some of the accepted answers that aren't the best answer. However, your article sheds a whole new light for me on the politics of the community. Nice read!
if you never contributed to stackoverflow because you think everything has been already answered, then you probably tried nothing really new or more complicated, how then you think others still get questions and answers, wouldn't they get duplicated questions? You cannot force it think out of your head, you need to come into a requirement that you have to solve and you found a solution by trial and error yourself, and I tell you a secret, stackoverflow in my opinion contains about 10-20% of programming knowledge the remaining 80% is on github or elsewhere or not replied, so sometimes you just have to only copy and paste from github forums, and I either post a question and a reply where I can't google it, or I copy it from Github.
Definitely in the nothing new category. When you work with something established like the Spring framework there are plenty of complicated tasks that someone else has done that's present on StackOverflow.
Why are we so afraid of duplicate questions or "do my work for me" questions? Wouldn't the community see this and won't answer. "Let the markets do its job"?
Love the idea of "related" .
I completely agree that with rapid change in technology, duplicate questions should be allowed to get "newer" answers.
Excellent post by the way.
This is how I've always felt about it. Instead of marking as dupe and being a jerk about it to a new user, just move on. Then the more friendly people can answer the question and get more rep and the high rep people won't have to waste time "educating" new users and can go back to trying to snipe easy questions off of New.
Joel Spolsky stepped down as CEO shortly after the new Code of Conduct was rolled out. I wonder if he saw how little the CoC changed things, and quit because of it. After all, he did say something to the effect of "I don't think I'm the right fit anymore" (not his exact words).
You claim to be a CEO, but do you have a board you answer to? Might change your perspective.
As I already said elsewhere in this thread...
...so I'm really not sure what "perspective" you're implying needs changing.
This article would be 100% better if you linked to or screenshotted actual examples of the problems you're talking about.
It's easy to claim that people respond with 'how dare you ask why you can't cast a string to a double, you snivelling plebeian.' but … do they really?
It's easy to claim that you've lost count of the examples where a python answer is completely wrong, but … if there are so many, surely you could give just one or two examples?
I'm sure your general point is valid, but to be honest, the specific claims you're making seem highly exaggerated.
The trouble is, one doesn't usually keep a log of something that vast and depressing, and it would be an enormous task to compile enough evidence. I know I'm presenting this without citation, but as you can see from the comments on this thread, I'm not alone in these observations.
As I've said to two other comments questioning exaggeration: this is my experience, and those of people I've mentored and worked with. I'm glad yours has been different.
I didn’t say my experience was different.
Also there’s nothing to stop you searching Stack Overflow right now and adding a few examples, either in a comment or in an update to your article.
P.S. The "sniveling plebeian" line was an expression of attitude, not a direct quote. Actually, I wouldn't quote some of the stuff that I've seen. A lot of it would violate our CoC.
You can blank out any swear word. Or you can link to the offensive post with a warning and not quote it directly.
I already have enough work, I don't need to be pouring hours into finding sufficient examples to satisfy you. I'm sorry. You're welcome to look yourself, as it is a public website. Otherwise, you can believe me as is, or you can disbelieve me. I really don't care whether you believe me or not. This is not to say there is no evidence, just that I value my time too highly to spend it digging up toxic waste.
I wrote this article mainly for the people who have had these experiences themselves, and to start a discussion about what went wrong, and how to prevent those mistakes from being replicated elsewhere.
I stopped answering a few years ago too, for the most part. I mean, I never answered a lot of questions anyway. I do still use SO and I do pop in and run a few moderation tickets when I see the little red dot appear.
When going through the review queues, I skip a lot of the "cerebrally domain specific" ones you're talking about and only chime in on syntax, grammar and similar edits, or on quality or duplication open/close votes.
I don't know how many other people do this, but I hit "re-open" quite a lot on content I think is relevant. There are obviously people who are trigger-happy with the close button, but at least SO has a way to self-moderate there.
I agree with most of your post, except for the bit about moderator selection:
That's theoretically how it is on SO at the moment, and how it's been for years. Anyone (with a fairly low minimum rep) can apply or vote, and I see people apply with a couple of hundred to tens of thousands of rep. I don't know about anyone else, but I vote based on their application post and any examples they link, not the number next to their names.
That's us! Or Dev and other sites like it. And code competition sites, and portfolio sites. We shouldn't hide from question-answer posts like in #help that people have been trying to build up, but neither are we trying to replace SO. We couldn't. If we tried to scale like that we'd change, and we'd probably change to heavy-handed moderation, I think. Small, friendly threads are where it's at.
Your post boils down to a few points as far as I can see (in terms of relevance to us here on DEV.
First, all the good questions have been asked.
We see the beginnings of that here already. Not so much in the way of questions but of content in general - how many "10 tips for people new to the command line" get posted every day? It's harder and harder for people to find something they can talk about that hasn't already been done to death.
I asked about duplicate content here before. I think there's an opportunity to add a feature such as related posts where we have the "another post you might like" block, but matched by keywords in your article. Encouraging people to search for content before posting, that sort of thing. I see people make posts which would work well as comments to earlier posts, and I also see the popularity contest you're talking about:
Second, popularity contests.
Dev does this pretty well, I think, by hiding people's "follower" counts. Sure, people make humblebrag posts from time to time congratulating themselves on being popular, but it's not common. We also have a problem with Ben's "big thread club" posts I think. There's a positive feedback to online attention that's not healthy, and highlighting people for having attention gives them more.
I wrote a post about that over on Quora (which is about the worst popularity contest there can be). At what number of followers are you considered popular.
I'm not saying people don't deserve attention for what they write, but I am saying that surfacing content that way isn't good.
If you browse the site by "latest" you get to see a lot of "hidden gems" that never make it, many of which have near-duplicates that do make it, because the writers have that elusive popularity factor. It's not fair to newcomers, and they try to break the pattern by scraping the barrel with "5 ways I made money with CSS" type clickbait.
Lastly, a ray of hope shines through the window of opportunity at the end of the tunnel: development and developers are still changing. We haven't run out of questions because every week there's a new piece of technology. It doesn't have to be cerebrally unreadable for someone to say they can't figure out how to do something in new tech X that everyone here knows how to do in old tech Y.
That happens to us every day, right? We pick something new, because maybe FOMO, and sit and stare at it for an hour or a week, thinking "how can I get this piece of shirt to print hello world and why can't I stick with Modula-2 and good old WriteLn?"
Maybe that's just me.
But it's a simple example of something specific that SO might divide into "how do I print text?" and "how does new tech X's internal frobulator frobulate nouns?" Dev lets us have digressing threads where we talk about all the pieces together.
We're not off-topic.
Interesting. I've tried using SO as a resource for answering questions while learning Python and found it less than helpful the majority of the time. Often the questions were too complicated and specific for a noob like me to extrapolate to my situation and the answers provided too complex for the simple question I was trying to answer. Sometimes, I'd find the more simple answer I needed for my 101 class buried towards the bottom heaped with scorn (not encouraging for a noob) a la "Ugh that's such a hackish way to do X. Learn how to code." I'll try the #help tag sometime.
Community editing is an interesting feature, actually. It has tremendous power for good. I've been able to shield many non-English speakers by correcting their spelling, grammar, and formatting before they could be assassinated.
The thing is, unless you have the appropriate privileges, your edits are supposed to be put in a review queue for the community moderators. Besides that, you can roll back the changes yourself if they contradict your intention.
So, the problem only comes when the people who either have free-for-all edit powers, or who go through the queue, start abusing the power. And that goes back to my point about selecting moderators carefully.
It's long been my view that asking for an answer on StackOverflow is like asking your bank for a loan. To get it accepted you first have to prove you don't need it.
I'm glad to see that I'm not imagining things. "Mr Burns" released the hounds on me on StackOverflow last week. I asked a question that was deemed to be a "duplicate" by some zealot. Without going into details, I found a question similar to mine with an Answer that can best be described as a "shorthand" answer, where I would prefer an answer in a more explicitly written "longhand" format. So I asked a question asking for help "translating" the "shorthand" to an equivalent "longhand". If I had had the option to add #explainlikeimfive I would have gladly used it as I was completely new to the topic.
So our zealous friend who shall remain anonymous chose to flag my question as a duplicate, and I posted some comments asking for clarification but no help was forthcoming and his or her responses got increasingly curt and arrogant.
BUT I took their comments to heart; while this "back and forth" was going on I spent some time figuring it out for myself, and I eventually worked it out. But this is where it got petty.
I accepted that my original question was poorly worded and not entirely clear. So I had no problem with them flagging it for deletion. But now I had gotten my head around it, I decided to re-post the question as a much clearer request explaining the difference between the "shorthand" and the "longhand", AND I stated that I was posting the question because I wanted to present my own solution to the problem for the benefit of other users trying to do a similar thing.
The question got immediately closed and flagged for deletion by the same zealous user.
I made the mistake of then going to their "meta" site to ask why this was happening. This is when they all ganged up on me, and they all descended on my questions, downvoting them and flagging them for deletion. Quite hilarious, actually.
Finally I decided this wasn't worth the fight. So I flagged my own questions for deletion. But I still thought my "longhand" solution to the problem was worth knowing about. So I went to the question in which I found the "shorthand" solution, and posted my "longhand" solution as an alternative answer.
Today I find this answer "downvoted" and marked for deletion, and my account banned from "asking more questions".
It's pathetic, really :-)
Meanwhile, sockpuppets are a major problem. The determined trolls always come back. So, in effect, only the earnest greenhorns are getting sifted out.
In my career as a developer, each time I land in SO looking for an answer, I find more often then not that the accepted answer and/or most upvoted is not the correct one, it's the just the one that first worked, and yes its driven by the reputation of the one answering.
I had felt that some of my answers have not been marked as accepted, just because someone with more points have posted a less accurate answer.
And yes down voting without accountability is very bad in SO. Receiving down votes in an answer you know is correct or just because it have a small mistake/inaccuracy or is just not explained with the best words, is just so infuriating. We should be given a chance to fix it, or the author of the down vote could just contribute with an edit to it.
But what really pissed me off with SO, was that when I first registered I got negative points, just 5 minutes after... WTF!!! This was enough to kept me away for years.
So my advice is don't trust blindly in SO answers, do your homework, and don't copy paste without understand what is really doing, and without searching for alternative approaches.
The dupe-flagging triage is a joke. Probably most of the questions I see are explicitly not dupes, but whoever flagged them simply hasn't read the question properly. Yes, it's tempting to scan a question and say "I know what they mean...dupe" but unless they are actually using a bot to do the triage, they really need to pull back on the knee-jerk.
Are you sure they're using a bot? I did dupe-flag triage for quite a long time, and there are carefully crafted false positive tests in place to trick bots and ensure reviewers are paying attention. If anything, those false positive tests are a little too overzealous, as every week, at least one reviewer would post on Meta about being incorrectly locked out.
No, I said "unless they are actually using a bot" — I have no idea if they are or not. But almost every day I would see a question marked DUP and when I followed the link, it wasn't a duplicate at all, but a question about a different aspect of the same problem that would not be answered by the linked question.
Couldn't agree more. The elites at SO are trying to turn a forum into a wiki, which is why they are so quick with the dupe flags.
It drives me nuts to see so many people posting questions that are downvoted because they aren't perfect or unique enough, and there is often no explanation for the downvote. All the veterans just say, "Don't take it personal - a downvote isn't an attack," but then it's used like one, so these new people who just want some questions answered feel anonymously attacked. Every time I go back and try to help out, I end up feeling angry at the way everyone is treated.
I personally love helping newer developers and I have been attacked multiple times on SO for trying to do that. It's why I usually do that kind of thing on Experts Exchange. It isn't perfect, either (lower volume of questions and some confusing UI), but I feel like it's usually supportive of that kind of situation. I've answered many thousands of questions over the years and many have been similar but they're all different in some way and deserve a human touch in the response.
Considering that's one of the founder's visions for StackOverflow, it's not "the elites".
Okay but it's still not a wiki, no matter how much anyone wants it to be. SO and all the other StackEXCHANGE sites are presented as forums. Even the terminology (question and answers) reflects a Q&A forum, not a wiki. If you think about it, ALL of the knowledge that has been gathered so far is an answer in response to a question.
So saying, "I want this to be a wiki," while retaining all of the indications that it isn't... is it any wonder why people get frustrated?
To top it all off, the voting mechanism is blindly seen by a small handful as some quality control device but it's implemented in a way that encourages inertial voting rather than quality control.
If an answer is downvoted once, it has a very good chance of getting more downvotes. Similarly, answers with several upvotes will get a lot more of them just by virtue of being the top answer, even if it's a bad answer. One downvote by someone knowledgeable will quickly be overshadowed by four upvotes from people who just copy-and-pasted the top answer blindly and thought it worked.
So even though some people have big dreams about how they want the site to work, it's ignorant of how it truly IS working.
Indeed, I too have seen this. Mob mentality at its worst.
Well said my friend. As a new user on stack exchange I have come accross alot of questions that have outdated answers (especially related to .net core) and have noticed that alot of the attempts to ask new questions and respond with up to date answers have been duped. It sucks because many times I've come accross a question exactly like the problem i'm dealing with that has been duped and then a link to a different question that isnt quite the same has been provided. It's a shame as I liked the idea of it, but in reality its just an elitist, competitive environment where new users have no chance of getting involved.
You make a good point about the comments, I have been ROASTED by someone I am trying to help, only for me to find an answer after asking a couple of more questions.
Jason, I particularly agree with your observation that the answers are getting less good. I'm not as embedded in the community as you, so I can't speak to the reasons, but I now often have to scroll down to the third or fourth-ranked answer to find the "best" answer. I most often use StackOverflow to look up syntax... My workload has me coding less than 50% of my week in a wide array of languages and while I could write pseudocode to do everything I want, we know that doesn't fly in the real world. So, I often know exactly what I'm looking for, I just need a syntax refresher and now, that answer is often buried under answers for previous versions of the language (Python 2.x vs 3.x), answers that answer the wrong question, overly simplified answers and worst, answers that don't answer any question but instead ridicule the OP for not knowing the answer in the first place. I still use it, but it's not the resource it used to be!
For syntax, you could just bookmark the reference sites for the language, and then you don't have to wade through all the half-baked answers on SO.
No downvotes => Sometimes problems do get downvoted by mistake. Although there is a review queue, there is no way to ensure that all problems have correct feedback. This mechanism can be indifferent to people who don’t care about reputation.
No "duplicate question" => Whether a question is closed has a voting process, and the question will be closed only when the close vote accumulates to 3. In addition, closed questions will be placed in the close review queue and re-open review queue, which means that others will participate in the review. When OP corrects its problem according to the rules, it can be re-opened
Avoid gamification => Depending on the person, the reputation mechanism does encourage users to post high-quality questions and answers to some extent. It is a positive feedback mechanism for some people, but it is impossible for everyone to like this mechanism.
Encourage learning => No one punishes people who don’t know the basic concepts and knowledge, but they need to abide by the rules of the StackOverflow community. Any forum and community have rules, otherwise, they will become trash
Nothing is perfect, it depends on personal choice
And often on purpose, even by the voter's own admission. Remember, the community has explicitly blocked all suggestions of attaching an (anonymous, even) reason to a downvote. "Downvoting for whatever reason I feel like is my right!" That assertion is conclusive proof of guilt that it's being used for harassment and bullying. No one who truly desires to use it only constructively would object to attaching a reason.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who participate in the systemic bullying who have close-vote privileges. This system does nothing to stop the elite from ganging up on others. (Observed personally as a close-vote reviewer.) In contrast, it tends to encourage it.
Can, but seldom is, even with corrections. What's further, often the problem wasn't broken in the first place, so there is nothing to "fix". Ill-aimed dupe-hammer closures are a constant problem, and are seldom re-opened.
"High-quality" is an odd term, that generally doesn't relate to actual measures of quality, but rather the arbitrary whims of the elites. I've encountered many who consider "high-quality" to be merely "something I personally find interesting" or "something I didn't already know". I have personally observed people being downvoted because of their inexperience, their country of origin, and even their income level. DEAD SERIOUS. But because downvoting has no accountability framework, there's no way to correct the problem. I've watched hateful explainations of the downvote be removed, but the downvotes remain nonetheless. One person had a good, well-written question heavily downvoted because he was a black student who couldn't afford a $300 book someone in comments recommended. The comments were removed, but the downvotes were never cancelled out.
Many good questions and answers get downvoted needlessly. It's not a matter of "doesn't work for some people," it's a matter of "inherently broken for the majority."
Anonymous, unmoderated downvoting and community diversity are inherently incompatible concepts.
I was a reviewer for some time on StackOverflow. There was not a single day that went by in which I did not encounter at least one (usually more than one) instance of a high-rep user literally punishing people for not having basic concepts and knowledge. I'm glad that hasn't been your experience, but believe me when I tell you that you're uncommonly sheltered in that regard. Be grateful for it.
Ahh, yes, the classic excuse we've been bandying about for 30+ years in the face of literally all anti-social behavior in the industry. It needs to stop somewhere.
If you're wondering why you haven't observed much of this, just look at your profile. You have nearly 30K reputation points with 28 gold badges.
What's further, you're mainly active in the JS tags, which we concluded elsewhere in comments here is not as prone to the problems I described because the space is constantly evolving and changing, preventing anyone from really becoming a long-term expert in the JS ecosystem. The JS tags don't "run out" of questions like most other technology tags do.
In fact, I have also encountered a downvote under the
gotag or even on Reddit. Even for people like me who are familiar with SO community rules. Some people seem to be very demanding on the problem ofgolang. Golang is great, but people in the SO community not. You can see that many problems are downvoted and closed under theGotag. This is not common underJStag andPythontag.My point exactly, and if one is a relatively new coder or has few reputation points, that negative experience is amplified by an order of magnitude.
(My experiences on the Python tag have not been stellar, for the record. I have better outcomes with the Freenode IRC room.)
I've felt similarly for a few years now, but I also feel that there are a number of questions that are answered on StackOverflow. All in all I think they try to do good, but I think you are right a better thing needs to come around. I've often thought about how nice it would be to scrape the questions and answers from StackOverflow into a database that takes away all negativity and references just questions and answers.
The worst part has to be when you're genuinely trying to help someone and a person with a little more "reputation" comes along and is incredibly negative even though the solution you provided is correct and in the right context. Often saying in some extent that while this answer is correct it is "not a one-liner" or uses an if-else instead of the ternary operator and the answer then gets pounded by reflection and the solution rewritten almost verbatim as a "refactored" statement that has a logical complexity that I'm not sure the beginner will always find helpful.
I also think that many (not all) in the community are not friendly, the shroud of slight anonymity giving them the power and courage to be a keyboard gangster and extra insults instead of quick educated responses. In one section of you are not a gadget Jaron revisits the early social media sites as places dominated by rage, aggression, and bullying because of the ability to not have ramifications or stigmas for anything said or done on the internet and I still think StackOverflow has some of that old internet culture.
Side note you can tell a lot by a developer based on how they use stack overflow. If you see a developer using stack overflow ask them to explain the code and what it is doing line by line. I've found many cases where I hear "I'm not sure" or "I would have to look it up", while that is fine if it is the first time seeing the code, it is not fine that many of these end up in production environments.
Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget : A Manifesto. 1st ed., Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
We've rolled out recently private SO in my company and it's been generally very well accepted. It proved itself useful in answering company specific questions. I think it is also perhaps down to that inside the company we have better control on overal culture of people?
But certainly there was similar patterns emerging - higher ranked colleagues tend to answer more questions, leaving less room for other colleagues to get points on answering. But then the question is, does it matter? In company the goal is to share knowledge, it doesn't matter who has points or not. If the knowledge is shared that's success.
Hey.. i am reading this almost a year since written and it is even more relevant today . I even found the moderators really bullying people out and randomly deleting post citing plagiarism even when due reference to the site was mentioned in the post... not sure what triggered such behavior but now after reading your post definitely looks like a perfect case of "It's our playground , you go home"
This is a brilliant article, I signed up to stackoverflow, and instantly noticed problems, not able to comment (because need points to do so), incredibly difficult to get points, even though I am fairly knowledgeable, this is because I either found I had no likes or dislikes, or people kept editing my answers to what they think is right, but often changes to something completely different to what I wrote, I had one question completely rewritten in the sense it became a different question and because I rejected the edit, it then got deleted.
I have concluded community based moderation is a bad thing, its something that requires maturity and the ability to stand back and treat it as a responsibility, not a toy for a kid to play with, and I 100% agree with removing down votes, I have never ever seen something like this work in a community, its a toxic feature and the problem with dislike systems they are a popularity contest, people supporting each other within their circle. I have seen forums over the years gradually remove dislike features.
Really! Great Article .. You are really Accurate .. But Stack Overflow is really getting worse as follow :
High Rep People are who dominating the Site .. They Manage All the Site .. Even sometimes High Rep people answer Wrong Question but they getting upvotes (Really Getting Amazed) But people like me getting no attention Beacause you do not have Rep (As I have 561 Repution)
Closing Question .. People are going crazy while closing questions (As people say Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate) Give me a second (Say Dupliacte Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate) as it getting worse (I also feel High Rep people are do not sleep as All the Day they mark question as Duplicate Also Big Repution Answer are really Old (As Frameworks changes everyday) So they must approve new Questions
That is All .. But really Big Thanks for the Great Article :)
Aside from the moderation experience (I don't have a sufficient score to moderate), this is entirely my SO experience too. The problem of questions going out of date is getting worse. I don't think SO is going anywhere though, the reality for me is that one of the reasons I've asked so few questions is because you can usually find the answer. The problem, is that the answer is found within a wall of noise and aggression.
The scoring system is fundamentally flawed because someone who is a very experienced programmer, but has not answered many questions, and has a score of 1, 10, 15, might appear to be another newbie, while someone with a score of 12k might have just got in first answering one of the git commands question and now has an enormous reputation from pasting from the manual. Not to criticse the person answering, but it just means your score is completely meaningless.
It's been like this for a long time. The very first question I answered on StackOverflow, in 2015, the accepted answer, given by someone with a reputation in the thousands, was wrong. I know it was wrong because I was working in the company providing that technology, I was an instructor teaching that technology, and I could talk to the engineers in my company directly (plus, you could just look at the open-source code yourself for the answer). The answer even claimed that the internal developers did not know the answer -- again, completely made up.
(I just looked at the question again, and surprisingly, my answer now has twice as many upvotes as the "accepted" answer. So maybe there's still hope!)
I find that there's a crowd of what I call "professional StackOverflowers" who just flood the site with half-baked answers hoping for reputation points, and those answers, which get the most points simply by getting there "first", also tend not to be the best answers.
Nevertheless, just like doing a Google search, you've got to know how to use SO effectively. For questions with multiple answers (say, a dozen), the "better" answer is often buried far below the popular, accepted answer, in almost every case where there are multiple answers. So you need to scroll down and read those answers. And often you'll see useful updates to the original answer (I know, since I provide many of those updated answers myself).
The reputation system is definitely broken, but I find that StackOverflow is still useful.
As to the "no more good questions" assertion, I don't agree with that. The area where I'm currently working -- AWS cloud technologies -- there are lots of new questions to be asked, and those technologies continue to change and evolve.
I've also not seen the toxic behavior that you refer to in your article, but I think that's because I'm operating either in the backwoods or the bleeding edge of technology where the toxic people don't hang out. Maybe it's because if you're just starting out in tech and going to a coding camp (and you're of a certain immature age), you're not going to be writing Terraform or AWS Cloudformation templates, which tend to be utilized more by the corporate crowd.
I agree with much of what you write, I have around 30k rep and I do sometimes still answer some questions but as of late I am really sick and tired of all the arrogant pricks that like vultures, wait for somebody to ask a question that they deem is stupid. It started out great but it is no longer a site where you can get friendly help. RTFM comments are not very helpful for a person just starting out and even if there are similar questions, it doesn't necessarily mean that the person will understand them, especially if they are a bit older answers.
This is an interesting article and very interesting comments. Excellent.
I am one of those high rep people who dominate certain tags. I am amazed by what I call "trolls" who berate newbies and also berate people, include myself, for helping newbies. I have had two trolls suspended with loss of all their points for this behavior. The system does work sometimes but you have to invest time, usually too much, to get action.
In my experience there are a few areas needing improvement:
1) Newbies need to be welcomed to Stack Overflow. A few kind suggestions will often help create more educated/useful questions.
2) Newbies need to invest more time writing good questions. Example, posting an error message with no context, code, etc is usually a waste of time. My personal pet peeves is someone who expects others to write their code for them. Stack Overflow is not a code writing service, but I have no problem sharing code when it helps.
3) Issue warnings to what I call "tag bullies". These are people that abuse others for not knowing what they expect everyone to know. They attempt to censor any answer they do not like.
4) Do not allow downvotes without providing comments. I am amused by downvotes on my answers for technology I am actively developing. Equally bad is downvotes for well written answers because the troll feels the question should not have been asked, therefore you should not answer it.
5) Self proclaimed experts. These trolls are the worst. They actually know little more than the surface area of a technology, but are probably really good with search engines. Post a question or answer that does not fit their narrative, and they go off like nuclear bombs.
We should have upvote/downvotes for people as well as their questions and answers. Those that get X number of downvotes are sent for moderation. Sometimes just a little attitude adjustment is all that is required.
Overall, I feel that Stack Overflow is a good service. The massive amount of shared knowledge is amazing.
An interesting reflexion.
The SO content becoming outdated is also a question wich hits me recently as I was landing in a row on several answers where the accepted solutions were provided with jQuery which in the meantime could actually be solved in "native" JS as the platforms evolved.
I don't know how they are going to manage, this UX wise and generally speaking, but sounds like to me something Stackoverflow should be concerned of.
It seems like, it's you who wanted to type a hyped out article and get popularity, you owe me 20 minutes of life, your article is funny as exaggerated grotesque, nothing else.
You got 4k points it's pretty much if you want to be the first, you should have luck if you one to be as "bill gates" you have to be first everywhere, first man on the moon is only one, but it's not about having most points, but knowledge sharing, you seem to push too hard to get reputation. Otherwise why to even care that a few people have a lot of artificial points? Those are not money, they don't exploit people, few have gigantic points but millions of users harvest knowledge advantage, you might envy about life is not fair thinking of Taylor Swift earning much more than any scientist will ever see, just swallow it.
I don't agree, you would be harshly surprised, how many questions are not replied there, I have about dozens in my todo list. If you think of popular questions, then you are right, probably many are already replied like popular domain names or emails, what did you expect really? How to perform echo replied in the year 2180?
My questions are never duplicated, answers are many but comments are rarely a different solution to an incomplete one, one has to check the other answers.
There are too many questions in computer science properly done or clearly discussed.
Maybe it's even partially like that, but if you plan to do it like that, you are partially or completely wrong. Many times it's not that their answer is wrong, but from a different angle or different context, or the most frequently used.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I agree with most of the your points. about others, I don't really know how it works.
Following the discussion in the comments, one thing that is clear is that SO must reinvent itself. The concept at the beginning was good, but the times have changed and some ideas are a bit old style, I guess.
I don't like either the downvoting system, it's just negative, it should be managed internally by moderators just in case the post is completely wrong, and warn the user who wrote it about the problem of the question/answer.
Also, the duplication is negative, as you or others have said, it'd be better to add a link or relationship with another question, and that's all.
I also feel a bit frustrated when I'm going to answer something, I'm just sure someone's going to do it faster than me because I'm the kind of person that thinks several times while writing, and tries to correct the post properly before clicking on the submit button :-). Anyway, in the end, personally I don't mind too much, I sometimes let my answer there, or just discard and move on.
Of course a good advice to newcomers is to read all the answers to a question, and may be similar questions. Never do copy & paste, but try to understand what the code is doing.
I just came across something, although I don't know if it's related to the issues this article discusses, or not. In any case, there's a major cultural problem at StackOverflow.
SO Meta: I'm resigning as a Stack Overflow community elected moderator
SO Meta: Yet another "step down as moderator" post
SO Meta: What could Stack Exchange do to make moderaters who've recently resigned want to stay?
The moderators who have stepped down appear to have been part of the group pushing to solve some of the endemic issues I described.
Interesting take.
I think the difference with StackOverflow, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is that it was intended to be a sort of wiki. When you publish an article on Wikipedia, anyone can edit it. That's an expected part of the workflow. Your content is never really meant to be "yours" (except it is? They're weird.)
I think the founders believed that by building StackOverflow on that basis, information would be (and stay) more accurate, much like how Wikipedia is often more accurate than many single-source articles. (There was a study about that, but I can't recall which university.)
Whether or not that was a good design decision though? Well, as you can see from the other comments, that remains to be seen.
From a newbie developer's perspective, your description of the question categories hit the nail on the head. 80% of the time when I have a tough problem, the question will likely fall into #2. Since any downvoting at all could remove my site privileges, I usually hold off until it's narrowed enough for category #3. And by that point, my esoteric question isn't really that useful to me anymore.
StackOverflow has become a festering quagmire of ego-trippers. I have encountered my final straw today and won't be sharing my knowledge there ever again. I am ok with unpaid work, but not when it comes at a personal cost of dealing with such dickheads just for the privilege of helping others.
The self-appointed hall-monitors at SO can enjoy constantly refreshing their reputation summaries without me.
Maybe instead of removing
duplicatesentirely there could be arelatedsection?Ciro Santilli wrote something similar 2 years ago.
github.com/cirosantilli/write-free...
Thank you too!
Civility. It's one of the things that makes DEV such a darn nice place!
Yeah. Just imagine how the above discussion would end if it were happening on SO. :-D :-O :-X
Finally someone with guts to talk about this.
One day I asked a technical JS question, and it got a lot of downvotes because of the website UX! Not one response about the JS code.
You're absolutely right with what has happened with the Stackoverflow community. I still use it as a last, desperate last resort instead of relying on it as a reliable resource for information. Google does a pretty good job of indexing Stackoverflow, but I have to pay special attention to the date of the responses.
Great, great, great article. Thanks. Great suggestions as well.
I expressed some similar sentiments here:
codingindelphi.com/blog/in-which-i...
My main frustrations were that someone had enough knowledge to understand the question, and therefore could edit it, but, yet still chose not to answer it..
Yep, agreed, with all of it (and the comments below). I'm happy with good documentation and github issues, no SO needed.
I agree with most points and the bit about answers being "woefully out of date" had gotten me a few times and i being but a pleb would be unable to gain any traction in updating such a question
Related and worth reading:
Why I don't use Stack Overflow
Facundo Corradini ・ Jan 19 ・ 7 min read
Yeah...I'd never really put much thought into it before this conversation. Something about that hybrid didn't work, did it?
"Stack Overflow", not "StackOverflow". See stackoverflow DOT com/legal/trademark-guidance (the last section)
Fixed, thanks.