[HN Gopher] Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
___________________________________________________________________
Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
Author : mooreds
Score : 192 points
Date : 2023-02-21 18:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| EamonnMR wrote:
| In my experience then preferred place is now Discord which is
| awful because it's not indexed by search engines. But at least
| there's a chance that your question gets answered, or you get
| pointed in the right direction.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain."
|
| I remember SO coming onto the scene, to combat Experts Exchange.
|
| Now, it's the modern EE.
|
| I've never seen a duplicate question. I have numerous times seen
| a question I've had closed as a duplicate, but the linked to
| "answer" was definitely "NOT" the answer.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| reddit is a lot more frendlier so I'm using SO mostly read only.
| rurban wrote:
| Quora is the better variant of SO. Not the toxic cesspool, that
| SO became.
|
| But same mailinglists are much worse.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| I find Quora difficult to navigate when I'm searching for an
| answer to a question. That's my main issue however, I also
| don't like the constant pay wall restrictions I feel I come
| up against frequently on Quora.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based
| answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on
| Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer
| (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing
| to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer.
|
| I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar
| pit. But sometimes there aren't that many options. You get 5
| different opinions and you pick the best one for yourself.
|
| I've sometimes thought there would be a place for a "Stack
| overflow overflow" site - banned on SO but allowed on SOO.
| shagie wrote:
| The difficulty is that questions that solicit opinion based
| answers often become unnaturally popular and difficult to
| moderate.
|
| Consider https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-
| favorit... and the "is another answer going to be useful?" Or
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-...
|
| The "no opinion based questions" is a clear line that can be
| drawn (rather than other squiggly lines that are more
| difficult) that reduces the overall moderation workload.
|
| You'll note that https://mathoverflow.net allows such questions
| - but they have _many_ fewer questions per day and a much
| higher percent of the userbase performs moderation actions.
| This means that you can allow for that additional workload
| (which is a few questions rather than hundreds or thousands) to
| be spread across a larger part of the site 's users.
|
| If you want Stack Overflow to allow such questions, then get 1%
| of the user base to close questions that should be closed every
| day so that the moderation tasks on them don't get too heavy on
| too small a group of people who would eventually say "we're not
| carefully moderating this anymore and instead not allowing
| those questions at all."
| stillsleepy wrote:
| [flagged]
| moate wrote:
| What does this have to do with Stack Overflow? Did you wander
| in from reddit? This isn't how we do things here.
|
| Do better.
| rcfox wrote:
| It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The
| language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am
| I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or
| articles get drowned out.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from
| more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14
| years I've used the website.
|
| The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and
| trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the
| context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing
| problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because
| we tire of the bullshit.
|
| That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on
| one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and
| your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some
| comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got
| instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never
| interacted with before.
| bombcar wrote:
| more and more you have to treat "reddit" as if it were an
| "internet" and have a separate account for every
| subreddit or group thereof.
| Slighted wrote:
| >I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a
| year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits
|
| Trust me, you aren't missing out on anything by not being
| able to post on r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/Chonkers, or
| r/FunkoPops
| pixl97 wrote:
| And yea, that's why read-only on reddit this days and
| feel no desire to contribute.
|
| I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name
| only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about
| what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't
| give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that
| work".
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone
| anywhere can show up and start causing problems.
|
| I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of
| western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass
| marketing.
|
| What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing.
| What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web?
| Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture.
|
| Marketing is all about creating a need so that people will
| buy your shit, and it does that by making you feel
| insecure, yet entitled. The psychological damage from
| having our attention constantly hijacked by this shit has
| caused severe damage to society as a whole over time.
| packetslave wrote:
| Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is
| "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble,
| break things, troll people, or some combination of the
| above."
|
| And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue
| of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular
| medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their
| filth."
| heisenbit wrote:
| I posted a story which provided unique background from a
| reputed web site on staffing decisions in one political
| party. It got pulled with two formal reasons both obviously
| wrong e.g. me having headline edited which was not the case
| and it also did not change in between. I took it up and wrote
| a polite request even providing reasoning why it was a good
| fit (which was not the reason it was pulled). Next thing
| happened was a two word message: "off topic"..
|
| I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of
| topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a
| bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of
| astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day
| moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities
| where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators
| have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories
| are just small stories with only little life in them. Why
| squash them - time will rank them down - so why?
| wmeredith wrote:
| Reddit is targeting late 2023 for an IPO. The end quality end
| is nigh for them as well.
| matsemann wrote:
| People complain about those questions being off topic on SO,
| and also complain when they have to endure them other places.
| You can't win, heh.
| DrThunder wrote:
| I don't know what kinda person actually considers Reddit a go-
| to for answers. It's absolutely abysmal for that sort of thing.
| SO isn't perfect but it's leagues above any subreddit I've ever
| used. Almost all subreddits succumb to getting too popular (if
| they're good to start with) and eventually the amount of actual
| help you get from them becomes exceedingly rare in my
| experience.
| permo-w wrote:
| it's pretty much the other extreme to SO. reddit is highly
| resistant to communal knowledge accumulation. everything is
| temporary, everything decays, and the continual churn of
| participants combined with a crap search engine ensures that
| ephemerality reigns eternally. Stack Overflow has spent most of
| its lifespan trying to do the opposite, and what we're left
| with is this. antibodies attacking the host
| DelightOne wrote:
| Those can be answered by ChatGPT. Only question is where to
| integrate it into peoples' workflows. Maybe into the post-
| creation interface? Maybe into the SO question-creation dialog.
| svachalek wrote:
| What would be really cool is an AI interview. "So this looks
| like the same problem, do the answers here help?" "Oh, why
| not?" "I see, so what else have you tried?" "I see we still
| haven't resolved the issue, so I'm going to rewrite this
| discussion in our standard format and post it for our expert
| community to solve."
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Interesting... I wonder if this is where knowledge sites
| gravitate to? Of course if the AI isn't smart enough to
| answer the question without it's training not having covered
| it, I'm not sure it would work...
| rbanffy wrote:
| My only advice: Karma is for burning.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Meanwhile, Old Reddit was recently shutdown.
|
| Do not care for the New Reddit.
|
| Goodbye, Reddit.
|
| source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34885234
| joemi wrote:
| It still works for me. Looks like it was just a temporary
| problem?
| cmh89 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that was just a technical difficulty. It seems
| to be up now. New Reddit is straight trash though.
| someuser54541 wrote:
| Isn't Discord the new platform? I used IRC quite extensively for
| asking development related questions, but after the freenode
| fiasco it seemed Discord became the best place to get development
| questions answered for a large variety of languages and
| frameworks.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| I use it as my own personal knowledge base. I only post things
| that I have figured out and haven't been asked before, basically
| answering my own questions.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I'd really, really like to see links to specific questions that
| were closed for allegedly bad reasons. These posts complaining
| about SO almost never contain them, so we're only getting half
| the story.
|
| Stack Overflow can be a rather harsh experience if you're
| unfamiliar with it and have wrong assumptions about how it works.
| The "wrong assumptions" part is not intended to blame the asker,
| it's just a fact that SO has some rules that are not obvious if
| you're used to more forum-like sites.
|
| I still find SO very useful, and I have no issue at all with
| getting questions closed. I may have received a downvote or two
| that I found unwarranted, but not more. And you don't always get
| an answer, but that is not that surprising for more specialized
| questions. It's still the most useful general purpose site for
| programming questions for me.
| filoleg wrote:
| At least for this specific case, you hit the nail on the head.
| Here is a comment[0] from the reddit thread that found the
| actual questions (that the OP asked on SO) and explained in
| very clear terms why they were closed.
|
| Not really happy with how trigger-happy SO is with closing
| questions based on wrong assumptions in general. But in this
| specific case, it feels very justified.
|
| 0.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I posted this comment, a couple of weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910
|
| It was part of a larger discussion on SO.
|
| In it, I mention an exercise:
|
| _Here 's an exercise: Go to Meta, and suggest that people
| applying for positions of authority have at least a 10% question-
| to-answer ratio._
|
| If anyone were to do that, they would be attacked and downvoted.
| Possibly banned.
| drewda wrote:
| > I've finally decided to cancel my SO account, to add it to my
| hosts block list, and to block SO results from Google using an
| extension.
|
| I won't say that Twitter and StackOverflow are exactly alike, but
| to quit a website I also find that I have go "cold turkey" by
| making it hard to enter the hostname on autopilot or click a
| search result. That's why I added "||twitter.com^" to uBlock
| Origin on both my desktop and mobile web browsers.
| teddyh wrote:
| Don't forget all the Nitter proxy sites:
| https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
| [deleted]
| timdiggerm wrote:
| I would love to see the author's posts
| [deleted]
| mdaniel wrote:
| Their profile was linked in the reddit comments:
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/8075005/webstackdev although
| one must have "close privileges" in SO to view their allegedly
| closed questions
| cwoolfe wrote:
| I had a lot of angst against stackoverflow for years. Eventually
| I had to come to terms with the fact that while I hated how I was
| treated there, they did somehow manage to create an incredibly
| powerful tool that helped me in my career. I had to come to terms
| with the fact the policies I hated somehow also helped make top-
| quality answers instantly accessible.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > helped make top-quality answers instantly accessible.
|
| I wonder if it depends on what questions you need answering?
|
| I stopped using SO because I couldn't find good quality answers
| to my questions (to be clear -- I'm talking about in their
| database, I wouldn't dare to actually post a question on SO).
| But the questions I have tend to be obscure or difficult ones,
| because I don't need much help with the easier ones.
|
| It's also a bit irritating when I find someone else has asked
| the same question, but they were either left unanswered or the
| answer was incorrect.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I haven't exactly had "bad" experiences on SO - but I do feel
| like it's generally a waste of time to ask questions on it.
| Basically - SO is _very_ good at general knowledge questions
| (kinda ChatGPT territory) but bad at corner cases. A good example
| was this fiddly CSS / font question I had that had some
| constraints from a static site generator where you could inject
| custom CSS[1]. People really wanted me to accept answers that
| would not work for my constraint set, and I think the implicit
| answer is that the combination of formatting tools does not
| support what I want to do, but the whole thing was frustrating.
|
| I mostly think that, once you get to a certain level of
| proficiency, you're going to lose time on SO rather than gain it.
| You will spend a lot of time crafting a detailed and clear
| question that does have an answer - but on balance if you just
| read the docs / source / whatever you'll get the answer you need
| faster.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66619732/can-i-write-
| css...
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Anything you post on Stack Overflow gets automatically downvoted
| no matter what.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Perhaps your code is ... compost? _headduck_
| labrador wrote:
| I recently silently rage quit a subreddit because it got a new
| moderator who is not very bright and deletes my posts as being
| off topic when I'm clearly on topic to anyone with a greater than
| room temperature IQ. I quit after several months of getting my
| posts deleted. I remind myself they do it for free, which was why
| I was silent in my quitting. The article isn't about AI writing
| code instead of using SO, but a follow up will probably be
| forthcoming.
|
| Moderators: Can't live with them, can't live without them.
|
| Edit: Note to moderators: If a post has garnered several
| thousands of up votes overnight don't come along a say it's not a
| good post in the morning when you wake up. You don't know more
| than thousands of people who have invested a lot of time in
| knowing their subject.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| That's gotta be frustrating. I'm sure you tried reaching out to
| other moderators. It's almost like Reddit needs a mod committee
| for mods so that users can petition their cases.
| labrador wrote:
| I think the problem is there is a lot of turnover. I
| appreciate the work of most moderators to keep the quality
| up, but like open source, the work-for-free model comes with
| it's problems
| t-eckert wrote:
| I never ask questions on Stack Overflow. I usually just chat with
| the people I know and trust in a Discord or Slack, which kind of
| sucks because the answers are not preserved for everyone else. I
| think with the toxicity of SO not getting solved, the future will
| be more distributed with people posting on their own blogs.
| shanebellone wrote:
| "Stack Overflow is a toxic cesspool that is utterly useless
| outside of historical answers. That begs the question, what fills
| the void? It seems like Reddit, mostly."
|
| The irony is too much. Reddit is wildly toxic. Though, there are
| a few good communities. With that being said, SO isn't super
| useful when languages like Python have awesome documentation.
| sattoshi wrote:
| These types of posts annoy me. I constantly see people talking
| about SO being "toxic", or closing perfectly good questions. And
| yet these people _never_ link to specific examples.
|
| Why is that?
| aendruk wrote:
| Part of it may be that there's nothing to link to. I received a
| toxic welcome in Stack Exchange comments just this morning and
| checking it now the whole thread is gone as if it never
| happened.
| jjordan wrote:
| It's been hostile for years. Lately I find that I'm getting
| actual answers from there less and less. Not sure what can be
| done apart from a decisive change in community engagement from
| the top down.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I think it's highly dependent on the individuals in the various
| programming language communities on SO. I've found answers to my
| Rust questions to be very helpful and welcoming, while I'm not
| sure I've ever managed to avoid a Golang question being downvoted
| (disclaimer: I write far more Go than Rust). Most languages are
| somewhere in the middle in my experience, with the default being
| not getting an answer at all.
|
| That said, as a search resource for common problems SO is
| invaluable.
| jrmg wrote:
| My pet Stack Overflow annoyance: the number of questions that
| have highly voted confidently incorrect answers or (perhaps
| worse?) answers that do work, but not for the reason in the
| confidently incorrect explanation that follows the 'what to do'
| part of the answer.
| yxwvut wrote:
| I feel like this is particularly bad for python Q+A on SO. At
| least it's not as bad as Quora where the top answer is
| invariably a grandiose answer to a different question than was
| asked or an excuse for some bullshit 'heartwarming' anecdote
| that answers nothing.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Way more often than not it seems like the first few answers are
| either wrong, overly complicated, or advanced RTFM posts with
| massive upvotes. Meanwhile the 3rd or 4th answer with modest
| upvotes is actually the succinct correct answer.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I said goodbye to StackOverflow more than 8 years ago[1]. I was
| an avid fan, listened to every podcast episode as Jeff and Joel
| were building it and was excited for its launch.
|
| The early days were so much better because the toxicity had not
| set in.
|
| However, my account clearly has first mover advantage. I sit at
| Top 0.5% without having contributed in a very long time. Both on
| the Question and Answer side, I have benefitted from providing
| answers to basic questions and asking basic questions.
|
| 1: https://stackoverflow.com/users/4960/nick-stinemates
| Aperocky wrote:
| I wonder if the amount of reputation had an outsized effect.
|
| I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any
| similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation
| from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K).
|
| I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions
| that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more
| of that to offset the overzealous folks if I find time...
| silversmith wrote:
| Counter-ancedote: my 13 year old, 9K rep account gets the same
| treatment as original poster. I've given up on participating
| (after latest and particularly upsetting episode of "question
| not good enough"), and use the site only through google. Shame,
| it used to be easy access to expertise.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Interesting, can you reopen your own questions?
|
| I'm quite OK with duplicate close if the reference actually
| solved my issue. But I've never had a question outright
| closed on me, I'd be fuming.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I mostly use other stackexchange sites, not stackoverflow, and my
| experience is completely apposite. I get good answers and my
| questions are usually upvoted. What I am missing is the ability
| to have a discussion.
| stillsleepy wrote:
| [flagged]
| uberman wrote:
| I enjoy answering questions but like the poster, I kind of hold
| my breath any time I do.
|
| Toxic downvoting is not just a question thing. There are people
| who will downvote any and every answer even a correct one to a
| question they feel is unworthy of an answer.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I think a big problem is voters are not shown and verified. If
| you upvote or downvote a post your id should show and you must
| provide a reason why the vote.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| can you imagine if HN had the gumption to offer the same?
| would solve so many issues.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| It might likely need to be an additional thing and phased in.
|
| Current voting can carry on as is, but 'verified voting'
| would be a secondary mechanism, and... over time people could
| choose to ignore the non-verified votes, or the non-verified
| votes could be phased out altogether.
|
| I like the simple up/down vote mechanism, but it definitely
| seems to be abused, and I would prefer more weight be given
| to votes with a public reason. Votes without an explanation
| should end up weighting less.
| mdmglr wrote:
| Perhaps downvotes should not be allowed at all.
| arp242 wrote:
| How would you distinguish between "poor quality" and "just
| hasn't been viewed by many"?
| matsemann wrote:
| If a 20k rep user answers a no-effort-clearly-duplicate-off-
| topic-question to get some more points, instead of using the
| moderation tools and pointing the asker in the correct
| direction, I gladly down vote.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| You know sometimes it's better to find a project's slack/ discord
| / mailing list / forum and ask your question there. The responses
| will be from the most knowledgeable people online and you'll get
| humane treatment.
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| [dead]
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Rant: I stopped flagging content on SO when my flags were
| moderated "unhelpful". They were not, and the content would later
| be removed or fixed (presumable after others had flagged it).
|
| I do get it that moderating a site like SO is a massive effort.
| But there needs to be a check on rouge moderators.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Unfortunately this doesn't really have much to do with
| StackOverflow, beyond it having the success that gives it
|
| a) A large community.
|
| b) Unpaid moderators who include people and cliques who feel
| self-worth in gatekeeping and other forms of "power".
|
| It's always been this way in most fora; the more success, the
| larger the community, with a corresponding increase in
| inappropriate moderation.
|
| See also, Wikipedia, Reddit, everywhere else of this ilk.
|
| HN's acclaimed moderation - apart from being in a much smaller
| community, doesn't fit that model at all; perhaps it's not
| scalable though.
| metabagel wrote:
| Yeah, there's probably a limit to how much dang can be scaled.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
| SeanLuke wrote:
| What has struck me was how many times the top answer to a
| question on S.O. has been utterly, pitifully wrong. That alone
| has gotten me thinking about whether S.O. is actually a force for
| good.
| jjgreen wrote:
| I feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best
| way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a
| code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces
| ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example",
| presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I
| was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was
| closed.
|
| Of course I deleted it. I'll take the issue up with the Clang
| people directly at some point.
| metabagel wrote:
| Yeah, typically there is always a better place to ask a
| question than SO. IRC, Discord, email list, etc. - wherever the
| experts and enthusiasts hang out who work all the time on
| whatever it is you are trying to wrap your brain around.
| Izkata wrote:
| > As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post,
| it was closed.
|
| > Of course I deleted it.
|
| It was closed to prevent nonsense guesses from being posted as
| answers, if you'd just edited in your minimal example it
| would've been put into the reopen queue.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've had an interesting experience on SO for a few
| months after I was fired from a small web shop in Boston.
| Literally every question I asked across the SE ecosystem was
| serially downvoted and/or had "request for closure."
|
| That's when I stopped looking at SO as a place to get help. When
| ChatGPT came out, I loved asking it SO-esque questions and not
| dealing with elitist/asshole humans.
| wesleyyue wrote:
| I just contribute questions and answers on the respective
| communities of the libraries and languages my question is about,
| which often have way more helpful and normal people. The
| moderation power of SO attract the horrible people and the
| abusive snark you get on the platform is just not worth it.
| metabagel wrote:
| This is the way
| nl wrote:
| This is such a foreign experience to me. I've been a member of SO
| for 13 years, and I've asked 24 questions.
|
| I've had one question downvoted[1] which I'm a bit annoyed about
| (I misunderstood the documentation terminology - but I don't
| think that is an uncommon problem).
|
| My only other bad experience was when I had a buggy version of a
| library and an error in my question[2]. Someone solved the error
| in my question after I had already edited it to fix that and
| wanted their answer accepted even though that didn't solve the
| problem I was having.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43889952/what-shape-
| inpu...
|
| [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63256952/pil-image-
| from-...
| [deleted]
| dpkirchner wrote:
| My favorite feature of SO is their ephemeral chat system that
| returns 404 pages instead of useful information. It's a good
| alternative to forums that have been deleted and turned into SEO
| link farms.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I haven't used SO for anything other than a read-only reference
| for probably over a decade at this point. It's always seemed
| incredibly hostile to me. But it's also about the only place you
| can find the answers to esoteric programming questions,
| especially specific error messages, so I keep clicking the links
| if they come up in a google search. But if I could do my job
| without using it, I would.
| [deleted]
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| This is slightly off topic, but still related to SO, Reddit, or
| whatever community out there that is being used for getting any
| kind of help:
|
| Most people doesn't know what they are trying to solve or
| achieve. And/or they don't know how to phrase themselves
| correctly.
|
| Look at /r/Unity3D, which I frequently visit, and you can see
| _tons_ of duplicate questions, with different wording, because
| the OP doesn't know what to search for to find the solution to
| the problem at hand.
|
| I see the same thing in SO as well, which is why I have also
| disregarded that for problem-solving information. I'm back to
| finding out stuff the hard way; reading the documentation and use
| my 30-year old programming knowledge to sort it out.
|
| Sometimes I share my knowledge on f.ex. /r/Unity3D, but often
| gets downvoted because it's illegal to use _anything_ that GCs in
| a simple ping pong game. So you need to use difficult to use data
| structures instead.
| Izkata wrote:
| They only gave two examples of their questions that have been
| closed, and the second one is obviously of a type[0] that hasn't
| been allowed for over a decade (long before they made their
| account). Nothing bad sticks out to me from their description of
| their first example, but the other indicates their understanding
| isn't as good as they think it is.
|
| [0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on
| a Q&A site where a single answer gets selected by the asker.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| Do you have a link to the rule about asking questions with only
| a "single correct answer"? Out of curiosity, I tried digging
| around and couldn't find references to that kind of rule.
| Izkata wrote:
| > If your motivation for asking the question is "I would like
| to participate in a discussion about ______", then you should
| not be asking here.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask
|
| "List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime
| users will understand. It falls under these "open ended"
| questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily
| opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close reason
| but got rolled into that when others were needed.
|
| Here's a meta question specifically about list questions that
| says basically the same thing:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139618/are-list-
| que...
| tsgagnon wrote:
| The question mentioned by the original OP was _" My last
| question (just now) asked about potential maintainability
| issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout."_
| which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from
| my interpretation.
|
| I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your
| question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes
| of a newer user trying to understand what questions a
| person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things
| were different.
|
| And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't
| know until it's closed".
| Izkata wrote:
| Keep reading:
|
| > and asked for other concrete examples.
|
| It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _It 's explicitly asking for an open-ended list._
|
| If your goal is to come with any reason to label a
| question a "list question", then I don't think it would
| be too hard to find a way to label any potential question
| as a "list question" and have it closed.
|
| A different interpretation would be that the question is
| about whether there are maintainability issues with a
| certain implementation of CSS. Which the question being
| potentially answered with a "Yes/No" where an obviously
| better answer might provide an example or two of issues
| that could arise.
| fabian2k wrote:
| The actual rule here is about question where every answer is
| equally valid, so asking for pure opinions
| (https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask). Questions that
| have multiple potential answers are valid questions in
| general.
|
| There are questions that are somewhere in between, something
| like "which approach is better here?". Those tend not to go
| well on SO even though they theoretically could be on-topic.
| This is a case where the community is sometimes overzealous,
| but it's extremely hard to consistently apply these rules to
| complex edge cases. And many questions of this kind do not
| fit to the rules and are closed correctly. These questions
| usually require quite a bit of familiarity with SO to
| formulate them in a way that works on the site.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They only gave two examples of their questions_
|
| How many examples would they have to post in order for you to
| be satisfied?
| Izkata wrote:
| It's not the amount, it's which example they gave. They
| insist they understand the rules, yet their evidence is
| something that's obviously against the rules?
| revskill wrote:
| Seriously i can't register new account on Stackoverflow. There're
| similar sites.
|
| The bug is simple: You previously registered using gmail.
|
| Now you register new account with same email but with password.
|
| Instead of merging my account as before, they said account exist.
| synergy20 wrote:
| soon maybe the same will be said to reddit?
| moate wrote:
| Unlikely. Reddit has subreddit built right into the ecosystem,
| so if r/developersneedanswerstotoughcodingquestions gets taken
| over by an SO style mod mob, you can just go start
| r/fucktheolddeveloperreddit and the cycle will start new.
|
| Reddit has a lot of flaws, but stagnation isn't exactly one of
| them
| permo-w wrote:
| my most recent attempt wasn't downvoted or closed, instead I got
| an 'typo edit suggestion' - or something to that effect - where
| someone had gone through and edited in about 5 false corrections
| to imagined typos. I did have the option to decline the edit, but
| it's another example of the weird moderation culture
|
| does anyone have insight into the moderator process that's
| encouraging these behaviours?
| ryathal wrote:
| Edits provide reputation when accepted and on SO specifically
| are about the only reliable way for new users to get
| reputation. Answering new questions that don't get closed is
| difficult, anything "easy" is mobbed by people and a single
| answer gets reputation and the other largely ignored or even
| deleted. Asking is also difficult for the reasons commonly
| cited elsewhere in comments. Edits are also further gamified to
| be accepted through review queues that give badges for stamping
| enough things.
|
| Technically, trivial edits are discouraged, but there's nothing
| enforcing that publicly.
| zabzonk wrote:
| post a link that proves what you say
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| In the long 40+ year history of "social networking" (with that
| term construed broadly to mean "anything where people
| contribute") the most stale, boring, pedantic debates have
| _always_ been "does this message belong on this forum?"
|
| Besides SO have gotten that way, it's why almost no one wants to
| contribute to Wikipedia.
|
| You could almost graph the decline of a forum as directly
| proportional to the percentage of content that debates that
| question.
| skilled wrote:
| I think SO has very distinct culture and it is a notoriously
| hard-moderated platform. It attracts a lot of like-minded people
| for the various exchanges and you can get a kick out of it if
| you're also extremely passionate on certain topics.
|
| But outside of that, I treat SO mostly as a dictionary/reference.
| The whole points and reputation system isn't for me, but in this
| case that's how SO works and without this system it would be yet
| another lame Q&A platform that's riddled with spam and bullshit
| information.
|
| I can see leaving the platform or not using it at all, but I
| wouldn't block it from Search.
| andrewfromx wrote:
| [flagged]
| mistermann wrote:
| As someone who listened to every single Stackoverflow podcast
| as it was being built, I would love to be a fly on the wall
| eavesdropping on Jeff and Joel's conversations (preferably with
| a bit of alcohol in them) about what Stackoverflow has become.
| Jeff especially was absolutely hardcore on perfection, I can't
| imagine he wouldn't be freaking out on some level with this
| nonsense.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I reached a similar place with SO a few years ago. These days,
| I rarely bother to go there, although I don't block it in my
| search results.
| benjamoon wrote:
| This a GPT summary?
| andrewfromx wrote:
| I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries
| with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get
| all these points from an AI summary?
|
| I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize
| every article now!
| grey-area wrote:
| Yes it is wrong.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You mind explaining how?
| grey-area wrote:
| If you think it's useful you're stealing the work of GPT
| by posting without attribution, if you don't you're
| wasting our time.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is where I want to make an omniscient bot that
| follows you around and gives you a severe electric shock
| every time you use potentially copyrighting material
| snippets (I'll be nice and give you a 3 second window to
| declare fair use).
|
| I will be happy the day copyright is dead and buried
| under a mountain sized gravestone. As much as you think
| it protects the small guy, it enabled the rich to buy up
| portfolios and enslave them to constant payments and
| holding back the progression of society.
| majkinetor wrote:
| No its not. You used the tool in useful way, producing
| result that is helpful to others. Points deserved.
| Autosumarization would be cool too.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary?
|
| I don't think so, as long as you've vetted it for
| completeness and accuracy.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| That's exactly my point of view. Human-vetted AI content
| is just content that the human could write themselves,
| like a fancy autocomplete.
|
| Automatically posting AI content with a bot is a
| different matter
| ducktective wrote:
| I think we need sort of an etiquette code to disclose when
| a piece of text is AI-generated. Like when we say "Full
| Disclosure" or "IANAL"
| andrewfromx wrote:
| i can't help think of Data from star trek, longing to be
| more human like. At some point can the AI be allowed to
| post with the same equal rights as humans. Picard would
| fight for Data's rights to comment on hacker news
| articles.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't. HN is a place for humans to write and
| converse with each other. Bots have never been allowed here
| and we've banned accounts for posting like this since long
| before GPT. (I don't want to ban you, obviously)
| m463 wrote:
| _> It 's been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn't
| closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted
| for good measure_
|
| sigh.
|
| How can these kinds of jarring experiences be eliminated?
|
| This was my experience years and years ago. I think the quote
| was:
|
| _" This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect
| answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific
| expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate,
| arguments, polling, or extended discussion"_
|
| This just made the site about as interesting as hanging out at
| the DMV. (actually, the DMV might be more interesting, because
| it's full of people)
| bediger4000 wrote:
| SO has an additional problem the article's author doesn't get to:
| high-voted answers that at the time were relevant and correct,
| but are not relevant now due to time passing and Microsoft
| aligning Windows to fit their current direction. I reckon this
| problem exists for other technologies that change with time, too.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Indeed, I was recently looking for some information, and all
| the SO results I turned up were for the language in question as
| of 2011, and found to be inapplicable.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I've had the same sort of experience. This leads me to
| believe SO could age off answers, or maybe even questions,
| and everyone except history buffs would benefit.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I
| posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I _know_ that 's not how you'd
| solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011
| when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you
| want to spend your days?"
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I think this could easily be solved by removing the ability to
| vote on anything after X number of time units.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That would make sense if a new question could be asked after
| the same X number of time units. As it is, 2012 answers
| suggesting jQuery for any simple Javascript question are no
| longer relevant.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I
| posted over a decade ago_
|
| People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds
| exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm not sure what your problem with downvoting is. It's not an
| attack on you, but to let other readers know that your solution
| is not the best solution. It may have been so in 2011, but
| readers like me don't want to be led astray if it is no longer
| a good solution.
|
| Likewise for their comments.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| But then you lose the ability to participate in the community
| because of your "reputation".
| BeetleB wrote:
| From https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation:
|
| > Reputation is entirely optional
|
| > The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are
| Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any
| reputation at all!
|
| Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that
| matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125.
| My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with
| any trauma to get there.
|
| Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you
| need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care
| for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will
| not benefit if you do have the high reputation.
|
| At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to
| gamify points.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| That's basically what I'm saying. Lack of reputation
| inhibits your ability to participate in the site (beyond
| asking, answering, and editing questions).
| BeetleB wrote:
| And what I'm saying is ... that's OK for 99% of users.
| I'm not sure it's a problem that it is hard to
| participate beyond voting, commenting and
| asking/answering.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| This make perfect sense if one view SO as a FAQ site.
|
| SO explicitly allows same person posting question and
| immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a
| forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
| tbyehl wrote:
| > It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it.
|
| And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to
| ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question.
| Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the
| only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being
| authoritative.
|
| SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in
| practice.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I don't care about the downvotes but I hate when people make
| misguided attempts to "improve" old answers.
|
| The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the
| word "you" as an attempt to "depersonalize" the answer. There
| was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the
| user's changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the
| answers more convoluted.
|
| The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post--which they
| wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth,
| the rationale for these awful edits.
|
| The user argued that "you" is not used in good, professional
| documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false
| and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good
| documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of "you".
|
| Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with
| anyone, saying that "standard C" only referred to the current C
| standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer
| "standard". The user would insist upon removing the C tag from
| any question about C90, for example.
|
| The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is
| that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible
| users.
| ryathal wrote:
| The edit thing is a self imposed problem because the site
| gamification for established Stack* sites mandates that
| people edit questions to get enough reputation for basic site
| functionality. Actually asking or answering a question is far
| too difficult for a new user, especially on SO.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| SO Editors are like reddit mods... drunk with power of their
| little fiefdom that they believe actually matters....
| indirecTid wrote:
| [dead]
| dietrichepp wrote:
| Unlike Reddit mods, anyone with sufficient rep is granted
| the edit power on SO.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Just wait until you see the Wikipedia mods.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not
| an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that
| are not obvious and clear improvements.
|
| If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention.
| Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I did roll back, and the user started an edit war with me
| and I flagged it for moderator intervention. I didn't see a
| response from a diamond mod.
| fabian2k wrote:
| You usually won't see a response, the moderator will
| either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop
| the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| Interesting. I dug through my inbox and was able to find
| the answer, and evidence of the edit war itself is gone,
| except for the actual edit history. The comments have
| been removed. (Good riddance, but the process is less
| transparent for me.)
| fabian2k wrote:
| The actions to warn and suspend users are kinda
| intentionally invisible or at least less visible. The
| idea is not to publicly shame the users and to let them
| come back and continue to participate without attaching a
| public black mark to their account.
|
| So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag
| something except that your flag is declared valid and the
| problem is resolved in some way.
|
| The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so
| they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might
| be.
| nmilo wrote:
| Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow
| is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with
| it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less
| since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about
| "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question
| is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps
| anyways. They've always answered my stupid questions from years
| ago like "why does my program crash when I put a 1MB object on
| the stack" and "please make this CMake setup work for me," and if
| they didn't, they point me to a duplicate question that does.
| Just set aside your ego, fuck karma, and you'll be fine. I really
| don't see how people can find this site toxic.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I kind of wondered about that, too - I've asked a few questions
| on SO and never had one removed. Not all of them ever got
| answers, but I don't think any were ever removed or even
| downvoted.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians
| got out of control and it no longer was about helping people
| but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge
| where most users started to be categorised as problematic to
| that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at
| expressing themselves in English.
|
| Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour
| from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also
| quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close
| discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech
| choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new
| questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer
| to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually
| asking (e.g. poor English).
|
| Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off
| the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice
| that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had
| given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the
| basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness
| and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had,
| that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.
|
| I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I
| wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the
| frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and
| it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I lucked in to some moderator powers by posting the answer to
| an extremely simple and common problem in Objective-C.
|
| Sometimes I'll go through and undo lots of those trivial
| "improvements" that people make where they slightly change
| the wording of the questions and answers.
| bombcar wrote:
| It really REALLY depends on how you use SO and what "sub
| overflows?" you're using.
|
| Some of them are quite active and fun to work with, others are
| brutal. And it also depends on how much effort you put into
| your questions, also.
|
| But any complaining that goes beyond "googling my question
| doesn't get me my complete answer anymore" should include
| examples of when it failed, because often people complain who
| just wanted SO to do their legwork for them.
| user- wrote:
| > Do I live in a different world than everyone here?
|
| > The response time is like 10 minutes or less
|
| I have to say, you do, and I want to live in it. I've asked
| detailed, well formatted, clear questions and they usually got
| like 10 views in a month.
| playingalong wrote:
| Me neither. But I think to ask a good question (on SO or to a
| more senior colleague at work) is a skill itself. Most people
| don't have it. Even most developers don't have it, which is
| somewhat surprising.
|
| Also this skill is not taught actively, or at least not widely.
|
| So people end up asking these poorly worded or poorly aimed
| questions. And they receive hardly any help to get it right.
| Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when
| using SO).
| mdaniel wrote:
| > And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither
| before (in their education), nor during/after (when using
| SO).
|
| I've never asked a question in order to know what the
| question guidance is like, but _undoubtedly_ there is a well
| written "how to ask" page
| <https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask> and (one that I
| cite in comments so often I have a bookmarklet for it) the
| "please rubber duck your way to the question before vomiting
| into SO" that used to be called MCVE
| <https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example>
|
| Now, saying "ain't nobody got time to read all that text, I
| got bugs to write!" is a reasonable response, but saying
| "there's no guidance on how to write a question less likely
| to be closed" is untrue
| berjin wrote:
| I agree. SO is great because it doesn't try to please everyone.
| It's for professionals not to build your whole app for you.
|
| There seems to have been a swell in beginners learning to code
| perhaps due to economic motivations rather than curiosity.
| These people seem to want SO to do their homework for them
| without having done any leg work themselves. I can sympathise
| with people trying their best to find the answers but lacking
| the domain vocabulary to find the answers; Usually closed
| questions point them in to the right place anyway. However a
| lot of the questions are 1) duplicates or 2) high level
| questions for which there isn't a definite answer it's a matter
| of taste.
|
| That's not what SO is for. It's your job to figure out the high
| level picture, learn the absolute basics of the tech stack
| you're working with and SO can fill gaps where information is
| too esoteric to find easily in docs. The questions are
| generally unique rather than duplicated and improve over time
| rather than a constant stream of crap that reddit is.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I find those who bash SO to be either help vampires or
| generally using the site wrong (asking an opinion based
| question, asking newbie questions without searching or not
| knowing how to form the right search queries, ...)
|
| Inevitably when their questions get moderated they'll feel
| personally slighted without dispassionate consideration of the
| situation (because why would they; they have a question and
| they want the answer NOW), thus to them SO is now "toxic".
|
| Many just don't have the right mindset for SO, it's
| unfortunate.
| metabagel wrote:
| Well, here is my question which was marked as a duplicate.
| I'll never make the mistake of posting a question to SO
| again. Total waste of my time.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-
| cast...
| shagie wrote:
| By intentional design, Stack Overflow is a poor site to use
| if you need to work through multiple questions and answers
| to solve a problem. There are other sites that work to fill
| in that approach and do so better.
|
| Stack Overflow works best when there is a well defined
| problem that can be reproduced and you are a specific
| answer rather than guidance for how to proceed or a
| tutorial.
|
| If someone needs to come back to a question to answer
| comments and work through it, SO becomes more and more
| difficult to use in that format. AN important thing to
| remember is that it isn't the right site for every question
| (and trying to use it as such will run into those
| intentional design choices made at the very start to make
| it difficult to use for certain types of questions).
| metabagel wrote:
| I don't understand your response. I asked a single very
| specific question. Everything else was context and to
| prove that I did some work on my end before asking for
| help.
|
| I would have to look again, but I believe that SO
| explicitly asks you to post what you tried. And now
| you're saying that posting what I tried muddies up the
| value of my question. Can you see how this seems like a
| no-win situation?
| hummus_bae wrote:
| [dead]
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I haven't used SO for about 4-5 years now.
|
| In the past, it was the first place I'd go. The last few
| questions I asked were downvoted and closed or told to reference
| answers from another question that didn't have anything to do
| with what I was asking for. I just gave up on it being a useful
| resource when I got stumped as a developer based on the last few
| questions I asked.
|
| The last few years I've gotten better answers from Reddit,
| Discord and various forums I visit from time to time. I've even
| started using ChatGPT to get answers which has worked
| surprisingly well.
|
| I don't want to say its outlived its usefulness, but even the
| small dev circles I run in, none of those people have used it in
| a while either.
| chrisan wrote:
| Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP
| eventually shared his questions that were deleted
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...
|
| > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for
| SO.
|
| > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up
| being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language,
| it wasn't as useful of a general question. This one I'd argue
| could be trimmed down further to a SCCEE for the bug and
| rephrased, but it doesn't matter now since the bug is auto-
| patched.
|
| > The third question has a great question set-up (formatted and
| straight to the point with SCCEEs) but the answer is the same as
| the linked duplicate so it should be closed.
|
| > The fourth question is another straight up duplicate asking for
| the meaning of certain Regex characters.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of
| correct).
|
| But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get
| modded to shit" now.
|
| I don't think the original author is complaining about the
| functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I
| think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not
| something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid
| questions, and their experience is that their questions are
| always rejected. This is true, and it remains true even if
| technically their questions should be rejected for valid
| reasons.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get
| modded to shit" now._
|
| I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people
| complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how
| rarely they provide links to the questions?
|
| If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly
| closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the
| case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the
| primary evidence?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Ask, and ye shall receive:
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968
| Izkata wrote:
| The main post[0] you go on about in there is a badly
| formatted question: It's not self-contained, and relies
| entirely on external links. It doesn't surprise me it got
| close votes.
|
| [0]
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75361518/accessing-
| an-io...
| slavik81 wrote:
| * * *
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| That's a GREAT discussion to be had... SO purpose is to be a
| kind of encyclopedia, so it makes sense to try to categorize
| duplicates (eventually fading them into obscurity). But is
| that the best experience for the user? Is it supposed to
| serve only readers, or those who are actually asking
| questions?
| chrisan wrote:
| > But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get
| modded to shit" now.
|
| You are 100% correct. SO clearly has an issue as this comes
| up time and time again.
|
| I wonder if a ChatGPT like front for it would serve everyone
| better?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yeah, probably. Even doing the modding in real time would
| help, I think:
|
| "Your question appears similar to these other questions, do
| they answer your question?"
|
| "Your question appears to be a rant, and doesn't actually
| ask a question. Is this true?"
|
| "Your question is easily solved: you have mis-spelled this
| configuration setting. Would you still like to post it?"
| Y_Y wrote:
| Yes to all.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| As someone who mostly just runs into SO through searches and
| rarely asks: I want to see these duplicates thrive, I want to
| see the ideas. It's so common that the first SO thread is
| useless but that a near duplicate does actually provide me with
| the answer I need. Unfortunately, near half the questions I
| land on which I feel might actually help me are shut down,
| which is not just a complete waste of an opportunity but also a
| waste of my time.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no
| reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted
| me!!". And people either refuse to give examples (because they
| know they're lying), or when responding it's quite obvious why
| they got the reaction they got.
|
| Mind you, I believe SO could be more friendly. But if you've
| tried moderating and being active there, you quickly understand
| the bluntness. With hundreds of useless questions being posted
| an hour, you quickly get jaded. Like, I genuinely want to help
| people there, but when you spend literally no effort asking
| your question you're not getting much in return.
| metabagel wrote:
| Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being
| a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never
| to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The
| cost/benefit ratio is off the charts.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-
| cast...
| RHSeeger wrote:
| A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of
| questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's
| supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly,
| blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that
| closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well
| enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no
| answer to the new question.
| jmuguy wrote:
| I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to
| moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just
| an endless sea of low effort shit.
| jotaen wrote:
| What I find off-putting about StackOverflow is their crowd-
| sourced moderation system (which I got access to at some point
| due to karma threshold). It's based on pre-categorised moderation
| queues with flagged submissions that you can (have to) go
| through, and it's designed in a way that you mostly choose from a
| set of pre-fabricated standard responses to "resolve" the issue.
| The eventual moderation decision is "democratic", so when 2 or 3
| moderators happen to come to the same result independently, then
| that's what it is.
|
| To me, that "moderation process" mostly felt like a robotic
| assembly line which isn't designed to genuinely help people, but
| it's primarily optimised for throughput. The frustration
| expressed by end-users is a direct consequence of this design
| that's not really surprising.
|
| What's most bizarre is that the system intersperses phony test
| submissions every once in a while, just to verify whether you as
| moderator are "doing it right" (or, are still alive, for that
| matter).
| exabrial wrote:
| What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and
| attributing it to me.
|
| For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I
| appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission
| edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm
| polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to
| reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they
| locked the post.
|
| So yeah, despite being top 5% in the world, I stopped answering
| questions on the stupid site.
| wendyshu wrote:
| That sentence is redundant noise on the page. Show your
| appreciation by upvoting answers instead.
| wendyshu wrote:
| I don't see the rationale for closing questions. If they're bad
| questions, downvote. If it's a duplicate, put an answer linking
| to an answer to the other question. Closing cuts off the
| possibility that someone might actually provide a useful answer.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > _" SO was incredible when it came out."_
|
| Amen to that.
|
| > _" That begs the question, what fills the void?"_
|
| ChatGPT or another language model.
|
| StackOverflow started with the vision of not being what made
| Experts Exchange so terrible - that was a brilliant plan at the
| time and SO did _many_ things very right.
|
| Now, many years have passed and not only have we seen SO grow
| into the whole plethora of QA sites that are Stack Exchange but
| also a couple of other QA sites. None of them are great, none of
| them are nearly as useful as the original SO was. I think it is
| save to say, that this approach simply does not scale.
|
| I might be wrong and maybe, some day, someone comes around and
| nails QA at scale. My bet is that with ChatGPT the humanly
| curated QA site is as dead in the water as the humanly curated
| web directories were when Google came around.
| politician wrote:
| (Programming) SO is done, and should be dismantled. Its
| historical answers have been indexed into GPT, and the recent
| content circa 10 years ago and since has been this constant fight
| against moderators.
|
| I've had the same experience as the author, but haven't blocked
| it from my hosts file. I think that I will.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that
| it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's
| only a secondary use case.
|
| The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of
| answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.
| They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to
| do X in Y language." They're _not_ optimizing for being the best
| place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
|
| When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how
| the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example)
| makes more sense.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| I rarely respond to super recent comments, but you're 100%
| right.
|
| What SO didn't expect was that their _real purpose_ was as
| feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them
| entirely.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| I look forward to the day that the LLM responds to a question
| like the users of SO do, duplicate, didn't do enough research
| before answering, etc.
| Natsu wrote:
| The problem is that you need people getting their questions
| answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten
| worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I
| just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.
| melling wrote:
| Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn't go around closing
| questions because you didn't "try hard enough before asking"
|
| I used to ask "interesting" questions to build that quality
| knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I
| had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions.
|
| I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I
| tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins,
| then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and
| I would delete my account.
|
| They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had
| close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete.
|
| Needless to say, I no longer feed the site.
|
| Hopefully, with more advanced AI's we can scrape the web,
| organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered,
| skipping the searching.
|
| Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++,
| Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by "Pair Programming" with an "AI"
| assistant.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > by "Pair Programming" with an "AI" assistant
|
| I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential
| posters would read the _Minimum Complete Verifiable Example_
| page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already
| frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed"
| drama
|
| I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the
| existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be
| pretty close
|
| 1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-
| example
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conv
| er...
| _gabe_ wrote:
| I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read
| when you go to stackoverflow.com is:
|
| > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others
| answer theirs
|
| And here's one of the first snippets on their about page:
|
| > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when
| they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform
| that over 100 million people visit every month _to ask
| questions, learn, and share technical knowledge_.
|
| Stack Overflow's website says _nothing_ about this when you 're
| looking at it briefly. _They_ highlight the fact that it 's
| primarily a _Q &A_ site. The people that insist that SO is
| _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that
| have ruined the site.
|
| Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is
| supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped
| producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The
| new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:
|
| 1. Google question
|
| 2. Click 5-6 different SO links
|
| 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap
|
| 4. Go to the documentation
|
| 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that
| actually gives me the correct answer.
|
| I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers
| are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by
| gatekeepers to defend themselves.
| arp242 wrote:
| Before you can ask your first question you're shown
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice
|
| Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips
| in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has
| been shown for _years_ and isn 't a new thing.
|
| Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in
| another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear
| vision, but people are certainly given more information
| beyond the tagline.
|
| You can take any tagline to its extreme.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632
|
| > I wish people would stop propagating this lie that
| gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie
| propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
|
| Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different
| view of things.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > I hear this strawman all the time.
|
| Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the
| 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?
|
| > Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia
| article for some extremely narrow, specific programming
| question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the
| user's snibbit? This question should only appear once in the
| site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected
| to the original question.
|
| Or here's the other cofounder's 2018 retrospective[2]:
|
| > Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with
| Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions
| and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by
| their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many
| other programmers that question or answer can potentially
| help over time.
|
| Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes
| that goal, but I think it's well established that it
| converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had
| it in sight for basically all of its existence.
|
| In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[3];
| it's just that it's never been not about giving _you_ the
| perfect answer to your question, for any value of _you_
| including me.
|
| (SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little
| tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A
| as envisioned there is, in particular, not a forum, which
| _would_ be about answering or discussing a specific poster's
| question. There should be an "SO is not a forum" blog post or
| FAQ somewhere there, too.)
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-
| lau...
|
| [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-
| want-...
|
| [3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-
| is-a...
| shagie wrote:
| Jeff's announcement can be seen at
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-
| com/
|
| > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange
| (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search
| engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It
| is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate
| intent of collectively increasing the sum total of _good_
| programming knowledge in the world. No matter what
| programming language you use, or what operating system you
| call home. Better programming is our goal.
|
| Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First
| sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.
| siwatanejo wrote:
| IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers
| are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good
| measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I
| gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as
| duplicate.
| metabagel wrote:
| I never considered asking and answering my own question. I
| didn't even realize it was allowed.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You're just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do
| you agree?
| rglullis wrote:
| Because it's a reasonable justification. Why _don 't_ you
| agree?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| SO is stagnant directly due to this policy.
|
| Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years
| ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get
| answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in,
| and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp
| on questions meaningful.
|
| SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to
| participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out
| of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something
| better will replace it, not IF it will.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just
| roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may
| aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense
| from the site owners but still link you to another
| answer)
| politician wrote:
| Time travelers preparing to travel to the year 2009
| certainly find it invaluable.
| [deleted]
| nextaccountic wrote:
| How can you not agree that the SO goal is to achieve whatever
| the owners of SO want it to achieve?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I didn't disagree with the goal. I question the owner's
| stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its
| audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If
| latter then describing the site that way reads more like an
| ad. Like taking musk's statements on what Twitter is "for"
| at face value
| watwut wrote:
| But the stated goal is consistent with actual behavior in
| case of SO.
|
| Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Inconsistent with community behaviors. Same with musk in
| that the community's behaviors can't be entirely owned by
| management
| fishtoaster wrote:
| What makes you think I agree? I certainly _am_ saying what
| the SO owners have said. I 'm repeating it here because I
| think it's a useful way to understand _why_ SO is the way it
| is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and
| think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being
| a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead,
| optimizing around a different goal entirely.
| tsian2 wrote:
| I think this is the reason why the site is found so useful now.
| The meta board is a good read for anyone who wants to
| understand more or find out how to resolve their issues with
| the site.
| LastTrain wrote:
| If that is true, wouldn't it be more effective to use noindex
| so as not to curtail interaction with the site?
| tayistay wrote:
| SO is mostly a mechanism for spreading unhappiness, secondarily
| it produces a searchable corpus of answers.
| AndrewPGameDev wrote:
| If we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to
| rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average
| user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like
| Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of
| the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of
| comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would
| be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge
| it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on
| SO is toxic (with regard to that context).
| qwertox wrote:
| In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers
| I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like
| yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a
| database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a
| couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to
| pipe the data.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus
| of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality
| answers._
|
| The issue is that by discouraging participation in the
| community, you end up with a repository of old questions with
| decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and
| fewer newer questions with even worse answers.
|
| My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a
| middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant,
| but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the
| community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.
| ryandrake wrote:
| SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I
| have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's
| aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates shows
| is the intended outcome.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for
| users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are
| and then have other users vote to override the previous
| answer
| arp242 wrote:
| One of the big problems with this is that many newer
| answers are _not_ good, and merely rehash the existing
| answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For
| example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to
| repeat the top answer.
|
| Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an
| alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example
| [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not
| "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional
| possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases,
| but not in others.
|
| The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also
| much harder to solve than people think it is.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921
| ROTMetro wrote:
| This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no
| longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we
| already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly
| things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime
| members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model
| that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community'
| with no interest in being a 'community'.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I don't know that SO _ever_ wanted to be much of a community
| in the traditional sense. We _had_ communities before SO:
| huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish)
| for people participating in them, but they were awful for
| random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a
| specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind
| up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-
| forgotten thread before finding out if _anyone_ had answered
| the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9
| problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a
| repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that,
| and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in
| the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion
| questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic
| discussion, etc).
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/979/
| autokad wrote:
| the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want.
| SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is
| comical considering the site only existed if people had
| done so.
| Gud wrote:
| This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and
| would come across a forum topic regarding the subject.
| Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post,
| 75% garbage
| wwweston wrote:
| Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and
| change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout
| history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
| jrumbut wrote:
| Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most
| people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process
| of overcoming.
|
| What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any
| means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a
| modern virtue.
|
| To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous
| progress in the last several years. They've been making
| pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in
| favor of the messy business of being a healthy community.
|
| I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the
| most part).
| largepeepee wrote:
| Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer
| programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer
| scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said
| questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality.
|
| Pretty common trade off in large tech these days
| [deleted]
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal
| questions answered.
|
| If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to
| zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack
| overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most
| problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too
| niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter
| expert instead.
|
| Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the
| questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs
| target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking
| up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia
| instead.
|
| Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and
| most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid
| level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why
| stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people
| contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable
| resource for the other 99.9%
| arp242 wrote:
| One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas
| about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't
| really seem to have a clear vision at all.
|
| It's undeniable that the _original_ intent of Stack Overflow is
| as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit
| about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended
| purpose was.
|
| But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very
| involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things
| have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack
| Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net
| result was that ... nothing ever changed.
|
| There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack
| Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack
| Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions
| being downvoted or closed.
|
| In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash
| site where different people are operating under different
| assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and
| it leaves everyone unhappy.
|
| [1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html
| moremetadata wrote:
| I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack
| Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments
| to solutions reminded me of this
| https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
|
| Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email
| from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me
| are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example
| of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people,
| which in my experience has been since before primary school.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web
| 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but
| now curated not by experts on their own little websites but
| distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think
| wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily
| geared towards _cleanup_ , not participation. However,
| databasing _questions_ never really made sense. It works
| remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What
| we really needed was a collective effort to produce great,
| searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a
| collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do
| not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful
| introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are
| dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.
| stuartd wrote:
| > What we really needed was a collective effort to produce
| great, searchable, navigable documentation
|
| They tried. It didn't work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q
| uestions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at
| https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus
| of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.
| They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how
| to do X in Y language."
|
| The problem with this is that answers change, for some
| languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best
| way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best
| way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of
| moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of
| info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to
| post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of
| outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers
| because "it's just going to get flagged".
|
| The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups
| and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I
| am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions
| anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples
| in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah
| those are high quality answers, if we were all still using
| Jquery.
|
| S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of
| answers" in a different way that would have preserved the
| quality but not dejected all of it's users.
| the8472 wrote:
| > no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just
| going to get flagged".
|
| I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers
| posted years after the original answer.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually
| beneath the stale answer.
| artificial wrote:
| Where's your preferred JS forum?
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| [dead]
| arp242 wrote:
| > After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers
| and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just
| going to get flagged".
|
| I have answered many old questions and never once has this
| been flagged; usually it gets upvoted.
|
| I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than
| 60 days later with score of 5 or more" - some of these
| answered questions that were over ten years old. And this
| excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet).
|
| Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my
| experience.
| bena wrote:
| But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up
| to date.
|
| They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have
| that be _correct_.
|
| But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get
| an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it,
| that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the
| fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different.
|
| But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to
| "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's
| not guaranteed to be correct anymore.
|
| You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.
| ryathal wrote:
| This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal
| potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions.
| Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it
| ever will happen.
| caconym_ wrote:
| The author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that
| they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which
| (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all
| suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to
| refute their point then you really have to make the case that
| SO _is functioning as intended_ despite their implicit claim to
| the contrary.
|
| I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't
| functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking
| or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.
| jmartrican wrote:
| In the beginning, I've had questions downvoted. But after a
| while, I learned how to ask questions. I can say that this is not
| something I struggle with.
|
| One issue I did have recently was with having one of my questions
| deemed a duplicate. And it was a duplicate if you only consider
| the fix or root cause. But the original question did not have the
| error message that i was getting, and hence never came across the
| original. Hence I did not think it was a duplicate. In time I was
| able to get the duplicate label removed, and the question opened
| back up.
|
| I love SO. And I'm saddened by the OP's experience. I can imagine
| how frustrating they must feel. Hopefully, posts like this can
| lead to positive change.
| matsemann wrote:
| If the other question solved your problem, it's considered a
| duplicate. However, a duplicate isn't necessarily bad, and
| getting your question closed for it shouldn't be taken as a
| slight. It's just another angle (as you had a different error)
| to get to the same answer.
| autokad wrote:
| > It's been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn't
| closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted
| for good measure (that'll teach me to use the site like it's
| intended!).
|
| I always hated stack overflow. they treat you like you raped
| their grand daughter for asking a question. I always recommended
| my students: SO is a great place to find answer, but don't ever
| ask a question unless you are into punishment.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| It used to be cool. A good place to ask questions (and answer
| them when bored).
|
| Now it's read-only. One of many sources of answers (mostly for
| Linux config rabbit holes these days). Never post anything on
| there because it gets modded to shit within minutes.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I have pretty much the same stats as the OP, with 28 questions
| over 8 years.
|
| I haven't had many questions closed, but there hasn't been one
| time where it was not legitimate, and the linked question didn't
| answer my problem.
|
| The OP linked a few questions that got closed, and while we
| cannot see the content, we can see from the URL that it's pretty
| obvious they are very searchable questions that are obvious
| duplicates or do not fit SO:
|
| - "meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex"
|
| - "any-reason-to-use-grid-for-mobile-andn-desktop-views"
|
| - "regex-matching-behavior-between-char-class-and-eol"
|
| - etc.
|
| Not only that, but those questions were not just closed, but were
| actually deleted, which indicates not only a problem with the
| content, but also big problems with the format.
|
| StackOverflow ain't the problem here.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions.
| ~1.9M people reached.
|
| I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions
| that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students
| community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to
| ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is
| discouraging.
| avgDev wrote:
| I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask
| for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post
| deleted or got some snarky comments.
|
| Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming
| environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to
| answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing
| you cannot be helped.
|
| I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but
| he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly
| realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need
| to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read
| them.
|
| I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a
| midsize company and I have never encountered anything that
| wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.
| bombcar wrote:
| You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory
| days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR"
| questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality
| of the _questions_ goes down, the discouragement for the
| _answerers_ goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by
| "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer"
| questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good
| question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).
| bena wrote:
| 14 years, 5 months, 71 answers, 7 questions, ~5.6m people
| reached. Top 10% reputation overall.
|
| The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was
| fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not
| conducive to community.
|
| And here we are.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-21 23:01 UTC)