Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting and still related to programming (closed as not constructive, or locked and marked as having "historical significance" such as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-langua...) the sense of community there pretty much disappeared. There's not much incentive for knowledgable people to visit a site that is boring, and now StackOverflow seems to contain a lot more questions asked by noobs (I've done this about subjects I don't know) that go unanswered.
The same also goes for questions that are almost duplicates. Or are basically but have been inactive so you want to get further information. And when interesting discussions get moved to chat. The whole place is just boring and too heavily controlled. I"m not surprised something that required community failed there.
My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve. The answers that required some effort, more code and explanations are not that "valuable" because they answer more specific problem that is not shared by many developers. I don't have a problem with that, I don't answer on SO only to accumulate points, but in my opinion it skews the incentives towards going after the low-hanging fruit. The closer it gets into "RTFM" territory the bigger the possible payoff.
EDIT: And the karma DOES matter if you want to get new opportunities via stackoverflow careers. I have landed a job recently via SO and chatted with the recruiter a bit about their experience with the platform. He told me some companies specify they want to hire from the pool of Top X% in given technology. Another thing is the response rate on SO is dramatically better than Linkedin, which doesnt surprise me: I do my best to answer every SO Careers message while I mostly ignore Linkedin recruiters.
The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page.
Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer.
So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community.
(I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)
> But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer.
But at the same time you are learning with blinders on, i.e. you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation.
This is not particularly bad when you're just starting out. But if you see RTFM-level questions from people which appear to already be in the business of building complex applications then you start to wonder if this kind of thing incentivizes help-vampirism.
Personally I prefer to answer niche questions or things that are not well-documented yet.
> you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation.
That's assuming that the documentation is articulately and technically well written. Unfortunately that's more often the exception than the rule. That's rather the whole reason that StackOverflow even exists, I think.
It's also assuming the SO answer is less considerate of context than the documentation; this can be the case, but I find quite often good answers are quite comprehensive and explain things broadly.
before: questions were always open. and over time people added those details.
now, after someone answer with a one liner and gets accepted, the question is "closed to prevent 'me too' comments"
it's going downhill for the same reason every internet community does: power crazy moderators who completely misses the point of the site they moderate.
The "me too" functionality is protection, not closing - registered users with a certain amount of reputation can still answer them. Similar to Wikipedia's system.
Every "me too" protected item I've seen has half a dozen "me too" answers deleted at the bottom. It's likely necessary.
I don't think it's just the moderators, there's also an incentive problem because a popular question/answer has no limits on its point-payout.
This leads to a kind of popularity gold-rush pattern. Hard important stuff languishes while easy stuff is has a glut of volunteers.
I'd be interested to see what happens if questions and answers only gave up to a fixed limit of Internet-points to the authors or contributors. Would it lead to a broader knowledge base?
I find JS is well documented on MDN, but doc writers can't possibly imagine all edge cases and interactions. A lot of these cases are "If you knew about that simple feature of instruction A and the simple feature of instruction B and how they work together then you can solve this problem".
Meh, it's just another resource. Sure you can make a case it encourages help-vampirism, but I would argue that help vampires are largely incapable of becoming competent anyway. Basically, anyone that will become a competent programmer has a hunger to learn and fit all the pieces together, and will be frustrated by endlessly googling and posting questions that take hours or days to receive a reply; no matter how much googling/documentation is involved, ultimately they will learn to synthesize solutions efficiently. Meanwhile there are many people who believe being able to program is just a question of accumulating enough facts and they never progress past asking whole-cloth questions. I'm sure some are capable of crossing the chasm, but if it doesn't happen early I don't think it ever happens.
For a help vampire, even SO is not rich enough to make them competent. For a competent developer, SO is not efficient enough for them to learn helplessness.
Generally if I'm going to SO instead of RingTFM, it's because I don't particularly need to learn. I just need to fix this one thing that's tangentially related to my work. And usually my deadline precludes me spending time learning it anyway, even if I'd like to.
> My top 3 answers are one-liners that solve "problems" any semi-competent developer shouldn't even need stackoverflow to solve.
Remember that SO's main traffic source isn't experts, it's novices searching for answers. I did some digging at one point, and the most popular questions on ServerFault are extremely basic, like 'how to make a symlink' basic (viewed 1 million times https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1951742/how-to-symlink-a...). If you're a developer or student just trying to figure out this one UNIX thing so you can get back to JavaScript or CS:Go or whatever, this is great.
I agree and appreciate that, but I don't know that it's always true. The problem is that a lot of documentation and man pages out there just aren't written well. They bury the lede and make you dig around to figure out how to do that simple thing you want to do. Googling for something and immediately finding that specific question on SO even if you could go look it up in pages of docs is a time saver.
Edit: Or perhaps the library has poor usability. I've been doing python programming for 6 years now and know the standard library like the back of my hand, but if I have to do anything reasonably complex with datetime you can bet I'll probably just look for someone on SO that has had the same problem and crib the answer.
I've answered a bunch of narrow questions like the ones you described, only to see them closed later because the community decided it doesn't want to include those questions. My attitude has always been, "Speak for yourself. I'm fine answering them." But, of course, they still get closed, so now I don't even bother.
There are people (like me) willing to kill some time solving useful problems that people in the real world are actually having, but SO's theory of broken windows is so extreme that they want to make me feel bad for doing that.
You can blame Jeff Atwood. He outlined his theory of the descent of sites into irrelevance in some blog posts, then put it into action. There's code on SO to prevent two questions having an identical title for example. Even though he's long gone from SO management, the legacy of his philosophy is still abundant.
It's weird that they're closing Documentation, because my experience is that SO doesn't actually want to be a Q&A site, it wants to be a crowdsourced documentation site disguised as a Q&A site for some reason. They'll close legitimate questions because they're not broadly applicable, which isn't really how Q&A works.
A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless.
Its possible to have a site that is a mashup of /r/programming, /r/programmerhumor and /r/learnprogramming (and a few others) all on one site. Though when all of those things are together on one site it makes the job of the people trying to curate it impossible.
Sure, Strangest language feature is interesting... and it has 320 visible answers when it was locked. Is it useful? It might be interesting, but it is impossible to remove the crap content from it (go to page 11 and start reading backwards and saying "is that useful or not?").
> 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.
Interesting stuff and fun stuff may be interesting and fun - but when it gets in the way of making a site that is a library of good programming knowledge... something needs to be done about it.
Everything doesn't have to be on Stack Overflow. There are many other sites that are better suited to discussions and fun things than the format for that Stack Overflow took as a Q&A site.
It may be boring and heavily controlled... but that unity of vision is necessary for trying to make it a site that provides material that I need when I search for how to deal with some programming problem of configuring Spring Statemachine or whatnot... and then interesting and fun gets in the way of me doing my job.
Lately I have been writing a lot of Python and I am seeing a lot of bit rot in Stack Overflow lately.
For one thing, it seems almost all the code snippets use "print-without-parenthesis" from Python 2, so you cannot just cut and paste them into Python 3. It isn't hard to fix this, but it's a clear sign the lights are on and nobody is home.
The lack of curation is a problem too. Often the first answer is wrong, or less than optimal. From the viewpoint of somebody looking for answers you don't really want 10 people's opinion, you want one really good answer.
It's even worse with javascript. Often times there will be 10+ duplicates with legacy kludgy answers that are irrelevant now or using jquery, when the correct answer should use new APIs or less buggy browsers.
The solution to this is to get the original question asker to consider changing the accepted answer. You can leave a comment on their question if it's many years old to bring it to their attention.
Yeah, success definitely varies if the person is no longer active and doesn't respond to the email notification. I've had mixed results with it in the case where the asker (new to SO) didn't realize upvoting answer(s) and accepting an answer are different things.
If it's a really popular question I think making it a community wiki is an alternative.
Agreed. I think a lot of this could be solved if they unpinned accepted answers from the top spot on questions and weighted votes based on how recent they are. That way new answers to old questions would have a better chance of rising to the top of the page more quickly.
But then you're not sorting based on quality at all. The idea is the best answer should be the one on top. That's not necessarily the most recent answer, but it's also not necessarily that one answer that is really outdated but has accumulated tons of votes by virtue of being around a long time either.
Active sort is still based on quality -- it's not strictly most recent, but some combination of recency and votes... maybe like Reddit's hot sort.
For instance, on this question I posted a nicely upvoted thorough answer to a popular old question whose other answers were dated. By active sort it becomes #2 (#1 is always the accepted answer), but by votes sort it's #4.
The part about an old answer that was highly upvoted but is no longer right definitely exists — I'm not sure if they've thought about solving that one.
You can edit other people's answers to update them or fix this. Most people are very open to it. I do it regularly if the code isn't linted or if SQL keywords are lowercase vs uppercase to improve readability for everyone.
I agree if it is fundamentally changing the nature of their code, but expanding an answer to include a Python 3 solution alongside an existing Python 2 one is something I've done myself and haven't experienced any issues with. IMO the most important part is to preserve and extend the original answer vs re-write it completely.
You don't have to modify, and I never do except to improve readability (read: eliminate or reduce horizontal scrollbars). It's not unusual to see a good contributor add an answer to an old question that uses newer syntax or version features. "The accepted answer is quite old but this question is the top result for 'javascript arrays' (e.g.), so this is how you do it in ES6."
Sure, but can answers be un-accepted once technologies have advanced and better solutions have become available? I see a lot of accepted answers that were correct and relevant once, but not in (Summer of) 2017.
Yes, it is possible and best practice to re-accept if the previously accepted answer is no longer correct. Only the asker can change the accepted answer.
But yes, answer rot can be a bit of an annoyance. Often it helps to check the answering date. The official answer to the problem is that one should post a new answer to an old question, but it would be great if one could just drive-by flag things as outdated, needs update or something like that.
> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material.
I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis. I think maybe a mistake that SO makes is to close or remove topics, rather than "deemphasize" them.
Instead of closing things, why not just make poor answers and poor discussions lead to less likelihood of being found in the search engine. (I suppose this might take some coordination with Google et al..)
One thing I don't particularly like about SO is that the questioner must select the "accepted" answer. Quite often this isn't the best one, or there isn't a best one, or there is too much discussion in the comments and not in the answers.
What is missing imho is a meta vote. Individual questions and answers have votes, but I think the "selection of the best answer" should also have a kind of "confidence vote". This might help to make the most interesting questions and answers more visible.
On the other hand maybe it's so "meta" that no one would use it, and a recommendation engine is only as good as the willingness of users to recommend things..
But in any case my overarching point is that there are too many "binary" evaluations of goodness on SO, instead of letting things bubble up to the top when they're interesting. (The difficulty of course being to define "interesting" as useful and accurate, rather than just clickbaity.)
> I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis. I think maybe a mistake that SO makes is to close or remove topics, rather than "deemphasize" them.
Questions should also "age" and become deemphasized with time, especially for more popular topics. SO is getting old, with a lot of out-of-date stuff, and relying on manually closing topic to maintain quality isn't going to help with that. If stuff aged out, it would push the more recent stuff to the top. It would also increase engagement since there'd be space to answer the old questions in new ways without it being futile.
That's not to say the old answers are bad (people have to work on legacy stacks after all), but you should only find that stuff if you want it.
True, it should be possible to flag information as old or obsolete without it being marked "wrong". Maybe similarly, there are cases where the specifics may be out of date but the idea or concepts are nonetheless valid. Perhaps it should be possible to mark answers as "timeless".
A down vote is not marking it wrong. It is indicating that it is not useful (compared to other content?).
As to "timeless" - consider that even such material can expire. The "timeless" information about how to simulate a closure in Java (valid from 1996 to 2014) is no longer timeless. The timeless material applicable for all versions of Python (until Python 3) would make it just as difficult to get rid of as a green checkmark next to the answer that someone found helpful at some point in the past.
If you ever create a meta-moderator user script for Stack Overflow I'd be interested in seeing how well it works. The biggest problem being the volume of material that is coming in on a daily basis.
Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material.
These are only a few instances of places on Stack Overflow where community curation of larger material has worked. The C++ community on Stack Overflow is very careful and protective with https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-... . But outside of that, most people let questions and answers rot.
Fun and interesting can happen when it doesn't become a distraction for the site as a whole. MathOverflow, with more active curation that is possible with a larger active contributor to overall community ratio is able to handle list questions ( https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list?sort=vote... ) in a way that has often failed to be curated well on Stack Overflow.
The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants. The way to remove noise to help with the signal for that vision of good programming knowledge is to, well, remove noise. People up voting fun things makes that signal for good material even harder to find though.
> Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material.
Right, but I guess I'm sort of suggesting that what is needed is something in-between. "Soft" curation, if you want. Just an idea anyways, but it seems to be like it would be more scalable, and less likely to cause controversy e.g. when something gets deleted.
> The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants.
But yeah I guess that is the crux of the matter.. not much can be done about other people indexing old/bad stuff.
> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless.
Are you serious? Whenever a community allows for more-or-less self-appointed authority figures, they ALWAYS emerge, as they are drawn to the perceived power.
Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc. They all have their toxic "lawyers". Users who have passed a certain threshold of "points", or else are simply willing to invest the time to squat on a topic, and enjoy abusing the power to delete or revert contributions from others.
To a certain degree it's probably a good thing, as the sites would be overrun by trolls without them. But they also tend to calcify the culture after a few years, and drive down any incentive for new contributors to step in.
StackOverflow's core problem isn't a lack of people willing to edit questions or vote-to-close. It's core problem is that it's been at least 5 years since I last felt like reading or answering any open questions, or even posting any new questions of my own, and I don't think this sentiment is uncommon.
> Everything doesn't have to be on Stack Overflow. There are many other sites that are better suited to discussions and fun things than the format for that Stack Overflow took as a Q&A site.
But that's the point: if people are leaving the site to get that discussion and fun stuff elsewhere they're not on the Stack Exchange network, and so they're not answering or tagging or voting or flagging.
Only a small fraction of the site is voting in ways that enable moderation and curation or flagging. They don't leave because they can't read fun things - they leave because those actions have no apparent effect on the crap that shows up each day... and then run out of votes for various actions.
Fun material is rarely present on sites intended for technical accuracy. Trying to add jokes to Wikipedia main page content is a similarly fruitless endeavor.
Speaking as someone who used to answer regularly and now doesn't at all, it's because the moderators have gotten insane and taken the fun / interest out of it. So at least in my case, your thesis is incorrect.
Would it be useful if while reading about a solar eclipse I would find jokes about people pulling their pants down and mooning you?
The content and vision of the founder for that content is what draws people to Wikipedia and stack overflow.
That it takes people who occasionally need to be assholes in order to maintain that vision and ideal is a failing of communication to the out of sync contributors... and those contributors to follow that ideal.
There is nothing stopping anyone from forking the content stack overflow or Wikipedia and providing a different vision. If more people follow that new vision, it wins and the world shifts to a different site (that is what happened with experts exchange).
The main problem with the fork however, is getting the people who contribute good material and don't want to have to read jokes about exposed buttocks on the moon or favorite comic strip amidst documentation for Java.
The problem is that "people who occasionally need to be assholes" overlaps significantly until it is a constant stream of people in asshole mode (who are just having their asshole moment of the day). So it's disingenuous to say that people are "only occasionally" being assholes. There is definitely a unified asshole front, even if it's only being manned by part-timers.
Yes, it would be fun. The problem being that there is no scale to measure humour and taste, and that moon joke doesn't seem good. But I regret that, in the absence of a scale, our culture decides there shouldn't be humour. I'm curious whether it's a USA thing or whether an Asia-originated or Africa-originated Wikipedia and StackOverflow would have resulted in different rules.
I don't know what the grandparent meant by jokes, but the current problem -- the malignant influence of a small number of authoritarian Wikipedia editors -- has nothing to do with cracking down on silliness.
>Its possible to have a site that is a mashup of /r/programming, /r/programmerhumor and /r/learnprogramming (and a few others) all on one site.
The fact that these are three separate subs and not one kinda betrays your point though. How did it get this way, where there are multiple subs? Is it because the mods were overbearing, or because the community decided what it wants and doesn't want?
There are cases when content from one sub seeps through to another, and the blowback isn't nearly as bad as what you see on SO.
The last few times I've asked questions, they were closed as duplicates to questions that weren't related but for a few key words. And often it was done by some of the same set of power users. I've tried adding explanation as to why its different, and some have been reopened, but mostly it isn't worth the time anymore.
I had this happen to me 2-3 times as well. Incorrectly flagged and closed by point seekers in a hurry. It made me respect the platform less and honestly I find myself barely participating anymore after years of activity.
If they were “point seekers”, they would have answered the questions (an action that gives points) instead of closing them (an action that gives no points). I somehow doubt the votes were incorrect, though.
> closing strictly off topic questions that were interesting ... closed as not constructive, or locked and marked as having "historical significance"
SO is a great resource, but not providing a mechanism for this is its greatest failing. I understand "subjective" questions are problematic, but banning them outright without qualification is not the correct solution.
I've always thought restricting them to users with 2K reputation or something like that, and having a different set of closing standards if you tag your question "opinion" or "tool-recommendation", could work well. The most highly upvoted (ie, useful) questions are more often than not marked "closed" -- and that has always seemed like an undeniable signal that the current system doesn't capture all potential value.
Instead of trying to say "these rules apply to only this tag and always when this tag is included", that entire set of topicality was taken to a different site. Consider trying to ask the question "what is the best C complier given XYZ requirements" on SO. Its tagged with "C", "recommendations" and "compiler". Well... that would mean that it shows up in the C feed - and those people don't think its a good question, so they close it. And then the recommendation followers say "but its tagged with recommendation - that means it should be open and its ok if it gets 100 answers." Two different policies on the site. So branch the community - ask the questions about recommendations where a different policy for what makes a good question and answer on a different site.
CodeGolf was that way. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf - but two things happened. First, it got lost in the noise of all of the other questions on the site. Secondly, people who wanted to have fun questions with many answers that constantly get bumped to the top of activity were getting their questions closed and down voted because of that fun. So the community branched to a new stack exchange site https://codegolf.stackexchange.com where they have flourished even more than they were when it was a tag within stack overflow.
That Software Recommendations doesn't have the activity and isn't flourishing the same way suggests that first off people aren't interested in moderating or curating the site in a way that attracts more than drive by questions. With a Q&A site it is the Answers that drive if it flourishes or not. The quality of the answers draw other people who want to provide at least as good content. Also, the format for Q&A doesn't work as well for recommendations. Why does it have to be on Stack Overflow or another exchange site? Why not go over to https://www.slant.co where the entire focus of the site is the "what is the best XYZ" - https://www.slant.co/topics/4265/~open-source-c-c-compilershttps://www.slant.co/topics/1376/~resources-to-learn-about-c... or https://www.slant.co/improve/topics/7940/~which-open-source-... for example. Different format focused on that question doing it better than Stack Overflow ever could (but that's also because it doesn't try to do a more general Q&A format).
I appreciate this answer. It's a well thought out response to my complaint.
> Why does it have to be on Stack Overflow or another exchange site?
This seems to be the crux of the matter, and here is where I still (at least partially) disagree with you. It doesn't have to obviously, but the SO seems particularly good at answering many of these questions, as attested by the innumerable highly upvoted and closed questions and answers. Which is to say, there are many posters on SO who are exactly the people I want to ask these questions of, and who would be willing and able to answer them.
> That Software Recommendations doesn't have the activity and isn't flourishing the same way suggests that first off people aren't interested in moderating or curating the site in a way that attracts more than drive by questions.
You know that's not a reliable conclusion to draw. There are all sorts of confounds here, the largest being that people don't know about the site. But beyond that, there is just habit and access: If I use SO all the time, and some subjective question pops up in a feed I watch, I may just answer it -- even though I would never visit software recs on its own. This phenomenon is ubiquitous, and the power of entrenched habits can't be overstated.
All that said, it's possible I'm wrong and it wouldn't work. But I've read the meta threads about previous "attempts" that failed, and none of them convinced me that it can't work.
I disagree. "What is the best Javascript framework?" may have garnered +2,000 votes for "jQuery" seven years ago. What would that question look like to a newbie today?
They would likely be confused whether they should use jQuery, Backbone, or React, as they'll all be intermixed as highly upvoted.
So because it could potentially confuse a newbie, all the professional developers who can easily incorporate the contexts of the questions dates and their knowledge should be denied the ability to share useful information?
This is thing: I'm not arguing (and I don't think anyone is) that these questions have answers. I'm arguing that access to the opinions of others, along with their reputation and other indicators of alignment with your own values, has immense value. More value than the technical questions that do have right and wrong answers. I can sort through the information myself can come to an informed conclusion.
A lot of closed questions do get deleted automatically. They have a few metrics to decide which questions to keep: https://stackoverflow.com/help/roomba
The same "question" can be asked many different ways, so it is useful to close all but one duplicate and have them all link to the authoritative Question.
This allows for Googlers to use several different wordings for a question and still find the single page with the answer.
The number of times I've received a quick answer from a closed question (as in marked off topic or something other than solved) is relatively high. Moderators tend to be either too heavy handed and nepotic or completely hands off. It's not an easy job but, seems like entrenched interests have always been more important than anything.
It honestly feels like some of the mods are on a power trip. Some claims questions are dupes of unrelated question (presumably they didn't bother reading them), vote to close within seconds of posting etc.
It used to be great to be part of SO. No, any time I ask a question I wonder if it's going to survive...
Consider that without people who care about the quality (and that means trying to maintain a standard for content by removing material that doesn't meet that standard), you'll get Yahoo Answers.
Surely there is a middle ground though? SO wasn't always such a negative place to be, yet users with enough points have always been able to perform 'mod' type actions.
I believe that people become rude when that is the only moderation tool that they have remaining in their toolbox to be able to maintain/protect the community that is there.
Look at those Yahoo Answers posts I linked above. Many of them are rude - because it is the only moderation tool that they have. Stack Overflow of old and the smaller Stack Exchange sites tend to be less rude because the tools to maintain the vision for what the site should be are sufficient.
The people who have the vision that closely aligns with the original Atwoodian idea tend to find the site (for lack of a better phrase) under attack from an endless tide of poorly asked questions. They cast down votes on them, they close vote them, they delete vote the worst of them... and it hasn't made any impact. A look at the front page and 50 new poorly asked questions are there. The tool that remains is to... curtly say the question is no good in comments.
This isn't helped at all by the belief from people who are more familiar with a zuckerbergian model of social sites where an up vote is the same as a +1 like follow user and anything negative done to a post is a judgement of the user who wrote it (rather than the content itself).
Another factor to consider is the ratio of people who are active in moderation and curation of the material (in particular, the amount of time they're willing to commit to those activities) to the amount of new content a day. When there are more people to help out, the content can get more attention and individual help. On CSEducators.SE, that ratio is very high. I'd guess its about an hour per post. On a site like Software Engineering.SE, it may be a minute per post. On Stack Overflow, it is fractions of a second per post.
With such little time available per post for the people who are trying to follow the Atwoodian vision of the site, you get: down vote, close, delete vote, and then when those run out "What have you tried?" and move on. There is not enough time to help a person posting a question unless they are active in trying to make it better. When it is clear that the person hasn't read a two minute tour, searched for questions first, or massaged the preview area of the screen with their eyeballs to realize how abysmally formatted the question is (ok, being a bit hyperbolic there) there's not much reason to invest any time into trying to make it a better post - down vote and move on, there's probably a better post somewhere... hopefully.
If its the 100th such post that one has seen and they're out of down votes, pulling a canned comment out of a user script and move on may be the most the person gets. It might be a bit terse (tangent - low context cultures tend to be a bit more on the terse side, while higher context cultures are expecting (pardon the stereotype) "Please kindly see the help page on editing. Thank you." in their interactions - this friction of expectation might be driving a bit of the negative perspective).
And after that, people consider Stack Overflow to be negative. Its not negative
So yes... there is a middle ground. A smaller site where there is a surplus of time and ability for moderators to do their moderation. Ideally one where new users have spent enough time on the site to understand the model for the site and its vision and goals.
You get the same thing on mailing lists. People talking about their favorite cartoon on Linux Kernel mailing list? I'm sure you would find people being rude in trying to get that topic out of their inbox - its not what was subscribed to (and in extreme cases, kicking the person off the mailing list).
In the context of Stack Overflow, it is becoming a victim of its own success. Too many people are asking questions. The ability to moderate has been on a decline - both from people leaving the site and from (what I perceive) as a change in the vision that Stack Overflow Corporate has - from an Atwoodian vision (a library of all good programming knowledge- https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ ) to that of a Spoloskian vision (useful and interesting content relevant to programming https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... ). The tools that are left... they seem negative to people who don't subscribe to the vision of what the site should be.
Nit-picking: what you are describing is not done by moderators, but by ordinary users. Anyone with 15 points can flag a question as a duplicate, then users with 3,000 points can vote whether the flag is correct.
Moderators are not ordinary users; they can do things like remove comments because they are inflammatory.
Yep, totally agree. It is total insanity to me that they allow many of their most interesting and popular questions to be locked by mods just because they involve a little subjectivity. Allowing the questions to remain open wouldn't harm the site in the slightest way and would increase engagement and user enjoyment significantly. The way the policy is implemented is incredibly user hostile and unfortunately is reminiscent of wikipedia and other places where you have power-tripping mods. Once the sense of community there reduces passed a certain level there, people will stop caring, and the quality of answers will continue to decrease.
Or questions that are original but get marked as duplicate. This has happened to me several times. It's become my biggest frustration with StackOverflow. I might run into a problem that is a new variation on an old problem. I try to document it carefully, and I often link to old questions on StackOverflow so that people will realize that I've done my research, and my current problem is not the same as the older problem. But still, the moderators on StackOverflow don't always take the time to read all the way through a post. They seem to just read the first sentence or two and decide that the question is a repeat of an older question. I've been shocked at how aggressive they can be about marking a question as a duplicate.
Another frustration is stuff like PowerShell where it's entirely luck of the draw whether they answer your question or redirect it to SuperUser (where nobody is likely to be able to answer certain classes of question anyway).
There seems to be an "Overflow" for pratically everything these days, so the question is, why can't they make another board for these more general questions and discussions? ITOverflow? WebArchitecture?
There a are people discussing the correct usage of English grammar and how to best raise their kids, why not whether NoSQL is really the right solution? Flame Wars?
> You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
This is sort of the fundamental limit of the format they chose.
AFAIK none of the StackExchange sites aside from Meta allow "discussion". It's all about questions and answers, discussion is supposed to be confined to chat rooms.
As you said though, there are a few StackExchange sites which deal with more "squishy" topics, like software design or parenting.
There is the softwareengineering.stackexchange.com where this type of question is on-topic:
> If you have a question about...
> software development methods and practices
> requirements, architecture, and design
> quality assurance and testing
> configuration management, build, release, and deployment
It would be nice if, instead of closing a question as off-topic and asking it again on another site, there was an option for easily transferring the question from one site to another.
I often wish they had implemented a ‘tangent’ mechanism that would have allowed folks to have an interesting conversation in a bit of an off topic manner about the question. It could be represented by an a link and not interfer with the main answer.
Stack Exchange moderators needing to constantly delete comment threads with "use chat" has to be one of the biggest case of desire lines online I've seen.
Absolutely this. And also whenever I see a mod axe a whole conversation and replace it with the form response of "this conversation has been moved to chat", I know that is Stack Exchange's way of tossing conversation into /dev/null (and oftentimes when I'm involved in one of those conversations, it gets the axe because the mod doesn't want opposition to their opinion). It's deleting content without actually deleting content. I've seen way too many useful, on-topic, mind-expanding conversations tossed out using this mechanism, never to be seen again.
Most people would tell you that if you seek the community aspect of it, you should go to Reddit, but honestly, I still feel like there's a hole for something in between. A site with the conciseness and technicality of SO but with the community and open-endedness of Reddit is something I'd definitely like to see and contribute to.
Isn't that down to just subreddit curation? Go look at askscience or askhistory, the top level responses are always relevant or they get deleted by the moderators. Nothing stops someone from making askprogramming that has that level of curation. The problem just becomes incentives, in that getting experts to write informative responses for free is hard, and once SO rating stopped mattering (like how reddit karma never mattered) people stopped trying to participate.
Yep. I stopped going there (except for incidental visits when it shows up in google searches) a long time ago because of that. The kinds of questions that most interest me -- for example, design questions -- don't have cut and dried answers. Most of what StackOverflow excels at I can find in the documentation anyway.
I find that the questions that are least likely to be answered are ones that require some expertise to answer. "Please write a regex for me" questions invariably get multiple answers.
There was a definite step-change in strictness a few years ago, though. This is evidenced by the sheer number of questions which are marked "this question exists for historical significance, but [don't ask questions like this]" and locked.
That's not a useful metric. The questions that today show up as locked for historical significance were simply closed before the historical significance lock was introduced.
Conversely, the lock was introduced to stop those highly interesting (but ultimately useless) questions from getting deleted. If anything, it's a step in being less strict.
The same also goes for questions that are almost duplicates. Or are basically but have been inactive so you want to get further information. And when interesting discussions get moved to chat. The whole place is just boring and too heavily controlled. I"m not surprised something that required community failed there.