As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is not the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them.

What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site.

I can't upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn't the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply:

- "Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score."

What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don't understand the reason behind this design decision.

Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get:

- "You must have 50 reputation to comment"

This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating.

I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path.

I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely not want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO.

These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to participate in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.

I understand that can be frustrating, but as you mentioned part of that is by design. Stack Overflow gets its success by being laser-focused on questions and answers, to the extreme that comments like "thanks" are seen as noise for developers to wade through to find the answers they are looking for. That's why they have such a high bar to comment - the number of "thanks" and "this solved my problem" comments would be a staggering moderation issue. Either that or the site would turn into a long-winded discussion forum.

In short, only questions and answers add any real value to the site for the most part. If you really want to contribute to the community, consider diving in and writing questions and answers.

As for upvoting, I understand that it's frustrating not to be able to vote in a community that you spend so much time in. But on the flip side, realize that 90% of the value of Stack Overflow comes from its questions and answers. If you want to contribute to the site, it only takes 3 upvotes across all your questions (or 2 across all your answers) to gain the upvote privilege permanently.

50 rep requirement for commenting is too high. Very often I have follow up question to ask the answerer but I can't and SO discourage private chat. That leaves me the only option of asking the question again. And of course it gets marked "duplicated" even though I emphasize a specific aspect of the question. At that point I just take a deep breath, close the SO tab, ask that question on Reddit.

If you want to avoid a similar sounding question getting marked as a dupe and closed, you can contextualize your question with the similar answers to show that you've searched and read them.

For example, "I've read the answers to A, B, C (linked) and they get me this far, but now I'm trying to take that output and output it to YAML" etc.

As mods / queue reviewers, we generally assume someone has not read (or found) similar questions if they don't mention this. I don't vote to close many questions as dupes unless it's clear the asker didn't even try to look at the related questions. I tend to close vote only on low effort questions that don't meet the minimal complete verifiable example (MCVE) best practices for asking a question.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve

To the comment on the 50 rep threshold, I believe you can hit this more easily than you think. For example, writing one answer that gets accepted (+15) with 3 upvotes (3x +10) is worth 45 rep. Then giving 3 suggested edits (3x +2) that get accepted is worth 6 to put you over 50. Suggested edits don't have to be big — you can look for common aspects of aging popular answers like outbound links that may now 404 or fixing grammar mistakes. A lot of people on Stack Overflow do not speak English as their first language, so if you do, you can help improve the clarity of their questions or answers which benefits the whole community.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

Here are some accepted edits I've made for inspiration. Many are simple one liners.

https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=a...

You get 10 reputations for each upvote you get and 15 if your answer is accepted. It doesn't take more than a few hours to get there.

There's plenty of simple question that you should be able to answer. Use what you know as tags, look out for new posts, and answers them using the best of your knowledge.

Do you get reputation over upvote on question? A few good questions should easily get 5 upvotes.

A few hours? I've been using SO suite of sites for years and only last year did I get over 50 on a single one

The reputation for commenting is way too high. I can't count how many times I could have contributed but for the silly reputation requirement. I've given up trying to contribute.

And based on the answers I've been seeing, it doesn't serve it's purpose anyway.

Earning reputation on Stack Overflow can be a really slow, tiring process. As others have mentioned, suggesting edits is one way to get there. For each that gets accepted, you earn +2 rep. I earned 25 rep this way and it was a slog.

The easiest way to get 100 rep on SO, though, is to get 200 rep on any other site on the network. This is called the Association Bonus. Enjoy movies or cooking or video games or board games? Go post questions/answers on those sites and get some votes. There are 170+ sites on the network and because they're lower-volume, earning rep is often faster because posts are more visible.

I'm not sure which sites you've tried so far, but it is possible to do and even have some fun doing it.

Well then I have been incredibly lucky because I only contributed twice, on simple questions and I got more than 50 without even thinking about it.

FWIW, you can always comment on answers to your own question, even with 1 rep.

The restriction on upvoting is necessary to have any chance of handling vote fraud like users upvoting themselves with socks. If any new account could vote it would be far easier to cheat the system.

15 rep is also a very small barrier. Asking good questions or editing are probably the best ways to start. Editing is certainly something a new user can do, simply fixing the formatting, grammar and typos in new questions will give you 15 rep in no time.

All low hanging fruit were taken. You can ask good questions, but it would be too niche and nobody sees it.

People see your low reputation and will automatically reject your edits with generic reason, even when I gave very detailed explanation in the note.

There are some non-obvious customs when editing answers, that's unlikely to go well as a very new user. But editing questions mostly for formatting and language is certainly doable without any reputation.

I'm assuming the edits are reasonable itself, there are some odd patterns that you see regularly like people using code formatting (monospace font) for emphasis. That kind of edit will get stopped.

Another option to get the basic SO privileges is to ask or answer on any other SE sites. There are many of them, and almost all are much, much easier to participate in.

If people are rejecting legitimately good edits that's a problem. People looking through the review queue should be doing so with an open mind and an eye for the edits, not the person making the edits.

Search for "teh": 7306 results.

And that's only a typo. There's so much stuff that could be fixed...

I believe that's too small of a typo to fix, isn't there a minimum length required when editing?

Yes. I was pointing out that there's still lots of low hanging fruit, rather than this specific typo. But just checking out those questions shows lots of low quality stuff that could be corrected.

15 reputation on Stack Overflow seems easy enough. I got it with a single answer on a low-traffic topic.

500 reputation for full Hacker News privileges, on the other hand, seems like quite the undertaking! I say this as a decade-long reader who still is far below that.

Yeah, low rep restrictions are annoying. I think it's to discourage bot abuse and spam. If you can get 200 rep in any StackExchange site, then joining any other one will give you 100 rep to start off with, so I found it was worth it to answer/edit questions until I hit 200 rep

This was the answer for me. I accumulated 200 rep basically goofing off on codegolf.stackexchange.com and no longer feel hindered on other SE sites even as a mostly-passive user. If that's not your bag there are plenty of other subsites that are accessible to users with few tech chops: puzzling, worldbuilding, rpg, etc.

I found the "You must have 50 reputation to comment" frustrating at the start as well as an answer I was using was wrong as in the code didn't run which took me a while to alter and get it to work and I couldn't point it out. I guess you can get reputation by answering questions but it was annoying. Also as a relative newbie I could only answer quite dumb questions.

Since you found the fix, you could post your update as an answer? With a "sorry I can't comment but here is what I found" disclaimer to your answer.

You could even skip the "sorry I can't comment" bit; just as well to introduce with, "this is what I had to do to make [other answer] work".

Answers are kinda the whole point after all; no shame in writing them...

Yeah guess so. I was new and didn't figure it.

I’ve been a member of stack overflow and programming professionally for over 4 years and still can’t upvote, comment on or answer questions.

I was a member and daily reader of HN for years before I started participating. You don't get down vote capabilities here until a much higher point threshold, and I think it helps. I think it's more likely to cause you to conform a bit to the community rather than clash with or disrupt it.

You see it here occasionally, where someone is getting down voted and they don't know why, and someone will explain its most likely because they aren't acting within community norms (here it's back up factual assertions with sources, keep it civil, if you make a joke keep it topical or follow it up with something useful, don't just post memes, etc. Basically keep the signal to noise high).

Limiting new users for a while when their initial mode of interaction may not fit will with the site is a sane choice, IMO, and if those new users never make the effort to go past that initial hurdle, it may be that their contributions are high enough risk that it's not worth it (or the hurdle could be too high).

Well, to be blunt is say you've been a consumer of SO. There's nothing wrong with this but I'd argue that if you don't have 15 rep after 4 years you've been paid back with the knowledge you've gained.

If you can't find a way to get 50 rep on SO get 200 on any other exchange site and that will credit you 100

That's the problem. I've tried to get rep but it's hard. I have a lot to contribute but no way to do so.

Have you been engaging in actions that potentially earn you reputation points, e.g., editing or answering questions? If not, that's why. If you have, but your contributions have gone unrewarded, that's an SO problem.

Not necessarily a SO problem. Some tags don't have a lot of traffic. Some answers aren't great.

FWIW, the way I was able to bump my reputation up was suggesting edits. It's pretty satisfying spending months learning proper technique and then recognizing small coding inefficiencies made by more experienced coders.

I'm in the same position as you. I ended up answering a few questions and asking one. It took a day, or so, to get up to 64 rep which was more than enough for me.

Have you tried suggesting edits to hit the 50 rep threshold?

I think this is an easy route to hitting 50 rep. See my other comment in this thread for more specific examples of edits that are likely to get accepted.

> I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with subperfection".

This. 100%.

My Stack Overflow account is approaching its 10th year, and I would credit a lot of my success as a self-taught developer to the welcoming almost overly helpful attitude of early Stack Overflow.

I hope it gets that back at some point (the recent rule changes have helped I think).

I often make this comment when the subject comes up but I'm one of those that tried to pay back the help I got over usenet on SO and did to an extent (top 2%). I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted").

It feels to me like an issue of framing. There's definitely a way to achieve this but I think you have to segregate "the library" (where you get truth) from the "playground" (where you seek help) as the cultures of the sort of people that prefer either place clash horribly. I'm a playground person, for reference. I like to try to understand what problems people are facing as opposed to what they might be asking.

"How do I quit vim?" should be the most asked question, and the most answered. There should be hundreds of these threads every day.

Learning and teaching are continuous processes and one that should be entered into in good faith by all. If you're tired of answering the same exact question hundreds of times a day, then you shouldn't really try answering the questions; maybe teaching isn't 'your thing'. My SO was a HS STEM teacher, it wasn't really my SO's thing, so my SO got a new job. It's not a big deal to not like teaching and it's better for everyone if you realize this quickly and leave it to those that do like teaching.

Pointing noobs towards already answered threads is not a good idea. That's basically saying RTFM. StackOverflow is literally the exact opposite of RTFM. It's explicitly a place to ask questions.

At it's core, StackOverflow is where teaching happens; you RTFM together.

> "How do I quit vim?" should be the most asked question, and the most answered. There should be hundreds of these threads every day.

A lot of people are going to disagree with you, including SO itself[1]:

> Please look around to see if your question has been asked before

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic

not everyone learns that way. We try to make them better people but that's a process.

The founders have explained several times that the goal of StackOverflow is to be a wiki, not a forum.

When viewed in that context, it makes no sense to have multiple answers to the same question.

This is such a good point. You see so many new questions where the way the question is posed shows a fundamental misunderstanding that prevents the poster from finding the "trivial" answer they seek.

Just look at the number of "I don't quite understand your question. Do you mean <topic x>" comments that end up assisting the person without providing an explicit answer to their original question. I think that's largely due to answerers feeling that the useful response they are providing is not fit for filing away in the library.

I like that plan. There could be votes to place playground questions into the library, and those could get preferential treatment in terms of search results to make it easier to find what you're looking for.

> I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted").

Same boat here. I also have been a SO user for over 10 years and my account says "top 2%" (though this is entirely from my early participation, before I largely gave up on it). I've gone through spurts of trying to participate again by answering questions over the past 5 years but always come away depressed and demotivated about it.

There's a bunch of things that happen:

* Questions get closed as duplicate incorrectly.

I've tried to argue for the question on a few occasions. One of my attempts was by providing a detailed answer which, by being clearly different from the "duplicate" answer, I hoped would prove the question was distinct. A moderator soon deleted the entire question. That demotivated me from answering anything for a year or so.

Since then, I've only argued in comments the question wasn't duplicate, but basically always get outvoted and the question is closed and eventually deleted. It takes a lot of effort to argue the question should stay open, and it takes basically no effort to click "close" so really, this is what the majority want.

* Questions get closed as duplicate -- correctly -- but the marked duplicate is a very old question and no longer contains the "best" answer.

When there's already a half dozen answers, and the top one has tens or hundreds of votes, it's basically impossible to get visibility to a newer answer. This is so bad that when I'm looking at a question trying to help with something I'm doing myself, if I come across an old question I usually sort by 'newest' to find the best answer. More times than I can count, a recent answer with fewer than 1/10th the votes of the "best" answer is the current correct answer.

Likewise, I have answered these but it takes years on an old question to get even a few upvotes, and it's pretty unfulfilling.

* Poor quality questions

If you try to look for older, unanswered questions (eg, don't want to participate in the "who can answer this new question fastest" game) it's very hard to find decent questions. There really is a lot of garbage that gets asked. My experience is when you do find one, after going through a few pages, you run into the next issue:

* New users don't come back

You answer a question from a new user, and maybe get one vote. The original user doesn't come back and mark your answer as accepted or comment as to why it wouldn't work. No one else provides any feedback about it being bad. It's just "internet points" but it is demotivating to put in the effort and have it go nowhere. Maybe I really am just bad at answering questions (but was good 10 years ago, and the high level position and respect I get at work is a figment of my imagination) but even then I'd prefer to get feedback.

---

These are just my experiences and opinions. I'm also not sure how to solve these issues, and I don't think it'll be easy to. Seeing as the rules governing the site are largely made by the community, and the "community" behaviour is largely the cause of many of these, the community is essentially saying they don't see these as problems or want to fix them. Getting past that hurdle is the first step to improving things, and honestly, I have no idea how I can help with that (other than posting long rants like this and maybe helping slightly shift some tiny fraction of people's mindset).

In its early stages, SO was an amazing site to learn from -- both asking and answering questions -- but I think the current policies and behaviours mean this isn't the case anymore. From what I can see, most new users are going to have a terrible time with the site if they try to actively participate. It's a shame.

The last two bullet points resonated with me. Every now and then I have some free time I try to answer some questions. You can actually learn new things by doing this, even if it's just by observing the "weird" way someone tried to solve something and where it went wrong.

However, most of the time is spent just finding a good question to answer. A lot of the bad questions are people asking you to do their homework or something hopelessly vague ("How can I create my own games?" or something like that).

While nobody should be treated with disrespect, I wish people would keep these issues in mind when mods act with a heavy hand in closing questions.

But when the site / idea / services were new there will always be the passionate bunch helping, but once those passion are all burned out they either leave or replaced with Snark.

The problems are, 1. New comer don't search. 2. The don't spend 2 min of their time to read the menu. 3. Entitlement, I asked, and I shall be answered. 4. Do the (home) work for me. They really expect you might as well do it all for them.

All of us were beginner at one point or another. And we know the path possibly better than many. If you have done any research on the topic before you asked, most of the time it would have shown / hinted in the question. So we know aha... you did spend time but you overlooked or never thought of xyz.

Most of the time people overlook the quality of questions were declining.

I've been a member for 10 years now. I racked up a few thousand points after I joined, before the novelty of gamification wore off for me. After a decade of steady usage, here's my take on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is an excellent resource when you access it from a search engine. If you're looking for a particular bit of programming knowledge and you type your query into your search engine of choice, chances are excellent that Stack Overflow results will be plentiful on the first page and that more than one will be relevant and helpful.

Stack Overflow is good enough when you have a very concrete problem that nobody before has asked about before. For example, if you don't know how to do X in the framework Y, you can expect one of the following: 1) someone who did it before will tell you how, 2) someone who had the same problem and found that it actually has no solution will tell you that, or 3) nobody will answer.

Stack Overflow is absolutely terrible when you're trying to learn something new just because you want to learn it or you're asking for advice of any kind. If you're trying to become a better programmer, Stack Overflow is categorically not the tool for the job. The less practical your question , the more it's likely to receive votes to be closed.

My favorite example is a question that outlined a thing you can normally do in .NET and Java because they are executing bytecode and can do certain checks before deciding whether to allow the code to execute or not. The question then proceeded to ask whether there are any pre-existing solutions to do so when working with native code or whether you would have to do it yourself. It received a downvote and a vote to close within 2 minutes of being posted. The voter posted a comment recommending Software Engineering Stack Exchange as a better site. The same question posted on Software Engineering Stack Exchange got a bunch of comments, only one of which actually addressed a question to a certain degree, the rest being ideas on how to change the requirements, snarky sniping of other comments, one idea that was already outlined in the question, and one snarky recommendation to "brush up on your understanding of [concept]" where the [concept] is not the primary concern in question.

I wish I could say that last anecdote is an exception, but it's simply the most egregious example of what's prevalent on Stack Overflow and programming-related Stack Exchange sites. Interestingly enough, I haven't seen it on any non-programming Stack Exchange site, so it's definitely something in our culture as an industry.

It is nice to see but without proper enforcement I am afraid that change will never come. IMHO, the biggest step they need to take is to allow repeat questions or at least to mitigate the "murder the SO" mentality that's displayed whenever it happens. It's one thing to suggest the question already has an answer. It's a whole different beast when you type out how worthless the SO is for not doing research prior to posting the question and ban against them with 50 down votes, ostracizing them completely. Moderators should be given an option to punish users for incorrect/inappropriate comments and action on questions.

Allowing repeat questions is absolutely essential to keeping a community vital.

I've seen this pattern happen on so many Internet forums, going all the way back to the WELL, where eventually they develop this surface crust of long-time users who systematically chase anyone new away by informing them that the thing they want to talk about, whatever it is, has already been talked about. At first, it might start with a chatty response that provides a link to the old conversation and also provides a summary or some other additional input. And, when done that way, it generally is helpful and friendly.

But, with practice, the procedure is optimized down to the point where the post is little more, and sometimes less, than "We've talked about this before: <hyperlink>" And that's toxic. The only way you could send a clearer message that someone's contributions are not valued is to come right out and say, "Your contribution is not valued."

Stack Overflow has, unfortunately, stumbled upon a way to accelerate this process by gamifying it.

StackOverflow is a wiki not a discussion forum

The UI may have some wiki-like characteristics, but, when you're talking about the social environment instead of the UI, it's kind of a distinction without a difference.

Example: Wikipedia has similar social problems regarding new contributors.

SE have explicitly stated that the site is a Wiki.

"Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum." Jeff Atwood, "What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?", 22 October 2018.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...

Doesn't matter. Wikis have and need a community, and the voting/comments/answers part of the wiki is where the community happens. Or not.

I think a lot of people don't realize how discouraging it is to receive downvotes. They're handed out like candy for any perceived flaws in a question. I'd rather have a dialog in the comments to get the questioner to fix the flaws.

It should be conpulsory to leave comments when you downvote a question. I always ask people to explain in the comment why they downvote me, and I would get more downvotes and 0 comment.

I've never understood that. It might be because people are afraid of retaliatory downvotes in return. I have enough rep there that I don't worry about it, but even so it never seems to happen.

IMO Removing/merging repeated questions is important to keep up the standard of SO and is what makes searching easier in the long run. I agree that comments sometimes can get very picky and discouraging.

I agree it's important, but if I had a dollar for every time a question whose answer I also needed was marked a repeat of a similar (but not identical) question with an answer that was invalidated by that discrepancy, I wouldn't need to use stackoverflow any more.

You're absolutely right about the culture changes needed to change the experience for new users, it's terrible right now. I imagine there could be a middle ground, where duplicates are allowed/answered/not aggressively downvoted, but once they're marked as a dupe they could 'fade out' to where they're eventually visible only via a user profile and not found in the main archive or search results.

Languages and tools and practices evolve. Stack Overflow is now getting old enough that the answers a question originally got may no longer be the best way to do things, and sometimes aren't even workable anymore.

If anything, what SO needs is a way to "fade out" old questions in favor of new ones.

Its basically become ModOverflow

edit: Thought I was coining something here but it was actually coined in 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816

Oh I love the way you put this.

I just checked and I've been a member for 10 years and 6 months. I used to answer questions. A lot. In the early days (at one point it was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me) and I'm kind of surprised how much karma I still get form those old answers.

But I haven't really answered anything in 8+ years. Even one year in I commented on and started several threads on Meta about the "mod problem". And it's only gotten worse.

To riff on a phrase, "those who can, answer, those who can't, mod", which is fine, but there is a particular kind of toxic personality that gets attracted to the authority of being a mod that then appoints itself the arbiter of content. You are fighting a constant battle to keep these toxic (but well-intentioned--mostly) souls out. I saw even then the trend of closing interesting questions as "subjective".

My opinion then--and now--is you can ask a question like "what are the advantages of React.js vs Vue.js?" in an intelligent way without it being a flame war. The fact that it doesn't have an objective answer is (IMHO) irrelevant. You can divine useful information from the answers to that question that will help you go one way or the other.

There is a lot of subjectivity in programming and a lot of not strictly better solutions. Giving people some points to consider as a starting point is incredibly valuable.

I noticed the "subjective" closing many times and always wondered why that criterion was even introduced on SO. I mean what's wrong with a comment/question being subjective as long as it contains useful information?

I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.

That is a similar issue Wikipedia has. Being a mod is fine, when your role-profile is clearly defined. But sometimes mods evolve into bureaucrats. And at a certain point, they take over a platform, mostly in a cultural/role-model sense. Then active contributors [also mods, but not obsessed with rules and enforcement] are being sidelined and start to quit.

This is a hard-to-solve problem for any community. Having lax regulation leads to scammers gaming the system. Having strict rule enforcement leads to a culture of punishment and death-by-process.

There is a place for people like this in organizations (controlling, lower management) -- here they actually can provide value being a process-oriented control-freak. In communities these roles can become toxic if they start to dominate the culture.

SO is dead to me since the bureaucrats have taken over, Wikipedia too for that matter.

-----

[0]: people who value 'processes' more than outcome.

Yeah it's an observable phenomenon that I've seen on Stack Overflow et al, as well as every Wiki site I've been a part of. Content creators don't give a shit about process, so they don't participate in the moderation echo chamber, so moderators trick themselves into thinking that they are the ones creating value on the site.

Stack Overflow's issue is fixable though IMO. I don't see the same level of aggressive moderation towards those who answer. So from a community attitude, it seems like answerers are recognized as the content creators who you shouldn't drive away. So the solution in my head is to do what you can to recognize the askers as content creators as well. Because they are a vital part of content creation!

Social networks need to be explicit about requiring a positive and constructive attitude in responses and debates. And follow up with corrective measures (in a friendly way, obviously). Otherwise the tone will deteriorate.

There should be a name for this law by now (could already exist, may have missed it).

Whenever I see a community that demands positive and constructive attitude it's always a dysfunctional community. All the functional communities I've ever seen created positive and constructive attitude through example and cultivation of good people. And they invariably had bare minimum of moderation, usually aimed at avoiding conflicts between members, rather than to enforce some kind of mandatory universal "values".

StackOverflow is actually an example of this rule. Questions get downvoted and closed because they're supposedly not constructive. Yay, more constructiveness, right? But in the long run it creates the environment that feels like a clique hostile to all newcomers.

Making demands on users, writing multi-page lists of rules and banning/locking/deleting does nothing to attract good people. It can only preserve something you already have, and even that isn't guaranteed.

Way too many websites forget this, go all in on "corrective measures" and mandatory positivity, while not doing anything constructive on their own.

An example of constructive moderation is running contests where people get recognition for doing something good. (This is no the same as having karma, which also leads to cliques in the long run.)

Another related thing: a lot of larger websites pay moderators to ban stuff, but don't have anyone on staff whose primary job is to "lead by example" via answering questions and providing help.

"Seeding" a website with good people and content is absolutely essential, and yet this is a topic I've never, ever seen discussed when someone writes about community management.

And another thing. Beyond certain scale people stop perceiving website as a place with people and start looking at is as a service with users. This completely changes the tone for everyone. Larger websites need to put efforts in "federating", i.e. creating sub-spaces that still feel like a place where people can have a conversation and get to know the "regulars" to some extent. This might seem like it's not applicable to StackOverflow and YouTubes, but it is. A lot this is about visual design and ways information is structured.

> There should be a name for this law by now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule

My belief is any forum that allows drive-by downvoting without making the downvoter constructively explain it (including Reddit and even HN), will suffer from this tone deterioration. I myself am guilty of this. Just hit that down arrow and move on—it’s too easy. Even good ol’ Slashdot made you at least pick from a canned list of justifications when you wanted to vote.

John Gabriel has a decent one: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Or GIFT for short.

> It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel.

I believe he's acknowledged this problem many times on his blog in the past, and discussed possible ways to improve things.

The only way to improve things is to change the emphasis of the site. The guidelines were set over time to prefer improving the site as a resource over helping the individual. You can't optimize for both at the same time.

Yes, I am quoting what was itself a quote from an earlier blog post . But it was new to me and is being cited as a challenge facing the next CEO. So I'm still glad to see he's treating it with a lot of importance.

IN the light of what he just said, then SO needs to stop banning people from posting questions even if their questions get continuously downvoted by experienced users.

"You have reached your question limit Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."

Why? When you post a single question that gets downvoted you don't get banned. It's only when you repeatedly ignore the rules and ask terrible questions over and over refusing to learn from your past mistakes.

There might be a discussion to be had about how to teach users what a bad question is, or how many is too many, but I don't understand why we should let people who repeatedly fail to clearly ask a question keep asking. Most people have no such problem.

In fact, when experienced posters politely point out what the rules are and where to read more about them, you start to see new posters fall into 2 categories:

   1. The people who say, "Oh, I didn't realize that's how it works. I'll update my question/do better next time/etc."

   2. The people who insist that no, it's their platform and they'll ask whatever they want however they want.

People in category 1 usually have no further problems using the site. People in category 2 usually end up banned.

And of course, there are experienced users who are jerks and don't point out rules or don't do it politely. They should not be excused. But letting new posters continue to pollute the site with terrible questions isn't going to help anyone - especially not the people posting the question.

By immediately framing questions as either good or bad you've shown that you're part of the problem. If someone's question doesn't make sense to you, that might mean you're not qualified to answer it. You don't have to weigh in on everything.

You can immediately analyze the effort undertaken by the asker. And it is worth pointing out sometimes. Of course no need to be rude.

And perhaps better ways to discourage this behavior from new users. This is no different then imagine a few programming newbies join a "Introduction to Programming" class taught at a college by seasoned professor and assisted by graduate teaching assistants. What if TA's start discouraging new students from continuously asking mundane questions? Do the instructors care only about the "performance" of average students in the class so they can go back to their department at the end of the semester and show they have hit a satisfactory passing rate? Or they care about that every student walked away with a good understanding of programming at the end of the day?

I have ran into the poor attitude on SO occasionally and it is definitely great to try to improve. That being said, SO has been such a useful tool for me in my career, I would be care when making changes that they didn't have the unintended consequence of hurting the quality of the product. I think it's similar to HN. HN downvoting can be really frustrating when I am making what I believe to be very good comments but I have to admit that overall I am happy with the product. I have been trained over the years to think a lot more about comments I leave in HN than I did in my early years here.

Who is given the most space in media? Seems like those who do the most noise, no matter the content. It sells much more that some boring truth. If you see it all around you, after a while it becomes a norm.

Have you noticed? When you start to be angry and hate a bit, somehow it spreads and sucks all these bad energies like a sponge. And if you don't know how to recover yourself and clean your mind, it is easy to become a hateful self-centered person. I wish we could change the direction.

> but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

I remember one of my first interactions with other developers was the #php.dk channel on Quakenet in the start 00s, I had shared a PHP script with them that didn't work, and had included my development database settings, and back then NAT wasn't really a thing, so one of them figured out that he could login to my MySQL database and change the password!

And I didn't know how to reset it, so they made me beg to get the new password, so they showed me how to change it to something new and they showed me how to protect myself from such things in the future.

It was a nice life lessons, and I guess that IRC channels needed some strict moderation, but I'm not sure the shenanigans that went on back then (and likely still happens) is all that great for learners and newcomers.

I've stopped contributing to the Webmasters page a couple of years ago because of this.