I wrote this as a reply to another post where there was some discussion about StackOverflow (SO), and decided to post it separately so as to not continue to distract from the topic of the original thread. Please don't waste your time responding with TL;DR, just ignore it if you're happy with the world the way it is. The problem I'm addressing here is that there ARE NO USEFUL DISCUSSIONS about this topic anywhere, especially on SO because self-reflective topics like this are not allowed on SO.
I wrote this as a reply to another post where there was some discussion about StackOverflow (SO), and decided to post it separately so as to not continue to distract from the topic of the original thread. Please don't waste your time responding with TL;DR, just ignore it if you're happy with the world the way it is. The problem I'm addressing here is that there ARE NO USEFUL DISCUSSIONS about this topic anywhere, especially on SO because self-reflective topics like this are not allowed on SO.
Personally speaking, I see SO as a "crowdsourced help desk". There's a class of problems that come up where you can clearly define an error and how to reproduce it.
However, there's a far LARGER class of topics where things just don't go the way you expect and you want some help figuring out what's wrong -- sometimes it's your code, sometimes it's your expectations, and sometimes it's just confusing behavior due to changes from one version of Delphi to another that you're not aware of. Sometimes it's an unexpected behavior in a 3rd-party component. What you want is lots of eyeballs to look over your issue and hope someone has seen it before and can share some insight based on their experience.
The Delphi board on SO focuses almost exclusively on the former group, and has become useless for people in the latter group who are not 100% total experts with every nuance of whatever Delphi platform and version they're using and all of the latest changes, because the "rules" do not tolerate misunderstandings. Nor do they allow people to ask about components that solve specific problems they're facing, especially when one component has a bug or something isn't working as needed, and they'd like to find an alternative.
The old saying, "there is no such thing as a 'dumb question'" does not apply to SO. Most 'dumb questions' are quickly assaulted with down-votes and often locked or deleted in less than an hour. And because SO users are penalized for down-votes, they'll voluntarily delete their 'dumb questions' pretty darn quickly, so periodic visitors can't get any sense of the sheer volume of such questions that come and go on SO from day to day. It's a LOT!
Therefore, it can be a brutal place for anybody who's not a highly-experienced Delphi user, especially newbies. This is not conducive to helping expand the use of Delphi, because after getting assaulted once or twice by the "experts" for failing to post what they consider a "legitimate" question, they go away and won't ever try again. I've had enough of my own questions attacked that I'm unwilling to post anything else there either, nor will I waste the time to answer anything any more. (Besides the fact that there seems to be a handful of people who have nothing else to do with their life but answer questions on SO and attack non-experts for poor questions and answers.)
I spent some time looking at other topics, and it seems the Delphi group is far more militant about this than many others, which is truly sad because it's discouraging people from getting help on a product that's been having its share of challenges just surviving in the marketplace for nearly a decade now.
On FB there are multiple groups for WordPress support: one for beginners, one for advanced users, and one where you can post questions if you're looking for suggestions for plugins. They are all quite active and useful in their own right. Things get posted in the wrong place from time to time, and the mods there are mostly polite in how they deal with it, unlike on SO where you basically just get kicked in the ass and expected to figure out why on your own. (Aside from the fact that there are not any alternative boards where your question or answer would be more appropriate.)
On SO, it's just one: for Delphi Experts who can narrow things down to the point where there's very little wiggle room. You cannot ask vague questions as a beginner, you cannot ask for suggestions for components, non-experts cannot post general ideas without the risk of being punished for trying to be helpful, and you cannot post things you don't fully understand and haven't been able to isolate down to a clear issue.
In other words, it's useless for tapping into the vast amount of expertise of people who may have seen a particular symptom before and can suggest further insight but don't have an exact answer. Maybe if questions were given a 24- or 48-hour period for exposure before being attacked as inappropriate for some reason; but the half-life for such questions seems to be about an hour, which limits exposure to a very small percentage of potential users who could be helpful.
And it has become a place that non-experts don't feel comfortable participating in. (Heck, I'm an "expert" and I don't even feel comfortable participating there!)
This leaves a huge portion of the Delphi user community unsupported and unsatisfied. Other products that compete with Delphi, eg., Visual Studio, do not have as much of a problem on SO.
IMO, it's especially problematic with Delphi since third-party components make up such a big portion of its ecosystem, and any questions or comments regarding them are pretty much prohibited. Requests for suggestions and alternatives outside of built-in components will get attacked and eventually deleted. I find this unacceptable for a product that relies so heavily on its (shrinking) ecosystem of third-party components, and the fact that so many of them are still in active use even though they've been abandoned by their original developers. Yes, I understand the rationale, and I totally disagree with it. Crowdsourced platforms should not restrict their ability to ask or answer questions based on any criteria other than "does this apply?" If it's available to the Delphi community at large, it should be ok to ask about it. Period. Delphi itself is a commercial product, and it's customers rely on a number of other commercial component libraries to accomplish their goals. Questions regarding them should not be restricted because they're not free -- especially as Delphi itself is not free.
Given this limitation, the Delphi board on SO is virtually useless for non-experts and anybody who's looking for components to accomplish something and don't know where to turn for suggestions. (The original Delphi discussion boards have such low traffic they're nearly useless. And this G+ thing is closer to what you'd get with an FB group than a true discussion forum. What other alternatives exist?)
I don't believe this Delphi board on SO is serving the majority of Delphi users and customers. It is what it is, and that's that.
If you disagree with the rules, your only real option is to go onto the 'meta' board and try arguing with the people who set the rules there, which is pretty much a lost cause from the get-go. These people do not represent Embt or anybody with a vested interest in the future of Delphi; rather, they represent their own narrow-minded self-ascribed roles, and they answer to no one. Why would anybody waste their time trying to convince them something isn't working? The answer they'll get is predictable.
SO is a self-fulfilling system. Any group of people running a specific topic can agree amongst themselves that something is "working fine" and refuse to change, just by declaring it so. There are no global objectives, or anything that can be held up as external measures to suggest there's a problem. It's their way or the highway, and nobody else really has a say.
The people who run SO don't seem to care that the Delphi board is not working for a lot of Delphi users. Nor do the people who maintain the militant rules on the current Delphi SO board. That's how SO works. I'm not going to waste my time trying to "prove" I'm right. All I can say for sure it that it's not meeting MY needs and rarely has, and I've heard the same from MANY other Delphi users. But the people who run this board and make the rules are not accountable to anybody, so they don't have to pay attention to any of this noise.
What's even sadder is that nobody from the company that owns and sells Delphi has ever taking an interest in SO or even whether this single board is or is not meeting the needs of a majority of their users. I guess they're just happy there's a place that some of their customers can go other than their own under-utilized discussion forums.
I'm posting this here because it would get deleted on SO and nobody would see it or have a chance to comment on it. Perhaps enough others will see it here that it might make a difference.
My wish would be that Embt would get more proactive in organizing and encouraging crowdsourced support media like this and stop pretending that by leaving their customers to their own devices that MOST Delphi customers would get served. It's not happening, it has never happened, and it's offensive that Embt even suggests that this single SO board is useful as a broad-spectrum support desk for ALL Delphi users. It's NOT! And never has been.
Until someone sets some goals and objectives in terms of how to measure its utility beyond the narrow user-base this one SO board now supports, I don't see anything changing, because the people who set the rules right now don't see a problem, and don't even care that anybody disagrees with them.
The mechanism for change is designed to be a "debate" and they'll usually win. This does not help solve the problem of how to serve unmet needs, because by definition these unmet needs don't count in such debates. It is what it is, and trying to argue that it's not something else is useless.
Personally speaking, I see SO as a "crowdsourced help desk". There's a class of problems that come up where you can clearly define an error and how to reproduce it.
However, there's a far LARGER class of topics where things just don't go the way you expect and you want some help figuring out what's wrong -- sometimes it's your code, sometimes it's your expectations, and sometimes it's just confusing behavior due to changes from one version of Delphi to another that you're not aware of. Sometimes it's an unexpected behavior in a 3rd-party component. What you want is lots of eyeballs to look over your issue and hope someone has seen it before and can share some insight based on their experience.
The Delphi board on SO focuses almost exclusively on the former group, and has become useless for people in the latter group who are not 100% total experts with every nuance of whatever Delphi platform and version they're using and all of the latest changes, because the "rules" do not tolerate misunderstandings. Nor do they allow people to ask about components that solve specific problems they're facing, especially when one component has a bug or something isn't working as needed, and they'd like to find an alternative.
The old saying, "there is no such thing as a 'dumb question'" does not apply to SO. Most 'dumb questions' are quickly assaulted with down-votes and often locked or deleted in less than an hour. And because SO users are penalized for down-votes, they'll voluntarily delete their 'dumb questions' pretty darn quickly, so periodic visitors can't get any sense of the sheer volume of such questions that come and go on SO from day to day. It's a LOT!
Therefore, it can be a brutal place for anybody who's not a highly-experienced Delphi user, especially newbies. This is not conducive to helping expand the use of Delphi, because after getting assaulted once or twice by the "experts" for failing to post what they consider a "legitimate" question, they go away and won't ever try again. I've had enough of my own questions attacked that I'm unwilling to post anything else there either, nor will I waste the time to answer anything any more. (Besides the fact that there seems to be a handful of people who have nothing else to do with their life but answer questions on SO and attack non-experts for poor questions and answers.)
I spent some time looking at other topics, and it seems the Delphi group is far more militant about this than many others, which is truly sad because it's discouraging people from getting help on a product that's been having its share of challenges just surviving in the marketplace for nearly a decade now.
On FB there are multiple groups for WordPress support: one for beginners, one for advanced users, and one where you can post questions if you're looking for suggestions for plugins. They are all quite active and useful in their own right. Things get posted in the wrong place from time to time, and the mods there are mostly polite in how they deal with it, unlike on SO where you basically just get kicked in the ass and expected to figure out why on your own. (Aside from the fact that there are not any alternative boards where your question or answer would be more appropriate.)
On SO, it's just one: for Delphi Experts who can narrow things down to the point where there's very little wiggle room. You cannot ask vague questions as a beginner, you cannot ask for suggestions for components, non-experts cannot post general ideas without the risk of being punished for trying to be helpful, and you cannot post things you don't fully understand and haven't been able to isolate down to a clear issue.
In other words, it's useless for tapping into the vast amount of expertise of people who may have seen a particular symptom before and can suggest further insight but don't have an exact answer. Maybe if questions were given a 24- or 48-hour period for exposure before being attacked as inappropriate for some reason; but the half-life for such questions seems to be about an hour, which limits exposure to a very small percentage of potential users who could be helpful.
And it has become a place that non-experts don't feel comfortable participating in. (Heck, I'm an "expert" and I don't even feel comfortable participating there!)
This leaves a huge portion of the Delphi user community unsupported and unsatisfied. Other products that compete with Delphi, eg., Visual Studio, do not have as much of a problem on SO.
IMO, it's especially problematic with Delphi since third-party components make up such a big portion of its ecosystem, and any questions or comments regarding them are pretty much prohibited. Requests for suggestions and alternatives outside of built-in components will get attacked and eventually deleted. I find this unacceptable for a product that relies so heavily on its (shrinking) ecosystem of third-party components, and the fact that so many of them are still in active use even though they've been abandoned by their original developers. Yes, I understand the rationale, and I totally disagree with it. Crowdsourced platforms should not restrict their ability to ask or answer questions based on any criteria other than "does this apply?" If it's available to the Delphi community at large, it should be ok to ask about it. Period. Delphi itself is a commercial product, and it's customers rely on a number of other commercial component libraries to accomplish their goals. Questions regarding them should not be restricted because they're not free -- especially as Delphi itself is not free.
Given this limitation, the Delphi board on SO is virtually useless for non-experts and anybody who's looking for components to accomplish something and don't know where to turn for suggestions. (The original Delphi discussion boards have such low traffic they're nearly useless. And this G+ thing is closer to what you'd get with an FB group than a true discussion forum. What other alternatives exist?)
I don't believe this Delphi board on SO is serving the majority of Delphi users and customers. It is what it is, and that's that.
If you disagree with the rules, your only real option is to go onto the 'meta' board and try arguing with the people who set the rules there, which is pretty much a lost cause from the get-go. These people do not represent Embt or anybody with a vested interest in the future of Delphi; rather, they represent their own narrow-minded self-ascribed roles, and they answer to no one. Why would anybody waste their time trying to convince them something isn't working? The answer they'll get is predictable.
SO is a self-fulfilling system. Any group of people running a specific topic can agree amongst themselves that something is "working fine" and refuse to change, just by declaring it so. There are no global objectives, or anything that can be held up as external measures to suggest there's a problem. It's their way or the highway, and nobody else really has a say.
The people who run SO don't seem to care that the Delphi board is not working for a lot of Delphi users. Nor do the people who maintain the militant rules on the current Delphi SO board. That's how SO works. I'm not going to waste my time trying to "prove" I'm right. All I can say for sure it that it's not meeting MY needs and rarely has, and I've heard the same from MANY other Delphi users. But the people who run this board and make the rules are not accountable to anybody, so they don't have to pay attention to any of this noise.
What's even sadder is that nobody from the company that owns and sells Delphi has ever taking an interest in SO or even whether this single board is or is not meeting the needs of a majority of their users. I guess they're just happy there's a place that some of their customers can go other than their own under-utilized discussion forums.
I'm posting this here because it would get deleted on SO and nobody would see it or have a chance to comment on it. Perhaps enough others will see it here that it might make a difference.
My wish would be that Embt would get more proactive in organizing and encouraging crowdsourced support media like this and stop pretending that by leaving their customers to their own devices that MOST Delphi customers would get served. It's not happening, it has never happened, and it's offensive that Embt even suggests that this single SO board is useful as a broad-spectrum support desk for ALL Delphi users. It's NOT! And never has been.
Until someone sets some goals and objectives in terms of how to measure its utility beyond the narrow user-base this one SO board now supports, I don't see anything changing, because the people who set the rules right now don't see a problem, and don't even care that anybody disagrees with them.
The mechanism for change is designed to be a "debate" and they'll usually win. This does not help solve the problem of how to serve unmet needs, because by definition these unmet needs don't count in such debates. It is what it is, and trying to argue that it's not something else is useless.
Nick Hodges On average SO gets about 4000 new users DAILY
ReplyDeletehttp://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252043/how-many-new-users-does-stack-overflow-get-per-day
Most of them just want fast solution for their problem without putting any effort at all into asking question, and even less into finding solution on their own where simple Googling would give it. And if they do get fast solution, they come back next day with equally bad question asking for another quick fix.
Do you think there is enough active experienced users that can baby sit all those newcomers and guide them ever so politely when they don't want any guidance?
I liked this thread. My 0.5 cent: that MVVM question is really bad for SO (opinion, and most likely to become obsolete in a year or five), and this group is an excellent resource for discussion and opinion.
ReplyDeleteThe old newsgroups were fine, but they weren't too easy for a beginner either. Many big personalities there!
Nick Hodges Check this comment for sentiment: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39295269/list-of-explorer-menu-options#comment65943062_39295269
ReplyDelete"@AnjumSKhan: you clearly do not understand how the shell works, and how shell context menus operate. Have you ever done any shell programming before?"
Written by Remy. Exactly the kind of thing that you have been berating me over. Holding Remy up as an example.
No criticism of Remy from me btw. I think it's a fair comment. Asker asks but then does not listen. Yes we should just walk away but it is human to get drawn in.
Your entire stream of comments here appear to be built on sand.