I thought this was an interesting read:
I thought this was an interesting read:
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.1tu3d0y26
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.1tu3d0y26
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.1tu3d0y26
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.1tu3d0y26
I'm not a member but reading some answers I find at times there is a lack of respect for others.
ReplyDeleteNo alternatives though it seems at present.
Basically Stackoverflow went the way of Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteSO is suffering from a Wikipedia syndrome, with moderators taking upon themselves to make it into some absolute, curated site.
ReplyDeleteWhile curating an encyclopedia is fine, IMHO curating a Q&A site on vague grounds is not. Curating should be limited to spam and abuses, not ambiguous questions or "opinion-based" or doubtful forms if subjectivity. Otherwise it is no longer a Q&A site.
SO these days often makes me think it's run on a tiny overloaded server running out of disk space, and the owners are constantly looking for stuff to delete or lock down.
meta.stackoverflow.com - Ideas for proposals to help Stack Overflow create a more positive community?
ReplyDeleteDavid Heffernan too many entrenched barons, it's like fighting windmills.
ReplyDeleteThe article is basically a big namecalling contest. It does not offer any solutions. The examples given are poor. I don't see what it adds to the debate.
ReplyDeleteThe problem SO faces is a tsunami of poorly researched noob questions, the answers to many of which have been provided many times over, or are impossible to provide because the question is vague or incoherent or worse.
I've never failed to get a good answer to a question I've asked.
I think people are mistaken about the purpose of the site. See meta.stackoverflow.com and read some of the discussions going on.
"That city's littering laws are too strict. I'd leave, but for some reason every other city is covered in garbage."
ReplyDeletemobile.twitter.com - David Robinson on Twitter: ""That city's littering laws are too strict. I'd leave, but for some reason every other city is covered in garbage." "
Every question has already been asked and answered (this is not SO specific), it's like stating water is wet.
ReplyDeleteAnd if there are many people asking it is because it is more popular, and there are more people in the field (simple demographics).
The point system mechanics however encourage fiefdom, and fiefdom leads to encyclopedic envy.
Discussions on meta show the encyclopedic envy has the most weight behind it. SO will never be a Q&A site in the traditional meaning ever again, the mechanics and demographics forbid it.
Whether SO will achieve encyclopedic status on the other hand is doubtful, as it is not really structured for that, and it already suffers from obsolete-already-answered questions. Technical answers accumulate technical debt (especially true for all Web related questions IME, and I would guess all fast moving fields), and I find less and less relevant answers on SO.
Eric Grange I get a head ache just thinking about wikipedia and how companies and personalities hire their own editors to modify articles to their like
ReplyDeleteGil Padilla any venue popular enough will be a target for advertisers and lobby groups, be they self-appointed barons or commercial companies. It is extremely rare when the initial spirit can survive that...
ReplyDeleteEric Grange The "initial spirit" was created by different people, many of them gone from SO long before. The today's SO authorities feel comfortable with the current stink. This is how the real world works.
ReplyDeleteSomehow Slashdot, one of the earliest tech blogs, has managed to stay interesting over the years. There are probably not the same people there as in the beginning but it is still worth visiting (or rather having the RSS feed in my feed reader). I realize that SO and Slashdot are different types of sites, but both offer comments and both are submitter driven.
ReplyDeleteCan we close this discussion as duplicate please? :p
ReplyDeleteThis is why Slashdot introduced meta-moderation...
ReplyDeleteStefan Glienke downvoted for being to vague:
ReplyDeleteWho is (included in) "we"?
Alexander Benikowski Stefan Glienke locking this as it is primarily opinion based
ReplyDelete"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle." -- George Orwell
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's really difficult sometimes to see what is in front of you if you rely solely on anecdotal evidence.
ReplyDeletehttp://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose interestingly enough, all of his examples are still not settled 60 years later, proving it's all a bit more complicated than merely seeing what it's in front of one's nose (though that's a debate for another place)
ReplyDeleteI can't see what is in front of me for the sheer amount of anecdotes piling up on it.
ReplyDeleteDeleting poor content on Stack Overflow requires collective effort of up to 8 people. They are not angry mob, nor elitists, nor trolls, they keep site usable for all.
ReplyDeleteDalija Prasnikar If they were not angry mob, not trolls, there would be no problem deleting poor content and keeping the site usable; the fact is they are angry trolls, and most former SO users stay away from it now.
ReplyDeleteDalija Prasnikar see http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that
ReplyDeleteIn practice a single downvote when a question is posted is enough once you factor the fast sedimentation an automatic deletion rules.
Eric Grange What usually happens though is that the sympathy upvoters arrive and make sure that even terrible questions are not allowed to hold a negative score. Even when completely valueless questions are closed, they are not infrequently reopened so that more dire non-answers can be added.
ReplyDeleteThis is all post Summer of Love. Before then it was much easier to remove the poor content.
It's odd that you opine that there are few good questions left to be asked, but then also rail against efforts to stem the flow of poor questions.
I get it. Stack Overflow would be much improved if I left.
ReplyDeleteThat's not what I meant, David, far from it. We have our differences, but your contributions are irrefutable.
ReplyDeleteThe meta link you posted didn't even give the folks on that thread pause, and the most up-voted answer basically said the article was full of crap.
It might be that there's something to the article.
Nick Hodges That comment was aimed at Serg.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the criticism goes, I've never yet seen any such criticism come with any actual evidence. Anecdote is largely useless since it can be used to prove anything. And clearly all things are not true.
To me it boils down largely to two camps:
Camp 1: All questions should be answered, and all askers should be encouraged to keep asking, no matter what they ask.
Camp 2: The site should curate high quality Q&A posts, even if that means discouraging contributors who produce low quality content.
In the early days, camp 2 held sway. Then there was the summer of love, Jeff left, and now camp 1 holds sway.
I'm in camp 2, you are in camp 1. Many of the posters appear to want to be in both camps but I don't believe that is possible.
The other well known classification system can be found in this answer: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252077
I started as a 3, became a 1, and am now flipping between 1 and 4.
Most of the people in this G+ community who complain about SO come down on the side of the type 2 vampires, but they also don't get to deal with helping them!
Sergey Kasandrov You are welcome to your opinion.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your oft quoted blog post, I wonder why you complain about the site being full of newbs, and in the same breath complain about the people that try to manage their content off the site. If you don't want the site to be full of newb questions, the eternal September problem, what is your solution. I see complaints, but nothing constructive.
Mostly I see somebody who is bitter about a post of theirs being deleted. Time to get over it if you ask me. Which you didn't!
Sergey Kasandrov Why would I want to delete your posts?
ReplyDeleteEric Grange Yes, I know how it works. Question is do those deleted questions deserve to live.
ReplyDeleteFor me, my frustrations with SC led to me stopping contributing to it. I still search it, but I never post or help anymore. Can't keep up with the badge hunters.
ReplyDeleteDalija Prasnikar a deleted question is likely a question that will be asked again. For every duplicate question you have different formulations, and for every stupid question, if it's not kept and answered, it will keep coming back.
ReplyDeleteAfter all the primary entry point for SO is Google. After all Google superseded all directories and human managed indexes, I do not see why SO moderators would do better than directory moderators of old.
Eric Grange those stupid questions are seldom dupes. They are usually unique to the asker. Too localised would have been the close reason before summer of love. Deleting them is fine.
ReplyDeleteFor actual dupes, well asked, with good answers, they can be closed and left. That's fine. They won't get deleted.
With respect, some of your comments indicate that you don't have a complete appreciation of how SO works.
IMHO, Stack Overflow is still the best place to look for answer to programming questions. I think people are complaining just because the reputation game is hard to play these days.
ReplyDeleteEric Grange Questions closed as duplicates are not automatically deleted, just like questions with upvoted answers.
ReplyDeleteThere are no stupid questions, but there are bad questions. Bad questions serve no purpose even when answered. Because if you don't know what is original problem you cannot know whether the offered solution will work for you. And trying takes valuable time.
I have experience so I can judge answers more easily than newbies and still I have find myself wasting time trying out answers that do not solve my issue because question is bad.
It's not really for me, not my kind of thing, but for all you helpful souls out there that believe that Stack Overflow should not close and delete and downvote questions, perhaps you'd like to try and help this poor soul:
ReplyDeletestackoverflow.com - Any good "Free" resources out there for learning Windows internals?
The current edit is a bit tame, but the "best" one is found here: http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/39734247/3
David Heffernan that looks to me like written by an unbalanced person.
ReplyDeleteBut they deserve to be helped. All questions must be answered. And preserved eternally.
ReplyDeleteDavid Heffernan if you just delete that question, you are guaranteeing it will be asked again... and again... until the world runs out of unbalanced persons.
ReplyDeleteIs that your strategy? Relying on the depletion of the global pool of unbalanced persons and newbies with ambiguous questions?
If some SO mods are intended on purity of content, no wonder they are becoming mad with a barrage of improper questions... it must be like charging waves of lemmings with lances of righteousness, Don Quixote would be proud.
It is a fight that can only be won by search engines, robots & automated barriers. Outright deletion only ensures that it won't be downrated, and that google search and others won't help.
Eric Grange Deletion or not won't change whether or not it gets asked again. Do you really think the asker searched for dupes before posting? It should be easier to remove such nonsense than it currently is.
ReplyDeleteJust ignore SO, that's the best one can do. Don't feed trolls.
ReplyDeleteYeah. Some people do have real trouble with loss of face.
ReplyDeleteEric Grange So it makes no sense in cleaning up the house because it will get dirty again.
ReplyDeleteMaybe people moderating SO are fighting windmills, but that is our choice. Just like it is everyones choice to participate on SO or don't. But if you do choose to participate, there are some rules to be followed. You are also free not to follow rules and in that case all bets are off.
But calling people that do follow official SO guidelines and use tools like down voting and close voting to deal with unwanted content trolls, angry mob, or any other name is just ridiculous (this comment is not specifically intended to you)
Dalija Prasnikar the problem is that this approach is only succeeding in making the atmosphere toxic, and turning SO into a legacy resource.
ReplyDeleteI used to tell people @work to go on SO to search and ask, but for the last two years, I no longer do, and I rarely do myself (despite having enough points to "bounty" my questions). I and they have moved back to a scattering of "less popular" forums & lists.
If this is a problem the SO mods are aware about, and if fighting windmills and making things toxic is really a choice, then so be it, it's the meta game of SO. Given the time and energy some "invested", defensiveness and denial is understandable, if regretable (as it will not end happily).
Eric Grange Toxic? Really? Any evidence for this? Nobody seems capable of producing it.
ReplyDeleteIt gets deleted? :P
ReplyDeleteEric Grange Toxic??? If there is anything toxic there it is amount of trash questions posted there. For instance there is about 1000 questions posted daily in Android tag. So what happens when someone asks non-trivial question there. It gets 3 and half views and no answers because all experts miss it due to heavy traffic. And if you are lucky you will get totally unrelated answer posted by 1 rep user that will immediately get up voted by his sock-puppet account.
ReplyDeleteOr if you are solving your problem you have to go through pile of trash, wasting time to find working solution to your problem.
Delphi tag is great.
Dalija Prasnikar you are making my point: this is beyond human moderation.
ReplyDeleteAnd your are also furthering my point about newbie friendlyness and not being noticed (which is why I mentionned bounties, I can bounty if I need to bring attention, a newbie cannot). Toxic is the feedback I got when redirecting people to SO.
As for going "through pile of trash", with only human moderation, it is a lost battle already: http://stackoverflow.com/tags/android/topusers
About 900k question tagged... you are firmly in the domain of search engines, and not even basic full-text search engine.
Moderated, human curated directories of the early internet did not went beyond a few million entries at their peak (4-5 millions for DMOZ, the largest and the one that survived the longest), and that was for all subjects, not a narrow field.
And more to the point: they were already obsoleted by search engines in the early 2000s, at the time they boasted about a million entries, same ballpark as entries for the Android tag.
So I think that SO is facing the end of an era, just like Yahoo was at the end of an era in Y2K, even if they did not knew it or accept it. The old recipes will no longer work the way they did.
Probably for the Android tag there's no hope of curating that by human hand. But that's not the case in the Delphi tag. The Android tag has 25x as many questions as the Delphi tag, and an unanswered rate that is 3x that of the Delphi tag.
ReplyDeleteAs for hostility in the Delphi tag, I don't think that's fair. If we are going to accept curation, then we are bound to have users who feel affronted when their questions are pushed to the sides by the human curators. You can call that hostility if you want, but it's an unavoidable consequence of human curation.
Once again, I've yet to see any evidence of this supposed hostility.
Delphi tag has 36k questions, while this may still be human-manageable with effort, I would argue that it's already past that.
ReplyDeleteEven if all new questions are curated, there are likely thousands of questions which could/would be considered obsolete or problematic in one way or another by a new curation round...
Yahoo & directories had one million entries when they were overtaken by search engines, but that was for all topics, ranging from animals to psychology to TV series and whatnot... Delphi tag in SO is already quite a lot larger than most topics at Yahoo when Yahoo had 1 million entries as a whole. In Yahoo terms, Delphi is a relatively narrow subtopic: it is a subtopic of programming langues which is a subtopic of programming which is a subtopic of information technology, which is a subtopic of technology. And Yahoo had way more than 27 such subtopics.
Eric Grange On account SO being great few years before, I would not know. I only started to participate less than 2 years ago. Not that I didn't used it as solutions resource but I didn't have account and I could not care less about reputation. And I still don't care much. I am not saying that it is not nice to have it, but it is mostly irrelevant. My ego is big enough with or without it and my wonderful personality is just the same as it was before :)
ReplyDeleteIt is quite possible that I have skewed perspective on how hard it is for newbies, but I have also seen plenty of real newbies doing just fine on SO.
You don't need reputation to ask and answer questions and bounty system is overrated. So reputation will only get you so far and any notions that you need to have it in order to do well there is pure nonsense.
Search engines can maybe help in going through existing Q/A database, but it will do you no good for getting your freshly asked question answered in due time. And as I read your suggestion, you are not in favor of deleting any posted content which would make bad situation even worse. Both for getting answers and for searching existing ones. Human moderation is still best way to go, but some tags don't have enough active users that will do moderation. And articles like above name calling moderators don't really help either.
How to deal with insufficient human moderation powers is discussion that belongs on Stack Overflow. Whether or not something can be done is not clear. One thing is for sure. Turning it into Crap Overflow will not do anyone any good.
What really makes me sad is that people with knowledge and experience are involved in trashing the site and more important people that do care about its quality rather than educating people how to ask good questions. And that is skill that goes beyond SO. Knowing how to clearly present your problem is valuable knowledge any good developer should learn regardless of wanting to participate on SO or not.
How many good questions a newbie programmer can make, that haven't been asked before?
ReplyDeleteI remember being a newbie back in Usenet and mailing lists times. When you showed no signs of having done your homework you were told (in very harsh ways, I must add) to go back and read the fancy manual. What changed?
It's close on impossible for a novice programmer to ask a really good question. When I first asked on the stack I had 15 years of professional experience, on top of 15 as an amateur. And I still had no idea how to ask well.
ReplyDeleteThe overwhelming proportion of users are not even members. So what matters is their experience. Not the experience of people asking. So the priority is to ensure the resource is of high quality.
The reason so many people here moan is that they like the high quality but don't want the moderation that produces that high quality. Which is a little unrealistic in my view.
But if you really don't want the moderation standards then go elsewhere. As simple as that. And spare us the sob stories. We don't mind.
I thought you were exaggerating a little, Nick. Today I finally understood what you mean. I think SO sucks in many ways, specially the Delphi part which is essentially controlled by a few people. However, some people are real lunatics with serious psychological disorders. This explains lots of things, including the fact that some cuckoos spend all their time in SO.
ReplyDelete