Looking for a new CEO (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The problem with being a beginner is that you probably don't know what those few lines are that make the most difference. Mods haughtily saying "You're doing it wrong; come back when you can do it right; here's a wall of meta-documentation that only tells you why your post sucks and doesn't help you figure out what part of your code matters" doesn't help anybody. If the bar to getting your question answered is to figure out on their own with no actual guidance how to ask the question perfectly, then you've already eliminated the 1/2 of developers out there who need the most help.

I'll never understand the mentality of people who put themselves in a position of answering questions, but are genuinely perturbed by the prospect of helping people with basic/misguided/imperfectly conceived questions. If they're the kind of person who could just read the documentation and solve all but the most complex of their own problems, congratulations. They should feel free to set that as the bar for anybody you hire or collaborate with. Or even set it as the bar for questions that they answer, but don't penalize people who are coming to a Q&A for not living up to those standards. If you're of that disposition on such a site, you're probably more interested in stroking your ego and watching some arbitrary points accumulate rather than actually helping people. There are lots of hobbies in development that don't expose you to beginner questions: go join a more esoteric users group, or contribute to an open source project without looking in the users forums/chat channels. Just do something that doesn't involve alienating inexperience developers.

I sincerely hope that you tell that to novices because they probably don't know any better. When you're new to development, it can be extremely difficult to distill any problem down to it's root elements. That's a skill that develops with experience. I would argue that it's one of the skills that makes a good developer overall.

Sometimes, all someone needs is a rubber duck. We can help by becoming that rubber duck.

> I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic.

That's very odd to me. I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've been hard pressed to find anything as welcoming and helpful as Stack Overflow. I became a high rep user over the years, and I made mistakes that earned downvotes, but usually someone could give me a pointer to how to improve my question or answer. (Not always, but usually.) It does suck to get downvotes, especially without a comment about why, but honestly, when I look at other sites (ahem hacker news) where the rules are only ever referred to by experienced users and in tiny print below the fold, the clear rules and help on StackOverflow, and posters who are willing to link to them and clearly explain them seem like a breath of fresh air.

> I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic

I haven't spend that much time asking questions, but I answered many (and commented, edited, flagged…) but Id didn't found the community that toxic, especially compared to other places.

This response is honestly part of the problem though. I understand not wanting many duplicate questions, and wanting a well written question/response style. However, different people approach differently problems differently. For every person who asks a question there are likely several others who didnt bother to post or were intimidated by the requirements to even get involved in SO. It seems like it’s been gamified to the point that it excludes newcomers.

A newcomer shouldn’t have to know the subtleties of the guidelines. When I go to the library and ask the librarian a question they don’t reprimand me for the formulation of my question. They don’t refer me to the weekly research/reference class (which is great by the way). They try to help me find what I’m looking for. Sometimes I find questions on SO through google that are dupes, but if it weren’t for that dupe I may never have found the original with the search terms that I used.

This isn’t to say that SO’s rules are wrong, I just believe that there are those who are more concerned with the decorum than the functionality. Unfortunately it feels like those users outnumber the functional ones.

There might have been reasons. But then when you ask for them in the comments section, people would just answer "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote". So actually you never learn.

The other issue is, even when the reason is given, sometimes you would not agree with that. E.g. sometimes people claim it's a duplicate, although they are not deep enough into the topic to really tell, and then the question gets closed. Or people claim is subjective, while in fact objective answers are possible. Or many other things.

> At this point I just deleted the question

>> Everyone there is just looking for someone to snipe at for internet points

I agree. But not just there. Here too. I feel I do not always express myself like I would were there no karma points to be earned/lost. I often wish for a karma-less HN .

Edit.

Because I get micro depressed when I loose karma and I start to question myself. I feel I shouldn't care because I look upon myself as strong, well-behaved, clever. But I do care. Immensely.

That is pretty much the reason for Stack Overflow's existence isn't it? Requests for debugging whatever problem you have (for free), and offers to do the same for others. You make it sound like a bad thing.

I had to chew a guy out the other day. He freely admitted that he wasn't a Python programmer and was looking for working code that he could run without modification. He tried to justify it by saying he was only asking for someone to "share their expertise".

OP "wrote up [a] code example" as is generally asked on SO, and that's somehow now bad asking "someone to debug your code for free"?

I'm an early SO user (userid < 500) and watched and got involved as the site developed. I'm in agreement with you, SO is still by a million miles way ahead of the traditional Q&A sites.

This isn't a personal bias and I'll admit that SO's had its ups and downs trying to find that balance between not being flooded by shit and not being overly authoritarian when trying to stem the flow of shit. I was a diamond mod on the site for a while, and despite what folks may think, the rest of the diamond crew are genuinely trying to maintain a good quality question and answer environment. I think it mostly works for the better. Sure there's the odd outrage here and there, but these are exceptions to the rule.

So here's a wee anecdote to finish up with. Whilst I'm a fairly experienced developer and engineer (30+ years in the biz) my latest project involves a bunch of Salesforce integration stuff (Apex code, triggers, callouts, inbound API bobbins...). How much did I know about Salesforce a month ago?....zilch/nada/zero; I was a complete and utter noob. Guess where I found the best answers to my umpteen google searches? Stackoverflow and the dedicated Salesforce SE site. Sure there's some good material in the Salesforce forums, but hoo...boy...there's a serious amount of utter dross that should just be deleted, which is what actively happens in SO. Sure there's the odd mistake here and there...for example, I found an answer the other week to a python thing I was having some trouble with. Google had a SO result but upon clicking through the question had for some reason been deleted. Turns out it was a misunderstanding and after a quick post on SO meta the question was re-instated. No big deal and no drama.

Every now and again we see posts like this here and there, folks bumping their gums about how terrible SO is, and how the moderation is overbearing and "my nebulous question about 'best frameworks'" was closed....blah, blah, blah. But like many things, in my experience, these complaints are usually from a noisy tiny minority. For the rest of us with a modicum of common sense SO and the SE network works just fine and we quietly get on with our day jobs.

I disagree. The old sites while sometimes had wildly varying answers, so does SO, especially in newer technologies that change frequently (React, etc...) you'll find answers that are 6 months old but out of date and new questions get closed pointing to the old ones. And the culture on the old sites was never as vile as SO is.

I won't be sad when the next gen Q&A comes around to fix the problems SO introduced, just like when SO came around to fix the issues of the other sites.

I agree and it's not just the nitty-gritty stuff either. With the amount of context-switching programmers need to do these days, it's very helpful as a memory-jog resource.

I just don't go there unless it's my last resort. I'll turn to irc, github, discord, quora and sadly even reddit before I go to SO.

>> site similar to ask.com or Quora.

One huge advantage SO has over a site like Quora is that on SO there are generally very few 'poor' answers that get voted up.

Quora is a shit show when it comes to both questions and answers (at least related to programming)

I'm a senior software engineer with 10+ years experience who has never had a problem getting a job at any company.

I've had 10-20 times where I've wanted to contribute on a SO question/answer (that I have no doubt who have benefitted somebody else) but I don't have enough reputation to comment...

The industry qualifies me as worth good enough, but SO doesn't?

When computer learning gets that good, programmers will be out of jobs. I don't see it happening in my lifetime.

> If someone is asking then either they failed to find the "duplicate" based on their search terms, or their problem is subtly different and the other answer doesn't help, or they don't understand the other answer.

Or they didn't bother searching possibly?

I think the 'up-vote only' model might be helpful for SO. If 1000 people down vote, but 100 people up vote, who's vote should carry more weight? Obviously, 100 people found the question/answer useful, so it's not useless. Whereas, we don't get a lot of value from a down vote, just that each individual that down voted didn't find the information useful/relevant.

If it's indeed a duplicate, well maybe it is, but perhaps the new question is a better version of the question (more/less generic/specific depending on context).

Why delete because of downvotes? I'm a top 8%, and my top karma producer is an answer that is technically wrong, but is useful to some people. It's fun watching the fighting upvotes/downvotes. It's currently at +124 / -58. But an upvote is worth +10, a downvote -2, so...

You can't down vote comments. SO is pretty toxic even with their newer policy. All downvotes should be public.

> The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company culture and focus.

Are there many (or any?) cases of this having a long-term effect on a company's culture/focus? I know it's the most-advertised reason for hiring an outside CEO, but I couldn't find any examples of a company's culture changing, and staying changed for years/decades, as a result of doing so.

> Stack currently feels like an attempt to be the worst parts of both Wikipedia and Ask.com.

Seriously? I can understand the Wikipedia aspect of it (though I'm not sure I totally agree), but ask.com? Isn't ask.com full of trolls asking intentionally silly questions, and writing ridiculous answers? I fail to see how StackOverflow falls into that category.

> There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things

I consider “being able to resourcefully look up the answer to your question” a critical developer skill, regardless of whether that answer comes from an online forum or page 254 of the official spec or finding the right academic paper. Having a nice searchable online resource contributes positively to this developer skill!

You know, I recently posted about how I learned to program with no home internet connection. Learning to only rely on the docs for major libraries has really helped me use obscure stuff.

That said, SO is still a wealth of information.

> If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site

Yeah that's if you create an account there. Land on a random SE site from Google or from the Hot Network questions and chances are you don't even have an account.

The site looks exactly like Stack Overflow, but if I press the upvote button I get an annoying error and the person who wrote that answer doesn't get any points.

If I do create an account, every time I infrequently visit that site I'm met with an annoying banner to "remember to upvote". Despite the fact that I upvote Stack Overflow questions daily. You can't win.

Editing is the other major place where I feel this annoyance. On Stack Overflow I edit a ton of posts to correct typos, grammar, code formatting, and capitalization. But I can't donate my free labor on SuperUser or AskDifferent. I'm not going to add these minor edits to a review queue. So the sites are just worse off because of arbitrary site siloing.

> Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites.

I'd very much question that belief. Maybe for the more esoteric sites, but a good user on Stack Overflow is going to be right at home on SuperUser, Ask Different, or any of the myriad slightly-different-but-mostly-the-same tech sites with slightly different focuses.

Thank you.

I could very well be wrong. I've never been a mod myself; maybe the bad ones just stand out. It's certainly noticeable on certain subreddits when the good mods are slowly displaced by power tripping bad mods.

There's still Reddit and I find it helpful when debugging stuff or tryin to bounce around ideas.

Yeah, as someone who has never asked a question, I can generally find what I'm looking for without much effort.

So, from a 'drive users from google search' perspective, the current moderation model must be working quite well.

I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing.

i got question banned for 10 downvotes spread across 3 questions-2 of which are still unanswered but have been "edited for grammar". not one comment as to why the downvotes. stack is little more than a toy for answering straightforward questions now