Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand, goes like this:
User: "Hi, how do I do Y?"
SO: "Why do you want to do Y?"
User: "Because I want to do [use case]"
SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?"
User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure this isn't about X and I really want to do Y."
SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?"
User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y."
SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to Y probably doesn't exist anyway."
Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted)
User: "Cool, thanks!"
SO: "This is bad practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or the accepted answer."
--------
Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question does get eventually answered.
New Answerer: As of v12,5 this is now supported first class like: [....].
Comments:
- this should really be the accepted answer
- OP can you make this the accepted answer?
- accepted answer is out of date, this should be used now
Accepted answer never changes, remains top result indefinitely
It may the nature of experience.
The type of questions that cause me a problem are deeper edge cases that had later fixes for early workarounds.
The only time an accepted answer doesn't pin to the top is when it is when the accepted answer is one from the OP - in which case it doesn't get pinned and sorts by votes only.
The meme is that it's power-tripping moderators and stuff, but it's mostly normal users like me reviewing an never-ending pile of garbage, trying to let the few good posts through.
I'm not sure if this kind of stuff increase recently* or if it's always been an issue that I only began to notice later. I'm also not sure of the cause, nor the solution, but it does seem to indicate a switch from one definition of "education" to another:
1. "helping" users solve problems
2. "schooling" users on what they're doing wrong
* I say "recently", but I just checked and it appears I joined SO ~11 years ago and haven't actively used it in ~7 years, so "recently" is probably not the right word...
Can you elucidate how these are not the same thing? In my mind, a good answer is one that solves a problem proposed in a user's question. A good question is one that poses a problem other users are / will also share.
"How do I do X?"
"How do I do Y?"
It seems like most of the "power users" treat it like some giant multi-player online adventure game, where the goal is to win points and go on quests to get questions answered first, get answers closed as dupes, or get the accepted answers. The quality of the answers or information provided matters less than the points.
When that happens to you, did you add a comment telling others why it is not a duplicate? In my experience most people don't and if they do it is just a comment like "It is not a duplicate". The latter is obviously not helpful and won't change anybody's mind.
Something I CAN control though is how I ask questions, and I guess I instinctively learned to avoid that trope you're commenting about. So when I ask a question, I state ALL my research, I link directly to related questions that didn't solve the problem, I link to specific places in docs, I paste in specific parts of my code, and I list out all my constraints. Then at the very bottom, bolded and in a single sentence, I state or restate my question.
Since I started doing that, haven't had the above issue.
Sadly, some/many don't and then complain because the community is "unwelcoming".
Usually, when "the YX problem" happens, "Y" is something like "SSH won't let me use my private key because the permissions are too open. I can't change the permissions because [insert reason that would make any security-conscious person cringe]. How do I get SSH to let me use a world-readable private key?"
So yes, there's probably some technically valid use-case, but it's a really big footgun and it probably would be a much better idea to fix the underlying problem the right way.
When you are browsing such a question, it was obviously written by three raccoons in a trench coat and you can’t understand why they wouldn’t do the obvious right thing and the question is missing all the relevant information about why they want to do what you don’t like.
For a site full of software developers there often doesn’t seem to be much willingness to accept compromises or trade-offs.
That said, I concede that I often see questions with silly constraints but those constraints are usually because the question was homework and designed as a teaching exercise for the environment which the question is constrained to.
Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be quantified.
Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I believe this was a mistake.
Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderators. They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have seen measured.
An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how to evolve, the voting system.
There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO.
Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.
2. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.
A big tell on this, is their homepage is no longer about the Q&A platform.
The new stack: https://i.imgur.com/RkzckLF.png
The old stack: https://i.imgur.com/kY1kkAi.png
The new image says: we took a lot of venture capital and there's not enough money in knowledge services. We've got returns to generate. We're going to sell you something, and hey we <3 people who code ("we less than three people who code"), we swear.
The old image (from 2015, when they were still in their prime) says: we're a knowledge service, we have a knowledge mission and that's what we're all about. Few frills, let's get to learning and sharing.
Do you suppose their tag line is revealing how few people at Stack actually still code? It's all MBAs now I suppose. Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code.
> Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code.
I chuckled :)
Population of new users grows faster than technological growth invalidates old answers?
Users with astronomically high points are deeply invested. How do you get to +10k points without being highly invested? Expert. Super User. Equals highly opinionated.
I make Python automation scripts at work, without formal training. I fall into many different pitfalls--all the time. One of my "favorites" is posting something to CodeReview. Then it get's closed (because CodeReview, despite its name, has a narrow focus). Then I try it over at SoftwareEngineering, only to get downvoted and flamed because I'm not asking a _serious_ question.
I've grown up with SO as a programmer (BTW, I'm over 40) just enough to be dangerous as SO becomes increasingly conservative and less interested in the questions and more interested in routine administering of rules.
> "They should have continued to improve this system..."
I'm divided on this. On the one hand there is room for improvement as tech questions age. I frequently get answers that are nearly 10 years old for some questions. Sometimes they're relevant, and sometimes they're not. The community has MonkeyPatched this problem by opening and editing old answers with "UPDATE 2020" or "UPDATE v3" addendums.
On the other side it's rare to get past the gimmick (voting; q&a site) that make the product so successful. The site's usefulness is growing old, while the community continues to grow, resulting in frustration, confusion and pain in the you know what. It's sad _and_ true.
Some times i feel the moderators are bit rude and harsh. especially to the newbies who submit their first questions. I could be wrong, but this is what i saw and felt..
Sure if it's obviously spam, or some kind of ridiculous screed, it should be deleted asap-- without votes, answers or commentary.
The problem is when people write questions earnestly, but because they lack subject-matter orientation, aren't able to formulate their questions in a way that SO experts would like to hear. Too many questions are smugly dismissed this way. It doesn't help anyone and it pisses a lot of people off.
I think many of these earnest but "bad" questions just need answers in the form of heuristic advice or pointers to get them on the right track. Being able to formulate a question is half the battle. Understanding ALWAYS begins with some amount of confusion. Admittedly, that's not optimal for a site where well-defined questions are supposed to get crisp answers that others can use over and over. But that still doesn't excuse rudeness.
I thought about this, why can't we do this like with monitoring. We alreday know that median isn't good enough, so so we look at the 95th or 99th percentile. Can't we do this with ratings too?
The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.
But being unwelcoming is a problem, and it needs solved. This just doesn't solve it.
At least on a standard forum, you can say "hello" and "thank you".
The people who are there with influence on direction have a very different view of what SO (and the rest of SE) should be. Most employees at corporate do not use any of the public sites in any way, shape or form and are disconnected about what the users and curators there need.
And so, you get continuous improvement - on a vision that the unpaid volunteers who maintain the sites feel is wrong or counter productive.
Did the pandemic/lock down cause a slew of newer developers that are generally more appreciative?
For me it's more like: newer developers that doesn't seem to like reading.
I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?
I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.
And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.
Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.
It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.
The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.
You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation.
This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.
We win friends by being compassionate, empathetic, supportive, and nurturing; by applying gentle correction. Leading by example. Helping each other up. Leading from the front.
I was a manager of a high-performance team; made up of people that knew a lot more than I did, and I kept us together, working as a tightly-coupled unit, for decades. I have some prior art in carrots over sticks.
One of the big problems, these days, is that documentation is just awful. People think that "more is good." That's not true at all. It just means that the SNR is much lower, and we waste time, reading irrelevance. We are also under a lot of pressure to get results fast. No time to look stuff up. Start coding.
Finding answers, in an efficient manner, is a real pain.
SO is a marvelous idea, and I totally support it. Ironically, I suspect that the "gamification" that has made it so successful, is also contributing to the issues it is facing. I do not have the answer. I think removing the gamification would also destroy the utility of the site.
I like the idea of the SO Story. Here's mine: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
I love SO. It is a big "go to" for me, and I have also asked twice as many questions than I have provided answers. I think that I ask very good questions. Sometimes, I'm wrong, and I don't mind finding that out. I become right by being wrong, and learning differently.
But people seem to be terrified to ask questions. I have no idea why. I am constantly asking questions; even "stupid" ones.
Reading some of the meta conversations, and seeing so many high-score members with single-digit question counts, says a lot. Whenever there is an election, my principal coefficient is the candidates' question count. I don't want to vote for people that think asking questions is something to be ashamed of.
I have over 35 years of shipping software. I have a great deal of knowledge and experience; far more than many folks on SO, but I also am constantly trying out new stuff that I don't know how to do. That makes me a n00b, all the time (I write about that, here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...). I don't always know the best places to look for answers, and appreciate RTFM responses.
What I don't appreciate, is some person telling me that the fact I didn't watch some well-known (to them) video, or read some well-known (to them) article, makes me a "lesser person," or (an SO fave), "lazy" (anyone that actually knows me, knows that "lazy" is not a word that can be applied to me). I appreciate being directed to the video or article, but the nasty sauce is not a condiment that I prefer.
UPDATE: I removed some stuff from this response that was probably not necessary to the conversation, and would not be constructive. I hope someone was taking notes. That's how we do it.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587
Overall, the biggest complaint against this is:
1. Not enough people vote on questions or answers.
We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment.
I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587
Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting.
Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers).
If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™.
The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote?
Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue.
There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.
Also what about the change in reputation when being thanked? It should be there in the blog post.
It's now quite painful to ask questions, there, because someone will pretty much always ding it. Usually, you have no idea why, or who. In fact, that happened to me just a day or so ago.
Also, I think that downvoters should be notified when the question/answer is edited, so they can review if the downvote still applies.
I once trolled a community (not SO) by writing an obviously inflammatory post, getting a gazillion downvotes, then editing it to be very reasonable, so everyone was on record as having downvoted a very decent post. Petty, but fun (They did not have edit records for posts, but you could see what users up/downvoted).
I like the idea of a "Thank You" reaction, but that's really just porcine lip gloss.
I think that it would be more valuable to require an explanation for a downvote, even if anonymously. I would have no problem telling folks why I downvoted a question or answer (in fact, when I do, I add a comment, mentioning the reason, unless it is blatantly obvious). As is evident by my HN profile, I am making a point of standing behind what I post. I got rid of my last anonymous Internet account months ago.
Standing behind my words has helped me to be a bit more careful about what I post, and that's a good thing.
It's also true of other Stack Exchange sites. Sometimes you feel like in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're sent from one site to the other and none of them think it's their job to deal with a question.
And I don't mean the low-effort questions, but well written interesting ones that are deemed to broad, too opinion-based, too whatever.
There is definitely an effect of territorialism, big egos and rule lawyering going on. As if people were playing a game of spot-the-broken-rule as some intellectual puzzle and going "heureka, there it is, you broke Rule No. 3, gotcha!!". Sites like SO and Wikipedia certainly attract people who get emotionally invested in this role and see themselves as powerful and enjoy feeling better than others.
That's why the debate is complicated. There is a problem with trigger happy moderation, but also with low-effort content.
It's clear the old school moderators seem to think of SO as a reference, but the company itself wants to view it as a place to seek help.
A lot of people in this thread seem to hate SO, and I disagree with them. If I ask a question on SO, no matter how obscure of a library or language I'm using, I'll get a response back within a day. And if my question gets flagged for being a duplicate, then I've just been redirected to more resources to solving my problem. It may not be warm and welcoming, but it's very helpful.
To be useful, SO doesn't need to be welcoming at all. It needs to be exclusive. If it wasn't elitist, it would be filled with Java programmers pasting 400 lines of code with little explanation. The elitism has caused me to write better questions and to really think about the hypothetical person answering my question. Elitism and helpfulness go hand in hand. If you want to see the horrors of a non-elitist Q&A forum, go check out the Unity forums or any popular Github repository.
If SO was a video game, it'd make sense to have newbies team up.
If someone doesn't grok the way that Stack Overflow works, the information that new users add (or ask for) may do more harm than good (see examples of people adding random formatting). Many times this just is reinforcing bad habits.
If you feel this could be useful, I would encourage you to try helping out by editing questions in the Help and Improvement queue so that they are good questions with all the necessary information (and matching the style that Stack Overflow expects).
There was a mentorship project at Stack Overflow a bit ago - but it didn't scale and the expectations were mismatched (many new users were expecting help with their problem /now/ rather than help with trying to make their question better).
The video game analogy - its not that you need to team up to solve a problem, its realizing that the quest(ion) has already been solved by someone else so you don't need to do it again.
These kind of things are what dehumanizes the internet, they don’t make for better human connections. It’s also basically the exact same as the current upvote icon. A way to send a message to the author privately saying thanks seems much more touching. Or even a hidden “thank you’s” list of grateful words that can be expanded on the question but that is hidden by default. Either of those would be better than this weird duplication of robotic thank you’s.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077
(and the rest of the discussion there.)
