I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes
-
So, I was busy answering a pretty interesting question on Stack Overflow. I spent a good 20 minutes writing a thoughtful, well explained answer, and just as I was finishing up, and giving my question a proof read, this happened:
This question has been closed - no more answers will be accepted..
Sure enough, the "Post Answer" button was now disabled, and my answer was trapped in the edit box, doomed to never see the light of day.
I've had this happen to me a bunch of times, and each time has frustrated, or even enraged me. This isn't the experience any normal UX engineer wants for their users, so I decide to go onto meta and explain how ridiculous the situation was.
It went very well, everyone agreed with me, and they're going to fix the problem soon... Just kidding
I got into the usual discussions with the usual "Church of Jeff's-way-of-thinking" douchebags.
Here are the highlights:
: If this keeps happening to you, I suggest you stop trying to answer off-topic or low-quality questions.
: Have you ever considered that some of those people are the ones who need the most help?
: It's not about helping people, that's a collateral benefit.
: That's the big problem with SO. That's why we had the "not very welcoming" issue. It's funny how a QA site has skewed it's objectives so much, that it's no longer about actually helping people.
: People asking low quality questions might need help, but not from here. Here is for high quality questions only.
: It's a good job that "high quality questions" are easily identifiable, and aren't subjective at all then!
So this boils down that you disagree what the site's priorities should be.
: no, this boils down to the fact that I spent a good 20 minutes answering a question, and having my effort thrown away by poor UX driven by questionable ideals.
: Snarky comment from a mod who should know better.
: as things stand, the system does this by design, and anyone that falls foul of it has a terrible experience. It's a problem that people should be aware of, and they should also be very aware of how it makes the end user feel, i.e. frustrated, enraged and defeated. Is that how good UX is supposed to make a user feel?
And the SO community wondered why the StackOverflow isn't very welcoming shit happened.
-
I suspect whatever their question voting guidelines are, they're not "we think you're stupid"Fun in the "related" section:
Only 40% negative? They need to try harder.
-
Clearly you don't hate it enough yet.
-
@loopback0 I go through fits and starts. I suspect I'm also drawn back to stack overflow due to a little bit of masochism.
-
Helping people is a collateral benefit? Are you fucking kidding me SO? Cannot believe someone said that.
-
Come to think of it, the cunts to non cunts ratio is so high when you compare SO to Reddit or even hackernews. Reddit and HN cannot even hold a candle to the kind of cuntery I've seen on SO. And this is the first site people go to when they have a question in our line of work. SMFH.
-
@kazitor said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
I suspect whatever their question voting guidelines are, they're not "we think you're stupid"On Meta, they pretty much are; it's fine on Meta to use your votes to indicate agreement or disagreement. This is sort of stated in https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta under the Voting is different on meta section, although for some reason that implies that such use of voting is restricted to questions tagged
feature-request
(which is not the actual norm that gets followed).
-
@DoctorJones said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
If this keeps happening to you, I suggest you stop trying to answer off-topic or low-quality questions.
They're making assumptions here and I think it's a tad dickish, but they might have a point; it's hard to judge without seeing the questions you're answering.
: It's not about helping people, that's a collateral benefit.
Not a fair representation of what was said. For the record, the actual comment said this:
It's not about helping individual users, that's a collateral benefit. You can try steering users to chat for that, through comments for example. It might be more suitable.
In other words, the point being made is that creating long-lasting resources for future searchers is the primary purpose of the site, and that helping the particular individual who asked a question is a secondary and subordinate goal. Which, for the record, I agree with completely.
doctorjones: no, this boils down to the fact that I spent a good 20 minutes answering a question, and having my effort thrown away by poor UX driven by questionable ideals.
Even if you'd been able to post the answer, there's a good chance your effort would be thrown away anyway, through the question getting eaten by the Roomba.
Snarky comment from a mod who should know better.
Eh? The comment was this:
You can always post a new, high quality question to post that answer to. It is not lost, you have the text right there to reuse elsewhere. If the question was closed as a duplicate, perhaps your answer is worth moving to the canonical, if it is of such high quality.
I don't see snark there. Again there's a presumption that the question you were trying to answer deserved closure, which might or might not be true, but if i did, then isn't this perfect reasonable advice?
I find wrongheaded question closures (and wrongheaded question closure rules) frustrating and I argue against them on Meta. But what confuses me here is that you don't seem to be disputing the merits of the closure itself; instead, you seem to be implicitly saying "yes, I agree that the question either had no value to anyone or was a duplicate, but I want to be able to post an answer to it anyway". To which the obvious question is... why?
-
:doctorjones: That's the big problem with SO. That's why we had the "not very welcoming" issue
I thought we had the "not very welcoming" issue because some of the staff decided that we needed to be extra nice to accommodate the fragility of blacks and women. The Welcoming drive was not exactly a thoughtful reflection on our moderation standards or how they serve our overall goals.
-
@Cabbage said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
instead, you seem to be implicitly saying "yes, I agree that the question either had no value to anyone or was a duplicate, but I want to be able to post an answer to it anyway". To which the obvious question is... why?
He said it several times: because he spent time writing his answer and, like anyone, hates seeing his work go to waste.
The OP is a bit muddled, which it being a rant isn't really surprising, but I think the issue is more along the lines of "why didn't the site notify me immediately that the question was being closed rather than waiting until I had it all done?"
With whatever-JS-acronym-soup-is-du-jour, this shouldn't be too hard. Of course if the question is being closed 19 min into his 20-minutes writing effort, that wouldn't make any difference, but if it was closed 1 min after he started typing, he would have known immediately what was going to happen.
Alternatively, since closed questions are not deleted and thus still visible, it wouldn't be entirely stupid to let him post it. What harm does it make whether a closed question has got any answers?
-
@remi said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
He said it several times: because he spent time writing his answer and, like anyone, hates seeing his work go to waste.
But he's still free to take it and post it somewhere else. Why is it important to him that he pins his answer onto the bottom of what he seemingly agrees is either a duplicate or a piece of irredeemable garbage, when he could instead pin it onto either the question being duplicated or a piece of non-garbage of his own creation?
Of course if the question is being closed 19 min into his 20-minutes writing effort, that wouldn't make any difference, but if it was closed 1 min after he started typing, he would have known immediately what was going to happen.
From my reading of DJ's post, I think it was closed 19 minutes in and that the banner appears the moment the question is closed.
Alternatively, since closed questions are not deleted and thus still visible, it wouldn't be entirely stupid to let him post it. What harm does it make whether a closed question has got any answers?
Perhaps a fair question, but it seems to me that it's really a challenge to the entire system of question closure rather than this specific scenario.
-
@DoctorJones dang. I was almost motivated enough to dig up my SO password to give you an upvote.
-
@Cabbage said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
But he's still free to take it and post it somewhere else
That would be no use, posting it elsewhere takes it outside of the useful context, where the post has little to no value. Plus I cannot get it in-front of the person who needed the answer. But, fuck them, it's just one person, SO clearly isn't for helping individual users. It's for helping people who's problem is an exact fit to some ideal standard of a question/answer pair. If it's only useful to one person, then it's useful to nobody. ;-)
-
This one particularly annoys me, especially with the number of upvotes it's getting
Yeah, fuck those users. They don't deserve an answer anyway.
FYI, it was a high quality question, with a very good minimum repro code example. It just got dupe hammered by a gold badge.
It's worse when it's closed as a dupe of something that is not actually the same problem, or it's closed as a dupe of a much lower quality question. I've seen it all, and it gets no less infuriating.
-
@DoctorJones Is it possible to post your answer to the question it's allegedly a dupe of? Or are the two too different?
-
@DoctorJones said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
closed as a dupe of something
Most of the time they're just closed as a duplicate with no obvious way of seeing what it's a duplicate of.
-
@kazitor they're too different. My answer directly referenced the OP's code example, and took them through it step by step.
It was one of my better answers, which is a shame.
-
The thing I really don't get is, why are they so hellbent on closing questions? Surely useful questions will get more pageviews, and less useful questions will get less pageviews. It's not as if volume is a problem, we're talking about a site that's been around for a long time, and has a massive database of questions.
As a user looking for info on SO, I'm most bothered by something being easily searchable, not whether it fits the ideal standard of SO.
-
@DoctorJones said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
The thing I really don't get is, why are they so hellbent on closing questions?
Their one god is King Jeff™ and it's his favourite thing.
@DoctorJones said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
As a user looking for info on SO, I'm most bothered by something being easily searchable, not whether it fits the ideal standard of SO.
-
@loopback0 Funny since Jeff is no longer with them. Is there a reason for that?
-
@loopback0 said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Their one god is King Jeff™ and it's his favourite thing.
It always comes back to that knob jockey.
-
@kazitor said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Funny since Jeff is no longer with them
Yes? They've not fundamentally changed their attitude since he was.
@kazitor said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Is there a reason for that?
Fuck knows.
-
@DoctorJones said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
The thing I really don't get is, why are they so hellbent on closing questions?
-
I don't use SO enough to know if this is a normal thing, but every single one of my answers is getting adjusted for grammar by random people at later dates. I got a pop-up for authorising one change but the rest have been forced. I don't agree with some of the changes either, why is expanding contractions better? I can only assume you get SO pointzz for doing this and it's low-hanging fruit.
-
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
Filed Under: INTERNETPOINTZZZZ
-
@Cursorkeys said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
I don't agree with some of the changes either, why is expanding contractions better?
I didn't know Peggy Hill was on StackOverflow
-
@kazitor
My guess would beEither SO got a big investor or something such that Jeff couldn’t be King Tuna in the pond any more and he left to have his own control, or he determined that burning through venture capital to make Discourse was more lucrative than plodding along as a maintainer on SO.
-
@izzion he claims it was to spend more time with his family.
-
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@izzion he claims it was to spend more time with his family.
Says every person who was forcibly told to go away...
-
@dcon hence my phrasing.
-
@boomzilla
Which is business-speak for "got shitcanned/forced out"
-
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@dcon hence my phrasing.
Yeah. I did forget to put the on my post...
-
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
Filed Under: INTERNETPOINTZZZZ
IIRC I was taught contractions are not professional, and should only be used in personal communication.
-
@PleegWat it would not surprise me to hear that many people share that view.
-
@PleegWat said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
IIRC I was taught contractions are not professional, and should only be used in personal communication.
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
Interesting!
I'llI will try to use them less from now on.
-
@Cursorkeys
Naw, it ain’t that important. Why, contractions are what’re separatin’ us’n from thems savages! You shan’t be gettin’ too worried ‘bout dem, ya hear?
-
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
How about splitting an infinitive? Or ending a sentence with a preposition?
Filed under: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!
-
@izzion said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys
Naw, it ain’t that important. Why, contractions are what’re separatin’ us’n from thems savages! You shan’t be gettin’ too worried ‘bout dem, ya hear?
-
@topspin said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
How about splitting an infinitive? Or ending a sentence with a preposition?
Filed under: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!
VOTES TO DELETE COMMENT
-
Poor, unclear or otherwise deficient questions get closed. High quality interesting questions do not.
Ah, yes, SO, the place where a question regarding design decisions that could foster a good discussion is considered a poor one and will get closed, while "How I do maths in jQuery?!?!?!11/" is a high quality one because it has a simple answer and can be closed quickly.
-
@Onyx said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
because it has a simple answer and can be
closed quickly.mined for INTERNETPOINTZZZZ if you're fast enoughFTFY
-
@izzion said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Onyx said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
because it has a simple answer and can be
closed quickly.mined for INTERNETPOINTZZZZ if you're fast enoughFTFY
Potato-tomato
-
Apropos to low quality duplicate questions, they do tend to attract flat out stupid low quality answers...
Accepted answer said (emphasis mine):
Why do you need to actually mount the ISO? Instead of installing unnecesasry 3rd party apps on your server, why not just use something like 7-zip to extract the contents of the ISO?
Granted, said answerer was probably envisioning extracting the files somewhere else with an unnecessary 3rd party app and then copying them to the server. But still I might as well farm WTFPOINTZZZ by making fun of him.
-
@izzion said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Apropos to low quality duplicate questions, they do tend to attract flat out stupid low quality answers...
Some answers are literally idiotic, such as someone providing a Python answer to a question specifically about C#.
-
@dkf said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Some answers are literally idiotic, such as someone providing a Python answer to a question specifically about C#.
from future import csharp
Duuuh!
-
@Onyx said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
while "How I do maths in jQuery?!?!?!11/" is a high quality one because it has a simple answer and can be closed quickly.
I think you mean:
"How I do maths in javascript i can't use any libraries?!?!?!11/"
use jquery
{SOLVED, CLOSED}
-
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@izzion he claims it was to spend more time with his family.
Won't someone think of the family? What a terrible fate, to have Jeff spend more time with them!
-
@PleegWat said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@boomzilla said in I still fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@Cursorkeys I get the contractions thing as a style. Especially when you want to make it easier for non-native English speakers to read. But yeah.
Filed Under: INTERNETPOINTZZZZ
IIRC I was taught contractions are not professional, and should only be used in personal communication.
I'm not sure what current style guides say, but that has certainly been the traditional standard. I use them in forum posts and IMs, but avoid them in more formal communication, including business email.
-
Someone over there has common sense! Let's see if it gets any traction. So far it hasn't been downvoted to oblivion, and it hasn't attracted the same vitriol that my post did, despite linking to it.
-
@DoctorJones
It's a different feature request though: you requested for the answer to be simply allowed to be posted, the meta.SO post requests a toaster instead.