What's killing off "gameified" communities (yes I made a post of my tweets, suck it)
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Hey guys, remember expertsexchange? That site made StackOverflow look like the tree<or heap> of knowledge.
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experts-exchange, you mean. They eventually realised.
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That was... useful?
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oneboxman strikes again!
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Oh, come on, FreePBX is the best thing to happen to Asterisk since sliced bread. Who wouldn't want to take a relatively simpleish CLI configuration and slap a GUI layer on it that obfuscates half of the useful features and makes the other half more or less impossible?
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The comment was pointed at the forums, not FreePBX itself.
Also, a to me qualifier is implied. Even though it likes to pop up on Google when I look for stuff I never found something I didn't already know on there. But hey, people who use it apparently do, so more power to them. I just couldn't resist a cheap Discurse joke.
Filed under: which is probably out of style by this point, I was away, gimme a break
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Research has its bounds, though -- there's no substitute for someone who can answer from [i]experience[/i].
I was thinking of, and my experience asking questions online is mostly with, things that are largely research-based. If you’re looking into, say, history, someone else’s experience isn’t really applicable, but their knowledge is. However, if you demonstrate the knowledge you already have (to prevent people telling you what you already found out) nobody tends to answer — I suspect because if you’ve done a reasonable amount of research then you’re unlikely to find people who know more than you do on a typical web forum.
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Or how about @PJH 's latest embedded software question? I don't even understand what's he talking about there.
Nor do the other 71 people who read it, it seems
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Sure I can. What reason would I have to do it? (Other than to fulfill the stupid StackOverflow bullshit.)
How about, to prevent a lot of the stupid shit you keep whining about in this thread?
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If their goal is to build a Wikipedia-like community of unfun nitpickers and passive-aggressive assholes, then they seem to be on the right path.
If their goal is to build a good Q&A site, then punishing people who post well-thought-out questions by practically guaranteeing they'll never be answered? Maybe not a good strategy.
If the site wants me as a member, it has to incentivize me to participate. That has not happened.
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Why should people answer your questions when you refuse to answer theirs? It's not a "Q" site, it's a "Q and A" site.
They are incentivizing you: you answer other people's questions, you build rep, you use that rep to set a bounty on your question. That makes your question more "valuable" and more likely to be answered. You just helped a bunch of people, and in turn made your question more likely to get help too.
It's not difficult ;)
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The site has to demonstrate its worth before I invest time in it.
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And the site won't give you any worth until you invest time in it... we got's ourselves a standoff!
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If their goal is to build a good Q&A site, then punishing people who post well-thought-out questions by practically guaranteeing they'll never be answered? Maybe not a good strategy.
What's a better strategy?
Their strategy has motivated a lot of people to answer a lot of stuff. You refuse to help other people and then you get mad that other people don't help you.
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Yes, exactly. I just asked a question (last week, my first ever). [...] I had searched and searched and tried shit for days with no luck, so I got desperate and asked the question. Someone up voted it, though no answers or comments. Honestly, I don't think anyone knows how to do what I was trying to do. I eventually figured out a workaround. [...]
Of course, now that you have a work around, you can't actually post it to the site, because you haven't asked enough stupid questions and racked up enough Forumpointzzz yet.
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Well that's dumb for sure. You should have total access to your own question.
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Of course, now that you have a work around, you can't actually post it to the site, because you haven't asked enough stupid questions and racked up enough Forumpointzzz yet.
Heh...looks like they auto-merged my old account, which had ~400 rep. I'm sure I used the same email and screen name, so it was pretty obvious.
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Of course, now that you have a work around, you can't actually post it to the site, because you haven't asked enough stupid questions and racked up enough Forumpointzzz yet.
Self-answering takes all of 15 rep laughs -- which is done primarily for spam control. (Otherwise, the spambots would post junk Q and A pairs all day long -- not that they don't do it already, but having a rep threshold for self-answers helps curtail that.)
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Of course, on SE sites, if you have more than 100 rep on one site, you can get a free 100 rep on any other sites you sign up for using the same login.
Not that I'd advocate using Gaming/Arqade to build up points just to transfer them or anything.
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Also, it takes all of 15 rep to self-answer...which leaves me seriously scratching my head at how he's not getting practically any upvotes whatsoever
You must be new here...
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Their strategy has motivated a lot of people to answer a lot of stuff.
And, as we've seen in the thread, a lot of smart people to seek help elsewhere. Clearly what works for the smaller SEs doesn't scale well to the size of SO.
Picture a pyramid of users, where a new user enters at the bottom step. New users on, say, Cooking tend to have one goal in mind: Get their question answered. They come and post. At this point, a lot of users forget they did so and never come back. Others come back a few hours or a day later, and they get a reasonable, well-written response. The majority of users go "Awesome", click the checkmark, and wander off. Sometimes they come back when they have another question, sometimes they don't. This is all expected behavior.
Some users, though, while they're getting their question answered, start poking around at the site, and learning a bunch of useful tangental information. That's the next tier up. A large portion of the userbase reads questions but doesn't otherwise participate in the site because they're just there to learn things. Then another layer up, some users discover that they actually know the answer to something and they post an answer. The more questions they ask and answer, the more they start to get into the gamification aspects, the more they play the game, the more questions get answered. At the top you have a small number of high-rep users being elected as moderators and spending large chunks of time bettering the site. But the ideal is always a small group of highly motivated experts with high rep at the top, and increasingly less active users down to the bottom tier. That's why rep gates exist: the higher up the tier, the more moderation-like activities you can participate in.
In short, Blakey's use case of "I come, I ask, I get value" is not only perfectly legitimate, it's one of the primary use cases the system was designed for. SO only seems to be working at that level for inexperienced users -- despite the platform's primary objective being to support expert users in the first place. There used to be a "general reference" close reason system-wide for things like "what is flour" -- questions that thirty seconds on google would answer. The idea was always to attract experts because inexperienced users can't answer questions in the first place, but SO chases away experts by heaping a mound of shit on them in the form of basic questions and "give me teh codez" requests while pandering to those who are in it for pure gamification instead of the pursuit of knowledge.
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I approve of your explanation.
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I just couldn't resist a cheap Discurse joke ... which is probably out of style by this point
Cheap Discurse jokes are never out of style.
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I approve of your explanation.
One could almost say you... liked... the explanation? :-)
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In short, Blakey's use case of "I come, I ask, I get value" is not only perfectly legitimate, it's one of the primary use cases the system was designed for.
Yeah, and it seems to work for a lot of people. But that assumes that someone out there knows the answer. We've already talked about this a bit in the thread, but if you ask weird, cutting edge shit, you might not get a lot of help, for reasons obvious to not everyone posting here.
I just love the irony of blakey bitching about "free" QA provided to discourse and how he can't get enough free advice from random internet dudes. Probably the welfare subsidies are keeping the smart answer folks away.
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But that assumes that someone out there knows the answer.
The best thing about StackExchange is how esoteric questions still get answers:
Why did people start using CO2 (instead of e.g. oxygen) for carbonated drinks?
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Did Tolkien really explicitly consider Sam the true hero of The Lord of the Rings?
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How can the "Boy or Girl" paradox be worded unambiguously?
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Where were "should", "shall", and "must" in the 18th Century?
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Well, that and silly ones:
Whose underwear is this?
Okay, this is a bit different.... My son recently got underwear for his birthday. The underwear came in a set of 5, packaged as Justice League underwear. On the packaging, you can see The Flash,
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TIL Batman is OSS-tard.
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I just love the irony of blakey bitching about "free" QA provided to discourse and how he can't get enough free advice from random internet dudes.
I thought of another ironic aspect of this earlier this morning. (I won't tell you what I was doing when I thought of it, but I sometimes do good thinking there.) Blakey complains about not getting free help on SO, but gets bent out of shape at people who refuse (by blocking the [excrement] they put on web pages) to give free help to web analytics companies.
Edit: Moved the parenthetical for clarity.
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The best thing about StackExchange is how esoteric questions still get answers:
Esoteric stuff on SO often gets answers. Of course, esoteric is in the eye of the beholder.
Maybe enough people on SO just already know blakey.
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Blakey complains about not getting free help on SO, but gets bent out of shape at people who refuse to give free help to web analytics companies (by blocking the [excrement] they put on web pages).
This doesn't make sense on like 10 levels. What free help was I requesting for web analytics companies? How does blocking the stuff web analytics companies put on web pages help them?
I do recall bitching about browser developers going out of their way to break web analytics in some cases.
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What free help was I requesting for web analytics companies? How does blocking the stuff web analytics companies put on web pages help them?
You ask us to help them by not blocking their stuff. Stuff like invisible 1x1 images helps them, but I get no benefit from it; therefore, by not blocking it I would be helping them for free.You have gotten angry (or fake angry for the lulz) at people who block this stuff. Clearly, you want us to help the analytics companies, and to do so for free.
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I don't blame people for wanting to copy and paste well-written, mild statements rather than try and customize moderation messages to each question.
Wouldn't it be better to link to the answer as a FAQ? Then you don't have to come up with a fresh statement every time, but (to me) it seems less impersonal than an inline reply. The "please read this faq" statement should be well-written, though, and I would say that the two quotes you used as examples are not.
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I'm at work, fuck you.
I love the way you just heap the unprompted abuse. A normal person would've left off the "fuck you", but not you, you Dalek.
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You ask us to help them by not blocking their stuff.
Right. By doing nothing whatsoever.
What I complain about it people going out of their way to interfere with analytics. You seem to have some trouble with this concept.
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And I would do that... why? Just to get Forumpointzzz so I could use the site?
I have a certain amount of admiration for a guy so dedicated to principle he'd fuck himself over.
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I don't think I've ever gotten above 10.
I have 36. 25 came from being the accepted answer on one question. Entertainingly, it only involved spotting a typo. I got 10 more on a different question, possibly from being upvoted?[1] That wound up being enough to let me do anything else I've needed to do, not that I've done hardly anything else there.
It turns out not to take a lot of effort, if you get lucky enough to find a question you can answer. (My experience mainly is in one low-traffic topic that has a couple of gurus who bogart most questions.) It also helps if the questioner actually comes back and accepts your answer, of course.
[1] In this case, the person apparently never came back, which was too bad, because it was kind of funny. He asked how to set the cursor to an hourglass, and two different people told him how to do it, but he insisted it didn't work. "I get a round blue circle instead." My answer was "that's what you get in Vista and later, instead of an hourglass." I guess I should've told him how to change the system cursor.
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Yeah, because taking 25 seconds to download a browser extension to avoid getting advertizing blasted at you is such a nuisance.
All it takes is one abusive ad (e.g., something that plays sounds at any volume) and I solve the problem permanently. If that causes you problems, fuck you, you caused the problem in the first place.
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If I did play the game, if I spent hours gaming for points by looking for easy unanswered questions, would I then "win"?
It depends on what you want. If you can get one or two accepted answers in, you unlock the basic features like commenting. That might be enough for your purposes. That hopefully won't take hours of trawling through the questions.
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Hey guys, remember expertsexchange? That site made StackOverflow look like the tree of knowledge.
At least those two sites let random people see answers[1] without logging in, unlike Quora.
[1] mostly, in EE's case. Sometimes you can find answer to a question that isn't blurred. I have, once or twice, anyway.
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Yeah, because taking 25 seconds to download a browser extension to avoid getting advertizing blasted at you is such a nuisance.
I'm sorry, when did we switch from web analytics to advertising, again?
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All it takes is one abusive ad (e.g., something that plays sounds at any volume) and I solve the problem permanently. If that causes you problems, fuck you, you caused the problem in the first place.
Yup. Example: I used to whitelist wowhead.com, because I found the site legitimately useful. Then I discovered that they would wait about 5 minutes and load an autoplay video ad. Until Chrome added the "this tab is making noise" icon, it took a lot of effort to track down where it was coming from, especially if I had 20 tabs open, and the wowhead tab was a really long one, because the ad was invariably at the bottom.
Fuck you for abusing me, wowhead. Off the whitelist you go.
I know that analytics is not the same as advertising, but try explaining that to people in general. That's why nobody agrees with Blakeyrat about that old issue.
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What I complain about it people going out of their way to interfere with analytics. You seem to have some trouble with this concept.
I'll stop blocking their shit when they stop:
- sending me 8MiB of javascript that makes the site run like shit because of all the snooping it's doing
- sending flash objects that have KNOWN security holes
- using fucking autoplaying video ads with audio
- putting full page ad overlays on their site that i cannot dismiss without actually clicking through the ad (or blocking their scripts)
- making the tracking image a 1x1px transparent gif, and sending me a 4kx4k gif to display in that 1x1px image
- pop up and popunder ads (popunder because they deliberately open in a background window/tab)
these are all things i have seen on otherwise reputable sites (such as Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, comcast (they are iffy), ebay, etc) in the last year. and they are why i block ads.
the text ads? don't care, the reasonably sized picture ads? don't care. the tracking cookies/analytics, whatever, just don't interfere with my browsing. the preroll youtube ads? annoying but i deal with them.
get rid of the ones that are on my do not want list and i'll happily stop blocking ads and analytics.
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people going out of their way to interfere with analytics
I have no incentive to help them, and at least a tiny incentive to interfere. Doing nothing helps them to harvest data about my web surfing behavior, potentially including things I don't particularly want them to know, including things (they think) I might be interested in seeing ads for. (I don't think I've ever bought anything from an Internet ad.)
It does not require going far out of my way to avoid abetting this (potential) invasion of my privacy. Spend maybe 10 minutes installing and configuring ABP and Ghostery once. No further effort required. The disincentive to doing nothing is sufficient to make this tiny effort worthwhile.
502 and Hanzo'd by
@Captaina whole bunch of people, because it took something like 10 minutes to post that.
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When they were always the same thing.
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I'm sorry, when did we switch from web analytics to advertising, again?
Ooh, Hanzo'd.
As I said, I don't think most people know the difference. I'm a bit fuzzy on it myself, but I assume it's related to things like Microsoft's CEIP: "here's what people are doing on the site, so we know where to concentrate development effort".
I can think of ways, possibly not reasonable, that could be abused by advertising.
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I'm sorry, when did we switch from web analytics to advertising, again?
Actually, the subject was, "Blakeyrat says the strangest things."
EDIT: moved "Actually" to it's rightful place
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MiB
putting full page ad overlays on their site that i cannot dismiss without actually clicking through the ad (or blocking their scripts)
F12 + hide element has only not worked for me once or twice. Apparently most people aren't familiar with the concept of "defense in depth".
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