StackGoFYourQuestion
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I know how to mitigate "The Fall of Stack Overflow"
The site should be made newbie-friendly Or, rather, question-friendly. I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides. But please hear me out. Pl...
Found this here, where the poster comments:
Stack Overflow hates its users almost as much as Unity. (Stack Overflow)
A user posts a detailed discussion on the problems with Stack Overflow in 2023, and the comments immediately prove him right.
Mmm hmmm. I haven't logged into SO for a looong. Time. Probably at least 10 years at this point. Still end up there a fair amount when searching for stuff, of course.
I love the Jeffiness of this one:
That OP is new to Meta. He's made multiple suggestions on here that are completely out of touch with the community consensus. He's also been rather argumentative with any and everyone that disagreed with him...
Which, Jeffiness, to be fair, could be either this commenter or the OP. But if you're on the side defending any "community consensus" of SO other than, "It's fucking toxic," you're on the wrong side.
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@boomzilla said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
Which, Jeffiness, to be fair, could be either this commenter or the OP. But if you're on the side defending any "community consensus" of SO other than, "It's fucking toxic," you're on the wrong side.
It's ironic that Jeff's whole MO for SO and CDCK was to eliminate toxicity, and instead the observed outcome of these policies was to cultivate a unique kind of toxicity.
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I'm glad to see that nothing has changed since I deleted my account.
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@boomzilla It's a long article which I haven't finished yet, so it's possible this was addressed somewhere. But in addition to the problems for newbies, there are other problems. The major ones I've seen are:
Questions which are not duplicates marked (even closed) as duplicates.
Questions which get closed by people who would not know the answer any way because they find the question insufficiently clear. They are demanding information that a person who knew the answer would already understand. I have no problem with people asking for information to help them understand. I do have a problem with people closing a question because they do not get the information they demanded when they are clearly not qualified to answer the question.
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@jinpa I think they were more or less addressed, often in different terms. A lot of that would be handled with the guy's idea of "ad hoc" Q&A, which seems like a good idea since it allows for people to ask and answer questions people actually have while getting points without having to have it "pollute" the canonical answers stuff that they're trying to build.
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@boomzilla It would mitigate the problems. But the two criticisms I gave would still lower the quality of the canonical answers even if there was an ad hoc category.
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@error
CDCK
CDCK RUN
RUN DCK RUNFiled under:
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Can we get 4chan to go troll the shit out of SO for some nerd on nerd internet drama?
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@Carnage said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
Can we get 4chan to go troll the shit out of SO for some nerd on nerd internet drama?
SO seems to create its own drama without needing 4chan’s help.
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I wonder what happened to Jon Skeet. He thought he was someone of note for having a lot of points there and wrote a couple of terrible programming books on the back of that. Haven’t heard from him for a while.
On the whole I think SO might be something of a net positive. A lot of the low hanging fruit has quick answers to get you started but it was never of much use when you had to stray off the beaten path.
Reminds me of the spring community. Christ but they’re going to ruin an okayish thing.
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@DogsB he’s busy working for Google these days. Hasn’t written a book in a few years.
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@DogsB said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
On the whole I think SO might be something of a net positive. A lot of the low hanging fruit has quick answers to get you started but it was never of much use when you had to stray off the beaten path.
I agree. It's a good way to basically get what a Google search should give you (and,
, what it did give you some years ago), i.e. a semi-random list of things more-or-less related to your query.It's is a great way to get the good keywords (or general ideas) that you did not know even existed and that you can further research to solve your actual problem. It's an awful way to get the actual code to use. You still have to do some work (
) but it's a useful resource to make that less painful than just stumbling in the dark.Of course, that's true for people like us, who have at least 2 functional brain cells (
). But copy-pasters are always going to blindly copy-paste, so trying to solve that problem is like trying to solve the Civilised Discourse problem.
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Questions which are not duplicates marked (even closed) as duplicates.
Questions which get closed by people who would not know the answer any way because they find the question insufficiently clear. They are demanding information that a person who knew the answer would already understand. I have no problem with people asking for information to help them understand. I do have a problem with people closing a question because they do not get the information they demanded when they are clearly not qualified to answer the question.
Exactly. I've seen questions closed that I (or anyone familiar with the technology) knows the answer too. But they were closed because the closer didn't understand it.
And too many times my search will find a question marked as a duplicate. So I will go to the other question. And it's also marked as the duplicate of another question.
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@boomzilla said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
I know how to mitigate "The Fall of Stack Overflow"
The site should be made newbie-friendly Or, rather, question-friendly. I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides. But please hear me out. Pl...
A user posts a detailed discussion on the problems with Stack Overflow in 2023, and the comments immediately prove him right.
Anyone familiar with the founders of Stack Overflow is not surprised that it is a gigantic unusable mess.
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Stack Overflow is proud to call itself "not a forum".
Its literal founder cites it as an example of a forum.
So, uh, yeah, about that.
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@Arantor said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
Stack Overflow is proud to call itself "not a forum".
Its literal founder cites it as an example of a forum.
I've noticed that the pro-Stack Overflow fanboys all seem to recite the same mantra in response to criticism:
You're doing it wrong ... because you don't understand what Stack Overflow is.
Apparently the founders don't understand what SO is, either.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
Apparently the founders don't understand what SO is, either.
Of course not. They’d need to have significantly more reputation to truly comprehend.
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@kazitor I feel like SO in the early days really was more like what the founders intended, and it's in the mists of time it's become... whatever the fuck it is now.
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@boomzilla said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
The site should be made newbie-friendly
TL;DR, so I'm not sure what he means, but I think the site actually needs to be made more difficult question friendly, and a lot more “give me teh codez” hostile. Because currently the actually interesting questions get swamped out by trivia that in the good old days of usenet would have been answered with “RTFM”, but “RTFM” isn't considered a good answer.
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@Bulb both angles are needed.
The newbie journey has two angles: there’s the “I’m trying to learn but I don’t understand” and there’s the “I don’t care, just give me the answer” people.
The problem is that in trying to discourage the latter, they managed to also burn the former.
The journey for a sincere newbie is quite specific: they have a problem, but they may not be able to articulate all the elements of that problem, likely don’t know what’s relevant and they need patience - being smacked down for all the usual reasons is not always because they’re not trying, but because they probably don’t know all the things they need to say to get an answer.
Now combine that with the difficult question problem: there is reduced perceived value in answering the hard questions, because in the time necessary to solve a hard question, you can have answered several easy ones for that sweet sweet rep.
The underlying solution is to somehow encourage difficult questions being answered (and bounties is not the answer) while not discouraging genuine newbies, while discouraging obvious time wasters.
I think easing off on the moderation actually is a valid step here because it’s not productive, it just shuts down legitimate discussion under what feels like a “meh, I don’t wanna answer that so I’m going to find a pretext to shut it down” which inevitably doesn’t help anyone, least of all the OP.
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@Arantor said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
@Bulb both angles are needed.
The newbie journey has two angles: there’s the “I’m trying to learn but I don’t understand” and there’s the “I don’t care, just give me the answer” people.
The problem is that in trying to discourage the latter, they managed to also burn the former.
Yes. The biggest problem when you are "new" is that you don't know what you don't know, i.e., you don't even know what question to ask.
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@Gern_Blaanston and SO’s format is uniquely geared to discouraging the person asking the question from being asked further questions to refine the situation and/or be able to learn something that they do not currently know.
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@Arantor please ask this as a separate question!
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@topspin closed as duplicate.
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@Arantor extended discussion Jeffed to chat!
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@Arantor subjective question. Closed!
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Recently-ish I found a useful answer on one of the SO sites. I couldn't upvote it because I didn't have enough NerdPointzzzz.
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@topspin said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
extended discussion Jeffed to chat!
That is the single most hostile part of the whole SO system, at least from my perspective. I've been boycotting their chat system virtually since its inception.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in StackGoFYourQuestion:
The biggest problem when you are "new" is that you don't know what you don't know, i.e., you don't even know what question to ask.
Indeed, and not just when you are new overall, but new to the topic. Most of the time once you know exactly what to ask, you can find the answer in the documentation or somewhere too and the main times you need to come asking is when you are not sure where to even start.
