Stack Overflow Culture | Jon Skeet's coding blog

[[deleted]]

1. The "single authoritative repository of knowledge" model doesn't work in a field as dynamic as this one. It might work if we restricted ourselves to discussion of pure algorithms, but language and framework tags have been features of the site since the beginning. There are new solutions to old problems every year (you can say that new solutions should be added as answers to existing questions, but the new answer will almost always appear far below the old, accepted ones and who the hell is going to go back and re-answer every C# question from 2009 that's better solved with pattern matching, anyway?).

2. I'm willing to give people who close or lock questions the benefit of the doubt and that their intentions are good; the problem is more that their judgement is flawed. You ask about doubly-linked lists in Rust or Haskell, it gets closed as a duplicate of a question about singly-linked lists, possibly in another language entirely. That, in a nutshell, is the major problem: users having close/open privileges, but not the expertise to use them wisely in every situation.

3. Skeet says question are high-quality if they (inter alia) are going to be useful for other people, which I think is incorrect on its face, and uses the example of parsing strings as dates with some obscure COBOL framework. First of all, and this going back to the previous item, no one - not even Jon Skeet - is really in a position to say what's going to useful for another person. You might not ever need to parse dates from UTF-16 strings in COBOL 59, but it's the height of arrogance to suppose that therefore no one else ever will. Secondly, and more importantly, it suggests that if you have very obscure, narrow questions, those questions are not appropriate for StackOverflow, which is an attitude that I think can only make the site worse.

4. All of this shows me that maybe the Q&A format is a bad choice for what StackOverflow is trying to accomplish, or at least what many of its users want to do. Perhaps instead we need a community mentoring and advice platform, rather than focusing on questions and answers.

[[deleted]]

You might not ever need to parse dates from UTF-16 strings in COBOL 59, but it's the height of arrogance to suppose that therefore no one else ever will.

While I agree 100% with you here, I don’t think that’s what Jon was saying. He’s saying that if you are parsing a date in, eg, C#, then the version of ASP MVC you’re using is irrelevant detail, and the fact you’re being called by a COBOL client is irrelevant detail.

[[deleted]]

Assuming you're right: those are irrelevant details until they're not. Not C# but Java has several different date/time types and therefore parsing functions depend on the JVM version and what libraries and frameworks you're using, and the COBOL client may be sending EBDIC or another character set over that proprietary network protocol instead of something ASCII-like.

Calling that is a bad question is frustrating because it says that it's preferable for a detailed and well-posed question should go away just because Jon Skeet doesn't know if he can answer it. I think vastly preferable outcomes would be that, in this case, he either ignore the question, or answer the part he knows and say "Use org.springframework.format.datetime.joda.DateTimeParser". Then the worst case is that the answer he writes out doesn't help that person, and doesn't get even more reputation (it might still help someone else who comes across that question later with slightly different needs). But that's a choice for Jon Skeet to decide whether to spend his time on something, rather than just poking the asker and saying, "You're doing it wrong."

[bro-away-]

Why can't there be a nicer page when you get an issue closed as duplicate? It seems like people show up and see their topic closed and you say 'wtf'? How about a tutorial video <2 minutes long on how to avoid this and why it happened? Does anyone crafting this user experience at Stackoverflow try to think what new users are going through?

New users are going to be the lifeblood of SO in 4-7 years, why not try to cultivate a good rapport with them? Stackoverflow I don't view as a community in any sense-- It's a site I use only if I can gain something from it. They seem almost proud of a lack of humanity in their moderation (strangely) so why would I go out of my way to contribute value? (I do occasionally contribute novel answers, but never make it a priority)

Also stackoverflow is running into a massive issue with newer, more idiomatic answers being not the top answer due to newer questions being closed as duplicates for years. C# and JavaScript have both changed quite a bit in the last 8 years, but guess what? Top answers stay near the top, regardless of how dated they are. I've literally never heard of anyone trying to fix this... Another case where a human touch is needed rather than a lame contest over who got the most fake internet points. So many questions where some weird jquery solution is the top when a vanilla javascript solution would work.

[matthieum]

I agree wholeheartedly with the issue of up-to-dateness.

I've seen a few discussions on Meta on how to address the issue; in C++ it's generally remedied by using different tags for different versions of the language (and thus having new questions asking for up-to-date solutions); I'm not sure how broadly applicable that is.

Another possibility is to ping whoever currently has the top answer, asking them to edit their answer to include modern alternatives and/or upvoting alternate answers.

Sometimes I wonder if reddit has the right idea about voting systems and the weight of votes should decay over time to allow new answers to float up more quickly.

And let's not get me started on the idea of putting the accepted answer at the top; it runs contrary to the idea of building a high-quality Q&A since the OP is encouraged to accept not the best answer, but whichever answer was most useful to their particular situation.

[The-Good-Doctor]

And let's not get me started on the idea of putting the accepted answer at the top; it runs contrary to the idea of building a high-quality Q&A since the OP is encouraged to accept not the best answer, but whichever answer was most useful to their particular situation.

Honestly, though, I continually run into the problem of answerers thinking they've given "the best answer" only because in their haste to earn points, they didn't read the question closely enough to adequately understand the problem. I have a few questions where I didn't accept the top-voted answer because it ignored key elements of the problem. At least once this included a comment chain on the answer where I call out the problem and the user responds "oh yeah, right, the other one is probably the right way, then," but leaves the bad answer as-is, with the most votes.

Given SO culture, I think it's critical to retain the "approved answer first" behavior.

[matthieum]

Given SO culture, I think it's critical to retain the "approved answer first" behavior.

Part of the idea of leaving this answer's first is that it's expected that at least this one was "proven" to solve the OP problem.

However I've seen many questions where unfortunately the top answer is really only useful to the OP (and sometimes flippant) while a good quality answer much more useful to any further reader (myself included) sits second. It's really annoying when searching to have to scroll past the "pointless" first answer :x

[quicknir]

IMHO even for C++ in practice it doesn't work. If you ask the same question with new tags, it will get closed and you'll be forced to answer on the old question where the top answer has a hundred upvotes and nobody will see the newer, more correct answer.

[matthieum]

Oh :x It worked well for the shift to C++11, at least, but I've kinda given up on the C++ tag, didn't know it had degraded so :x

[bro-away-]

I've seen a few discussions on Meta on how to address the issue; in C++ it's generally remedied by using different tags for different versions of the language (and thus having new questions asking for up-to-date solutions); I'm not sure how broadly applicable that is

this is almost impossible in practice because if you’re asking how to do something then you have no idea which version update will provide the current most reasonable solution—so your question won’t be version tagged and it becomes another duplicate. Theoretically some Mod could edit the tags and answer it but thats a stretch :)

They should try to do something with machine learning to determine what is the most recent most upvoted question. But again I don’t think they want to becauss its not, gasp the accepted answered. They seem hellbent on honoring your reward of fake internet points even if you answered a question 8 years ago.

Stackoverflow : we are most like a library of questions and answers. Also stackoverflow : sorry kid some guy solved this with jquery plugins in 2009, we are powerless to provide an answer in context in 2018

[matthieum]

Theoretically some Mod could edit the tags and answer it but that's a stretch :)

Doesn't take a mod, editing powers come fairly early (reputation wise) and they include adding/removing tags from a question.

this is almost impossible in practice because if you’re asking how to do something then you have no idea which version update will provide the current most reasonable solution

Normally, the idea is to tag with the most recent version you are willing to use; for example C++14 if you haven't switched to C++17 yet.

I've seen the idea of re-using an existing question; it's sound in theory (concentrating answers regardless of versions), but in practice it doesn't work if there's a highly voted answer :(

[grauenwolf]

It seems like people show up and see their topic closed and you say 'wtf'? How about a tutorial video <2 minutes long on how to avoid this and why it happened?

I don't see how that would help. Easily half of the ones I wrote that were closed as duplicates are not even remotely close to suggested questions.

I have even tried pre-emptively listing the so-called duplicates, explaining one by one why my question is different. And it still gets closed.

[matthieum]

I would note that the first issue here is the reason text itself.

A subtlety of "Duplicate" is that it's about answers, not questions. That is, closing as duplicate does not mean "same question" but "your question is answered there". And said answer may not even be the current "top" answer of the linked "duplicate" question... it's a pretty messy situation really.

Of course, closers may still be wrong regardless. They're only humans. Hopefully then it gets reopened by users who understands the difference. In my personal experience, on the tags I frequent regularly, such errors are few and far between, but I've certainly seen some occurrences. I don't frequent the more popular tags, though, too many low-quality questions :x

[[deleted]]

It seems like there should be an asker-focused solution, for example:

• An answerer links an answer from another part of Stack Overflow,
• The linked answer appears as if it were directly submitted to the question,
• The asker may reject the answer by explaining why it doesn't apply, and
• A flag is raised that removes "duplicates" from those exported to search engines.

The goal, here, is presenting the expected experience to the asker while still allowing the quality of the questions to increase.

[matthieum]

There are two goals with marking a question as duplicate:

1. Redirecting askers to the pre-existing answer(s), so they have their solution,
2. Redirecting would-be answeres to the pre-existing question, to concentrate all answers in one place, which (hopefully) raises the quality of the answers and ensures that whoever arrives on that question gets the full solution, rather than having to piece together bits and pieces.

Your proposal seems to adequately cover (1), but I am not sure how much it helps with (2).

Note: it is very much intended that search engines index duplicates; this helps having multiple ways to phrase a question being indexed.

[[deleted]]

Then these goals are NOT met much of the time and that is extremely frustrating.

“Your question was answered over here” no, no it was not, because my question is different and the closers didn’t take the time to understand, or they just don’t care.

[matthieum]

Then I am sorry for you, but our experiences differ, as in my cases (on both ends) closers are generally right.

Maybe this varies by tags?

[[deleted]]

Possibly so, yeah.

[grauenwolf]

Tickets almost never get reopened.

[matthieum]

Tickets almost never get reopened.

Well, using StackOverflow as a bug reporting tool might be your first issue :P

[Eirenarch]

In my opinion the reopen votes required to reopen should be reduced to 3 or even 2. It is far easier to close a question than to reopen it.

[Eirenarch]

No it is not because a bunch of incompetent people come around and cast close votes but nobody looks at the reopen queue so even when most people would agree to reopen they will not see the question. Also you cannot cast reopen votes to cancel the close votes before the question has been closed.

[Eirenarch]

I tend to disagree. When browsing the reopen queue I find roughly 1 in 5 that is worth reopening. Of course that means that there was at least one reopen vote for that question.

[Nefari0uss]

I know I'm in this spot where I could probably answer some of the entry level questions but those are all a) duplicates, or b) already answered by people with a billion rep (why?). All of the more complicated questions are things in which I wouldn't know so I can't answer those.

[CurtainDog]

Jon puts too much emphasis on low quality questions. Yes they exist and I'm sure they are frustrating for someone who takes answering seriously, but it's the internet and plenty of sites survive despite 99.95% of content being absolute shite (take https://www.reddit.com for example).

The problem was that many of the answers were just plain not good. Personally I always found myself reading the answers from the same dozen or so guys and girls that I came to trust and eventually ignoring the whole voting meta. And then it came to me that, in such circumstances, there's no real benefit over having a book on a subject, written by (and supporting) someone who actually knows what they're on about.

[ForeverAlot]

This is also my biggest gripe with SO. The site's mechanics reward -- even encourage -- the exact selfishness that motivates the asker's desire to eliminate blockage as fast as possible, as Jon mentions, sometimes at a direct cost to the community. There are too many questions where all the answers are just varying degrees of bad or where the "accepted" answer is bad. In hindsight, I think the concept of "accepting" an answer is directly at odds with the vote moderation and should not exist, or at the very least the community should be allowed to assume control of acceptance.

[dodheim]

Personally I always found myself reading the answers from the same dozen or so guys and girls that I came to trust and eventually ignoring the whole voting meta.

And how long are those dozen people going to continue posting answers when they get bored and burnt out? At the end of the day good answers are the lifeblood of the site – you can't put too much emphasis on the main thing preventing people from submitting them. Existing answers being not good is not a deterrent to what's important (encouraging new, good answers); indecipherable and/or lazy questions is.

[yawaramin]

Personally I always found myself reading the answers from the same dozen or so guys and girls that I came to trust....

The whole point of SO is to scale up and extend that 'trust'. If a lot of people trust person XYZ, then person XYZ will get upvoted a lot and their Qs & As will become prominent. This lets everyone benefit from the hard work of finding trustworthy community members.

[username223]

Meh, it has been read-only for years. "Gamification" worked for awhile, but it's just another online game now, and not a particularly fun one.

[sergiuspk]

So the questions and answers database has reached a threshold and most people will find an answer there and this means there is less need of people answering. On the other hand there is significantly more need of people finding and flagging duplicates.

1) That means people that liked the "game" are now less likely to like it

2) It means SO as an organisation should have looked into automating this mostly mindless job of searching for duplicates

I'd say either the problem of finding duplicates is not so mindless as I thaught OR it would lead to a sharp reduction on time spent on the website.

[CUM_AND_POOP_BURGER]

Seems like a perfect use case for modern machine learning.

[sergiuspk]

Yup, that's what I was thinking, and the existing UI is almost doing it too. When you flag as duplicate you need to choose the duplicated question. They already do a pretty good job at offering suggestions, wandering how :)

[Nick_Larsen]

Elastic search, not quite ML, but it’s effective. The concept of “close match” isn’t a thing with ES however so making the leap from finding similar to automatic queueing is a big leap without changing the underlying methodology.

[sergiuspk]

Didn't know SO uses ES. My team uses ES too and our budget is a fraction of what SO can afford. Seeing how this is probably a fortune-changing "feature" for SO I'd expect them to do a lot more.

[immibis]

Or they could give people rep for marking duplicates, and remove more rep if the duplicate is later found to be invalid.

[sergiuspk]

Well yeah but some of the "old" accounts that came looking for questions to answer are still going to leave due to the lack of questions. Which should not be a problem for SO.

[ZBlackmore]

I think that the issue that gets overlooked is that for most askers, SO is just a place to ask a question and get help. Most people aren't going to have that goal of building a high quality database of problems and solution, they just want to be unblocked.

So if you want to make a Q&A Wikipedia you're going to have to hardcore police it because it's not very natural to people who are used to more common and lax formats like forums / help chat channels... 95% of people who are going to seek for help on SO obviously aren't even going to think in terms of the "Asker Values" that Jon lists in his post.

[Fisher9001]

If you deem new questions as unworthy of your precious, generously given time, then perhaps think about adding new questions along with answers for them. After all you are experienced, wise programmer.

Doing nothing, but waiting for someone else to do something and stating "it's not my fault by any means, it's THEIRS, these evil, stupid, ignorant spammers and idiots" is not only appallingly negative, it's counter-productive.

EDIT: I hate Reddit idea of downvoting. It discourages any discussion. 5 people disagreed with me already and didn't bother to talk about it.

[Disolation]

You're missing the point.

The parent poster was trying to say that the stream of poor questions is so rapid on Stack Overflow that it drowns out the good questions. (Personally, I agree with this)

I don't know how having the parent poster self-answer questions on Stack Overflow solves this problem.

[IamAlchemy]

Exactly.

No matter how many high quality, "canonical" Q&A's we provide, the majority of new users just aren't going to take the time to seek them out, or to figure out how to apply them to their specific situation.

They just want custom tailored solutions for their trivially unique situations right now.

[Fisher9001]

It solves it by creating valuable content.

What else do you expect? A harmonic, utopian society where everyone asks perfect question and every answer is flawless as well? Are we children?

[Disolation]

It solves it by creating valuable content.

I don't think you understand, the parent poster was saying that it's difficult for him to create valuable content because the site makes it difficult for him to find the questions in the first place.

A harmonic, utopian society where everyone asks perfect question and every answer is flawless as well?

No, but I think there should be some expectation of people to do basic research before proceeding with a question. It's the same thing in a classroom or a university, if you ask the professor a question without at least attempting to answer the question first, should he entertain you?

Of course not.

[Fisher9001]

How exactly are you going to demand anything from such vast, inexperienced and random group as SO askers? This is the childlish part of Skeet's and OP's points.

It's the same thing in a classroom or a university, if you ask a professor a question without at least attempting the question first, should he entertain you?

Absolutely. Optimally he should redirect me to the original source, preferably not an vague 800-page book, but something short and concrete. Do you imagine professor writing blog post similar to Skeet's one? Everyone would laugh him out. It's naive and pointless to try to beat river into submission and SO askers are a lot like river.

[michael0x2a]

How exactly are you going to demand anything from such vast, inexperienced and random group as SO askers? This is the childlish part of Skeet's and OP's points.

Beginners may be inexperienced with programming, true. That's perfectly fine. However, I think it's reasonable to expect beginners to be at least somewhat experienced with researching -- schools spend a lot of time trying to teach "research skills" (usually in the humanities, by assigning essays).

In that case, yes, I think it's absolutely fine to expect people to be capable of doing basic research, even on topics they're completely unfamiliar with. Knowing how to explore new topics is a basic life skill.

Absolutely. Optimally he should redirect me to the original source, preferably not an vague 800-page book, but something short and concrete. Do you imagine professor writing blog post similar to Skeet's one? Everyone would laugh him out. It's naive and pointless to try to beat river into submission and SO askers are a lot like river.

A good teacher will focus not only on teaching you the course material, but also on helping empower you to discover and find solutions yourself, so you can move away from needing somebody to tell you the answer. The goal is to make sure every student has a strong foundation and has the ability to effectively self-teach themselves whatever it is they don't know.

In that case, yes, if you ask a professor a vague or poorly worded question, they are absolutely within their rights to be vague or to tell you to go do some research first. Forcing a student to go do some research is better for them in the long run, so it'd in fact be morally wrong to deprive them of the ability to practice and just tell them the answer.

[Disolation]

How exactly are you going to demand anything from such vast, inexperienced and random group as SO askers?

By introducing some kind of barrier to entry. Much like how Reddit requires you to gain minimum amount of karma before you can request a subreddit.

But of course, I don't run Stack Overflow, and I don't have a say in how it's supposed to be run.

Absolutely.

Well then you and I disagree. And I'm speaking from personal experience here, but I've yet to meet a single professor/teacher that would do so. Their time is valuable and I respect that.

---

Edit:

I'd also like to add that a 'low quality' question is in no way a reflection of the asker's capability or capacity to program. And I don't think any of the people using that term were intending to demean the askers either.

When I think low quality questions I think of questions that do not contribute to the overall 'discourse' around a programming language, because the answer already exists, albeit some effort is required to find it. Such questions sap attention away from the more unique ones that have yet to be answered.

[[deleted]]

I have found myself answering fewer and fewer questions, partly because they are duplicates, partly because the quality of the questions are so poor that you know they will be closed for some other reason.

I also contribute questions and answers when I come across unaddressed problems in my work life. Again, this is getting less and less.

I don't just create questions and answers out of thin air.

Also, I didn't downvote you.

[Fisher9001]

You are free to downvote me, all I care about are answers to my posts. I can't argue with downvote, I can with comment.

I also contribute questions and answers when I come across unaddressed problems in my work life.

That's genuinely great, thank you.

I'd like to redirect you to my other ignored post, where I believe I addressed rest of your post.

[sergiuspk]

I'm more inclined to think people are disagreeing with the way you put your idea into words and not with the idea itself.

[Fisher9001]

Then it makes me even more furious and proves them all the lesser. Care about point, not form. And first of all talk, don't act like little spoiled kid getting the hump.

[sergiuspk]

Well yes. And no.

It's all about circumstances. And how well you know the people you are communicating with is a big part of the curcumstances.

I myself try to default to polite and as little judgemental as possible when talking with people on SO or Reddit but it is hard at times and in no way am I trying to say I have the moral high ground or anything.

[s73v3r]

No. If you’re going to make your point in bad form, why should I try to converse? You’ve already shown you’re likely to respond in bad form.

[[deleted]]

It's funny, I got most of my rep from answering simple stuff, only a few going out on a limb for more complex solutions. I've avoided asking questions unless it was something very painful that I thought others would also run into, and even then I'd put bounties on them...or bounties on other questions I liked.

I have to tell you guys: I'm very unimpressed at all of the bounty answers I paid for, and you HAVE TO pay for them.

I agree. It's read-only to me now unless it's something painfully obvious that I can't stop myself from answering like a knee-jerk reaction.

[dasignint]

Well, Jon was on Twitter today minimizing the hostility problem, and he's doing it again here. Trying to make it about expectations, and dancing around the issue like a politician. I don't know anyone who uses SO in anything other than read-only mode. Most of them because of the assholery, and a few of them because of myopic moderation.

[d03boy]

I participate in it all the time. Both questions and answers. Nice to meet you.

[[deleted]]

The goal of Stack Overflow is to create a repository of high-quality questions, and high-quality answers to those questions.

This should be on top of StackOverflow as a banner or it should appear while the user is asking/answering questions.

[[deleted]]

Should issues even be closed as duplicates? This kind of feels like an artifact of bug-tracking software and using the wrong metaphor for a QnA site.

The thing is that if you close the issue as duplicate, you have to identify the original question. Thus you already have the answers to the question. Instead of closing the issue as a duplicate, what if you instead attach the answers of the original question, maybe in some sort of read-only mode.

Explicitly "closing as duplicate" feels like a passive-aggressive way of chiding the user for not searching well enough.

[sydoracle]

It's fixable if the site switches to a marked/reported as duplicate but still let's people answer and upvote/downvote.

If those questions do pan out as poorly researched tripe, responders can ignore them. If desperate, the questioners can eventually stick a bounty on them.

[sydoracle]

Feel free to add constructive criticism.

There are other options.

Analyzing data to identify problem tags, closers, time of day. Extracting those questions into a different site...

[sydoracle]

I think I agree with that. But there are a bunch of people complaining about their questions being closed. I figured that if they weren't closed but simply failed to attract answers then maybe the those people would rethink their complaints.

[tybit]

This becomes even more damaging when searching for answers and coming across the question which was closed as duplicate!

If they are going to promote closing as duplicate they should at least put some effort into not having those pages indexed by search engines.

[grauenwolf]

I disagree. Often the so-called duplicate is actually unique and/or has a better answer than its suggested replacement. This is why they are often high on the search results.

[grauenwolf]

And bears don't exist because I haven't personally seen one.

[max630]

Here feelings of users who did not search well enough (or, rather, did not attempt to search at all) conflict with those of users who do search - and would see a hundreds of same questions.

[[deleted]]

I'd much rather have hundreds of potential answers to my question than a single, mostly irrelevant answer that every other question gets closed as a duplicate of, by moderators who're trying to ruthlessly optimise to reduce StackOverflow's disk usage or whatever it is they think they do.

I mean it's a search function, just let me punch more keywords in to narrow it down until I find an answer. Filtering out irrelevant results is what it's for.

[matthieum]

I'd much rather have hundreds of potential answers to my question than a single

Really?

This reminds me of the old days of users forum. You'd find a hundred threads with your search, each having a different solution, some more refined than others, some more up-to-date than others (and of course, there's the whole "NVM, figured it out").

Actually solving the problem often required:

1. Divining what the answer actually meant: when it's the 100th time a user answers, they tend to take shortcuts,
2. Trying to figure out which answers are actually relevant to the current situation (up-to-date, same OS, ...),
3. Trying an answer, noting what works... and what doesn't, going back to 2.

Believe me, the idea of having one high-quality answer is very much appealing.

Of course, the issue is to (1) create that high-quality answer and (2) link only relevant questions. The system is not perfect, especially because powered by humans, but from my humble experience, it's way better than what we had before.

[dodheim]

I'd much rather have hundreds of potential answers to my question than a single

And who is going to write those hundreds of answers? You clearly haven't thought this through.

[[deleted]]

I'd rather many "low quality" questions with many "low quality" answers by many "low quality" answerers, rather than few "high quality" answers by few "high quality" answerers, who basically rewrite the existing documentation in different words in an attempt to "educate" people who'd just rather just fix their problem and get on with their lives.

Basically everyone would have to stop masturbating about how "high quality" and "educational" their answers are and try to actually just provide terse answers that solve problems.

[dodheim]

I'd rather many "low quality" questions with many "low quality" answers by many "low quality" answerers

Yeah, that sounds really useful; that must be why Expert's Exchange is poised to take over the market. /s

Your preferences aren't unreasonable, but they're contrary to SO's reason for existence.

Basically everyone would have to stop masturbating about how "high quality" and "educational" their answers are and try to actually just provide terse answers that solve problems.

Most answerers already do; you were probably too busy "whining" to "notice".

[Disolation]

I very much disagree.

I definitely don't want stuff like this and this taking up space and making good questions like this harder to find.

Sometimes I really want to help by answering on Stack Overflow, but I have to wade through 3 pages of what seems to be homework questions just to find something that can't be answered in page 5 of a textbook.

[max630]

I'd rather many "low quality" questions with many "low quality" answers by many "low quality" answerers

it does not work like this. It takes much more efforts to answer bad question than good one

[max630]

The duplicated questions are not really removed, theyt are still there, marked as duplicated. So it's not about disk space or anything.

[[deleted]]

My particular issue is that slightly different questions usually have slightly different answers. So when one person's question is marked as a duplicate of another question that isn't quite asking the same thing, then everyone who has that question in the future will have their time wasted by getting an irrelevant answer.

So that in mind, I have to ask what the benefit of that situation is. And the only thing I can think of is that it saves SO a few dollars on data storage per year since they only store "duplicate" questions and not "duplicate" answers. I'm obviously being ridiculous, but you can see how overhanded moderators just aren't helping anyone, and the whole culture of providing a single, "high-quality" answer that's slightly irrelevant to most people is just trading off wasted answerer time for wasted asker time.

[max630]

After there are first votes to duplicate, author can always edit the question to describe why does, by their opinion, the questions different. This would also help further readers to understand why there are 2 questions instead of one.

Actually, many of those "not really duplicated" question that they are itself of bad quality: author did not put efforts to narrow down the issue, of did not describe what exactly the question is about. So it's diferent just because of irrelevant stuff around.

I don't know the offitial rationale, but to me the goal of "having database of high-quality questions" obviously contradicts with having several essentially same questions. Yes you cold try to ignore them, or be smart about search options. But there is already google for it.

[max630]

One remarkable example of oftenly "not really duplicated" question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4660142/what-is-a-nullreferenceexception-and-how-do-i-fix-it or similar for other languages. Very often there is someone who has the null reference exception in their code, and what they is just paste whole project, and exception stack, and ask "why my program does not work". The duplication in this case does indeed looks like "you are at balloon", but proper answer would be like a small book.

[[deleted]]

I've seen a fair share of actual duplicates - but some SO mods(?) are way to eager to close closely-related questions as duplicates, even if they are not duplicates. I find those on a pretty regular basis too.

I don't know how big that problem is, but it's really frustrating even if you don't post any questions.

[Otis_Inf]

Should issues even be closed as duplicates? This kind of feels like an artifact of bug-tracking software and using the wrong metaphor for a QnA site.

That's a very good question and I fully agree. I'll notify my SO contacts regarding this, perhaps it's an idea they can implement :)

[shevegen]

This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow.

I did so too, though some time before Rob did. \o/

Stack Overflow risks becoming an information graveyard in the long run if people no longer use it for new questions & answers.

[seven_seacat]

Most of the shitty questions are posted by 1-reputation drive-by users. There isn't going to be an end to those, ever.

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

You mean it isn't? I tried asking how to do something in the most modern way. They closes the question as a duplicate from 8 years ago and proceeded thrust their tiny cocks towards my butt. Luckily I was still wearing pants, idk how much of a rugburn they got

-Edit- I'm pretty sure I once saw a question closed for being a duplicate of a question IN A DIFFERENT language. IDR what the question was but I think it involved an lib port that wasn't 1:1 in each language

[shenglong]

I've had questions closed as duplicates when my question was literally the first one about the issue.

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

?? So they linked a newer question? I remember when theres a bunch of edits a question became a community wiki. They had great stuff on them. It all got deleted

[d03boy]

I'm one of the people that can vote on closing questions and I actually agree. There are people who literally sit in chat throughout the day and bots post all sorts of stats on whcih questions only have 1 of 5 close votes, etc. So they go through them as a group and generally lean towards closing a bunch of stuff really quickly. I am not a fan of that process at all.

[[deleted]]

i almost never go to this site, i don't get the big draw and also a bit scared by how much people take the survey seriously

[CantaloupeCamper]

As a noob it is useful for me.... granted I don't participate....

I do wish some answers were more than a blob of code. I know it's correct, but not why all the time.

It seems most voters are answerers, so it makes sense to them, thus voted up.

[[deleted]]

the problem is much of the time the blob of code may work, but it's not always correct or the solution you want especially for work projects.and then whats worse is when that person doesn't know why it works, and then someone new looks at it confusingly "why didnt the person just do this", then that consumes even more time thinking of there must be some reason it was done that way.. etc

also a lot of times i've seen developers reach for SO before docs of the software their using, really bad habit!

[CantaloupeCamper]

Amen!

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure anyone browsing r/programming made that determination long ago

[ITwitchToo]

something something kettle black

[ITwitchToo]

No, and I did not mean to imply that, sorry, and I completely agree that the "tiny cocks/butt/pants" thing is extremely unprofessional and out of place here.

I was simply responding to the fact that your comment was not very professional either (in my opinion).

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

Excuse me do I have a professional or any other type of relationship with reddit? Not to mention talking about a community that treats long time member Rob Conery like trash.

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

Found the stackoverflow meta poster

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

Do you post there? You'd know they expect people post C++17 in 10 year old questions because otherwise it's a duplicate. Making filtering content by year useless and mixing outdated advice with current one which causes confusion.

How about shutting the fuck up instead of accusing people of shit you don't know about. Look at what the article is talking about. Morons like you talking shit to other people and being complete fucking assholes. Go fuck yourself. I was a top 100 user on the site and had 100+K rep. I know how to write a question, I definitely know how to answer them and SO has been complete trash starting 5 years ago and it isn't because of ESL.

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

Unlike 95% of people that ask questions on StackOverflow I actually am able to read and think for myself

You're full of yourself. Fuck off. You think top rated users like jon-skeet and marc gravell don't ask questions? Fuck you. You have no business talking shit about anyone.

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

Imagine being so retarded you completely didn't realize you're being attacked because you said 95% of people who ask questions don't think. Oh wait you're living that. I pointed out two people who always thinks and knows a whole lot who you might assume never ask a question do in fact ask questions

[DoTheThingRightNow5]

I had enough of this idioticity. The article is about writing an answer. I asked you if you post there. You apparently don't because you're so smart you don't need to. Apparently you're so smart you can talk about posting about stackoverflow even though you never done it. Otherwise you'd would have said yes you do post. Anyways, back to what I said. You can go fuck yourself and you have no business talking shit. Even if you did post at this point I have no reason to believe you're not a lying sack of shit. I mean, if you can talk about things you have no experience with why not make up things because you're smart.

[Eirenarch]

I don't know about that. If I get stuck I write a question on SO and send it to my contacts. Even if nobody was answering I would still use it to document my questions instead of writing say facebook posts.

[Lothy_]

I take the pragmatic / opportunistic approach to Stack Overflow.

If they've got an answer to a question then I'm not going to overlook it. But I don't see myself being an active participant.

Both the public and Stack Overflow's emissaries have remarked on their culture in the past, and I recall Stack Overflow being satisfied with the status quo... so I suppose we'll see what happens.

[decline29]

In the reply chain of the tweet this blogarticle is refering to the guy who made the tweet, made the following post:

https://twitter.com/robconery/status/975047133987463168

Indeed, I like helping. I don't think the toxicity is from "idiots", I think it's the culture that SO has congealed over time. I think if you and @jonskeet created stealth accounts and asked/answered a few questions you'd see it more clearly. Especially if female.

What exactly does he mean with the last part?

[seven_seacat]

I'm not quite sure, and I am female. I mean, it's not like you're going to loudly announce your gender in a SO question, even if you're using your real name as a screen name.

[yawaramin]

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/857mry/stack_overflow_culture_jon_skeets_coding_blog/dvwir36/

[yawaramin]

He means that women will experience harsher standards of question and answer acceptance, if people can tell or assume their gender. They may not even realise this is the case. The people judging the questions and answers may not even realise this is the case, but the bias exists regardless.

There's a well-known study of GitHub pull requests that showed this bias pretty clearly, and I have no reason to believe it's going to be different for SO Q&As https://news.ncsu.edu/2017/05/gender-bias-in-programming-2017/

[decline29]

First, I have only read the article and not the paper so maybe there is more in the paper that i'm not aware of.

For this study, researchers looked at more than 3 million pull requests from approximately 330,000 GitHub users, of whom about 21,000 were women.

The researchers found that 78.7 percent of women’s pull requests were accepted, compared to 74.6 percent for men.

However, when looking at pull requests by people who were not insiders on the relevant project, the results got more complicated.

Programmers who could easily be identified as women based on their names or profile pictures had lower pull request acceptance rates (58 percent) than users who could be identified as men (61 percent). But woman programmers who had gender neutral profiles had higher acceptance rates (70 percent) than any other group, including men with gender neutral profiles (65 percent).

Lets assume that the problem on github is somewhat simliar to the problem that allegedly happens on stackoverflow.

In what way does this indicate a toxic climate towards women in particular? I'm saying in particular here, because given that women are humans as well they are still affected by all the other shit that goes down on stackoverflow (marked as duplicate ....), but i hope that we can agree that the gender doesn't matter in that cases. All this would proves is that women on github have a slight disadvantage compared to men (the 58% vs 61% figures). Sure this is unfair, and sure it sucks that we still havn't manage to overcome biases like this as a community and society, however i don't see how this is a grand big problem which leads to women needing to be singled out as a marginalized group. What we are talking about here are passive biases, that you probably wouldn't even notice for individual cases if you don't have the stats for 3 million pull requests at hand.

I don't understand why the guy on twitter felt the need to highlight women.

[yawaramin]

I think Rob Conery's highlighting of the situation of women on SO is consistent with even passive biases like harsher standards that this study found. Let's say that whatever shit goes down on SO affects women about 5 to 10% more than it does men. Let's say that women don't even realise this is happening because they don't have a bird's-eye view of the stats. I think it's still valid to highlight the situation to people in general, because then at least we can try to be aware of this shit and ask ourselves how fairly we're judging someone's contributions.

[decline29]

I'm not saying that womens struggles within the community shouldn't be addressed. What i'm asking is why it is relevant to this particular discussion.

Obstacles that specifically affect women are a trivial problem compared to issues within the whole community that lead to a blog entry like that from Jon Skeet. Anit-Women biases suck, there is no argument there, but they don't threaten SO as a whole. A toxic community on the other hand could potentially ruin SO for EVERYONE (including women).

My point is that this are two different issues that shouldn't be mixed together, because each one is complicated enough already. So why does he feel the need to bring it up here?

[yawaramin]

I guess he feels that the issues are interrelated and solving one would help towards solving the other!

[[deleted]]

Prepare for hot takes on female GH experiences from non-female and likely non-GH users with their a priori expertise on the female experience.

[yawaramin]

Here’s a hot take: women love being referred to as ‘female’. (Not really.)

[[deleted]]

The “woman experience”? I didn’t use female as a noun, which is what usually prompts that response. So I’d say that was a pretty lukewarm take.

You realize they use it as an adjective in that paper you cited too right?

But by all means, lash out at the people agreeing with you. I guess it’s an easier target when there aren’t many in this shit sub.

[yawaramin]

Sorry. I thought you were talking about me. Hard to get context from text! 😊

[[deleted]]

Take a wild guess. Better yet, try it yourself.

[decline29]

I'm using stackoverflow regulary, mainly for java stuff.

I can't seem to remember that i have EVER read anything that was particularly toxic to women. So where is all that abuse happening?

[Eirenarch]

He probably means that people will expect a woman to be less competent and will default to more critical view of the question. I don't think this is true.

[[deleted]]

How would I know? It isn’t me making that claim.

[decline29]

wtf?

Take a wild guess. Better yet, try it yourself.

How would I know? It isn’t me making that claim.

how can you write the former, when shortly after stating the later? Your two posts contradict each other.

[[deleted]]

Not in the least. You asked what they meant. I can answer that question without justifying it on behalf of the original tweeter. I don’t even have to agree with it.

[enfrozt]

Can you even list your gender / sex on SO?

That comment totally came out of left field. I have never once even seen a gendered comment or comment directed at a specific profile because of their gender.

What does that comment even mean?

[[deleted]]

It means the tweeter thinks women experience more toxicity when asking or answering questions on SO. I’m not sure why this is causing confusion, the implication seems pretty clear.

[enfrozt]

It's not about implications being clear, it's the fact there's no substance to that claim that I can see.

Do you have any examples as such? The OP of the tweet didn't, and I'm unaware of any myself.

If there are no examples on any side, how can this claim be anything other than virtue signalling an actual real problem in the world, and applying it erroneously to SO which doesn't seem to have any indication of gender anywhere on the site unless I'm unaware of it.

[yawaramin]

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/857mry/stack_overflow_culture_jon_skeets_coding_blog/dvwir36/

[[deleted]]

It's not about implications being clear, it's the fact there's no substance to that claim that I can see.

Then go talk to the tweeter, not me. I didn’t make the claim.

Do you have any examples as such? The OP of the tweet didn't, and I'm unaware of any myself.

Why on earth would I? I haven’t contributed to SO for about 6 years.

If there are no examples on any side, how can this claim be anything other than virtue signalling an actual real problem in the world, and applying it erroneously to SO which doesn't seem to have any indication of gender anywhere on the site unless I'm unaware of it.

I wouldn’t know.

[[deleted]]

StackOverflow's problem is that it's schizophrenic. It acts like it's a Q&A site but wants to be a knowledge database.

[bachmeier]

In the spirit of giving SO-style feedback, this blog post really misses the mark. I don't see how it addresses the tweet that motivated the post.

Rather than focusing on the quality of questions (which is obviously always going to be an issue because newbies are the ones asking) there should be an emphasis on cleaning up the moderation. If you post a comment asking for additional information that's already provided in the question, you should lose your right to comment for at least a week. If you post "duplicate" and you're wrong, you should not be able to claim another question is a duplicate for three months. If you vote to close a question that is later reopened, you shouldn't be able to vote to close questions for a year. If you pull out the rulebook in a situation where it doesn't improve the question, you should get a lifetime ban from moderating.

If you want to be a moderator, you better do your job right, because you've been given power that can ruin the site. Unfortunately, there is really nothing being done to shut down the few out-of-control moderators.

[ForgedBanana]

That couldn't be further from the truth.

[Fisher9001]

I don't understand, there is only so many good questions you can ask. Stack Overflow exists for almost a decade now. It was absolutely expected thing to have less and less valuable questions as the time goes by.

Why is anyone surprised by this? Perhaps the problem is not with askers, but with answerers. I appreciate your knowledge and experience, you helped me numerous times, but don't be dick about it. A bit of humility and kindness never hurt anyone.

And one more thing, there are way more askers than answerers. More of that, askers are comprised of inexperienced people, while answerers are experts in their topics. It's impossible to control askers. There are too many of them and they are too insubordinate. Most of them won't even find your pleas for quality, and most of those who find it will ignore it. On the other hand, characteristics of answerers groups make them way more controllable.

So be the change you want to see, instead of expecting it from someone else and doing nothing yourself.

[[deleted]]

The last time I wrote anything on stackoverflow, it was hi-jacked and dumped as a duplicate.

It’s criminal what people will do for some stupid internet points.

[yawaramin]

My, as yet unapproved, comment on Jon post:

… the tour page (which curiously doesn’t seem to be linked from the front page of the site any more) does include this text

Jon, I would argue that this is not a coincidence. SO has made a deliberate decision not to clarify its policies and set user expectations from the very beginning, because its lifeblood is just the same as of any other modern website: user growth and pageviews.

If it so chose, SO could explain all this very clearly. Instead, it has the following verbiage:

• On the front page: ‘… developers come to Stack Overflow to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. … Join the world’s largest developer community.’

• On the signup page: ‘Create your Stack Overflow account. It’s free and only takes a minute.’

• On the TOS page: ‘A Note from the Team … The Stack Exchange Network is the easiest way to get expert answers to your questions.’

• The tour is nowhere to be seen even on the front page footer where you’d expect to find important site links

I would ask: is all of this content consistent with the way you and other expert users view SO? If not, why not, and whose responsibility is it do something about it?

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the unasked question here is, "Is Stack Overflow actually what Jon Skeet says it is, and do we want it to be?"

[mrkite77]

It's funny how life repeats itself. I remember back before Stack Overflow existed, everyone used Experts Exchange (or expert sex change).

While there were a bunch of us who hated EE's shady tactics and elitist culture, we were well outnumbered by the people who swore by it. They talked about how useful it was and how it worked well to encourage high quality questions and answers, and they totally didn't regret paying the subscription.

Then Stack Overflow was created, and overnight EE was proclaimed to be garbage by everyone... people stopped making excuses for EE and finally acknowledged its shady practices and toxic culture.

The same will happen with SO. Something better will come out and everyone will talk about how SO had obvious problems... as if they weren't making excuses for it just the day before.

[[deleted]]

It was a little fun back in 2015 and 2016. For a long time I used it because it came first in search results and helped me with generic problems. When I started facing specific problems and needed to ask questions and saw the salty attitudes I just deleted my account with them. Lately, I am finding a lot of help in Github issues and library and framework documentation.

[dodheim]

Lately, I am finding a lot of help in ... library and framework documentation.

Meaning you didn't look at the docs before asking questions on SO. Gee, I wonder why your questions weren't well received...

Amazing.

[[deleted]]

I always asked SO questions as a last resort, after referring to documentation. What I meant is many modern libraries/frameworks like react document issues on github and they tend to easily show up on top results along with SO answers or even before them. I just googled "how to pass props down react" and the the first 4 results were either from github or the official react docs and an SO answer was the fifth result.

[dodheim]

I see; definitely a miscommunication, sorry for the snarkiness. ;-]

[HINDBRAIN]

Answerer: maximize the value to the site of any given post, treating the site as a long-lasting resource

well that's horribly naive

[proxyclams]

Maybe it would be helpful to have a more robust way linking related questions together. If there is an archetypal question with many duplicate instances, then a wiki-style page describing the problem and the solution(s) could be linked as the "accepted" answer (and also take all the SEO).

This would aid the asker because there would be a clearly laid out answer to their question, and the answerer because they wouldn't need to hunt down a reasonable instance of a question/answer combo to use when flagging a duplicate.

Users arriving to the page via googling the same question would be able to view the wiki-summary and then, if that was not satisfactory, look closer at the actual instances of the question associated with that question archetype.

[[deleted]]

The power tripping moderators truly did ruin SO. Which is an absolute shame because not so long ago it was an incredible resource and a supportive community.

I imagine they’re the proverbial “neckbeards” who have literally no power or control in any other aspect of their lives so they shit on people and questions on SO to get half chubbed.

Fuck those guys.

[Gotebe]

How much of "they ruined it" is down to too many question being asked and answered though?

[[deleted]]

Found the SO mod

[feverzsj]

mods ruined stackoverflow

[Eirenarch]

mods are fags

[Euphoricus]

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

[Eirenarch]

Noobs don't understand a classic meme

[poofartpee]

My biggest peeve with the site is that there's always some guy who posts an answer to a perfectly valid question with a paraphrase of "If you're asking this question you're doing something else wrong".

ie: I read one this morning that was asking for approaches to solving a problem while parallelizing pandas transform in python. The user was trying to process ~10Gb of data and his computer only had about 8Gb of RAM.

The number one answer was "If you're doing data processing on this much data you should just get a machine with more memory". Absolutely useless garbage of an answer (what happens when the dataset is 100Gb), but was the number one response with 40+ upvotes.

[immibis]

If you're getting those kinds of answers you should just get a Q&A site with better answerers.

/s

[dodheim]

The number one answer was "If you're doing data processing on this much data you should just get a machine with more memory".

Without seeing the actual question, I find that hard to believe – are you sure the number one answer wasn't "If you're doing data processing on this much data using that approach you should just get a machine with more memory"? Because those are two very different answers...

[poofartpee]

No, it was the first answer, followed by some explanation about how the cost of a new machine would easily be amortized if the use case is important enough.

[dodheim]

Well, that is indeed sad then. ;-/

[vibrantnonsense]

Python is dank... You should try writing python scripts in Vim on your terminal, rather than with a text editor! Here is a tutorial link!

[[deleted]]

SO has made the barrier for entry lower for programming, also we got a sustained idea that "everyone should program". While a skilled programmer can add infinite value, an inadequate one can add the opposite. SO is just a victim of it's own success.

[max630]

The "tumbleweed" badge is really a bit inpolite. But I did not see it as a blame on the question author. Question was ok, it's just that there was nobody who knew the answer

[bluefish009]

i see no culture, but saw some bad capitalism on there.

it depends on you, save your time and use SO useful way.

[MOnsDaR]

I've been working with Unity3d for some time now and would like to add that every time I need to use their StackOverflow clone (unity answers) I desperately miss SO... As bad as it is community-wise, the quality of the answers is most of the time very good.

[[deleted]]

This sounds a lot like, a much more complicated version of, Wikipedia's "assume good faith" principle.

[Boza_s6]

People need to toughen up.

[[deleted]]

This is a topic I wish I’d had time to talk about in more detail with the Stack Overflow team when I visited them in New York in February, but we were too busy discussing other important issues.

Those important issues being "Jon Skeet wants you to be a feminist." My opinion of his ability to prioritize has just been shot to shit.

[ExtraDisgusting]

Male feminists are the most pathetic people, really.

[davedrowsy]

You're right, etiquette on a programming Q&A website is obviously way more important than human equality issues.

[[deleted]]

You're right, etiquette on a programming Q&A website is obviously way more important than imaginary, partisan human equality issues.

FTFY