6 ms·

Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (

by hehheh 9y ago

Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up. One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)

shagie 9y ago
I suspect there's a mismatch between what you expect Stack Overflow to be and what the other users expect it to be. From the tour ( https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour ): > With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers. Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works. > Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")
- hehheh 9y ago
  > Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. If that is truly their goal (and I don't doubt that it's at least a hope) then they should go ahead and remove all the vague questions from their database, or at least flag them so they don't show up in web searches. After all, who's using Google to find unsolved, vague problems? > No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. I see. I didn't realize that. They do get the number but I guess it doesn't "persist" throughout the site. Good to know. Though, then I guess I don't understand what their motivation is to respond with useless comments. > Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. That's OK, I guess, but it seems to be counter to the idea of building a library. Rather than have a set of answers that may address the question for various versions of C++, you have a question and zero answers (because the person asking for details disappeared). That's the reality, anyway. In any case, it wouldn't even have to be a private message. Simply having a "needs more detail" checkbox that hides the question (from Google et al) until the detail is added would be enough to improve the SO experience.
  - shagie 9y ago
    There have been efforts to remove vague questions. There is a lot of them. Stack Overflow corporate tends to leave that to the community moderation... which is a bit under powered. Until recently, the elected moderator team tended to be on the preservationist side. As to removing from search? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/316881/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/316881/ - remember that Stack Overflow monetization is driven by views. Deleting those vague questions that people search for (they do) that happen to have a lot of views and are locked ends up as a - on the balance sheet. Reputation changes happen from: * Upvote on a question you asked (+5) * Upvote on an answer your provided (+10) * Accepted answer you provided (+15) * Accepted edit (+2) * Down vote on a question you asked (-2) * Down vote on an answer you provided (-2) * Down vote you gave on an answer (-1); yes down voting other peoples answers costs you points. * Receiving a bounty (+varies) * Giving a bounty (-varies) Thats it. Nothing about comments. Nothing about closing questions. The comments aren't necessary useless. They are often trying to help the person asking the question write a better question that can get a better answer. If the comment truly is useless, it should be flagged to be removed (and that won't give or cost anyone any points). Guessing at the answer isn't that helpful. You've got no idea if it solved the problem or not. The next person to find it with search won't know if it solved the problem or not either. So instead of one question with an answer that did, you've got a question that has a dozen guesses... and you've got to go through and figure out which one works for you in your environment. Might as well have searched a forum and paged through all the guesses there. Questions that don't have any answers eventually get removed by the system. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 describes the criteria. > If the question is more than 30 days old, and ... > has −1 or lower score > has no answers > is not locked > If the question is more than 365 days old, and ... > has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case of deleted owner > has no answers > is not locked > has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5 > has 1 or 0 comments The "needs more detail" is often part of the close reason. The question is closed not as a "you did bad" but rather as a "don't try to guess at an answer until this is cleared up" > Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error, and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example. > Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question. The hides from google, again, is the "this is how SO makes its advertising impression money." The reason given often is the "breaks the internet." If people linked to the closed question from outside that link becomes a 404. I'm skeptical on that being the only reason as I noted the advertising impression dollars there. I personally believe that maintaining poor quality material, no matter how many people link to it, is damaging to the brand and sets a poor example for what people asking questions expect. And thus, when they do catch the eye of someone who has an Atwoodian (quality above all else, delete the stuff that doesn't contribute) philosophy of quality on the site, it becomes a poor user experience for everyone involved. And as Jeff isn't there and Joel is CEO, the emphasis is different. I say Atwoodian there - thats following the call of: > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The Spolskyians are following the call of: > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. Its shifted a bit from those original calls to people to contribute... but you can see a profound difference in the emphasis between those different calls for contributors. Then give https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too... a read and look at the editor history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions The thing I'm trying to say there is the "why don't these questions get hidden from google" gets an "its complicated" and goes to the top of the company and its founder about what is appropriate for the site and not. Its not something easily done or decided.

by hehheh 9y ago

shagie 9y ago

I suspect there's a mismatch between what you expect Stack Overflow to be and what the other users expect it to be. From the tour ( https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour ): > With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers. Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works. > Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")

hehheh 9y ago
> Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. If that is truly their goal (and I don't doubt that it's at least a hope) then they should go ahead and remove all the vague questions from their database, or at least flag them so they don't show up in web searches. After all, who's using Google to find unsolved, vague problems? > No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points. I see. I didn't realize that. They do get the number but I guess it doesn't "persist" throughout the site. Good to know. Though, then I guess I don't understand what their motivation is to respond with useless comments. > Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful. That's OK, I guess, but it seems to be counter to the idea of building a library. Rather than have a set of answers that may address the question for various versions of C++, you have a question and zero answers (because the person asking for details disappeared). That's the reality, anyway. In any case, it wouldn't even have to be a private message. Simply having a "needs more detail" checkbox that hides the question (from Google et al) until the detail is added would be enough to improve the SO experience.
- shagie 9y ago
  There have been efforts to remove vague questions. There is a lot of them. Stack Overflow corporate tends to leave that to the community moderation... which is a bit under powered. Until recently, the elected moderator team tended to be on the preservationist side. As to removing from search? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/316881/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/316881/ - remember that Stack Overflow monetization is driven by views. Deleting those vague questions that people search for (they do) that happen to have a lot of views and are locked ends up as a - on the balance sheet. Reputation changes happen from: * Upvote on a question you asked (+5) * Upvote on an answer your provided (+10) * Accepted answer you provided (+15) * Accepted edit (+2) * Down vote on a question you asked (-2) * Down vote on an answer you provided (-2) * Down vote you gave on an answer (-1); yes down voting other peoples answers costs you points. * Receiving a bounty (+varies) * Giving a bounty (-varies) Thats it. Nothing about comments. Nothing about closing questions. The comments aren't necessary useless. They are often trying to help the person asking the question write a better question that can get a better answer. If the comment truly is useless, it should be flagged to be removed (and that won't give or cost anyone any points). Guessing at the answer isn't that helpful. You've got no idea if it solved the problem or not. The next person to find it with search won't know if it solved the problem or not either. So instead of one question with an answer that did, you've got a question that has a dozen guesses... and you've got to go through and figure out which one works for you in your environment. Might as well have searched a forum and paged through all the guesses there. Questions that don't have any answers eventually get removed by the system. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 describes the criteria. > If the question is more than 30 days old, and ... > has −1 or lower score > has no answers > is not locked > If the question is more than 365 days old, and ... > has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case of deleted owner > has no answers > is not locked > has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5 > has 1 or 0 comments The "needs more detail" is often part of the close reason. The question is closed not as a "you did bad" but rather as a "don't try to guess at an answer until this is cleared up" > Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error, and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example. > Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question. The hides from google, again, is the "this is how SO makes its advertising impression money." The reason given often is the "breaks the internet." If people linked to the closed question from outside that link becomes a 404. I'm skeptical on that being the only reason as I noted the advertising impression dollars there. I personally believe that maintaining poor quality material, no matter how many people link to it, is damaging to the brand and sets a poor example for what people asking questions expect. And thus, when they do catch the eye of someone who has an Atwoodian (quality above all else, delete the stuff that doesn't contribute) philosophy of quality on the site, it becomes a poor user experience for everyone involved. And as Jeff isn't there and Joel is CEO, the emphasis is different. I say Atwoodian there - thats following the call of: > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. The Spolskyians are following the call of: > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling. Its shifted a bit from those original calls to people to contribute... but you can see a profound difference in the emphasis between those different calls for contributors. Then give https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too-simple/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too... a read and look at the editor history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions The thing I'm trying to say there is the "why don't these questions get hidden from google" gets an "its complicated" and goes to the top of the company and its founder about what is appropriate for the site and not. Its not something easily done or decided.