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I do hope that Stack Overflow will become usable again. In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers. I went all the way from a simple coder to managemen

I do hope that Stack Overflow will become usable again. In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers. I went all the way from a simple coder to management, and now I'm doing both, running my second startup. I talk to people of different walks of life, and I always do my homework. But on Stack Overflow, it's like I'm back to the early years of my career, a stupid newbie whose questions get randomly downvoted. I delete it, tweak the wording a little bit, and now it's suddenly accepted. I say something like, "a solution or a 3rd party library", an idiot downvotes me saying that "requests to recommend 3rd party libraries are offtopic". I change it to "a solution (3rd party library is OK)", and now it's suddenly fine. It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as their role model. As a side effect, the good answerers are gone, and the really tricky questions are left unanswered, so I often answer them myself. Although, the way Stack Overflow is, my desire to contribute to the community is diminishing.

klez 9y ago
It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close. Your example is a bit borderline and it's something I wouldn't close, but I can see how someone might think it warrants to be closed. Consider that the rule about external tools is meant to avoid a deluge of answers about libraries. They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. If we can avoid this by being strict, I think it's a good thing. But hey, I'm just one of hundreds of thousands users, so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours.
- js8 9y ago
  > They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. Like many, I find the answers to these "religious" (in fact, they are not, because done properly the answers are supported by arguments) questions to be the most useful content. In many ways, I can answer the most objective questions myself from the documentation or source code. But what I cannot do this with is distillation of expert knowledge that requires time, and the more distilled it is, the more subjective it is. Subjective doesn't mean unsupportable by facts (experience).
  - mlvljr 9y ago
    Exactly, the answers like "been using library X for three years but finally gave up due to Y" is the kind of personal advice-style answers that usually are the most helpful. PC mods crowd, you're missing that! :)
  - ufo 9y ago
    Letting more opinion based question in stack overflow sounds like a nice idea but in the end it doesnt work out because of the conflicting goals problem john skeet talked about. Answers that just recommend a 3rd party library optimize for solving the immediate problem an answerer is having asap but they don't work very well at creating a long lasting resource and they also give answerers a hard time. Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable. They also don't work well with the site format because you cant summarize the solution into one accepted answer. Instead, you get hundreds of tiny small disconnected answers, which cant really be edited to consolidate or keep them up to date, and no room for discussions (SO comments don't work well for long discussions)
    - acjohnson55 9y ago
      Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for. Until they effectively stamped that behavior out, it was one of the best ways to get a request-for-recs in front of a massive audience of informed professionals. It was messy, but very useful.
      - shagie 9y ago
        It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  > It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose. Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules. As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation. It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict.
  - shagie 9y ago
    > It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict. Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate. Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help. And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling. You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-research-project-results-wrap-up https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r... > 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners. Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site. The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion. Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people). A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  > I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO answer or in a github project ?
  - shagie 9y ago
    The code is ideally a "this is the code that fixes the problem" and its done. Once there's an answer, you don't often get a dozen more answers with slightly different code. Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on. And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post, doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a different site for Struts. The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++ book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far too much moderation time across the community. On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in mind. https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks does it much better than Stack Overflow can.
    - Can_Not 9y ago
      But there are times where I want to see everyone vouch for their frameworks in that exact manor in the stack overflow format by the stack overflow crowd.
      - shagie 9y ago
        That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.
- gergles 9y ago
  > so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours. But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?
  - klez 9y ago
    Well, I'm not closing it out of spite (in fact, I'm not closing it at all, just voting to close, you need five votes to close a question). I'm closing it because there's a rule on SO that says that those kind of questions should be closed. The point being, SO is not for opinions, and not because I say so. The rules of the site say so. And I (and others) already explained why there are such rules. So why shouldn't I vote to close a question that is patently off-topic when the site rules say I should vote to close it? > But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so? Is this a trial? I find this phrase is a bit accusatory, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
pjc50 9y ago
I have 30k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question on stackoverflow and it got instantly obliterated. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-logging-in-c-sharp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-... IMO it doesn't scale indefinitely. There's a site culture to be maintained, and as the site gets larger the core moderator culture becomes a smaller and more isolated part of the site.
- clan 9y ago
  The weird rule about opinionated answers! I get why your question is on hold. But I find it unfair. Some of the best questions and answers have been highly opinionated. And I have often been led to on hold questions by google. An opinionated SO site might be nice. In the old days we had newsgroups for this. But that audience has disappeared when everything moved to the web.
- the8472 9y ago
  You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. Additionally the preface about the GDPR is a distracting, non-technical detail, instead you should have described which security properties you want, your threat model is etc. with the GDPR as a footnote in case someone wants to know your underlying use-case, not the other way around. That's very much considered offtopic on SO. Maybe other sites on the SE network such as Information Security or Software Engineering might have taken it. But I don't use either of those, so I don't know if that would actually fit into their policies.
  - avinium 9y ago
    > You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. That's exactly what I want to discuss on SO. Most SO questions/answers are things that could easily be googled/RTFM with 5 minutes worth of effort. Seasoned developers/architects don't need that, and to be frank, it's pretty low-hanging fruit and not super valuable. What is valuable are opinions, experiences, perspectives on trade-offs and engineering considerations. These are, of course, highly personal and subjective. But that's why it's so important - it's this kind of experience that people pay high salaries for, not answer to specific code one-liners. If SO isn't willing to provide that kind of discussion, they're going to very susceptible to someone who starts up a competing platform to do so.
jodrellblank 9y ago
In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers And .. I downvoted you. I hope it will sting. People giving up free time to add value to your thing and you blame them for the site problems? Then the site design is really failing, if the problem is all the people being engaged with it. Whereas on stackoverflow when I downvote it’s for “this question shows no research effort” which is the downvote button tooltip, but a single downvote is felt as a personal attack on character. Stackoverflow is for programmers - people whose character traits are tainted to be nitpicky about small details - yet the bad experience angry posts call answers traffic cops and Martinets - exactly the kind of people who could help get your code past the compiler or browser or api or whatever. “Neutral” responses feel like negative ones (see: “what have you tried?”). As an answerer more than an asker, if I help someone understand then I feel good, if it seems someone asks from a sense of “help me” I’m endeared to the question and if they ask from a sense of “solve my business problem” I feel more abused (personally or site-being-abused) and resentful. No amount of Jon Skeet blog posting about the classic usenet popup “this reply will be sent to thousands of people who will have to spend time and money on it, are you sure?” seems to work on the modern web. If it were me reworking it, I’d get rid of the low quality question idea, let answered be the judge of that and google sort the wheat from chaff. Then get rid of downvotes and close votes and “neutral” comments. Leave only room for feedback buttons that in some way communicate “I tried to answer your question but couldn’t, Your question might be more answerable if ..” Forget being a repository of high quality questions and answers in the same way software has forgotten about big design up front and perfect quality goals and turned into “put an MVP on GitHub and let the issue tracker be the driving force”. The goal of “stop duplicates, everything that can be questioned and answered has been questioned and answered” forgets that there are 150,000 new humans every day, and thousands more existing people learning to code - a goal of turning everyone away with “that’s already finished nothing for you to do here” is .. daft. Questions and answers are, if nothing else, practise. A good way to learn is to try explaining it to someone else - SO churn has that room. But not on stack overflow, where following the site plan for downvotes and closevotes makes everyone feel shitty. I even doubt it is “high quality questions” that are supported but a combination of “this question feels like the asker is like me” combined with “and they’re asking about a thing I like and feel positively about rather than an edge case of the tool I feel bad about and wish the asker would politely overlook it like the rest of “us” all do”.
jodrellblank 9y ago
It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as their role model. It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Broken site design somewhere that leads to that effect.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  > It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Are you 100% sure? Because from my experience, the most useful subset is between 100 and 2,000, those with experience but not arrogance. The top karma hoarders more often than not provide citations from official documentation and sabotage questions. I wish they were appointed by an evil overlord because the overlord is better than a swarm of annoying mosquitoes.
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    what I mean is, their high karma score comes from the community voting up their contributions a lot. If they have high karma that's supposed to communicate that they will be good answerers, and of course you want good answerers, so you'd think that's whom you should want. it doesn't communicate that, they're not who you want - as you say in this comment. That's what I was commenting on. The disconnect between what that karma should say vs. what it does say

klez 9y ago

It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close. Your example is a bit borderline and it's something I wouldn't close, but I can see how someone might think it warrants to be closed. Consider that the rule about external tools is meant to avoid a deluge of answers about libraries. They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. If we can avoid this by being strict, I think it's a good thing. But hey, I'm just one of hundreds of thousands users, so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours.

js8 9y ago
> They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. Like many, I find the answers to these "religious" (in fact, they are not, because done properly the answers are supported by arguments) questions to be the most useful content. In many ways, I can answer the most objective questions myself from the documentation or source code. But what I cannot do this with is distillation of expert knowledge that requires time, and the more distilled it is, the more subjective it is. Subjective doesn't mean unsupportable by facts (experience).
- mlvljr 9y ago
  Exactly, the answers like "been using library X for three years but finally gave up due to Y" is the kind of personal advice-style answers that usually are the most helpful. PC mods crowd, you're missing that! :)
- ufo 9y ago
  Letting more opinion based question in stack overflow sounds like a nice idea but in the end it doesnt work out because of the conflicting goals problem john skeet talked about. Answers that just recommend a 3rd party library optimize for solving the immediate problem an answerer is having asap but they don't work very well at creating a long lasting resource and they also give answerers a hard time. Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable. They also don't work well with the site format because you cant summarize the solution into one accepted answer. Instead, you get hundreds of tiny small disconnected answers, which cant really be edited to consolidate or keep them up to date, and no room for discussions (SO comments don't work well for long discussions)
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for. Until they effectively stamped that behavior out, it was one of the best ways to get a request-for-recs in front of a massive audience of informed professionals. It was messy, but very useful.
    - shagie 9y ago
      It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
vadimberman 9y ago
> It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose. Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules. As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation. It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict.
- shagie 9y ago
  > It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict. Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate. Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help. And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling. You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-research-project-results-wrap-up https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r... > 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners. Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site. The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion. Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people). A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.
jcelerier 9y ago
> I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO answer or in a github project ?
- shagie 9y ago
  The code is ideally a "this is the code that fixes the problem" and its done. Once there's an answer, you don't often get a dozen more answers with slightly different code. Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on. And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post, doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a different site for Struts. The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++ book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far too much moderation time across the community. On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in mind. https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks does it much better than Stack Overflow can.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    But there are times where I want to see everyone vouch for their frameworks in that exact manor in the stack overflow format by the stack overflow crowd.
    - shagie 9y ago
      That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.
gergles 9y ago
> so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours. But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?
- klez 9y ago
  Well, I'm not closing it out of spite (in fact, I'm not closing it at all, just voting to close, you need five votes to close a question). I'm closing it because there's a rule on SO that says that those kind of questions should be closed. The point being, SO is not for opinions, and not because I say so. The rules of the site say so. And I (and others) already explained why there are such rules. So why shouldn't I vote to close a question that is patently off-topic when the site rules say I should vote to close it? > But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so? Is this a trial? I find this phrase is a bit accusatory, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

pjc50 9y ago

I have 30k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question on stackoverflow and it got instantly obliterated. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-logging-in-c-sharp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-... IMO it doesn't scale indefinitely. There's a site culture to be maintained, and as the site gets larger the core moderator culture becomes a smaller and more isolated part of the site.

clan 9y ago
The weird rule about opinionated answers! I get why your question is on hold. But I find it unfair. Some of the best questions and answers have been highly opinionated. And I have often been led to on hold questions by google. An opinionated SO site might be nice. In the old days we had newsgroups for this. But that audience has disappeared when everything moved to the web.
the8472 9y ago
You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. Additionally the preface about the GDPR is a distracting, non-technical detail, instead you should have described which security properties you want, your threat model is etc. with the GDPR as a footnote in case someone wants to know your underlying use-case, not the other way around. That's very much considered offtopic on SO. Maybe other sites on the SE network such as Information Security or Software Engineering might have taken it. But I don't use either of those, so I don't know if that would actually fit into their policies.
- avinium 9y ago
  > You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. That's exactly what I want to discuss on SO. Most SO questions/answers are things that could easily be googled/RTFM with 5 minutes worth of effort. Seasoned developers/architects don't need that, and to be frank, it's pretty low-hanging fruit and not super valuable. What is valuable are opinions, experiences, perspectives on trade-offs and engineering considerations. These are, of course, highly personal and subjective. But that's why it's so important - it's this kind of experience that people pay high salaries for, not answer to specific code one-liners. If SO isn't willing to provide that kind of discussion, they're going to very susceptible to someone who starts up a competing platform to do so.

jodrellblank 9y ago

In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers And .. I downvoted you. I hope it will sting. People giving up free time to add value to your thing and you blame them for the site problems? Then the site design is really failing, if the problem is all the people being engaged with it. Whereas on stackoverflow when I downvote it’s for “this question shows no research effort” which is the downvote button tooltip, but a single downvote is felt as a personal attack on character. Stackoverflow is for programmers - people whose character traits are tainted to be nitpicky about small details - yet the bad experience angry posts call answers traffic cops and Martinets - exactly the kind of people who could help get your code past the compiler or browser or api or whatever. “Neutral” responses feel like negative ones (see: “what have you tried?”). As an answerer more than an asker, if I help someone understand then I feel good, if it seems someone asks from a sense of “help me” I’m endeared to the question and if they ask from a sense of “solve my business problem” I feel more abused (personally or site-being-abused) and resentful. No amount of Jon Skeet blog posting about the classic usenet popup “this reply will be sent to thousands of people who will have to spend time and money on it, are you sure?” seems to work on the modern web. If it were me reworking it, I’d get rid of the low quality question idea, let answered be the judge of that and google sort the wheat from chaff. Then get rid of downvotes and close votes and “neutral” comments. Leave only room for feedback buttons that in some way communicate “I tried to answer your question but couldn’t, Your question might be more answerable if ..” Forget being a repository of high quality questions and answers in the same way software has forgotten about big design up front and perfect quality goals and turned into “put an MVP on GitHub and let the issue tracker be the driving force”. The goal of “stop duplicates, everything that can be questioned and answered has been questioned and answered” forgets that there are 150,000 new humans every day, and thousands more existing people learning to code - a goal of turning everyone away with “that’s already finished nothing for you to do here” is .. daft. Questions and answers are, if nothing else, practise. A good way to learn is to try explaining it to someone else - SO churn has that room. But not on stack overflow, where following the site plan for downvotes and closevotes makes everyone feel shitty. I even doubt it is “high quality questions” that are supported but a combination of “this question feels like the asker is like me” combined with “and they’re asking about a thing I like and feel positively about rather than an edge case of the tool I feel bad about and wish the asker would politely overlook it like the rest of “us” all do”.

jodrellblank 9y ago

It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as their role model. It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Broken site design somewhere that leads to that effect.

vadimberman 9y ago
> It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Are you 100% sure? Because from my experience, the most useful subset is between 100 and 2,000, those with experience but not arrogance. The top karma hoarders more often than not provide citations from official documentation and sabotage questions. I wish they were appointed by an evil overlord because the overlord is better than a swarm of annoying mosquitoes.
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  what I mean is, their high karma score comes from the community voting up their contributions a lot. If they have high karma that's supposed to communicate that they will be good answerers, and of course you want good answerers, so you'd think that's whom you should want. it doesn't communicate that, they're not who you want - as you say in this comment. That's what I was commenting on. The disconnect between what that karma should say vs. what it does say