Comment by kulahan
1 year ago
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them.
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.
Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself.
Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
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When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again...
... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).
But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
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How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem
You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)
If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.
If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)
If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
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Seems to me like you're part of the problem. Of course it's not my problem anymore because I no longer contribute there.
From GP:
> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
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If I'm part of the problem, then that's because of something I do, or else something I don't do.
The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution.
9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.
I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.
You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.
Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
> I have a deadline and a problem.
Stack Overflow is by design not there to help you with this:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569
If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.
If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.
We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.
> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.
Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.
The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.
It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.
> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.
Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.
> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.
> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?
It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.
It is not about you.
> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.
A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.
> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?
No, in fact. It is not social media, either.
Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)
All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.
Stack Overflow does not. By design.
Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).
By design.
> Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
You don't realistically get "dinged" for this. Whatever question of yours was downvoted to -4 (since your "reputation decreased by 8 points") certainly had other things wrong with it.
Sure, these things were edited out of your question; the post does not belong to you (in the terms of service, you license it to the community).
> Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
The site is what it is. Sites on the Internet are allowed to be what they want to be. You are not entitled to them changing to suit you.
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There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.
Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem.
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.
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"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.
"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
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> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
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Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base.
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
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If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.
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The last time I used it I was asking a math question that was somewhat beyond me. I'd already spent hours researching it. Part of the problem was I knew I didn't know the right terminology but I could describe the problem in detail. I asked on SO, got one slightly snarky comment that answered the wrong problem. It did give me a clue to the right wording to look for though so in a way I got my answer. But the general attitude, and your attitude, is "why are you asking this question?"
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.
> vandals
How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard?
> who seem to take glee
Why do you imagine so?
Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing.
OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
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Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).