First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said.
I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/)
There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.
Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized".
I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.
I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks:
Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API?
I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question.
For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out with a language/tool/library. I haven't found it very useful for complex problems.
Oh well. I've written about my rants on SO before. [I won't link here but it is in my submission history]
Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places).
The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice.
Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).
Is that really as widespread as you say? I looked at the last few hours of the six most popular chat rooms and control-f'ed for "cv-pls" on all of them, and found a grand total of ONE hit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28568303/python-3-object-...
The question was closed because the asker himself answered it apologizing for posting it, the problem being something completely unrelated to the code he had pasted. Everybody agreed.
The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.
Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone closes something incorrectly (you can point to a definite reason it's incorrectly closed), then re-open it or raise a meta post.
If you want to remove the ability for the people helping moderate a community to moderate, then how do you expect it to be moderated?
The big issue is that there are a LOT of low quality questions being asked. Duplicates. Many times literally copy/pasting the the question title into Google will give you the answer. Should these questions remain open because you want to repwhore? Should they remain open and further reduce the ability for Google to take you to a good canonical answer?
Or should they be closed and point to the good canonical answer? That way people can find their way to good content, rather than littering the site with duplication and poor copies of other answers.
The meaning of the CV reasons has changed over time as the community matures and figures out what works and what doesn't.
I do disagree with closing questions about particular framework (unless there's a dedicated SE site for it).
But bitching doesn't help. Raise a question on Meta. Step into the chat rooms and have a discussion. Get involved and help us fix things.
All bitching does is make the people who are putting time and effort into the community feel like they are doing something bad. Which is the fastest way to kill a community.
I've stumbled upon "too localized" a few times and it's BS. Just because I'm daring to build a desktop app on OpenBSD doesn't mean it's not a real question.
Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.
The problem doesn't stem from people just being wankers in a chat room, it's a deeper problem than that. It's hard to know exactly why people voted to close the 'niche' question you're talking about, but I had to rant recently to someone else who was complaining about how their 'recommend me a library' question was closed unjustly.
What is Stack Overflow's goal
-----------------------------
To be a large repository of reasonably correct answers to small technical problems, where there is only one reasonably correct* answer. Everything else is considered off topic, and unfortunately not a good fit for the site, due to the lack of tools to manage other types of questions
Although there are lots of other things that could be asked and answered, if they are out of that scope then they are considered off-topic and should be closed, according to the people who own StackOverflow. They're closed, not just to annoy people who want those other types of questions answered but because SO really lacks the tools to manage the answers to those questions reasonably.
For example the question "how do you install and configure nginx on different operating systems" is definitely a question that could be asked. However it would require a massively long answer, without a provably correct answer, with different approaches based on how you prefer to configure stuff. i.e. not a single probably correct answer.
Questions that ask for a recommendation for which library to use don't also meet the criteria of having a single reasonably correct answer. Which library you should use depends on lots of factors, and there's probably several, if not a hell of a lot more, possible libraries to use.
Also, questions like that invite debate, multiple answers, spamming by companies trying to promote their software etc. Although people might like to ask all sorts of questions SO have decided to try to limit the number of off-topic questions.
But hasn't the goal of being the large repository of answers already been achieved?
Yup, which is why StackOverflow is a considered a shit-show by people who used to find it very useful. If I had to guess, I'd say that something like 95% of all questions that are 'on topic' have already been asked and answered.
Although I've been using it a while, it's just incredibly rare for me to find a technical question that would be on topic for SO, that doing a google search for doesn't have an answer on SO in the top 5 results.
I think the people who run StackOverflow are either morons or have business reasons for not dealing with this problem.
Although the 'find me a library' questions are off-topic they aren't really a big problem - what is a big problem is just the same set of questions being asked day in, day out by people who are too stupid to be able to use Google to find answers to questions like "Q) Why is my compiler saying there is a syntax error on this line?" "A) There's a syntax error on that line."
The vast majority of people who are asking questions on StackOverflow are people who either read their compiler's error message, or do a google search - so it's really unlikely that they're going to spend time trying to understand the ethos behind StackOverflow or spending much time formulating a short, self-contained, correct example.
Because it's so easy for people to sign up to StackOverflow it only takes people a minute to post their badly formed question, which leads to the current torrent of the same questions day in day out. Without increasing either the 'cost' of asking a question or other barrier to prevent people who fail at using google, then it's inevitable that SO will continue to be besieged by bad questions.
-------------
As I said, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. The site needs better tools for finding duplicates or expanding into a wider set of questions, for which some answers will be longer, non-authoritative answers which just currently aren't a good fit for the site as it currently exists.
The current system lacks lots of tools that would be required to manage questions and answers that are currently off-topic. Personally I'd prefer it if they improved the site to allow more wide ranging questions and answers and better filtering of 'questions' (e.g. why is the only tool available to mark a question as something that is asking for a recommendation of a library to close it? Why can't we just tag it as 'find me a library' so that people who are interested in answering that can answer it?
*Note - even if an answer is provably incorrect, it won't get deleted unless it's downvoted into oblivion. Which leads to raising of eyebrows when answers to security questions have wrong answers that have been voted to 40+
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities.
What I see 6 years later is a lot of "why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!"
There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain.
I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc.
On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?
So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant.
The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to...
The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming. Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day (Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this (if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many do, you drink from the firehose at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest) or some mixture (if you stick to the home page).
The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal September thing, because that's most of what they see. The chance of dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just stumbling upon a new question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well... You're probably not answering very much anymore.
The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick.
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack Overflow pretty much forever.
I followed a parallel development with at mathoverflow.org. In its early days it had several fields medalists posting long answers to almost uniformly good questions. As the site evolved and more people joined the quality of questions gradually declined and it is generally much less exciting to visit the site.
> On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the sort of person who makes these places bad... but I do ask decent questions, and the only people who ever pay attention to them are the rep farmers hoping to cash in with a Google answer.
Perhaps users need a vote to reopen option? Even if you put it above 5 the questions I've run into would easily hit that based upon up votes on comments.
Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up.
The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.
I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.
It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex).
It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance.
Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.
A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism.
On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock posts.
May I ask which field/languages you are in? Cause my experience is not entirely like what you (and THE OP, to an extent) describe. Is it possible the community on SO is actually a bunch of subcommunities, not all as nice as the other?
I'm mostly on msbuild/labview/C++/C# tags both for questions and answers. I do see locked questions when looking for answers, but definitely not every single one rather the opposite, and I don't have the impression at all my participation is fruitless: some of my answers get a decent amount of upvotes which should be an indication they are useful now and in the future, some do not (mostly because they are in a less popular tag) but still get an explicit 'thanks this helped' from the OP.
Sure I do see the problems with SO, but unlike some I don't have an urge to rant because the problems are of minor inconvenience for me. Either my threshold for starting a rant is way higher, or I just have less problems. Or a combination of both.
Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question should be on stackoverflow".
It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.
"Which site do I submit to" shouldn't be as hard of a problem for certain.
Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for professional questions not minor schema questions).
I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of expertise [0].
I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There is a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years.
I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar.
I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer".
[1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).
My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here."
SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.
Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed.
I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.
If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.
I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B.
I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit could be problematic.
Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to have to.
You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag for moderator attention if it comes to that.
I'm actually struggling to recall the last time I followed a link to a StackOverflow question where the question wasn't closed for some reason or another. It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only goal of the site is curate old content.
I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer,
But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about)
Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far.
Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate.
Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible.
But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?
I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.
> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the long-term content of the site is much more important
Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages.
Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: "The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master". http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731
I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!).
The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard".
I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers?
I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.
SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you."
One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/
As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.
"Stack overflow has failed to understand it’s mission. Stackoverflow exists to share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary strategy of ranking good content highest."
After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution.
I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue.
I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here.
"Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..."
Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.
Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.
I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional!
Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.
Sounds like early Wikipedia. It started out fun - people from all over working together and helping each other out to create something that was going to change the world. My contributions may not have been the best quality possible, but others would edit or offer suggestions for improvement. Sometimes others would start something and get stuck, and I could offer an edit or suggestion to get them going again. To see the entries grow and improve, and be a part of a group helping each other to become better and achieve more, was one of the great things about it. Together, we made something from nothing.
Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions.
It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.
[+] [-] jofer|11 years ago|reply
I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/)
There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.
Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized".
I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.
[+] [-] codinghorror|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monksy|11 years ago|reply
Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API?
I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question.
For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out with a language/tool/library. I haven't found it very useful for complex problems.
Oh well. I've written about my rants on SO before. [I won't link here but it is in my submission history]
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).
[+] [-] PinnBrain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|11 years ago|reply
Do you have any actual examples?
[+] [-] apetresc|11 years ago|reply
The question was closed because the asker himself answered it apologizing for posting it, the problem being something completely unrelated to the code he had pasted. Everybody agreed.
I don't think it happens that frequently.
[+] [-] teh_klev|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelthelion|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ircmaxell|11 years ago|reply
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665
Etc...
And especially: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-oth...
Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone closes something incorrectly (you can point to a definite reason it's incorrectly closed), then re-open it or raise a meta post.
If you want to remove the ability for the people helping moderate a community to moderate, then how do you expect it to be moderated?
The big issue is that there are a LOT of low quality questions being asked. Duplicates. Many times literally copy/pasting the the question title into Google will give you the answer. Should these questions remain open because you want to repwhore? Should they remain open and further reduce the ability for Google to take you to a good canonical answer?
Or should they be closed and point to the good canonical answer? That way people can find their way to good content, rather than littering the site with duplication and poor copies of other answers.
The meaning of the CV reasons has changed over time as the community matures and figures out what works and what doesn't.
I do disagree with closing questions about particular framework (unless there's a dedicated SE site for it).
But bitching doesn't help. Raise a question on Meta. Step into the chat rooms and have a discussion. Get involved and help us fix things.
All bitching does is make the people who are putting time and effort into the community feel like they are doing something bad. Which is the fastest way to kill a community.
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.
[+] [-] Danack|11 years ago|reply
What is Stack Overflow's goal
-----------------------------
To be a large repository of reasonably correct answers to small technical problems, where there is only one reasonably correct* answer. Everything else is considered off topic, and unfortunately not a good fit for the site, due to the lack of tools to manage other types of questions
Although there are lots of other things that could be asked and answered, if they are out of that scope then they are considered off-topic and should be closed, according to the people who own StackOverflow. They're closed, not just to annoy people who want those other types of questions answered but because SO really lacks the tools to manage the answers to those questions reasonably.
For example the question "how do you install and configure nginx on different operating systems" is definitely a question that could be asked. However it would require a massively long answer, without a provably correct answer, with different approaches based on how you prefer to configure stuff. i.e. not a single probably correct answer.
Questions that ask for a recommendation for which library to use don't also meet the criteria of having a single reasonably correct answer. Which library you should use depends on lots of factors, and there's probably several, if not a hell of a lot more, possible libraries to use.
Also, questions like that invite debate, multiple answers, spamming by companies trying to promote their software etc. Although people might like to ask all sorts of questions SO have decided to try to limit the number of off-topic questions.
But hasn't the goal of being the large repository of answers already been achieved?
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Yup, which is why StackOverflow is a considered a shit-show by people who used to find it very useful. If I had to guess, I'd say that something like 95% of all questions that are 'on topic' have already been asked and answered.
Although I've been using it a while, it's just incredibly rare for me to find a technical question that would be on topic for SO, that doing a google search for doesn't have an answer on SO in the top 5 results.
I think the people who run StackOverflow are either morons or have business reasons for not dealing with this problem.
Although the 'find me a library' questions are off-topic they aren't really a big problem - what is a big problem is just the same set of questions being asked day in, day out by people who are too stupid to be able to use Google to find answers to questions like "Q) Why is my compiler saying there is a syntax error on this line?" "A) There's a syntax error on that line."
The vast majority of people who are asking questions on StackOverflow are people who either read their compiler's error message, or do a google search - so it's really unlikely that they're going to spend time trying to understand the ethos behind StackOverflow or spending much time formulating a short, self-contained, correct example.
Because it's so easy for people to sign up to StackOverflow it only takes people a minute to post their badly formed question, which leads to the current torrent of the same questions day in day out. Without increasing either the 'cost' of asking a question or other barrier to prevent people who fail at using google, then it's inevitable that SO will continue to be besieged by bad questions.
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As I said, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. The site needs better tools for finding duplicates or expanding into a wider set of questions, for which some answers will be longer, non-authoritative answers which just currently aren't a good fit for the site as it currently exists.
The current system lacks lots of tools that would be required to manage questions and answers that are currently off-topic. Personally I'd prefer it if they improved the site to allow more wide ranging questions and answers and better filtering of 'questions' (e.g. why is the only tool available to mark a question as something that is asking for a recommendation of a library to close it? Why can't we just tag it as 'find me a library' so that people who are interested in answering that can answer it?
*Note - even if an answer is provably incorrect, it won't get deleted unless it's downvoted into oblivion. Which leads to raising of eyebrows when answers to security questions have wrong answers that have been voted to 40+
[+] [-] DonHopkins|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasode|11 years ago|reply
What I see 6 years later is a lot of "why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!"
There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain.
I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc.
On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?
So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant.
[1]http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[+] [-] Shog9|11 years ago|reply
The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to...
The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming. Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day (Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this (if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many do, you drink from the firehose at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest) or some mixture (if you stick to the home page).
The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal September thing, because that's most of what they see. The chance of dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just stumbling upon a new question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well... You're probably not answering very much anymore.
The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick.
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack Overflow pretty much forever.
[+] [-] orbifold|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|11 years ago|reply
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the sort of person who makes these places bad... but I do ask decent questions, and the only people who ever pay attention to them are the rep farmers hoping to cash in with a Google answer.
[+] [-] james-skemp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] O____________O|11 years ago|reply
The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.
I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.
[+] [-] jarcane|11 years ago|reply
It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance.
Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.
[+] [-] fredley|11 years ago|reply
On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock posts.
Disclosure: I am a Stack Exchange moderator
[+] [-] savanaly|11 years ago|reply
Are you sure confirmation bias isn't causing you to overestimate the frequency of this happening?
[+] [-] stinos|11 years ago|reply
I'm mostly on msbuild/labview/C++/C# tags both for questions and answers. I do see locked questions when looking for answers, but definitely not every single one rather the opposite, and I don't have the impression at all my participation is fruitless: some of my answers get a decent amount of upvotes which should be an indication they are useful now and in the future, some do not (mostly because they are in a less popular tag) but still get an explicit 'thanks this helped' from the OP.
Sure I do see the problems with SO, but unlike some I don't have an urge to rant because the problems are of minor inconvenience for me. Either my threshold for starting a rant is way higher, or I just have less problems. Or a combination of both.
[+] [-] kl4m|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvivo|11 years ago|reply
It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.
[+] [-] Guvante|11 years ago|reply
Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for professional questions not minor schema questions).
[+] [-] monksy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|11 years ago|reply
I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There is a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years.
I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar.
I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer".
[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*
[1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).
[+] [-] Ensorceled|11 years ago|reply
SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.
If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.
[+] [-] jarrettc|11 years ago|reply
I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit could be problematic.
Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to have to.
[+] [-] _kst_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezyang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goronmon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|11 years ago|reply
But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about)
Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far.
Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate.
Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible.
But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?
[+] [-] icehawk219|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages.
Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: "The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master". http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|11 years ago|reply
I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!).
The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard".
I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers?
I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.
[+] [-] mmphosis|11 years ago|reply
One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/
As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.
[+] [-] davelnewton|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] claimstoknow|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eitland|11 years ago|reply
"Stack overflow has failed to understand it’s mission. Stackoverflow exists to share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary strategy of ranking good content highest."
[+] [-] mmorett|11 years ago|reply
I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue.
Here's that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-...
I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here.
"Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..."
Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.
Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.
You win StackOverflow.
[+] [-] EdSharkey|11 years ago|reply
Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.
[+] [-] reitanqild|11 years ago|reply
What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into being helpful. Same goes for others.
Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.
[+] [-] Falkon1313|11 years ago|reply
Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions.
It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.