The site should be made newbie-friendly
Or, rather, question-friendly.
I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides.
But please hear me out.
Pl...
I’m surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer’s time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you’ve tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.
I think the real problem is that people’s expectations aren’t properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.
I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I’ve found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying “look it up” is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that’s discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who “don’t get the site” to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it’s valid. I wonder if that’s why they’re pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who “don’t get the site” to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
Stack Overflow does have chat rooms, though it takes a bit of rep to get access to them (though that can be rep from any instance of stack exchange - this is because when it didn’t have a rep requirement they were spammed).
The next question would be “to what extent should Stack Overflow (the site) be redirecting people to other sites?” Consider the “if you don’t like {system}, to what extent does {system} need to be responsible for directing you to somewhere else?” Should Reddit be redirecting all its malcontents to Lemmy? Should Lemmy (the org / devs) be sending people who don’t like how its run to KBin or Mastodon?
Two things there - first, is it better to say “your question isn’t a good fit here, try this other place that accepts that type of question” (note that even if neutral wording is used people will interpret it as “your question sucks, go ask over there where its marginally better than Yahoo Answers”) and would the other place appreciate getting the poorly formed newbie questions at the rate that Stack Overflow gets them? Could any discord handle the hundreds of newbie questions that SO gets daily? How much of a disservice would Stack Overflow be doing by redirecting those questions to someone else?
I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It’s the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it’s less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn’t need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don’t bring value to SO’s database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.
Consider, however, “what if on every Python question on SO, someone left a comment to check out the python discord channel to ask their questions”.
Would the python discord channel be able to handle that volume of beginner questions (about 1 question every 5 minutes all day, every day)? And if someone did post that and try to encourage people to ask there instead, and would a representative of python discord go and ask SO meta to dissuade that user from doing so?
Sites like Stack Overflow, if they even point/redirect a fraction of their traffic at some other place can overwhelm the capacity for both support and moderation of that other place easily.
Part of the problem is also that many people asking questions don’t want help, they want copy and passable answers that involves them (the person asking the question) doing as little as possible. I realize that’s a controversial stance in some circles, but if you spend time trying to help all the users with low rep on SO (and even some with higher rep), it feels like they represent a significant portion of the people asking questions. Sampling bias? Confirmation bias? Dunno… I’ll admit to some bias somewhere… but I still know what it feels like.
It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking.
I don’t really think that’s the problem here. It’s pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here’s a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I’ve had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:
To be candid, this is much to lengthy and broad to follow. When you get the wait cursor (the spinning beachball of death), it means that the system is waiting for something before it can move on. It could be from either RAM or your disk or another application. Before you start taking drastic steps, boot into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists.
If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It’s clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.
In fact if you look back at most of my questions you’ll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn’t provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it’s just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand
SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions.
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
Though I’ll certainly agree with that it doesn’t reward giving good answers to hard questions enough and rather encourages easy answers to popular questions (even if the popular questions have been asked before).
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
I’m not sure how rewarding those are - or common. A total of 257k out of 21M doesn’t suggest many people are getting rewarded for flagging (and that’s just one). Raising 80 helpful flags (for example flagging spam or people leaving rude comments) is less than 0.07% of the user base.
The cleaning the queue is… Stack Overflow’s review queues have never been cleared. Today’s stats for Stack Overflow’s close queue ( with 3000 items in it that time out after 3 days https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ) has had 273 reviews done (not all were close votes) done by 18 people (out of 21 million) and most of those people who have done the majority of the reviews received the marshal badge over 5 years ago and so aren’t getting any new rewards for doing more. You are equally rewarded for clicking “leave open” as you are for clicking “close” in the queues.
There is no reputation reward for any of the review tasks either.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
You can do at most 40 reviews per day (to avoid people going on autopilot) but you are no more rewarded for doing 40 reviews in a day than you are doing 1 review a day for 40 days. The only exception to the 40/day limit is for diamond (elected) moderators.
Furthermore, you’ll note that the review that you recently did (first posts) you were rewarded for doing it for the firs time… and your review action (which is public) was “looks ok” rather than down voting it or flagging it (though the answer you review wasn’t upvoted… so its ok, but not ok enough to up vote?).
The goal of the review queues is to get people to just check to make sure things are going ok.
If/when you get to 3000 rep, you’ll be just as rewarded for casting a close vote in the close vote queue as you would for saying “leave open” - or going into the reopen queue and casting a reopen vote.
The point is that the one sided statement of “SO rewards tagging and closing questions” doesn’t properly capture what you are doing. Additionally, the rewards for doing reviews (badges) is completely separate from the rewards that drive the rest of the site (reputation).
Overall, the system of voting, curation, and moderation on Stack Overflow has broken down. There are not enough people doing these things on a regular basis and so the actions that are taken to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers are predominately “close” rather than “cultivate and curate” because there isn’t enough time for people who are able to do those tasks to do so and make a meaningful impact.
Your next badge would be to help out in the first posts review queue another 249 times.
The badges are there to help guide new users to discovery of the site as they participate more on it. Voting everyone does and understands, but few people see the review queues unless guided there by badges and blame “the moderators” (which is everyone on the site with sufficient rep to do reviews) for actions.
How do you get users who have participated enough to get 1000 rep to do a first posts review? Or 2000 rep to help out and check the suggested edits? Or 3000 rep and see if things should be opened or closed other than with the badges prompted prompted by reaching various reputation thresholds?
Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
Zulip and Slack and discord are quite good for interactive help with someone on a problem now. They’re absolutely a non-starter for searching for past issues so that you don’t need to ask someone to get interactive help now.
Reddit is ok as it’s indexed by google… until people go through and delete their old content. Sure, that’s fine and it’s their content, but it also means that you’re asking questions there. And you’ll also note the curation and formatting of in https://www.reddit.com/r/javahelp/ isn’t exactly up to Stack Overflow standards.
The point is that these are different systems with different goals and are trying to do them in different ways.
Reddit doesn’t care about the long term searchable value of a question or answer as much as Stack Overflow does because once it drops off the page it’s gone and no one is going to find it again. Stack Overflow had a different goal.
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
It’s fair to argue if its by programmers anymore - but that was its goal and its a very different goal than “help each person who asks a question.”
I’m surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer’s time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you’ve tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.
I think the real problem is that people’s expectations aren’t properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.
I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I’ve found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying “look it up” is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that’s discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who “don’t get the site” to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it’s valid. I wonder if that’s why they’re pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.
Stack Overflow does have chat rooms, though it takes a bit of rep to get access to them (though that can be rep from any instance of stack exchange - this is because when it didn’t have a rep requirement they were spammed).
The next question would be “to what extent should Stack Overflow (the site) be redirecting people to other sites?” Consider the “if you don’t like {system}, to what extent does {system} need to be responsible for directing you to somewhere else?” Should Reddit be redirecting all its malcontents to Lemmy? Should Lemmy (the org / devs) be sending people who don’t like how its run to KBin or Mastodon?
Two things there - first, is it better to say “your question isn’t a good fit here, try this other place that accepts that type of question” (note that even if neutral wording is used people will interpret it as “your question sucks, go ask over there where its marginally better than Yahoo Answers”) and would the other place appreciate getting the poorly formed newbie questions at the rate that Stack Overflow gets them? Could any discord handle the hundreds of newbie questions that SO gets daily? How much of a disservice would Stack Overflow be doing by redirecting those questions to someone else?
I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It’s the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it’s less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn’t need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don’t bring value to SO’s database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.
https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/6/python and https://sopython.com/chatroom for SO’s python chat room.
Consider, however, “what if on every Python question on SO, someone left a comment to check out the python discord channel to ask their questions”.
Would the python discord channel be able to handle that volume of beginner questions (about 1 question every 5 minutes all day, every day)? And if someone did post that and try to encourage people to ask there instead, and would a representative of python discord go and ask SO meta to dissuade that user from doing so?
Sites like Stack Overflow, if they even point/redirect a fraction of their traffic at some other place can overwhelm the capacity for both support and moderation of that other place easily.
Part of the problem is also that many people asking questions don’t want help, they want copy and passable answers that involves them (the person asking the question) doing as little as possible. I realize that’s a controversial stance in some circles, but if you spend time trying to help all the users with low rep on SO (and even some with higher rep), it feels like they represent a significant portion of the people asking questions. Sampling bias? Confirmation bias? Dunno… I’ll admit to some bias somewhere… but I still know what it feels like.
I don’t really think that’s the problem here. It’s pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here’s a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I’ve had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:
If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It’s clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.
In fact if you look back at most of my questions you’ll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn’t provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it’s just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
Though I’ll certainly agree with that it doesn’t reward giving good answers to hard questions enough and rather encourages easy answers to popular questions (even if the popular questions have been asked before).
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
I’m not sure how rewarding those are - or common. A total of 257k out of 21M doesn’t suggest many people are getting rewarded for flagging (and that’s just one). Raising 80 helpful flags (for example flagging spam or people leaving rude comments) is less than 0.07% of the user base.
The cleaning the queue is… Stack Overflow’s review queues have never been cleared. Today’s stats for Stack Overflow’s close queue ( with 3000 items in it that time out after 3 days https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ) has had 273 reviews done (not all were close votes) done by 18 people (out of 21 million) and most of those people who have done the majority of the reviews received the marshal badge over 5 years ago and so aren’t getting any new rewards for doing more. You are equally rewarded for clicking “leave open” as you are for clicking “close” in the queues.
There is no reputation reward for any of the review tasks either.
With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
You can do at most 40 reviews per day (to avoid people going on autopilot) but you are no more rewarded for doing 40 reviews in a day than you are doing 1 review a day for 40 days. The only exception to the 40/day limit is for diamond (elected) moderators.
Furthermore, you’ll note that the review that you recently did (first posts) you were rewarded for doing it for the firs time… and your review action (which is public) was “looks ok” rather than down voting it or flagging it (though the answer you review wasn’t upvoted… so its ok, but not ok enough to up vote?).
The goal of the review queues is to get people to just check to make sure things are going ok.
If/when you get to 3000 rep, you’ll be just as rewarded for casting a close vote in the close vote queue as you would for saying “leave open” - or going into the reopen queue and casting a reopen vote.
The point is that the one sided statement of “SO rewards tagging and closing questions” doesn’t properly capture what you are doing. Additionally, the rewards for doing reviews (badges) is completely separate from the rewards that drive the rest of the site (reputation).
Overall, the system of voting, curation, and moderation on Stack Overflow has broken down. There are not enough people doing these things on a regular basis and so the actions that are taken to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers are predominately “close” rather than “cultivate and curate” because there isn’t enough time for people who are able to do those tasks to do so and make a meaningful impact.
Your next badge would be to help out in the first posts review queue another 249 times.
The badges are there to help guide new users to discovery of the site as they participate more on it. Voting everyone does and understands, but few people see the review queues unless guided there by badges and blame “the moderators” (which is everyone on the site with sufficient rep to do reviews) for actions.
How do you get users who have participated enough to get 1000 rep to do a first posts review? Or 2000 rep to help out and check the suggested edits? Or 3000 rep and see if things should be opened or closed other than with the badges prompted prompted by reaching various reputation thresholds?
I’m sure that people still go to https://javaranch.com to view posts like https://coderanch.com/f/33/java for getting help and searching for answers.
Zulip and Slack and discord are quite good for interactive help with someone on a problem now. They’re absolutely a non-starter for searching for past issues so that you don’t need to ask someone to get interactive help now.
Reddit is ok as it’s indexed by google… until people go through and delete their old content. Sure, that’s fine and it’s their content, but it also means that you’re asking questions there. And you’ll also note the curation and formatting of in https://www.reddit.com/r/javahelp/ isn’t exactly up to Stack Overflow standards.
The point is that these are different systems with different goals and are trying to do them in different ways.
Reddit doesn’t care about the long term searchable value of a question or answer as much as Stack Overflow does because once it drops off the page it’s gone and no one is going to find it again. Stack Overflow had a different goal.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
It’s fair to argue if its by programmers anymore - but that was its goal and its a very different goal than “help each person who asks a question.”