[qubex]

I’ve experienced it often. I came across a question pertinent to a problem I was experiencing, I tried the work-around in the comments, it didn’t work, I mentioned this and was moderated to oblivion and attacked; I created a new issue, and drew fire for then answering it myself (but also accidentally using a comment to do so); I got hollered at for creating a link between the two issues; I was downvoted for being new. It’s a totally hostile environment. As of then I consider it a Read-Only resource (plus my questions never get answered anyway).

[shagie]

There are many Stack sites. Stack Overflow with its 6k questions/day has (by necessity) a different moderation approach than Computer Science.SE that has 16 questions/day.

That difference of several orders of magnitude in incoming questions results in very different moderation approaches. You can spend 15 minutes reading every new question and answer every day compared to trying to filter the 90% of crap that gets posted on SO in a few seconds. This means that new users can be given more guidance in crafting a question and getting answers... though again that depends on a user putting the time and effort into writing the question and making sure they understand the scope of the site first.

Each site has a different set of users who are using the moderation tools to make the site into the one they want to see. The highest rep user on CS.SE has substantial rep on CS, Math, Theoretical CS, MathOverflow, and TeX (not Stack Overflow). The next highest has rep on CS, Information Security, Cryptography and Theoretical CS (again, not Stack Overflow). The next highest is CS, Theoretical CS, TeX and then 2.7k (not even enough for a close vote) on SO. Followed by a user who has CS, Academia, Aviation, Travel, and English Language Learners (not SO). This is a different community with different goals - in particular, this one is about the mathematical underpinnings of computer science... and that shows in its user base.

[gbacon]

The different sites have different personalities as well. The main SO can be brutal just because the herd responses can be so swift. Niche categories tend to be friendlier, Aviation.SE for example. Gaming, Movies, and Sci-Fi all seem really friendly for the fairly large volume they see.

I have heard that chicken farmers have to monitor young chicks carefully for injuries that produce bleeding because when the other chicks spot one, they will relentlessly peck, which is likely to quickly kill the bleeder. Regardless of whether this is true, it’s a decent model for how drawing a bad initial response to a question can be fatal as the other chicks pile on. I once made the mistake of asking on Workplace.SE whether the HR profession had empirical support — as opposed to the usual conflicting folk wisdom — for whether including personal interests on a resume is helpful[0]. An early answer clearly failed to comprehend the question at a basic level, but it nonetheless was the initial spot of blood. Comments from multiple moderators saying the question was reasonable were not enough to stave off the pecking.

[0]: https://workplace.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4888/ques...

[shagie]

Aviation gets 9.2 questions/day. Arqade gets 23. Movies gets 16. SciFi gets 31. Combined that is 80 questions/day. About 1/4th of what the Java tag on Stack Overflow has gotten today.

You've got a higher percent of users who are more willing to invest the time necessary to help new users and a larger body of "good questions" that serve as examples.

Niche categories tend to be friendlier because you will see the same people more often and and have interactions with them more frequently. The vast majority of users on Stack Overflow ask a question (toss a bunch of text in a text area) and disappear. Pulling up the front page, you get questions where the entirety of the body of the question is:

> "i need to scan part of page by ImageEn in delphi for faster scanning like window7 paint scanner dialog! (screenshot)" ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/48050760 )

and

> "Hi I have the promblam the I want to sent with volley post a string to my php script on a server and get a Jsonarray. But I search a long time but didnt get an answer. Can sombody help me with that." ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/48050744 )

And remember that every minute there are 10 new questions asking for help in a similar fashion. When there are 10 questions a day, people can spend 1/10th of the time they're going to spend on moderation on the site commenting, editing, and helping every question. Lets say that's 6 minutes. Where there are 6k questions/day, or several hundred in the preferred language tag/day - you (and other people) making judgement calls on the order of seconds. Down vote and move to the next? Comment about how to improve?

It is very difficult to spend sufficient time to get people to update their question for it to be helpful. When I participated, I was hesitant to spend any more time doing community moderation than was evidenced by the person drafting the question. If they spent 10 seconds writing it, I'll spend 5 seconds reading it and 5 seconds voting on it. If they spent 10 minutes writing it, crafting a MVCE and getting the punctuation and grammar correct... I'll spend 10 minutes working with them trying to get it into the best question it could be. But if I'm only going to spend an hour... that's 1/6th of my time budget. It works when there's only a dozen questions/day but fails miserably when there are a few hundred.

[mcguire]

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758/why-is-stack...

[shagie]

I'm quote familiar with that post, the linked questions and comments are often quite interesting to read as a bit of social commentary. On large communities decaying over time, being nice or mean, and Stack Overflow ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/256003/ ) is another read that I would suggest about the social dynamics there.

Much of this has to do with a conflict between two visions of what Stack Overflow should be. Elsewhere (private slack channel post), I've mused about those visions:

++ The Atwoodians

Those who are drawn to the site by the original call for the site ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ )

> 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.

There is a word in italics there - its in the original. It is about good programing knowlege. Not all programming knowlege. It is about high standards and quality. This presents a higher barrier to entry and some degree of eliteism. It is also a vision of what the site can be.

Close and delete questions that aren't good. Delete answers that aren't good - especially if they make it harder to find information.

++ The Spolskyians

The Spolsky vision differed a bit, and it is hinted at in Joel's launch anoucement. ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... )

> In addition to voting on answers, you can vote on questions. Vote up a question if you think it’s interesting, if you’d like to know the answer, or if you think it’s important.

> ...

> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

Things that are interesting and helpful to someone. The annoucement encourages polls and questions with dozens of answers (the example being favorite keyboard shortchut in emacs). This is a different vision than the Atwoodians subscribe to and there are occasional debates to be seen on meta between people with these different visions.

Hot network questions that bring in more things that are interesting are wonderful. And they upvote interesting things to make it easier to find them too. In general, deleting posts should be avoided because it might be interesting or helpful to someone.

----

These two visions of what the site should be play out, and new users who aren't aware of the background can get confused as one post or another attracts the attention.

There are also people who come to the site with a view that its like facebook and since people like getting a :+1: on facebook, they should get it on Stack Overflow regardless of the material - it makes them happy and its good for people to be happy.

There are people who are using Stack Overflow as a differentiator between their resume and the hundreds of other applicants. Any down vote on their questions or answers impact is seen as impacting their future career prospects.

And then there are the people trying to keep their "develop a clone of facebook" bid that they made on eLance to under $100 costs that they're writing between classes on on the weekend so they have some left over for beer money.

[yorwba]

If you're also qubex on SO [1], then I'm not seeing any of that hostility. Did it get deleted, or is it that my perception differs because I'm an unrelated third party?

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/3637244/qubex

[qubex]

Yes that’s me, and yes there’s been a significant amount of a posteriori revisionism.

As somebody else pointed out, I answered my own question with a comment, which seemed innocuous enough, but was actually a formal faux pas. I guess I had it coming, I didn’t want to make myself out to be innocent and aggrieved, but it struck me as a bit harsh. Then again, everybody always feels they have been treated too harshly...

[afarrell]

> drew fire for then answering it myself

Which is really weird and unfortuante. Asking and answering a question yourself contributes useful information to the site.

[chias]

Answering your own questions is also explicitly allowed -- you are informed as such on the page where you ask questions.

By the sound of it, I suspect expect that what the parent drew fire for was answering his own question using a comment.

[qubex]

I answered myself with a comment, which was a faux ps. It’s rectified now.

[gbacon]

An issue with Stack Overflow is that the site incentivizes people with badges to review and disposition large numbers of questions and posts, which spurs Fastest Gun in the West competitions. For a new user unfamiliar with the culture, this can result in a question being downvoted and closed within minutes — not a terribly welcoming feel.

Changing the site’s incentives to reward soft skills such as mentoring and encouraging new users seems like a really hard problem.

Answering your own question is 100% in bounds; no one should criticize you for that. However, an answer should be posted as an answer, not a comment. My imagination fails early in the morning pondering how one might accidentally use a comment for an answer.

In the original question, was the workaround a comment or an answer? Did you stop at “didn’t work” in the failure report?

Got a link?

[cjwhite]

I'm sort of amazed that I find anything of value on there, given the same experiences.

[shagie]

The structure of Stack Overflow is designed to get question and answer pairs that contain the critical information and are easily discoverable by google.

Questions and answers that have value and that follow that model are likely to be more discovered by people using Google.

There are many people who consider all social media sites to be "the same" - basically posting whatever they want. Be it forums and facebook or whatever random idea hits your mind on Quora. Those are different models and work for different types of problems. An asynchronous debugging session likely works better on a more forum like site than Stack Overflow... and yet people post such questions to Stack Overflow. When those questions are found, the people who are entrusted with the various community moderation privileges, in an attempt to follow those ideas of "This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat." (from the tour) will use those moderation tools to try to make the good stuff more findable and the stuff that makes the good stuff harder to find... well... gone.

There are many different sites out there that have different focuses. Stack Overflow (and the model the rest of the Stack Exchange sites use) is trying for one narrow slice that they can do well. People that want a forum should look to a forum... those who want to ask for opinions and anecdotes should look to sites that do that better. Stack Overflow is not intended or designed to be the be all and end all of software questions.

[cjwhite]

Thanks for the reply, but this doesn't explain why correcting answers is so frowned-upon. Or a general hostility in tone from the mods.

No worries. I find that in practice the kinds of questions that I can't answer for myself (the kinds for which a natural language question rather than a straight Google search for documentation is helpful) are almost always already answered anyway. So having it a read-only site is not a big deal.

I think their model does indeed turn away a lot of people with good experience and intentions, and even leaves a lot of incorrect cruft lying around, but overall it's a mostly-beneficial source of information, with, as you say, high searchability.

[shagie]

First note - "mods" - only the people who have a diamond after their name are mods - https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators - its a rather small group.

Everyone on the site who has 15 reputation or more can participate in community moderation to some degree or another. There are people within that community who use the community moderation tools of voting frequently in an effort to have the site match their vision of what it should be... but they aren't mods.

When dealing with thousands of questions per day (90% of which are crap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law ), the amount of time they have to work with any one post is very limited. Often people are terse in their comments - it takes time to sit down and write a thought out reply... and that is very limited in comments if it isn't an answer itself (and to that point, that is by design).

This terseness of communication is often interpreted as rude. Its not intended to be - its just the medium and limitations. Yes, sometimes people are rude. The thing to do in these cases is flag the comment as rude - if there is a pattern with the behavior, the moderators (with a diamond) handle the flag and will take it up with the user who is rude. Saying that your code does not work as described in the question, however, isn't rude.

I applaud your use of google first. There are so many people who fail to realize that the goal of Stack Overflow is exactly for people like you - who search with google and find an answer and never need to ask a question on the site themselves.

The significant amount of incorrect cruft laying around is a side effect of people not using the moderation tools (downvotes on questions can make the questions get deleted and make search results better) or a value proposition that has entered the collective community moderation of "anything that attempts to answer the question has value and shouldn't be deleted." Unfortunately, that later point reduces the value proposition of the site and diminishes its utility.