Stackoverflow website sucks because of its moderators and Top Users

[Matthew N Davis]

As a regular participant on the site (Matt Davis), I understand what you are referring to, but I take exception to the notion that all "the top uses" start voting down and ranting. I have never once seen Jon Skeet, for example, "rant" on SO. The same goes for Marc Gravell and most of the other truly top users. Most of the top users and many others, including myself, view SO as an opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with those that may be new or stuck on a particular problem. This covers the vast majority of my experience on the site. Still, your criticism is not without merit. There are some users that do tend to lord their experience over newer users and abuse the privileges afforded by their reputation. But these are not ordinary SO users. They represent a small, but sometimes very vocal, minority. In my experience, new users that ask a "simple" question are often asking a poor question. In many cases, the question has already been asked and answered before by other users. In these cases, the questions are closed quickly with a link to the duplicate. Other times, it is clear that the question is related to homework, which is a clear "no-no" on the site. Still other times, the question is convoluted or constructed with very poor English to the point that it is simply impossible to understand what is being asked. In both of these cases, the questions will be closed quickly, which may certainly add to the frustration of a new user but is in keeping with the policies that have been enforced for years now. For me, SO is an invaluable resource. I find that many problems I encounter have already been addressed on the site, and I flag many questions so that I can use the answers for quick reference in the future. There is no other place like it on the internet for developers. In closing, I regret that your experience with SO has been met with frustration. Despite your misgivings, I stand by my claim that the vast majority of users are there to help, not to tear down. I would encourage you to continue learning and, when possible, contribute to the learning to those coming behind you. That's how we help ensure the progression of our craft.

[Shog9 0]

Bingo. FWIW, I collected some stats a while back on how much cruft gets deleted for various reasons. One of the things that persistently irritates me about searching for problems on the 'Net is wasting time clicking through to unresolved problems - getting questions that can't be effectively answered out of circulation to make room for those that are is critical, IMHO.

You must be careful in the forest Broken glass and rusty nails If you're to bring back something for us I have bullets for sale...

[Shog9 0]

I like your restaurant analogy... I was in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, and took time to visit my favorite restaurant there: Mother's. Amazing food, great prices, constantly busy, but... Not the sort of place where someone sits you down, takes your order and chats about the weather. You're expected to know what you want, ask for it, pay, and get out of the way until your food is ready to be picked up - if you screw that up, you'll be gently but firmly informed of protocol. SO aims to be the Mother's Restaurant of programming Q&A sites - open to all, providing good results fast. Anything that gets in the way of that is ruthlessly stripped away. BTW, if you ever encounter issues with your account again, just let us know[^] - I or someone else will fix it.

You must be careful in the forest Broken glass and rusty nails If you're to bring back something for us I have bullets for sale...

[MarkRHolbrook]

Member 9082365 wrote:

But there are restaurants not unlike that and they have a regular clientele who go precisely for that reason. Some people thrive on rough and tumble, insult and abuse. That's just human nature.

You are absolutely right. However (pulling the age card here :-) in my almost 60 years of life not many last. Sure some do but eventually another restaurant comes long that offers better this, better that, cheaper and right across the street etc. The only thing... usually... that keeps the first place in business is a change. As far as "reputation" I guess you are right that especially in this day and age you should search, read, get feedback on the place you wish to join before you join. However we are now in a "gotta have it yesterday" environment where sometimes the answer you need is really needed quickly or bad things could happen. It would suck to have to tell my boss. Sorry... I need to do a few hours of web research to see if I should join StackOverflow because I think they have the answer I need. I agree 100% that it is futile to expect StackOverflow and similar big sites to change and trust me I'm not looking for a path of sweet smelling roses and a gift card because I graced their website with a question or comment. I don't mind being told when I'm wrong or doing something stupid. I try hard not to do so but when you are degraded for reasons beyond your control and for attempting to offer something that might help someone someday then it really says to me that StackOverflow is already on the path of those restaurants we speak of above. They will fade over time. Probably not ever just disappear but certain they have left the door open for others to jump in and take away membership. And to make it clear I was not ASKING SO to change just for me. In fact I didn't ask them to change at all. The very existence of this thread indicates I'm not alone in my feelings and beliefs about that site. So don't get on me about trying to change SO. I wasn't I was merely (just like I was on SO) attempting to add to this thread my opinion. Pulling the old card out for the last time, I'm almost 60 and I've been programming since I was 16. One of my first jobs was punching cards. Later I moved to up run technician where I ran the cards, kept the machine alive and later due to my electronics background became a repair technician. I think part of the issue today is there is almost too much information and it is too easy

[Francois Wahl]

pandu web dev wrote:

In stackoverflow, if a new one asks a simple question, then the top users starts down voting, ranting.

Can you link us the questions on SO that happened to? I would be very interested in the questions myself.

pandu web dev wrote:

If someone don't have knowledge on particular topic or another then the regular users start insulting them.

Could you please link to the SO posts in question that demonstrate this stated behaviour? I make every effort to flag any insulting comments and posts regardless of the users reputation.

pandu web dev wrote:

They call themselves as experts.

Could you please link to any SO comments or posts where users claim to be experts or what is your statement based on?

pandu web dev wrote:

They are playing with site good reputation.

Not sure exactly what you mean by "playing with good reputation" :( I love SO and I love helping people, getting reputation for it is self rewarding, though I could start charging for my efforts a affordable daily rate if that is preferred :)

pandu web dev wrote:

Overall this website has became very funny.

I think that might not be the intend of SO. SO is not intended to be funny but a collection of useful questions with useful answers that current and future users can benefit from,...for free. If you are stuck and have tried several solutions but don't know any further ask a question on SO. All that is required is a to the point question, describing the issue, a description of what they have tried and preferably some code demonstrating the issue, if possible. Having read the SO FAQ on what question to ask and how to ask them does help in obtaining the desired results. I had to do that too before I asked my first question. Reading FAQs and manuals are part of the learning process. SO is not for users looking to obtain help without any self effort, though they do get their questions answered by users who care more about upvotes than teaching a guy how to fish! SO is not oDesk, Freelancer or anything equivalent, though we do get sometimes users ask "questions" like: "Please write me an application that does X and Y. Thank you in advance" SO is also not a social

[MarkRHolbrook]

Thank you sir! I think the key point in your reply is:

Shog9 wrote:

if you screw that up, you'll be gently but firmly informed of protocol.

Note the words "gently" and "firmly". Those are great words and yes I've been to such a place and agree you do need to learn to fit in. Most people in the world have no trouble doing that however one needs away to "learn" how to fit in. The gently and firmly are one way that happens. You go in, you screw up, you get gently and firmly told here is how you do it next time. The problem I see so often at SO is the gently is completely missing and usually the firmly consists of all the reasons you should not allowed near a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Not often do the "gently and firmly" posts do anything to point the misguided soul towards the right way to do things.

Shog9 wrote:

BTW, if you ever encounter issues with your account again, just let us know[^] - I or someone else will fix it.

Thanks for that. I believe I did send a note but never got a reply. It just magically got fixed.

[Zan Lynx]

Oh yes the "simple question." Like one I saw today (paraphrased), "I am using pthreads. Something is wrong because when my thread finishes I notify my main thread but it never gets notified." Oh yes. Like I can answer that. No, that question vaporizes in less than 2 minutes with 6 downvotes. Because it is useless.

[Jadoti]

Why not post a link to the question you asked over there and got treated so harshly for so we can point out exactly why your question got pounded. SO is a community, and they're very newbie friendly, they're just not lazy, stupid, or redundant friendly. If your question could have been answered with a simple search, you're going to get pounded. If your question could have been answered with a little research on your part, you're going to get pounded. If your question shows you haven't thought about it at all, you're going to get pounded. If your question looks to be a valid question, but you have such little concern for those you're asking help from that you can't include sample code, full error text, ample description of what you're seeing, or any other relevant details, you're going to get pounded. Thought out questions that clearly state the problem including errors, what you've tried, how to recreate (if possible), etc., generally get answered. "Experts" answering questions on SO are just like you and me, and many of them do it to help the community. While they might start out helping every random user with their "how do I double click a file" questions, they will quickly grow tired of it and degrade to "RTFM" or just not answering the question altogether. Now, as far as part 2- why you get downvoted and deleted - SO is a community. The questions they are ignoring and not going to answer for above reasons need to get cleaned up somehow. So again, post a link to your question and I'll be glad to point out why you're seeing the reaction you are.

[Rio Rico Rick]

Hey if you have the card in your deck, might as well play it, especially if it makes no sense whatsoever!

hatfok King Yiddum's Castle Pegasus Galaxy

[pandu web dev]

People have complained in meta many times that the website users are rude like here, but no use SO is continuing in the same way. Top users try to prove that whatever they are doing is right. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161539/rude-responses-from-the-community[^] There are many questions where they post disrespectful comments or downvote etc. It is not a new thing. Since, stackoverflow comes in top of google search results, it has a good set of QA, that doesn't mean whatever they do with new users or beginners is correct.

[Dan Neely]

Not true. Any edit to a closed question automatically adds it to the reopen queue. (On the assumption that the edit was an attempt to fix what was wrong.) You could also try leaving a moderator flag or asking why it was closed on Meta. However the Moderators aren't likely to summarily reopen it unless it was obviously closed by mistake or has ended up the subject of a close war; ditto for asking on Meta.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt

[_CodeWarrior]

I have never had any issue on SO. Most of the downvoted questions that I have seen have been because OP asked a question that is covered by 10 other previous posts, did not show any work, is vague, or is asking for recommendations that are often going to be biased. If, however, you do research and ensure that there are no other answers on SO that fit your situation, AND you create a well written post that shows what you have done, shows where you are having the problem, explains what you THINK is going on, etc, it will get answered. I have found that if I write my post, and look at the right hand pane there are a bunch of suggestions, and often I have found my answer there without posting, maybe 10 our of 15 times.

[luiggixd]

I'm a happy user of StackOverflow community, I highly participate in Java Q/As mainly by answering questions. After seeing this thread and similar questions on Meta StackOverfow[^] I start thinking on what can possibly be the root of all evil (like premature optimization ;P ). Anyway, let me try to provide a personal opinion on all the topics covered in your post:

Quote:

if a new one asks a simple question, then the top users starts down voting, ranting

Define simple question. For example, if somebody in Java asks "how can I create a hello world app" then I would post a comment saying "that's covered in a tutorial" and vote to close. This question lows the quality of the site. Ok, another (not that) simple question: "this piece of code doesn't work code that doesn't even compile I appreciate your help." ok now this is unanswerable at all, first because the code doesn't compile, and if it does compile but there's no stacktrace, then I usually have to read through a wall of code to tell OP: "you didn't initialize foo variable, thus you getting a NullPointerException...". There goes another simple question that lows the quality of the site. And a last example of a simple but too broad question: "how can I create RESTful web services in Java?". Again, this is an unanswerable question that can is already covered in plenty tutorials. No need to reinvent the wheel in stackoverflow.

Quote:

If someone don't have knowledge on particular topic or another then the regular users start insulting them.

I'm ashamed of this, and I see stuff like that for one of the following reasons (AFAIK): - OP is really lazy to understand the answer. You spot a question like "how can I foo the bar" then an answer posts "Use quo, it will foo the bar as you expect: Here's a sample code fulfilling the answer" and I upvote it for showing a good example, but then OP raises a comment like "ok now I need to baz the bar from foo, how can I do that?" and I reply in a comment "OP please read about how foo and baz are very close you just have to change one line it's not that hard" and OP starts complaining about me insulting and giving him the bad eye. Then, another user reads all that and provides a new answer with the line to change and he gets the accept

[_CodeWarrior]

http://stackoverflow.com/users/1535478/jennifer-marsman-msft[^] http://stackoverflow.com/users/471760/julie-lerman[^] http://stackoverflow.com/users/148870/amber[^] To be fair, I am not a woman, and I don't know the discrimination of women firsthand. But I am a StackOverflow user, and have had a number of very good and useful answers from the women there, and have never seen anything to suggest there was a discrimination problem. Just write good questions and the answers will flow.

[Br Bill]

Perhaps if the more powerful users who are being dickish had a way to get downvoted for their dickish behavior, it would help make it a more friendly environment. Newbs on the site have no power at all. They're encouraged to ask questions to gain reputation and then are often slammed for asking inappropriate questions. Sure, they should read the FAQ. But they're newbs. It's their job not to know what they're doing. When one of the dickish power users inappropriately punishes a newb for being a newb, or punishes an experienced user for doing something the power user just doesn't like personally, we "rabble" should have some way to vote asshole points on that power user. SO should put some effort into preventing the the site from becoming exactly what it isn't supposed to be - a bully den.

[jibalt]

No, it's you who suck. StackOverflow is an extremely helpful place; questions only get downvoted when the poster hasn't followed the site rules and is lazy.

[jibalt]

I appreciate the people here complaining about SO for self-identifying as morons. The software industry is better off without them.

[jibalt]

Er, no, the goal of SO is to have good questions with good answers. That's why it is the go-to place for professionals to find answers. Several times every week I google a technical issue and almost always the explanation or answer is already posted at SO.

[C Grant Anderson]

Yes, I've noticed the attitude over there as well. Since CP wants to compete with SO why not build a Knowledge Tree of posts and answers that they could quickly search and browse (and link to articles)? I have yet to see a proper Knowledge Tree structure implemented anywhere yet. And I've haven't had the time to write about it. But it's a proper and significant next generation step in the evolution of knowledge structures (another concept that needs writing about). If anyone is significantly interested I will do a CP article on this.

[jibalt]

You rolled back grammar corrections? What a jerk.