Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.
I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource.
That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion.
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, should.
But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.
Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.
While I'm ranting, I'll just note that the position that there's a canonical way to ask every question and a that there exists a single acceptable answer is a fairly absurd proposition that, once accepted, leads to all kinds of equally absurd behavior.
This is by far the worst problem with Stack Overflow. The mods seem to leap at the chance to mark questions that are similar, but not identical, as duplicates.
There's one easy fix for this, and several other problems with SO: Don't close duplicate questions. Just cross-reference them.
Reasons:
- Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.
- Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
to almost, but not quite, the right question,
cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.
- Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.
- Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
a site like Stack Overflow. A way of dealing with
duplicate questions that rewards users for
cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
public shaming.
- Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.
- Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
about software engineering. Many questions really can
have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
can depend on subtle details. Which answer gets the
green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
of the asker than the quality of the answer.
That's exactly what closing duplicates does: cross references it to the original. If someone wants to post new information, they can do it on the original.
Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.
Yes. I shouldn't have said nobody. I actually like answering old questions, for example. I've earned that badge 10 times :)
What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.
It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally ignored.
It does happen. In fact, I think that a couple of my best (and highest-voted) answers are necromancers. However, I should note that the question you linked has 51464 views. And a lot of the questions I've earned necromancer for were similarly well-viewed. That's not typical. Most old questions get a fraction of those views.
Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.
It does cross-reference them. But read the rest of my bullet points. It isn't just about cross-referencing. It's about cross-referencing in a way that encourages a vital community that resonates with SE's gamified nature by keeping the site fun for all players.
Closing with a link to the original is cross-referencing in a way that does just the opposite: It decreases the vitality of the community by taking away opportunities for newcomers to take part in the gamification feature.
Let's frame the issue another way: What's Stack Overflow really for? Is it for people to ask questions and get answers? Or is it just a gamified Wikipedia?
The number of times I've come across a question that was marked as a dupe, and the linked to question it was "duping" had nothing to do with my issue pretty much means anytime I see an SO link, I know I'm in for a world of hurt, bad answers, and links to no where.
SO has hurt the industry more than helped, I believe.
It doesn't take a mod to mark as dupe. Five normal users or one with a gold badge in the tag the question is in suffice. Took me a bit by surprise the first time I closed a question with just my own vote.
It reminds me of the Wikipedia "notability" fight from early last decade. The cost of adding an extra page to Stackoverflow/Wikipedia is beyond trivial, there is no reason to restrict additions except to please these mods who want to build a tidy card catalog.
It's almost like there should be a mechanism when marking a question as a duplicate to automatically move the answers from the new question to the old question... along with a 301 redirect on the removed-as-duplicate URL.
Not sure if that would work since most "duplicate" questions are similar but not identical. Therefore an answer responding to the duplicates' specific use-case would be confusing in the context of the original question. Perhaps include the duplicate question in the answer when it's merged. Hidden behind a link e.g "This answer was posted in response to a duplicate question" and a link to view the content of the duplicate question.
If a question gets asked more, maybe having more indexed landing pages for it for search engines will make it easier to find. It seems to be a popular question after all! Why limit yourself to just one answer?
A closed question isn't automatically deleted, so the search engines can still find it. You'll just need to click another link to find the answers.
Theoretically it's better to have all the answers in one place instead of scattered about, so that you can compare and contrast them. In practice it's far from ideal. Often a new question will generate a fresh take on an answer, and the diversity would be welcome.
If there's a subtle difference between the "duplicate" question and the older one, you can edit it to highlight the difference. Unfortunately that's hard to do, and you're unlikely to get the reopen votes even if you do a good job.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time.
However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.
On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive."
It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.
Yeah slant is ok, but still needs more users/moderation to be as useful as SO (even despite questions getting closed). Eg I browse to http://www.slant.co/topics/799/~what-are-the-best-continuous... and it lists 'Visual Studio default theme' as an option with one recommendation. So I signed in but I see no way to tell a mod that it doesn't belong there? (I could add a con saying 'This is not a CI' though)
>Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:
Thanks :) Do you like what we did with the sources? (example: http://bit.ly/1va9Aj6. The favicons act like tabs if you didn't notice)
- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.
Good point. I'll double check with the analytics in the morning and see if we can simplify.
- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means
It's very opaque at the moment as I'm experimenting with various sorting algorithms almost weekly. Once I nail something down I'll work on the UI transparency.
- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.
We're building this! Not only "this is related to" but the ability to easily sync/add pro's from one occurrence of an option to another. (Yep, I'm aware of the potential issues with changing context, it's not going to be an auto sync, more like "suggested pros/cons/sources")
- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates
This is part of the same flagging project I'm in the middle of.
- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?
I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of people add pros/cons to be good community members, not necessarily due to them personally agreeing with them. I think it will end up being a checkbox that's enabled by default.
Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out! I'll keep working away until you describe Slant as "amazing" instead of "ok" :)
(btw if you want to help us shape the product even further we have a meta.slant.co)
I'm honestly really sorry about that, we're in the middle of building a flagging system at the moment. Up until now we typically have been using the comment to moderate but this is obviously really inefficient.
I removed that option, thanks for pointing that out. We have a long way to go on the moderation side of things.
Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:
- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.
- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means
- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.
- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates
- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?
Wouldn't this be easily solved by adding a "discussion" link from the question page to a wiki/forum page for more free-form or reddit-vote style questions?
Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.
But stack-everything only has such a vibrant and focused community because community rules have been made as clear as they have. If you go through Jeff Atwoods blog, you'll see that they are making the same considerations for Discourse, which has it's own "community rules" that ship with it. They're not only writing better forum software, they're also investigating what makes great forums great and horrible forums horrid and they're baking it into their product.
That's because Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Think back; remember the time when you actually got usable, timely help on a forum? Can't think of any? I didn't think so. Why? Because forums are flooded with useless, mindless crap, like users who can't be bothered to form complete sentences, who can't be bothered to do fundamental research or learn the most basic skills of their craft, who want someone to write their program for them, and who have an unbridled sense of entitlement.
It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.
Make no mistake about it: SO's attention to broken windows was revolutionary. But the system is out of control. For example, comments are now silently deleted because, as one mod told me, SO "is about content, not people." Anybody who thinks a site that relies on volunteer contributions isn't about people is so far down the wrong path it's hard to know what to say to them.
Sadly, I think a site that relies on volunteers to maintain the community standards is doomed to go down that path.
The people who tend to rise in a site that's organized that way are people who devote the most time to volunteering for the site. And volunteering for the site means spending a lot of time reeeeaallllyy focused on a glowing screen. Meaning people who naturally rise to the top in such a community are people who've chosen to devote large portions of their free time to content, not people.
The key difference though is that you got timely help from a forum by asking a question. However, as the next person trying to find the answer to the same question, I would have to wade through multiple forums with pages of answers (the answer you got was on page 3 of 5) with people asking clarification and the tangent from someone else (on page 2) about drivers I care nothing about.
Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed,
With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.
I only reach Stack Overflow from Google so its value to me in regulating answer quality is limited. The main thing it did for me was remove bad answer aggregators (expertsexchange and friends) from the front page of Google results.
When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.
I was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions.
And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.
Oh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO.
Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.
TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion.
Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to be the default behavior.
Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs.
SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge.
The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.
I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.
I think hostility to discussion is what separates SO from reddit. What SO trying to be is not the place to discover new knowledge through discussion, but rather repository of existing knowledge as shared by experts.
That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.
I don't think you would. The split between topics allows sites to cultivate communities with strong domain knowledge. In fact, the whole process that sites go through to be created[1] relies on finding such a group to kick the site off. Many sites fail this process, becoming wastelands. Some are eventually shuttered. Those that make it to 'graduation' do so only because they have a community that helps create the content in the first place.
If the sites were merged, this sense of community and ownership would be lost. This is why each site is separate, with a style somewhat picked/influenced by the site's community, with ads chosen by the community, and rules drawn up by the community. Stack Exchange is the sum of many small (and a few big) communities, not one big one.
It may be getting worse. Not sure. There are definitely a lot of questions that have been marked "closed" or "off topic" that I would genuinely like to have seen more answers to.
The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.
People now seem to be afraid to answer for fear of downvotes, and those that do get downvoted go on a witch hunt and downvote anything you've ever posted.
Nope, not at all. MSFT employees will have to earn reputation just like all the other users. I imagine there's already a few on the site that have gained the usual kinda privileges - vote to close, downvote, flagging etc. And there'll be non-MSFT users who'll be IE tag specialists and already familiar with what is considered an acceptable IE question to ask.
It has turned into something like Reddit, where many people will do everything for points. Some of them also have a very elitist mindset and are hostile towards new users who make mistakes.
I agree. Considering most people with IE will be regular computer users and not power users, I can see their questions being downvoted to oblivion and their questions closed.
I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.
Microsoft has been opening up for a decade...its first open source project, WIX Tools, was released in April 2004. ASP.Net MVC source code was released five years ago. Even before that, the CLI was released as an open specification as far back as 2000. Hence Mono.
I have never understood why people consider Microsoft "Closed". Apple is closed. Microsoft in past too had been extremely open to all sort of partnerships. They built technologies that were relatively ahead of open source world.
Probably because until relatively recently, MS has not open sourced very much or any software, whereas Apple has a number of notable open source projects (LLVM/Clang, Webkit/JSCore, ...). OS X is also build on open source software (BSD, Mach) whereas Windows is not.
There are other reasons too, but those are the biggest ones, I think.
An outsider's view: Microsoft has long relied on their open-if-you-have-money model (shared source), wherein if you mattered to them, you could pay them money to see the source. Presumably, if you paid them more you might even be able to make changes and use them for your own purposes.
Apple, OTOH, embraced open-source from the beginning (for a given value of embrace). Lots of open-source projects that go fine as long as you do it the Apple way and don't mind them passive-aggressively slowly pulling away, but not enough to kill the project.
I love me some Apple, but let us not pretend that they're saints compared to MS when it comes to actual, existing projects.
> Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community.
They've been doing things like this for years now. I think it's more that the tech community is starting to take note of these things that they are doing.
