Hacker News Reader

Comment by bunkat | Hacker News Reader

This is why I don't bother with SO anymore. I once spent a good 45 minutes carefully explaining how something worked to somebody that was obviously a beginner. When I went to submit the answer, I was informed that I couldn't because a moderator had closed the question.

When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed.

I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.

View on HN

This is a real problem with SO. SO is still the best place to go to find answers, but they do quite a bit - though not nearly as much as Wikipedia - to frighten off beginners. Arbitrarily closing perfectly fine, sometimes even great questions, is only the half of it.

Bill_The_Lizard does this so much I actually remember his name. I assumed it was just because he only had time to make snap decisions since he handling so much content. Now it sounds like this is a conscious decision to push beginners out.

It's also the manner in which it is done. About 5 years ago I asked a (dumb) question, I had no idea how to ask the "right" question and was closed down and told "this isn't your personal code writing service". I had phrased the question as can you give advice on how to proceed, I wasn't asking for code samples. Yes, SO wants you to post code, but if you have no idea where to start, some advice could go a long way. Being snarked at was unnecessary and it was 3 years before I posted there again.

Its surprising to me the amount of snark that is allowed from the moderators. Perhaps of the last 5 questions I've posted, I've received rude responses from moderators twice. Each time was in response to a mistake that I had made, so criticism was welcome, its the rudeness that was unprofessional.

A contributing issue might be that the moderators are the result of elections. This would weight moderator personality types towards people who crave recognition, perhaps even more on the narcissistic end of the scale. As opposed to more "level 5" type leaders who are probably less likely to run in an election and talk themselves up.

SO has a few bad mechanisms that encourage behaviorial issues that the SO people just like to stick their heads in the sand about. Closing valid questions is one example. Making most questions a race to copy and paste the correct response out of Google by awarding the first response that looks vaguely correct with a permanent "accepted answer" badge is another bad thing, and really hurts people trying to give thorough or good answers. It also really hurts when that accepted answer turns out to have issues. How many times have you come across a question and found an answer with 10x the upvotes of the accepted answer and a thorough explanation about why, while that answer may seem right at first glance, it's actually wrong?

I spent a day or two trying to get karma on SO and then gave up. SO is still a good resource for some types of questions, but for the most part, it's not worth hanging out there to answer questions.

Contributing to what ChrisDutrow said, SO used to be great for asking questions. However, they retroactively changed their points value for asking questions. I found this to be a bit counter productive.

I realize that they are trying to "fight the people gaming the system." But I just felt like asking questions wasn't valued well enough. My participation dropped on SO like a rock after that.

I wrote an article about SO 4 years ago, and many of the points still remain and there are newer issues: https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...

My participation in SO now is primarily focused on asking questions only when I have something I've been struggling with for quite a while. By that time, I won't get an answer on the questions because it's so obscure.

My reaction was different. I chose to keep asking a lot of questions and just brace myself to get kicked in the teeth by some people.

The value of just the chance that someone will clarify things and suggest things that I wouldn't have known about is worth the inevitable online beat down.

This is essentially what I do.

I've deleted some of the questions afterwards, after receiving a lot of down votes or having it closed, but generally within 30 seconds there'll be a two line answer to a question that I spent several hours trying to figure out.

It's still an amazing resource, just a broken points/closure system.

Consider that the vast majority of beginner questions are already asked and answered on SO; inability to Google is appropriately selected against, as it's a core skill.

The problem, I believe, with this line of thinking is that at a beginner level one simply does not know what to Google. You need a certain foundation to be able to simplify the problem down to a few key words. You need to understand the problem you're having on some level that beginners simply don't.

And I think it's a fairly elitist attitude that's prevalent in programming that leads people to treat the field as if there is some innate quality that makes for a good programmer that we want to filter for. It's a similar fallacy that leads people to believe that they're "just not good at math," I think.

I think there's a world of difference between the existential question of "what is a programmer" and the concrete question of "should SO allow yet another list comprehensions syntax question".

There exists a category of programmer who has so little knowledge that SO is not the place for them. They can be, should be, and are directed to Google and the documentation.

I think you may have misunderstood me if you boiled down my point to an existential question.

My point was that directing to Google or documentation is a basic misunderstanding (or simple forgetfulness) of what it means to be a beginner in the field. It is that telling someone to "Google it" or "read the docs" fails to understand the fact that beginners often simply can't comprehend documentation and can't use Google effectively because they do not have the foundation necessary to understand the problem they are facing.

This isn't an existential question of "what is a programmer." It's the statement that if SO is exclusive to "beginners" then it is doing the field a disservice. And it's a statement that directing beginners to Google or documentation is elitist and inherently exclusionary in practice.

I think that the people behind SO have weighed up the pros and cons - a million questions about the most basic parts of a language are not that helpful to anyone but the person asking, and are better answered in the context of a tutorial or whatever. Generally those kinds of super-beginner questions are not useful without context, so they get either a useless answer or a small tutorial that doesn't really work because it's on SO.

Expecting people to be able to learn a language from nothing by going on SO and asking questions just isn't going to work well. It'll burn out answerers and fill the site with mostly useless content. I respect the decision made by the SO guys to focus the site and avoid that, because a useful resource for one group is better than a bad resource for everyone.

SO should not be the point they start, then. They need some sort of mentoring/tutoring service, or start with a low-level beginner Online Course to help them learn the terms.

Once they have that under their belt, their knowledge/experience has been "bootstrapped" enough such that they know what they don't know, or where they need help, etc.

That's not helpful if those things aren't available or easy to find - which, for most beginners, they aren't.

(An online course in what, exactly? Web design? C? JavaScript? Scratch? CS fundamentals? "Coding"?)

The SO approach is just nasty - unforgivably so, IMO.

SO could at least have split into abs. beginner/more experienced beginner/journeyman/professional/expert levels.

Currently it just seems to provide an excuse for not very interesting people to bully beginners instead of helping them.

This is a fairly well known problem for SO (see people trying to explain a question about the ternary operator - a name you only learn after you first try to find out what it is - in any language where it's all symbols).

SO does account for this though. Questions can (and regularly are) closed as 'already answered'. Those questions then link through. This means that all those questions hang around as pointers with all the ways of describing the issue people tried, hopefully increasing the search term surface area.

This is the reason i stopped contributing to SO. It has become very insular and discourages interesting questions that are challenging to answer. The problem SO has is that the effort to become a mod is only put in by people who align with the rigid mindset of existing mods, and this perpetuates and reinforces a hostile culture.

I am saddened by his response. I have noticed that over time, it is becoming a much more negative environment - for beginners especially. I don't understand why the people in charge have chosen that direction. Up until now I did not know it was a conscious decision. I thought it was just a side effect of becoming larger and having too many mods who don't ask questions (only answer them).

Over the past 5 years, I've probably increased my skills 10 fold by actively asking questions on there, its really sad that other people will not have this opportunity: http://stackoverflow.com/users/84131/chris-dutrow

So their slogan should basically be "There are stupid questions". It's not how I was raised, and I don't agree with it, but at least they would be honest.

I don't disagree with your point, but I have to ask: How do you design a site like SO that is simultaneously valuable for both beginners and experts?

By letting everyone (almost) regardless of rep upvote or downvote questions and closing questions only when they're downvoted into oblivion. The trick is to get a wide variety of questions, and that means vague and confusing beginner questions need their fair shot as well.

SO did go through that phase.

People appear to be forgetting how it used to be. Before SO, that was how it was, and it sucked. You constantly found answers to beginner questions that were wrong or useless because of lack of context, or just unanswered questions when you searched.

SO is regulated because it means the content that is there is quality. Getting rid of stuff that doesn't work on SO makes it a better resource. Trying to shove that stuff back in would be terrible.

By all means, go set up that 'SO for newb questions', and when it's full of ananswered questions (because all the answerers get fed up trying to decode incomprehensible questions and feeding the help vampires), and content no one wants, maybe you'll get it.

Beyond all that, it's better for those asking too. Getting a short answer out of context isn't what those people need. They need proper, in-depth tutorials.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com