Comment by johnslegers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnslegers | Hacker News Reader

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I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO’s intricate workings!

Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about.

During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved.

However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…

> Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

This strikes me as a key point that went unaddressed in the reply article. Yes, trolling is a standard feature of the internet. Yes, ignoring it is the right thing to do. But most places, trolling means an anonymous or throwaway account was rude, and will probably be removed/downvoted on any moderated site.

On Stack Overflow, we're frequently talking about reputable power users mocking novices, and being rewarded for that behavior. When a novice programmer shows up and is promptly insulted by someone with a decade more experience, something has gone terribly wrong.

Obviously something has to be done to help control the tide of "fix my voodoo code" posts that come through, but right now the 'cure' is largely insulting non-answers from major users. That's a terrible, antisocial way to address the problem.

> The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed.

Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...

Taking article views as acceptance for the article's viewpoints is quite the fallacy. That headline alone will generate many thousands of views because people are curious, not because they agree -- this is a problem with the internet as a whole these days, so many people have news and topics filtered and curated to their own beliefs, they are unaware that they are living in their own "filter bubble" and thus we assume if I click on article a it means I like article a, so news algorithm xyz will proceed to show me more like a.

I've read the article. It has some legitimate claims, I've even experienced some of them, but I am not so thin-skinned as some people are about internet points, and these issues aren't exclusive to StackOverflow. They are gripes about internet behavior, and human behavior as a whole. It all has to be taken into context, as many point out, the situation was much worse before Stack Overflow.

In the article,

> Quora might seem like an obvious choice, but it shares many of the issues common at Stack Overflow,

Exactly. You can take Stackoverflow and substitute Quora, or reddit in some cases and get the same exact situations described. It's a people problem. Anything led by a curated community of imaginary points will naturally produce elitist behavior. Heck you have this problem in real life (opposed to virtual life) in Academia, a.k.a the "academic elite," what makes you think it is going to be any different on the internet?

I've been getting the same vibe but have nowhere near the amount of experience in the industry as you.

Many times I've seen other users link answers from a previously asked question to a newly asked question, so I thought I was allowed to do the same....

Nope! Someone told me I was "plagiarizing" (I had clearly linked the old post and quoted the text containing the answer) and shortly after I had a moderator in the thread talking to me...

Later that day I got a message from a different moderator about the same issue to which I replied, but it's been a few days and still no reply...

Many of the down-votes my answers receive are from users who incorrectly answered the OP's question, but they still negatively impact me considering I only have ~35 rep at this point.

The big issue here is that you're identifying duplicate questions (which is helpful!) but don't have the reputation yet to mark them as duplicates. So you have answers that are essentially calling them out as duplicates, but won't help them get marked as such.

That's... A hard problem. On the one hand, it'd be nice if we could just lower the reputation needed to flag things as duplicates... on the other, there's a real risk of abuse there if folks who aren't yet familiar with how things work go around flagging things and annoying askers: there are a lot of new questions that are similar to existing questions, but have subtle differences that a cursory examination may not pick up.

An idea that's been tossed around for a few years is to enable folks to essentially post "this is a duplicate" answers that do nothing but link and summarize another answer... If they get upvoted / accepted, the question is a duplicate; if they get downvoted, it's not. There are some potential pitfalls there too, of course.

In the meantime, my best advice would be to summarize the answers you're linking to, and spend at least a sentence or two explaining how they relate to the question you're answering... Then include a link as your source. Not only does this avoid problems when the question isn't a duplicate, it doesn't make it look like you're just trying to ride the coattails of someone else (which tends to inspire negative reactions in people even when the answer is helpful).

More advice here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing

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