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| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site. It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work"). I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora. Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all. | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work"). This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/ | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish. That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them. | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish. Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information. From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons. Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center: Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.
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| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information. At the beginning, even Atwood and Spolsky didn't really know what "a Q&A site" is. They didn't have a precedent for what they were making; that was the point of making it. Even Quora came later, and it's useless now because they didn't get it. It turns out that a Q and A site actually fundamentally is pretty close to "a wiki of fact-checked information", just with Qs as a prompting and labeling mechanism. (Which really isn't that surprising; if you've seen e.g. science books for children in Q&A format, you'll notice the Qs are generally unrealistic for children to ask. I remember one that was along the lines of "is it true you can get electricity from a lemon?", used to introduce a description of a basic copper-zinc battery cell.) By 2011 or so, at least Atwood had figured this out, and was publicly blogging to explain it. By 2014, a core group of users clearly grasped the idea, but was still struggling to figure out what kinds of close reasons actually keep questions on target (and were also struggling with a ton of social issues in general). > Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange Not true. https://stackoverflow.com/tour | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > https://stackoverflow.com/tour From your link: > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. > > Just questions... > > ...and answers. And that's specifically what you said the site was not; people were going there for answers to their questions. They weren't getting them. |
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| ▲ | foobarbecue 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...? | | |
| ▲ | threecoins 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Here is one fine example. [1] The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you.
There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit...
[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ | | |
| ▲ | rob802 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here: > "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them! > Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR! | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | js8 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that. It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri). | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | There is nothing "passive-aggressive" about closing a question as a duplicate. It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with. What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed. Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem. It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it. > What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer. You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call? > Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer. So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago. There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago. What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there. The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived. Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question. > The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself. We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about. |
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| ▲ | foobarbecue 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction. |
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