Timeline for Over eager downvotes and close votes
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 21, 2013 at 5:39 | comment | added | Pekka | @Brian you have a point there, and I agree there's dumb voting going on and blind adherence to a code that looks bureaucratic to those not entrenched in SO's rules. Still, look at the size of this whole thing (5 million questions now! 7,000+ new every day) and consider that the "unwashed masses" are a painful reality - in some tags more than others. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 2:08 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | By giving lots of encouragement to nitpick slightly poor questions (review queue, badges for voting on questions, and the overall community attitude that we need to protect the site from hordes of unwashed masses), I feel like the site has started to become systematically unfriendly. And it's really discouraging that the response I'm getting isn't "huh, yeah, it has gotten kind of unfriendly around here, I wonder what we can do about that", but "no, you're wrong, we need to close these questions and set an example of people". | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 2:05 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | By the way, it's not just this example. It's a long term trend I've seen; this is just the most recent example I could come up with. I actually wasn't planning on saying anything, until I got involved in that discussion on Hacker News, and found many more people who have been off-put by the community. I was trying to defend SO, and talk about how useful it is, but there are so many people who have been burnt, and so many examples that I've seen of the community being unfriendly, that it's actually hard to defend. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 2:03 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | It actually doesn't take doing that much; it takes not being mean to them. Downvotes and close votes are ways of saying "your question is invalid". They should be used sparingly (except in extreme cases, of obviously abusive questions, "give me teh codez", or completely off-topic questions). I'm asking that people try to use them more sparingly, and maybe to change the implementation of review queues to avoid having too many people being too aggressive about slightly poor quality questions. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:53 | comment | added | slugster | @BrianCampbell I can understand that you're upset/annoyed by what happened, but the truth is that there is only so much you can do to fix the "nice to newbies / non techs / non native English speakers" problem. While it can be intimidating, I would suggest that its actually good to have this apparent entry barrier. I'd also suggest that you're experiencing the same disillusionment that a lot of experienced users have struck at some time - there's no real fix for that except a holiday. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:42 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | But I want to make sure that other people know about what I perceive to be a problem, and see if there are any good suggestions for addressing it. It's possible that there will be solutions that make everyone happy; that separate out more of the noise and preserve more of the signal. I don't know what those solutions are; that's why this is a "discussion" thread, not a "feature-request" thread. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:39 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | 'Posting a new discussion question about it and leaving a prolific amount of comments is going to do little to "solve" it.' So, there were two aims to this post. One was to point out this specific problem, in the hopes that maybe someone would vote to undelete and we could actually fix up that question. That has happened. The second was to open up a dialog about whether this kind of behavior, of downvoting and close voting too quickly, is harmful. We are having that dialog. It seems that there are a lot of people who disagree with me; I'm not surprised. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:39 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "Did you take the time to fix the question?" I spent my time answering the question, which is what this whole site is supposed to be about. I didn't have time to fix the question, because seconds after I answered, the owner deleted it. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:38 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "it's clear that the problem is that you are annoyed the community didn't share the same collective conscious as what you do." Yes, I am. I feel that the community has lost its way, become unfriendly and in many cases unhelpful, and is going to lose a lot of valuable contributors due to that. I am posting this in the hope of pointing out what I think it bad behavior on the part of the community, and to ask if anyone has suggestions for how to fix it. It seems that your opinion is "nope, that's not bad behavior", and that I shouldn't complain about what I think is bad behavior. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:26 | comment | added | Geobits | @BrianCampbell I feel voting to close is not the same as making fun of someone, but that's just me. While I have seen some of the latter at SO, those comments tend to get flagged/deleted pretty quickly. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:26 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | This really is not a theoretical issue for me; I've been quite hurt by this kind of behavior before, and there are places that I avoid because of it. When I first started contributing to SO, I found that it was a welcoming place, a nice change from earlier forums and IRC channels and the like. As time goes on, I'm seeing the kind of bad behavior that caused me to avoid those places coming up on SO. People are just defensively shutting people down rather than trying to help them learn how to ask good questions. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:24 | history | edited | slugster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:23 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | @Geobits Sure, and I'm a native English speaker who has plenty of experience with online forums, and have been put off contributing to other forums in the past because I asked questions not quite perfectly and had people make fun of me for it. There's a reason that I avoid many technical IRC channels; when I've asked questions in the past, about things where I didn't know exactly what information to provide, I had people make fun of me rather than explaining to me how to ask my question better. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 1:02 | history | edited | slugster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:56 | comment | added | Geobits | @BrianCampbell Your first question showed example code, an error message, and gave version information along with a clear explanation of the problem. It's hard to compare that to the question you linked above in any meaningful way. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:53 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | Some people who ask questions and avoid the site due to the unfriendliness may be people who could become valuable contributors answering questions if they are not pushed away. I started out here by asking a question, and stuck around because I got a helpful answer that taught me something about Ruby. I didn't ask a perfect question (the code isn't runnable as-is), and if I had gotten the kind of abuse that many new people get, I wouldn't have come back. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:48 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "Questions are easy, answers are hard. Many of the good answerers are busy professional people with a level of expertise that demands a good dollar rate per hour. If you start allowing crap questions then you will quickly lose these people, (to put it diplomatically) the site will degenerate to the point where you only have non-experts answering the questions of other non-experts." As someone with 82k rep through nearly 1000 answers, I know what it takes to answer questions here. The unfriendliness is being off-putting to me, and if it doesn't improve, may lose me and more people like me. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:45 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "That's a shame, but the site cannot be all things to all people." I don't want it to be. You'll note that I'm not coming here trying to ask that it's more accepting of open-ended questions, or anything of the sort. What I'm taking issue with is that the unfriendliness is off-putting to people, even for valid questions that just need a little fixup. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:37 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "You'll have to get used to this - you can submit a fantastic answer but there can be a bunch of reasons why it ends up goneburger." Please try to be less dismissive. I've been involved on StackOverflow for a long time, I know how it works. I feel like it's become less friendly in the last few years, and am trying, by posting this, to see if I can change that. I recognize that questions are deleted sometimes, and I don't have any problem with it in general, but coupled with the other problems described here, I thought it was worth pointing out that the effect was also to waste my time. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:33 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | A jury is deliberative; they get evidence presented from both sides, and are able to debate among themselves. Close votes and downvotes come from whoever happens to get peeved about some minor problem with a question. Since there's no way to vote against close before a question is closed, and reopening a question is much harder, I feel like the system is weighted fairly heavily in that direction. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:31 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "while what happened is frustrating, you can't (and shouldn't try to) beat the community. A jury of your peers acted on what they saw, and the owner wasn't inclined to bring the question up to standard." Sorry, I just don't buy this. This isn't a jury; this is a bunch of people who, in many cases, don't really know what they're doing downvoting on a website. I've seen this happen a lot more since the introduction of the review queue and extra encouragement to vote on questions; it leads to people who aren't really familiar with the topic at hand voting to close questions for some extra points. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:30 | comment | added | Brian Campbell | "just because you understand (and can answer) the question that doesn't mean it should stay open." So, there are several reasons why answerable questions should be closed (they are homework, they belong on another site, etc). But some questions are closed for reasons that boil down to "they aren't answerable in the current form". However, if I am able to provide an answer, that indicates that they are, in fact, answerable. I've seen many cases (not just this one) of people claiming that a question is not answerable and then been able to answer it. | |
| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:24 | history | edited | slugster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 21, 2013 at 0:16 | history | answered | slugster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |