How should we fix or refute the charges made in "Why stackoverflow sucks and participating there is impossible"? [closed]

Question

I found "Why StackOverflow sucks and participating there is impossible" on Google.

One point is:

New users are more likely to want to “dip their toe into the water” than to jump into a pool. In Stack land, this would mean adding a comment to an existing answer. But you can’t. You start out with only 1 “rep” which means that you can ask a question or add an answer to an existing question. So if you’re knowledgeable enough to provide a counterpoint to someone else’s poor answer, you have to post it as a new answer… and then you get down voted (lose rep!) for adding a new answer versus just commenting on the original, flawed answer.

and another is:

The intelligent fellow you are, you decide to try and find a question that you can provide a good answer to so you can get real rep points so that you can contribute all over the place. So you dig through tags and search, but you quickly realize that every question that’s not some vague, poorly worded, open ended impossibility has already got 10 answers (ranging from wrong/poor to highly thoughtful, correct). So you start trolling the “New” list hoping to catch a question that you can answer quickly and hopefully get some rep/upvotes so you can actually participate in a useful fashion.

Then you see where Stack is really, really broken. You see you’re not the only one doing this. In the time it takes you to write a thoughtful, correctly documented (and heaven help you if you try and write code and then format it in the terrible editor), 6 people have written short, one line answers as placeholders and then they go back and edit their response multiple times, finally building an appropriate reply (hopefully). So now the question has 7 responses, all in some weird state of edit and your response is lost in the noise and you never get the rep points that you were trying for in the first place (ie. it was all a waste).

I agree with most of his points. So should the community moderators and owners do something to remove all these barriers?

Answer 1

New users are more likely to want to “dip their toe into the water” than to jump into a pool. In Stack land, this would mean adding a comment to an existing answer. But you can’t.

So the user is arguing that providing an answer is "TOO MUCH" of a commitment, fine. How about helping us combat our never ending "information rot" battle, by editing some of these problematic answers and expanding them to be relevant.

The smallest unit of work that gets you rep is an edit. The barrier for editing is non existent. Anyone can edit anything and get 2 rep when they do good.

Participating in meta commentary is dangerous, comments often simply add on to the information rot problem, lead to flame wars and other uncivil behaviour.

Do we really want this kind of person leaving comments on our questions?

"Listen Bob, what you are doing is TOTALLY wrong."

Lots of rambly stuff about how we do everything wrong, and he knows how to do everything right

Fastest Gun In The West has been discussed to death. Search for it.

Terrible editor is a terrible bit of non constructive criticism. Improve XYZ about your editor may be valid. I was expecting syntax highlighting as I was typing, may be valid.

... and so on

Answer 2

A summary of the main points I picked out, and my personal responses to them.

1. Low-rep users can't comment, so comments are posted as answers!

• The reason that users need to get past a (small) reputation barrier in order to post is to avoid noise. If as a low-rep user you feel an answer is lacking something but you can't comment on it, post a more complete answer. IMO this is fine even if most of it duplicates an answer that already exists - if it has more merit than others, it's more likely to get up-voted.

2. Old questions that aren't poorly worded already have good answers!

• Creating good answers is the whole point of SO. So the system's working? Excellent! :)

3. People post short one-line answers, then edit them into something worthwhile.

• Fair point, and I personally don't like it when I see people do this. However, when all the editing is done we have a collection of nice answers, and the best ones will get up-votes. If you post a thoughtful and complete answer, it's likely someone will recognise it.

---

IMO The most telling comment in the piece is in the final paragraph - my own emphasis added:

So I’m a pretty smart guy and this is why I can’t (and now won’t) participate on StackExchange sites (StackOverflow, OnStartups, etc.). I don’t have the patience to troll the new question list and fight the unwashed masses to try and get my voice heard in order to get a seat at the big boys table. I’m sure that I am not the only one making this same decision.

So basically this guy is annoyed because he can't be recognised from the off for the supposed genius he is? Oh please. SO is a community. If you want to be respected you have to earn it with good questions and good answers. Reputation is something you have to work at just like in the real world - it isn't built overnight.

Answer 3

In my opinion, this is just a rant of a single person, not negative publicity for the entire site. So I disagree with the post.

If you really want to participate, you need to invest some time in the site and you will be able to get about 200 reputation within a week which gives you most of the every day privileges (comment, vote, chat, flag).

You can even edit. Yes you need two accept votes but in return you get +2 reputation points which speeds up the process to get more points.

Answer 4

I don't agree that his charges represent a real problem with the site, but I do agree that there's a real chance that such posts might (might) indicate a public-image problem.

But the response to these claims should not be to assume that they're correct and try to "fix" the "problems" described; it should be to enhance the public perception of Stack Exchange.

Now, in my experience, I think I've heard mostly positive things about Stack Overflow and its brethren. But it's certainly never a bad thing to attempt to draw positive attention to it. This is probably most easily done by sharing exceptional questions/answers elsewhere on the web.

In response to the particular claims made in this post, it seems to me that they all rest on one single faulty assumption: Stack Exchange sites are games, and the point is to win.

Yes, we have rep. Yes, we have badges. And yes, that does make this site something of a game. But the point of Stack Exchange sites is to act as a useful resource--not for users to show off their intelligence.

Answer 5

I expect to get downvoted pretty heavily for this but here goes...

If you do feel the need to downvote could you please explain why

Having used SO for nearly 3 years now I must say that I am getting extremely disillusioned with the arbitary manner in which posts are being closed and downvoted. Furthermore it appears that this situation has become noticeably worse in the last few months – to give some examples from the last few nights

1: A beginner C# user posts a question on why a database isn’t getting updated (ok he left out the conn.Open command and probably should have checked further answers). The users connection details are in Persian so the post gets closed as being too localised ???

2: There appears to be an issue in the AWS S3 restful api where under heavy load it’s returning an internal server error (I’ve seen this issue myself and have a case open with Amazon). User posts a question detailing the error and asking for help and/or mitigation approaches. Instead post is closed for not being constructive. Now the thing is the people who voted to close have never used AWS judging by their answers.

3: User posts question on Programmers SE asking wether he should major in software development or web programming – just looking for help at a very important time in his life. Closed within 5 minutes ?? WTF – isn’t this what Programmers SE is for ?

Perhaps one approach to address this would be only to allow closure / downvotes by people who have already amassed a certain number of points in that topic rather that site wide.