If you really want to reduce the snark level

Question

So, the death of WSOIN (What Stack Overflow is Not) was intended to help reduce the snarky comment level. I don't see any diminution of the volume of sarcastic comments added to weak questions. I don't write this to reopen the debate.

Let me be a little more precise about what I mean by snark. To me, the issue is not a bit of humor or a slight poke, but the comments that very clearly call out the OP as some sort of idiot. As discussed elsewhere, these are particularly squirm-inducing when (one of) the OP's problem(s) is English language proficiency.

I used to be a fairly aggressive flagger of snark, but I got the sense (impossible to determine for sure) that the preponderance of my declined flags were cases where I flagged some snark as rude or offensive. I don't drop that many flags, and I couldn't explain the declined ones any other way. This led me to believe that the mods were setting a high bar of rudeness, so I stopped.

If you really want to reduce this behavior, you have to create a negative feedback loop, and it can't involve mod involvement for every single instance.

One option would be to add another flag option, 'snark'. This would make it clear that you don't have to insult someone's genetic heritage to qualify. Further, you could set a low bar for comment auto-deletion on these.

If this doesn't work, you could consider a rep penalty for comments that get flushed this way.

I see this as one of those consistency issues: if flushing WSOIN was important, then the job is really not done.

A little more in response to Shog9:

So, here's the interaction on my mind. A new person shows up and posts a crappy question. Fine. I stipulate. It's crappy. Further, I'm as pessimistic as the next person as to the chances that this person will pay attention to any responses and improve their question, let alone post a better one next time.

However, when the question is decorated with one, or often several, comments of sarcasm and insult, it gives a poor impression to other readers and supports a culture of jerkiness.

WSOIN at least was never personally insulting. It didn't accuse anyone of being a vampire, or stupid, or expecting other people to do the OP's job for the OP. Brusque, yes. If I were the team, and choosing between WSOIN and 'Only an idiot would ask that,' well, I'd choose the former.

Shog9's ideas about making comments go away at least limit the time window in which this is all visible.

I would point out that I've already seen comments today which are just like WSOIN only without the link to the more or less friendly explanatory paragraph.

Answer 1

So, the death of WSOIN was intended to help reduce the snarky comment level.

No, not really. It's intended to slow its increase.

Listen... I'm actually not extremely worried about the people who are setting out to be rude, at least on Stack Overflow. The bit that worries me about WSOIN, whathaveyoutried.com, and a few others is that in many cases they're being posted by folks who are actually trying to be helpful.

But it's like when I can tell that my dog is thirsty and so I pour her a bowl of water and then... She doesn't drink. So I drag her over to the bowl, point at it in a meaningful way, and yell DRINK, YOU STUPID ANIMAL, IT'S 110°F HERE IF YOU DON'T DRINK YOU WILL DIE!!! And she gives me an annoyed look and lies down.

You can't force people to learn by repeatedly shoving information in their faces, any more than you can force them to be nice by deleting rudeness. All you can do is make that information available, and try to lead by example. Which we're gonna work on doing a better job of here.

Fortunately, you're all a hell of a lot smarter than my dog.

Towards the more efficient removal of unhelpful comments

So yeah, on to the rest of your suggestion. As I said in my comment, expecting moderators to be the gatekeepers here isn't really workable. Neither is expecting anyone else to though. The really nasty comments already get deleted; making casually rude or simply unhelpful comments easier to remove just increases the opportunity for drama in lengthy or heated discussion, but probably won't do much to solve the actual problem. Comments are boring, and plentiful. Who wants to spend time flagging anything but the most offensive?

Talking to a few other people, I'm getting the impression that the real problem is simply that even though we say comments are these disposable post-it notes that can and will disappear, most of them don't. They stick around, for months or years, no matter how useless they've become.

And it hit me: remember when comment thread collapsing was introduced? The intention was to highlight only the best of the bunch. But the algorithm chosen to do this was... Fairly simplistic. And hasn't changed that much since.

On most posts, you don't get five exceptionally useful comments that float to the top of the rest; heck, you probably don't get five comments period. So when someone leaves a stupid, snarky, or simply quickly-obsolete comment, it's probably gonna remain visible.

Why not just... Collapse all comments older than a week, provided they haven't been up-voted in the last, say, month? Comments on questions with more than 30 answers already collapse all non-up-voted comments, simply to save space... Well, this would save space everywhere. By default, only the most recent, and most recently-useful comments would be shown. Everything else is squirreled away, visible only to those bored enough to look for it.

Rather than making the reduction of pointless comments more effort, this makes them no effort.

Answer 2

Personally I think this will gain very little for anyone.

There are a lot of cases where a genuine comment is misinterpreted as snark, or when an intentionally sarcastic or humorous comment is meant precisely for humor or irony - and that was the point. There's always going to be someone that will be offended by even the most tame remark. Snark is like beauty - the beholder decides whether it is offensive or not.

If the user has really crossed a line, flag it for a mod. If you find someone's comment offensive (but not to the point of enlisting help), then say so, and why... that's going to hold a lot more weight in the long run for that user than clicking some anonymous down-vote flag. We don't need an anonymous down-voting system for comments. We already have that for answers and it is not exactly the feature that frequent answerers like best about SO.

I think the best this will do is to discourage folks from posting comments at all - which will net us with less useful feedback on questions / answers and even more anonymous voting.

Answer 3

Users already abuse the "not constructive" and "rude or offensive" flags to mean "Hey, I don't like this comment". I'm not an SO mod, but it's certainly been my impression that handling the comment flags is one of the most annoying tasks already because of the low value of most of them. I have seen similar, useless flags on the sites I moderate as well. I'm glad people have the option, but I don't want to create yet another subjective, easy to abuse reason to flag.

Let's not forget that most of our snarky users are higher rep, helpful users with good posts that are getting ticked off any low quality drive-by users. Yes, they shouldn't be rude, but at the end of the day, driving away our regular contributors is much more destructive than driving away those drive-bys that put in no effort; most of them never come back anyway.

Nudge people to be polite, act politely yourself, but punishing people for using the slightest bit of humor or having the audacity to ask someone to add more information to their question is a brutish way to do it.

If the post is actually significantly rude or offensive, use the rude or offensive flag. You don't need a new flag for that.

What you're really doing here is trying to bake in the idea that snark is unwelcome; snark can also be polite or teasing among friends or equal. Systematically banning snark is a terrible way to go about fixing any rudeness problem; it's banning pointing fingers at the playground because you're scared of guns.

Answer 4

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Answer 5

Something I often miss isn't a new flag option but a way to privately tell someone that his comment might be perceived as rude.

I don't want to involve other people, I just want to help someone realize, sometimes by pointing towards a specific debate in meta, that his comment wasn't totally appropriate.

And I don't want to be rude towards this commenter, nor to make a scene or expose him.

In my opinion what is needed isn't a new flag, but a kind of private warning regarding a comment. I'm not sure this is a solution but maybe something intermediate, like high-rep visible comments, or "localized meta comments"...

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A precise case : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11257288/how-to-implement-sort-command-using-c-programming#comment14796843_11257288

I felt this morning that some user was a little rude with his "Is that homework ?". He wasn't really but maybe I was a little sensitive after a few questions I saw demolished by an insistence to prove they're were homework. So I tried to point the risk to the commenter. And by doing so I feel I was rude. Sigh...

Answer 6

It's interesting - this question and the responses in light of the "Summer of Love" initiative. SO seems to actively not foster community through various means (the zealous laundering of any salutations and expressions of appreciation, the admonitions against discussion, the increasingly narrow focus of allowed topics (e.g.requests for experienced developers' opinions get closed, requests for book suggestions (so that people can learn) get closed, etc. No doubt I am in the minority with this observation and that's fine.

As to comment snark, why not offer users another option and manner of expressing those snarky feelings and opinions through a more positive structure. Since SO is all about badges and chasing reputation, why not provide a menu of "flags/badges which can be presented in lieu of snark but which which express the same thing in a neutral or encouraging way. And most importantly, have these flags sent to the person posting the question as comments are now, along with displaying the flags on the question.

This would make clear to both the person posting the question and those who view it how a question is being received by the "community". You could have the "scant information" or "inverse/bizarro TMI" flag or badge, the "do you want me to chew your food" badge (I'm joking), the "break down the task" flag, and so forth. When the person posting the question edits their question, perhaps people who have flagged it get notified so they can remove the flag.

Obviously this idea is half-baked but the gist is to provide a way for commentators to provide constructive feedback that does not come across as a personal attack, and for persons receiving that feedback to understand what is meant, and thereby learn how to help themselves.

As an aside, I taught programming to beginners for a number of years and one of the key difficulties people had was how to accurately and succinctly represent (in their own minds and in their articulations) exactly what they were trying to accomplish. (Of course there were other common issues, like trying to use found code that they didn't understand, etc.)

So what I am saying is that asking a question, however badly formed, is often the beginning of a process and rather than simply reducing the number of whathaveyoutried.com comments, SO might provide a way to provide constructive feedback, one which doesn't take lots of effort to provide. (maybe a"Search is your friend" badge with an SO search query string using the tags or keywords gleaned from the title (as is done in the Question UI).

[edited out] Cheers [edited out]

Answer 7

I think this is veering a bit too much towards social engineering (the political kind).

Don't you think the snarkiness is a sort of auto-corrective mechanism (in addition to downvotes) to force posters to improve the quality of their posts?

I agree with Ben Brocka - the flagging system already has "rude/offensive", I don't think you need a new flag.

You could enforce suspensions or a rep penalty for being rude (at discretion of moderator).

This is a bit extreme though.

Answer 8

A perfect case of really low-level snark that can be seen on the network is the following comment:

What has this got to do with c#? C# files are just text files with a .cs extension.

On the following question:

How to hide info in a file c#

I'm wondering if it's possible to hide somewhere in a file some info. For example I need to save for each file a GUID to make it unique. Thanks in advance.

c#hidefileinfo

Now don't get me wrong, the question is far from the best question I've seen on stackoverflow. That said, it's far from the worst!

The commenter has c. 2.5k reputation, mostly from answers, so on that basis I'm going to suggest they're fairly "switched on" and thus their comment is not them misinterpreting the question/tag combination, but a "dig"/"snark" against the OP.

If a question is tagged c#, then it's almost a given that the qustion is being asked in the context of writing some code in c# not in the context of working with files which contain c# code.

Therefore - a comment like this deserves a "snark" flag.

Answer 9

I was going to suggest much the same thing after reading Joel's declaration Kicking Off the Summer of Love -- a 'snark' flag for comments. The OP here has, I think, expressed the idea better than I would have, so I'll just offer a refinement:

The impact of the snark flag should depend in part on the newness of the author of the thing being commented on.

That is, if a comment attached to a question (or answer) is flagged as snarky by two people, that might be enough to trigger an action if the author of the question (or answer) only joined SO last Thursday. If the author has been on SO for a year and a half, though, it might take eight or ten snarky flags to trigger the same action. A sliding scale would have the following benefits:

• encourage people to take an author's SO experience into account when commenting and hopefully be nicer to newbies

• allow some good-natured ribbing between old SO hands

• limit whatever additional moderation work might be required to deal with the snark flag to those questions where very new users are affected or where the situation is egregious