Could we please be a bit nicer to new users?

Question

There is a distinct decline in the level of civility on all the sites here. Some of this is due to new users coming in and posting spam and other nonsense, but the off-topic and downvote buttons are doing a pretty good job of keeping this under control.

Unfortunately, a lot of this is coming from more experienced users, and the site's built-in moderation system does not (and probably cannot) handle this very well. Folks are rushing to pound new users down with "this belongs on meta!", "this is off topic", "this is a duplicate!" and "read the Help!". (Which is correct, but should be done nicer) All this, of course, is accompanied by a flurry of downvotes. This is not very welcoming to new users who don't know about meta, the Help, or what counts as off-topic.

Now I am not proposing that we just allow off-topic, meta, or duplicate questions. However, I think we could be gentler in the way we express these sorts of things. Explain what meta and the FAQ are and provide useful links. Just using please and thank-you when asking folks to read the FAQ or post something on meta would be an improvement. I also think we could rein in the downvoting a bit. Not that we shouldn't vote stuff down, but unless a new user's post is clearly spam, voting it down to -1 or -2 should be sufficient to send a message without piling on.

I like Stack Exchange and I want it to become a resource for everyone, not just an elitist site for high-rep users on the sites.

Answer 1

I've used Stack Overflow for all of a week, and today is my last day (I always keep a link for at least a week).

I've answered a few questions for people, found the reference for the question I asked. I posed an opinion question and the results were interesting:

• Six answers within a few minutes
• Question was suddenly down voted to -5, all in one go.
• Two more answers, and question voted up to -4
• Question closed by some other user within 10 minutes.

The answers were interesting, in that I didn't expect them and made me think. Unfortunately, there are no other answers. The question is still available at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/298076/what-is-the-coolest-aspect-of-your-favorite-language-closed

Answer 2

I haven't been here long, but I see:

• Sarcastic nonanswers getting up voted
• People with "High Reputation" being complete jerks and personally attacking.
• People with high reputation points giving completely inaccurate answers
• Downvoting everything a user says, because he/she made you mad
• Answers with the most cheerleading getting more upvotes than clear concise answers.
• Too many people have inaccurate information and excessively repeating it does not make it any more accurate.
• Post Whoring
• Holy Wars

In general, I feel there are too many people with rights they shouldn't have.

Reputation is far too easy to obtain and there are a lot of people drunk with power.

I don't trust 90% of people, why should Stack Overflow?

Answer 3

I think there's nothing wrong with closing (as duplicate, belongs on UserVoice or whatever else) a newcomer's questions. Of course, adding a comment explaining why is always nice, but I think the main thing is to just not downvote.

If the question is made in good faith, and it's going to get closed in another 30 seconds anyway, why bother downvoting it? Does it deserve it? Does the poster deserve to have the negative votes on his record, simply because he did not yet know how Stack Overflow works?

I try to reserve downvotes for questions that are either

• made in bad faith, as spam or to otherwise disrupt Stack Overflow
• or are simply bad questions (unreadable questions, no information supplied to actually make it possible to answer, or "questions" that aren't questions but blog posts or rants).

But a suggestion to improve Stack Overflow shouldn't be downvoted. It should simply be closed and directed to UserVoice. An off-topic question shouldn't be downvoted, but closed (as not-programming-related, or moved to Server Fault in some cases.

I often see questions that get downvoted because they belong on UserVoice, are not programming related, or whatever else. When I do, I generally leave a comment saying that there's no need for downvoting as well as closing the question, and encouraging people to bump the votes back up.

Answer 4

I'm a noob. I've been following this site for a few days and so far I really like the format and the quality of topics and answers.

From what I've seen so far there most of the answers to questions are constructive and well thought out (exhibit A in the original post doesn't work). If Stack Overflow was just another forum site flooded with questions from people that won't do any footwork before bombarding a board with questions, I wouldn't have bookmarked it.

The FAQ was useful for me, maybe add some of the good examples of bad questions to the FAQ for us noobs too.. It might be fun to go through those too.

Answer 5

I just want to include myself as an example of this:

unless a new user's post is clearly spam, voting it down to -1 or -2 should be sufficient to send a message without piling on.

Now, I do think I had to be voted down, and the community should express itself so I can see if I fit in or not. But, as far as I can see, the reputation system is also associated with spam and bot prevention up to a certain ammount of points. So, until that is reached by any valid user this should be the focus: making the user able to use basic resources, such as voting, posting links, etc.

Maybe even the system should change a little bit on that sense. One thing is getting reputation to be able to moderate. Another thing is to achieve "human rights" in the system. And that should not be too hard for newbies.

Anyway, yet again, just my two cents as a newcomer.

Answer 6

I agree, and I experienced this. I posted something off-topic and marked it as such. It was sufficient to have it downvoted, I don't need somebody flaming me to not post content like that on here. The training is built into the system.

As best I can tell, they're hoping to get some sympathy from other veterans to their cause to help their own rep.

I'm just trying to get to a point where I can upvote interesting questions and answers, and I'm not sure how to best do that when I'm not the quickest or most authoritative response.

Answer 7

Just imagine the poster is someone else in your company.

Give 'naughty' noobs the same bland, negative, unemotional response you'd give to a "boss" who asked you to refactor code in some moderately inane way because they simply didn't understand that of which they spoke.

No need to even be supportive (although that can be nice) but flaming people for mistakes of form, judgement or fact is behaviour that should be beneath real problem solvers. Use the down-vote judiciously and the site will flow better than if we indulge our frustrations on others.

"That is a question that you'll find an ongoing discussion about here" is a polite and straight forward way to deal with a duplicate post that avoids offending anyone.

Practising such pat phrases will serve all of us well in our workplaces too. If you don't regularly need to politely and effectively deal with people who should know better misusing their opportunities you have worked in better places than me.

Anyway that's my two cents worth.

Answer 8

Interestingly (to me, anyway), I think that moderation in Stack Exchange has just hit a new level in "social experiment". In a way, you might even say that this is a sign of maturity for SO (but still a problem).

Bureaucracy.

First

I'm going to talk about moderators here, but I'm not taking a shot at anyone. Really. I think that this is more of an interesting social effect than anyone being bad. So before I write the next bit, I want to thank all of the moderators for donating so much time and working so hard to make SO a great site. I mean that, and there is no sarcasm or disparagement intended whatsoever).

Now: Think about this: We have a number of rules and guidelines for using the site, and now we have a lot of moderators. As they work to optimize their job of moderating, they apply group-think based upon supporting the rules. They are doing what humans do -- optimizing their actions to complete their goal. In this case, moderating. BUT, does that necessarily mean that the work is doing the best thing for Stack Overflow (just my opinion, but nowadays, I think twice before posting and sometimes go elsewhere, because I don't want my question getting closed -- I just don't want the extra "intellectual tax" of dealing with cleaning up or thinking about a closed question, when what I'm really looking for is an answer.

Now that I've said all that, where else so you see this sort of group think effect? government bureaucracy! In way, it's really interesting, because in order to have that, doesn't the object of the bureaucracy have to be something that everyone involved feels is worth worrying about? So, in a way, cool! (that said, I'd like for it to be easier to post questions :)

Answer 9

Just something I wanted to throw in here.

I know it's a bit outdated, but anyone who's asking questions on the 'net in a technical forum should still read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

Specifically of consequence to this discussion:

Before You Ask

Before asking a technical question by e-mail, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

1. Try to find an answer by searching the archives of the forum you plan to post to.
2. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
3. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
4. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
5. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
6. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
7. If you're a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.

When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things. We like answering questions for people who have demonstrated they can learn from the answers.

Use tactics like doing a Google search on the text of whatever error message you get (searching Google groups as well as Web pages). This might well take you straight to fix documentation or a mailing list thread answering your question. Even if it doesn't, saying “I googled on the following phrase but didn't get anything that looked promising” is a good thing to do in e-mail or news postings requesting help, if only because it records what searches won't help. It will also help to direct other people with similar problems to your thread by linking the search terms to what will hopefully be your problem and resolution thread.

Take your time. Do not expect to be able to solve a complicated problem with a few seconds of Googling. Read and understand the FAQs, sit back, relax and give the problem some thought before approaching experts. Trust us, they will be able to tell from your questions how much reading and thinking you did, and will be more willing to help if you come prepared. Don't instantly fire your whole arsenal of questions just because your first search turned up no answers (or too many).

Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that having put thought and effort into solving your problem before seeking help, the more likely you are to actually get help.

Beware of asking the wrong question. If you ask one that is based on faulty assumptions, J. Random Hacker is quite likely to reply with a uselessly literal answer while thinking “Stupid question...”, and hoping the experience of getting what you asked for rather than what you needed will teach you a lesson.

Never assume you are entitled to an answer. You are not; you aren't, after all, paying for the service. You will earn an answer, if you earn it, by asking a substantial, interesting, and thought-provoking question — one that implicitly contributes to the experience of the community rather than merely passively demanding knowledge from others.

On the other hand, making it clear that you are able and willing to help in the process of developing the solution is a very good start. “Would someone provide a pointer?”, “What is my example missing?”, and “What site should I have checked?” are more likely to get answered than “Please post the exact procedure I should use.” because you're making it clear that you're truly willing to complete the process if someone can just point you in the right direction.

also

How To Interpret Answers RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up

There is an ancient and hallowed tradition: if you get a reply that reads “RTFM”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Read The F***ing Manual. He or she is almost certainly right. Go read it.

RTFM has a younger relative. If you get a reply that reads “STFW”, the person who sent it thinks you should have Searched The F***ing Web. He or she is almost certainly right. Go search it. (The milder version of this is when you are told “Google is your friend!”)

In Web forums, you may also be told to search the forum archives. In fact, someone may even be so kind as to provide a pointer to the previous thread where this problem was solved. But do not rely on this consideration; do your archive-searching before asking.

Often, the person telling you to do a search has the manual or the web page with the information you need open, and is looking at it as he or she types. These replies mean that he thinks (a) the information you need is easy to find, and (b) you will learn more if you seek out the information than if you have it spoon-fed to you.

You shouldn't be offended by this; by hacker standards, your respondent is showing you a rough kind of respect simply by not ignoring you. You should instead be thankful for this grandmotherly kindness.

If you don't understand...

If you don't understand the answer, do not immediately bounce back a demand for clarification. Use the same tools that you used to try and answer your original question (manuals, FAQs, the Web, skilled friends) to understand the answer. Then, if you still need to ask for clarification, exhibit what you have learned.

For example, suppose I tell you: “It sounds like you've got a stuck zentry; you'll need to clear it.” Then: here's a bad followup question: “What's a zentry?” Here's a good followup question: “OK, I read the man page and zentries are only mentioned under the -z and -p switches. Neither of them says anything about clearing zentries. Is it one of these or am I missing something here?”

Answer 10

As someone new to Stack Overflow, I have to agree, to a point. I've noticed a certain SlashDottishness around here, though it's pretty limited so it is not that large an issue.

I think the environment will take care of itself over time. Those who don't need, want or deserve to be here will leave or be encouraged to leave.

Answer 11

I think civility could be improved in general, not just regarding questions about Stack Overflow. For example, the first question I asked here was a CSS question and I got a rude and slightly off-topic answer: "if you say liquid that usually means percent based dimensions, start associating things like that in your head" (I had not even said "liquid", and in the end there was no satisfactory answer to that question, which suggests it was not dumb).

Answer 12

I agree, thanks for bringing this up. I have at times been attacked personally just for making a logical statement. It's not always whether you are newbie or not, but it can be other subjective things such as if your question is liked or disliked (for example, Jon Skeet-related questions seem to get a lot of cheers here) regardless of its merits), which is why I brought up a related discussion in question Why is there a double standard regarding non-programming related questions at Stack Overflow?.

I am sensing a much higher civility in this thread, probably due to the way the question was posed.

Answer 13

The good things we do in this life reflect in the next. We should all help each other. No question is too small, and no question is too large.

Long live Stack Overflow, and I hope its good ethics rub off on the old school elitists. Let's all work together to make Stack Overflow what it deservers to be.

Answer 14

Is there a limitation on when the deadline for posting on a question is considered beating a dead horse? ;)

I have little reputation, am a novice programmer, but I'm not scared to be voted down even if I answer honestly thinking I understood the question. Nothing will show me the progress I've made throughout the years like documenting my failures.

While being downright mean to someone is not the solution, I would assume people don't really need to be pampered...just my opinion as someone from the 'trophy kid' generation, you shouldn't always be protected or even rewarded when you make a mistake.

I love this place, even if I still have a lot to learn.

Cheers!

Answer 15

I recommend some type of cookie-cutter response that we can just copy-and-paste depending on the mistake made.

I agree with Outlaw Programmer, but would add that it would be useful if there was a menu or similar to quickly (and politely) allow "problem post" identification.

For example, if you see that a post is a duplicate, you hit a button, enter the url/id of the post duplicated. Successive viewers can then agree or disagree. The question poster will get a canned and polite notification.

So instead of templating being a burden on individual users, have it be a function of the system for the most common problem posts.

Offhand, those seem to be:

• Duplicate
• Belongs in user voice
• Offtopic
• Not a question
• Unclear question (not enough detail to respond, etc.)
• ...More as post requirements develop

In essence this would be a votable, post classification tag?

Quick and painless for advanced users...just chose the classification from a list of canned ones, or vote up the existing classification(s) if you agree.

It would be friendly and helpful to the new(er)bies. They would see "15 people think this post belongs in the uservoice section. Do you want to move it there?" or "107 people think you should probably add more detail to your question. Edit now?"

---

I would definitely support a template-message approach. I haven't participated much here, I admit (yeah, I know, I'm a n00b commenting on a thread about n00bs), but I have over 2 1/2 years' experience on Wikipedia, much of it in vandal-patrol. The template message system set up there works pretty well, and what I see in the suggestions from Outlaw Programmer and ee is a kind of combination between Wikipedia's system and Digg's Bury menu. Am I right? If so, I'd be 100% behind that method.

Answer 16

I see a lot of discussion about "noobs" and such, but aren't we all technically new to the site. It's not that old yet (for example, if this site was slashdot instead, we'd all have really low UIDs).

I mean, the only difference between people joining now and people who "have been here since the beginning" is something like two months (if that). And most of that time was spent in private beta. I think the question itself promotes hostility to those who didn't join the private beta as it starts to create cliques of users in the community.

Pretty soon we'll have the group of guys who were in the private beta, the group who joined during open beta, the people who joined the first month, the people who know Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood personally, and it will be a mess of down votes and bickering in the answers and comments with moderator powers being thrown about willy-nilly.

Please, let's just ask questions, give answers, vote on the best of each and try and ignore who said what and concentrate on what was said.

Answer 17

I'll add an example of what happened today. Today I've seen two quite "easy" questions. They are so easy that they could be funny.

32 bit unsigned JavaScript bitwise operation is one short

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7388752/and-precendence-how-does-it-work-closed

Now... Everyone that has a little of knowledge of IT should be able to answer both of them without problems.

• The first one was upvoted 8 times (at the time I'm writing).

• The second one was downvoted 24 times and closed by a moderator for "closed as not a real question". At this time it's the fourth most downvoted question (the wood spoon). I'll add that the question wasn't badly formatted (there isn't any revision on it and its formatting is quite good) and the English is good.

I hope this isn't "n00b friendliness" :-)

Answer 18

We probably need to distinguish between two types of "new users":

• New users to SO/SE
• New users to a language/tool or whatever the subject of a question.

They are usually correlated, but we need to think about them separately. Personally, I prefer new user questions to questions so specific that they can be answered with a single line. But I understand that there are others different than me (and I do reply with one-liners from time to time).

My answer to the present question is to:

• Establish a system of tags or ranks that allows askers to classify their questions as "beginner" / "real beginner" / "intermediate" / "advanced" / "postdoctoral". And allow potential answerers to search by difficulty level, of course.
• Criticize questions according to the assigned difficulty level.
• Guide users to become proficient in SO/SE as we are doing today: sweetly. Assume that question's difficulty is also an indication of SO/SE expertise level. Be lenient or demanding accordingly.

Answer 19

I think a lot of users, perhaps especially "power users", should consider whether their comments and up and down-votes are productive or not. Am I commenting because I hope to get up votes? Because I felt someone attacked me and I need to defend myself? Is it really telling the asker of the question something they didn't already know? For some people it feels good to be on the majority's side. Especially if there is someone agitated on the contrarian side. Thus, you have situations wherein five different people explain to someone asking a question what's wrong with it. Four of those explanations may be redundant, but they all felt good when posting them so that's why they are there.

Perhaps the moderators could police comments more? If someone has a history of posting snarky, rude, or unkind questions the moderators could warn them or remove their commenting privileges if they fail to behave nicely? Perhaps remove the ability to upvote comments to remove one of the incentives of posting "piling on" comments?

Answer 20

The point to be noted is that, downvoting isn't the only trick to teach the new user, how to not post syntactically ill questions.

The experienced user here are much more aware of all the guidelines and regulations of this community. But the new user is not.

Whenever a new user logs in, they don't bother to read the FAQs of community. Not even someone else would bother to do so, if they are using the site for the first time.

I don't think there is anyone who reads the FAQs of each and every site they open. Nobody thinks it as useful.

The new user should be made aware of the point that Stack Exchange sites works on some guidelines that should be followed strictly to wrap your posts into relevant words.

There are better ways of doing so. Comment with relevant links are powerful enough to direct the new user to the FAQs page instead of a heavy volume of down votes. Two or three downvotes are sufficiently enough to let the user know about how this site works.

Getting a large volume of downvotes in the initial stages are worth embarrassing, as I got in first post of mine.

Answer 21

The review queue has a great approach on this manner:

[just Downvoted a question] :"Please comment on the question to tell user how it can be improved".

But there isn't an mechanism like that on normal up/down voting. It is very interesting to see double to triple amount of downvotes on something, but only a handful of people active on the question/answer/comment. From people active, around 75% are users with rep higher than 1K and others are in between of 50 - 1K.

This brings a question to my mind: "If people who downvoted aren't part of question or answer, and don't participate in commenting... why did they downvote?"

I don't know why, but I can think of several mechanisms to safeguard new users from downvoting "just because".

• You can not downvote without posting a comment why did you downvoted. This will discourage anonymous downvoting, or downvoting for personal reasons.
• After months has passed after you've downvoted and been active on question/answer, SO (company)/SE should ask you "a month has passed, do you still have same opinion?" or something similar. This way if a user who asked his/hers question has proven themselves, cleared the question user who downvoted has a chance to be reminded to update their choice if needed.

Flagging and downvotes aren't bad per say; they are forgettable. It is too easy to hide behind a username these days, so what we need is a sense of choice to govern our behaviour. And many times it has happened for users to mention that they will be back to revise their opinion, but they never do. In many questions and posts on this topic (or similar suggestions) there isn't much discussing, but as there is defending. Many similar topics end up on a one-sided argument that has popular votes without any contra argument (or contra argument is lost somewhere among faded out questions).

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After some more research:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1105415?Increment=1000&MinRep=25000&MaxRep=100000#graph

I've noticed that most of users that have reputation higher than 100,000 have a large upvotes-to-downvotes ratio - sometimes going as far as 450 upvotes per 1 downvote. But users below 100 K have a lower ratio, often going to 100 upvotes per downvote, with a peak at 150. I think this is interesting data to consider.