The Tyrannical Mods of Stack Overflow

i have this string i want to split on the pipe but i don't know how i don't want to split it the white space only at the pipe is this possible did you try googling anything about the split method welcome to stack overflow you seem to be asking someone to write some code for you stack overflow is a question answer site not a code writing service please see here to learn how to write effective questions whatever happened to stack overflow how did we end up in a place where we not only get rude and snarky comments but we also get robotic like responses from real people for valid questions this is not a rare scenario this has become the norm on stack overflow and i just have one question how did we end up here [Music] my name is gabe and today we're going to look at some of the key factors that resulted in the cesspool that is stack overflow q a today i'll also explore some approaches that may solve the problems we face so that developers can just share information without fear of reproach let's go back in time to 2008 nasa's unmanned spacecraft phoenix becomes the first to land on the northern polar region of mars google chrome is first released the stock market plunges across the globe in a little-known website stack overflow comes into existence stack overflow was created by joel spolsky and jeff atwood to address an issue that was apparent in the mid to late 2000s the issue was that programmers had no way to easily share knowledge about difficult problems there was usenet which became obsolete once the world wide web became popular then there was experts in strange where developers could share questions and answers this had a myriad of problems the foremost being it was a paid service joel wanted a free website that could replace experts exchange and earn money by doubling as a job listing board he knew somebody would do it eventually so he waited and waited and he waited then one day jeff atwood came to him for advice on blogging and joel simply responded i've got a better idea instead the stack overflow experiment went extraordinarily well it was based on a gamification system similar to reddit and other sites where users could upvote good questions and good answers once you got a certain amount of reputation you were granted more privileges to the site these privileges included editing questions closing questions and reopening questions this means that poor questions are dealt with quickly and good answers rank higher this worked great for moderation in the short term however it led to the problems we see today okay so let's review real quickly how do users gain privilege well they gain privilege by answering questions what can you do with the privilege you can answer questions you can close questions you can edit questions and you can reopen questions okay well that all makes sense well what happens if you ask a question and somebody decides to close it well you can reopen it but wait a second you need the privilege to reopen it the privilege you don't have because you're a new user okay well what if somebody's bullying you in the comments well you flag the comment okay and then the flag comment goes to the moderators so let's just take a look at some questions on stack overflow right now there's this user who asks i apologize in advance if this kind of question is not allowed here but i was wondering if anyone knows what technology the site has been built with now i think this is a valid question programmers build websites using so many different technologies it's reasonable to ask if anyone knows what a particular site used to build it well the stack overflow users they have a different thought the first one says seems like you knew this was off topic and then this person says i can see quite a bit of information in the dev tools the implication being why can't you see what the dev tools show me this next person says really the console offered nothing to me it just yelled out pixajs.com and this user gave a very helpful answer and said it's magic naturally and then finally somebody just says it's pixajs that's what they used the poor user simply says thanks and then leaves with their tail between their legs what's wrong with these people why is it so difficult to just say it's pixajs all right so the next question is pretty technical but an experienced programmer should be able to help out so this person asked what is the meaning of the following line of code why is this allowed as 0 is an r value and it's not a variable name what is the significance of const in this statement and the responses so first person says homework and what does your c textbook have to say the next person very hopefully says just read a good book and then here this link has a similar question which may or may not have been helpful at all now i was actually curious about what this question was like what the answer to this was because i didn't even know what it was i code in c plus plus pretty regularly and i did not know the meaning of this i had never seen this syntax and didn't even know it was valid code and this poor guy was downvoted 10 times why because he had the audacity to ask a question okay okay so he finally finds an answer and then he posts it to the website uh the answer gets down voted so if anybody else is looking for something similar they can't find it and i was actually curious about this like i had never seen this before and yet if i ever were searching for it i probably wouldn't find it because google is now gonna rank this low since it was downvoted this next user asks what is e and e.prevent default he says i'm not able to understand what the parameter e which is passed to prevent the default action in javascript is now to an experienced programmer this is pretty obvious however if you don't program and you've never seen this or you're new to programming this is a completely valid question the response is e is the event well that's actually a pretty tame response but it provides absolutely no information then this lovely gentleman says this question shows zero research effort aside from the fact that you got the answer by literally typing your title into google did you try anything like console.log e on different element bindings to see what this might be what is wrong with these people they seem to have forgotten that stack overflow is a q and a site how dare this user ask a question on a q a site this user says i'm learning to code c plus plus and unreal engine i see the syntax i don't get it i think it means this but it just does something different can anyone explain how this syntax actually works the response is please pick up a textbook and learn c plus plus systematically um i'm sorry this is a q a site this is a class pointer declaration no more no less ah that makes it perfectly clear how did i not see that before just in case you're wondering that is sarcasm because that is not clear at all once again this is an example of a problem i've never seen before and i program in c plus plus almost daily this user thankfully provided a clear and concise explanation but why did all those other users feel the need to waste time out of their day to berate someone who had the audacity to ask a question this next questions answer gives us a little window into the moderator's brains warning it's a scary place this user asks how do i answer a closed question he says this question was closed yesterday for some reason it was missing some key information the original poster fixed the question and now it's very clear how can i answer this should i start a chat room now this is the crux of the problem of stack overflow closed questions are sort of left in a limbo state they're closed so they can't be answered you have to edit it to be able to answer it but we've already talked about the problems that come with editing it and trying to get your answer reopened hint you need some reputation which most people don't have fortunately a moderator gives us an answer to this question he says edit the question to include the comment then vote to re-open it oh okay so uh you just edit it and then you have to vote to reopen it so even if the question is fixed you can't really open it at all and then he puts in bold do not open a chat room or answer in comments or otherwise work around the closing because how dare somebody try to help some other random person on the internet okay let's change it up a bit let's look at some questions that were closed but lots of people disagreed with that closing this question says the use of multiple jframes good or bad practice well why was this closed because it is opinion based stack overflow moderators they hate opinions okay and why do they hit opinions well nobody really knows and opinions are kind of tricky because you can't tell if a question is subjective or objective there's kind of a blurry line between those two and who gets to decide whether it's objective or objective well the moderators and the responses we can see some people say this question has become more valuable than they ever thought it could well i guess the mods just got this one wrong whoops it looks like they got this one wrong too this question has 557 upvotes that's a lot on stack overflow where questions typically get only five to six up votes why was it closed well uh we don't know it was closed because ahmad decided it needed to be surely this was just another one-off mistake right wait the mods messed up again this question was closed because it wasn't focused enough well it got 518 upvotes so clearly some people at least half a thousand of them thought it was focused enough i'm beginning to see a pattern here 371 upvotes well it's close why because it's an opinion another opinion how dare these programmers ask an opinionated question finally somebody was fed up enough and said plus 220 votes and not constructive clearly moderators and users have different perspectives on what is constructive i agree random user i completely wholeheartedly agree another opinion man these stupid programmers can't stop asking subjective questions can they these moderators they have such a difficult life this question was closed because well we actually don't know why it was closed unfocused question closed nice moving on more opinions moving on you know i just don't like this guy's name let's close this one and move on another opinion oh wait three thousand people actually wanted to know the answer to this one maybe i'm not such a good moderator nah those people just don't know an opinion what smacks them in the face unfortunately i have so many more examples of this if you want to see examples of this just click the link in the description and you can see up to 500 more questions that are just like the ones i just showed you even though there are only 500 questions there there's probably thousands of questions that will never see the light of day because of the rigged system that we already talked about that is in place stack overflow has a problem i wish it didn't because it's helped me and so many other programmers over the past decade however i think it's reaching its lifetime it's going to remain a valuable resource for decades to come but it's no longer gaining value if you ask programmers who have asked questions on stack overflow i bet you they got their own horror stories to tell not only that but they'll talk about how they now go to discord servers reddit poor anywhere except stack overflow because nobody likes to be berated for absolutely no reason maybe stack overflow will notice this problem the real problem and fix this anyways that is all i have for today i hope you learned a little bit about the cesspool that is stack overflow [Music] you

Channel: GamesWithGabe

Views: 178,015

Keywords: gameswithgabe, games with gabe, stack overflow, toxic stack overflow, toxic community, bully, stack overflow sucks, why is stack overflow harsh, why is stack overflow mean, the death of stack overflow, stack overflow mean

Id: IbDAmvUwo5c

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/greatestish]

I have 19.8k reputation on Stack Overflow. I was really into asking and answering questions for a long time.

Then I started to notice all the negativity for valid questions. There are people who would write incomplete and often incorrect answers. They'd then bully people via comments on the better answers, and try to convince the asker why their answer was better. One guy did this a lot, like 10 threads a day or so. I made the mistake of answering something at the same time as him; my response was selected as the answer because it didn't start with a negative "Did you even try.." thing and included a code snippet. The dude immediately went through my history and downvoted about 30 answers from two or three accounts. He was made a mod just a couple months later, so I haven't contributed to that community since.

[u/GezelligPindakaas]

As others have mentioned, SO was born with some clear goals, and there are things that they always steered away from early on (eg: avoid duplicates, avoid homework dumping, ...)

SO never intended to solve all problems of all programmers in the world, and I don't see why that should be a problem.

More specifically, regarding the 'opinion based', I see clear reasons to discourage that kind of questions, because more often than not, they lead to endless discussions with poor results. In the end, everyone has its own opinion. That doesn't mean that opinions are not valuable or that having discussions is not interesting; it just means that SO is not the place for that.

[u/be-sc]

I have a good bit of sympathy for the kinds of comments mentioned in the video. Most questions he shows in the first half are by absolute beginners. They’ve been asked and answered a million times. There’s a never ending stream of these questions on StackOverflow alone. In fact when I look at the Python or C++ newest questions almost all of them are of that kind. Of course it’s frustrating to see the same old questions again and again and again. Especially when you were initially drawn to SO because you love to answer technically challenging questions.

Let’s face it: StackOverflow is and always has been a terrible place for beginner questions because of how the question-and-answer system works. It actively discourages dialogue and assumes the asker to have a base level of expertise because that’s what you need to write a competent question that can be answered directly. Both points are problematic for beginners: They don’t and cannot have the expertise to write a good question, so they need a dialogue with more knowledgeable people to pin down first what the question actually is.

So, what do we have?

• A site that’s not suited for the needs of the people asking the majority of new questions.
• A good part of the existing active user base probably did not come to SO to answer mostly beginner questions.
• Enough questions show that no up-front research effort was put into the problem whatsoever.
• SO has become a mass medium, and as always the masses bring the arseholes with them – on both sides.

That’s an awful situation overall, no doubt about it. Blaming it mostly on those rude commenters and bad bad mods like the video does seems a little overly simplistic. However, I do mostly agree with his conclusion. SO is an extremely valuable source of information. That’s why I still go there regularly; and that’s not gonna change any time soon. But participating on a regular basis, especially answering questions? No, it’s no fun any more.

[u/felix-hilden]

2k+ rep on SO here. I'll try to argue both points:

Yes, the environment is hostile, especially for beginners. People can be douches and I'm sure valid questions could be closed. I don't know the details though. I can see many people having ego problems and answering in less than helpful ways.

The thing is though, SO isn't a forum for *all* programming Q&A. It is very specifically either designed to be (or evolved into) a site that aims to be a knowledge base, hence the on topic, don't ask and how to ask guides.

So yeah, being overly hostile is no good. The people could have just pointed out what the site is for and closed lots of the questions in this video. Reputation boundaries are good to not just let everyone edit and reopen questions whenever they please. Having the right people as mods, then, that's a bigger issue 😀

[u/lurgi]

He misses the mark on the basic question about what

class Someclass * foo;

means, because Stackoverflow is explicitly not there to teach basic programming. This looked like a case (based on the name of the class, which I don't remember) where someone was trying to learn C++ by learning Unreal Engine, which is a horrible idea (closed: opinion).

That's no reason to be a dick (he says, nervously, looking through his comment history), but sometimes "Please learn C++ in a systematic way" is the right answer.

[u/FullStackDev1]

I don't mind the mods closing low effort questions, but they can go fuck right off for closing all the opinion-based ones.

[u/Pockensuppe]

I'm going to be that guy:

This video did no research. It relies solely on anecdotal evidence and projection of the narrator's lack of information.

Note how he says that „why do they hate opinions? well, nobody really knows“. That's a straight-up lie here. They have multiple blog posts about this. Everyone is of course free to disagree with their stance, but claiming that nobody really knows shows that you either never bothered doing research or you have malicious intent.

The narrator also likes to appeal to emotion: In an obvious attempt to make SO look bad he asks „how dare somebody help some other person on the internet“. Just… wow. While SO is obviously a site to help other people on the internet, it also defines a framework and resulting restrictions for this. You can't just say „if you provide a site to help people, you can't restrict this in any way, that makes you a bad site!“. That is ridiculous.

For all the examples he shows, he never provides any statistical data. SO is a huge site, with an enormous amount of questions. Of course there will be some moderation faults in there. Providing no context makes this totally useless argument, again only designed to make SO look bad.

While I am an active SO user, I will not defend them here (SO does have serious flaws in its management). I just want to point out that this video is solely venting of a single user, and in no way a constructive criticism of the site.