I had a very similar experience to what you described on stack overflow. Novice questions about simple syntax I usually didn't understand. Met with downvotes and my questions then fell to the bottom of the void to never be answered. Luckily I stuck with it and most of my projects could live without whatever it was I needed help with, but it boggles my mind how bad things really are there for inexperienced developers. Anyways, thanks for all your great content. Learning flutter right now because of you videos, hopefully I wont have to go to stack overflow....
I give up asking questions in SO and start looking for courses instead. Even though SO is a great quick-way to get answers of the problem I'm having, most of the time what I'm looking for does not satisfy my needs or the code provided are lack of context (e.g. only one line but no examples of how to). I manage to solve some of the problems myself by using interactive code playgrounds to test and get basic understanding of them with lots of trial and errors.
I did. I was trying to learn WPF and C#, and couldn't figure out some things. About 5 questions that were closed within hours later I couldn't find beginner friendly answers to what I needed and eventually gave up. I didn't give up on programming completely (I still use JS and HTML a ton) but I haven't returned to C# since
Gosh I hate those ones on world building SE. I ask a question about structuring cities for an aquatic species, and it gets marked as duplicate when the question I am "duplicating" only tangentially is related.
Definetly. I hate reddit as a platform and I don't use it often, but atleast the few subs (tech and photography related mostly) I follow have a pretty cool, helpful communities.
@@TrifectaMonkey I joined a subreddit of japanese tv show contents, they're full of very nice people. Most subreddit that I joined are very welcoming and very helpful too, especially those with smaller subs counts. But if you joined a football/soccer subreddit tho..... lol
I am a member of several programming/tech - related subreddits and I now go there first because if redditors think it's dumb or a waste of time or just don't want to answer it, it just gets ignored. I think only one comment has ever been negative, but on SO, I have to do crazy gymnastics just to figure out how to ask a serious question and have someone answer it in a not-so-demeaning way.
@@anbi7418 B is not part of the requirements! If it was I would be using B! My requirements are A! So I asked a question about A! I am still angry about how SO did me. If I had a question about Python, I would ask a question about Python! But Python isnt POSIX compliant so its not a valid solution now is it!? I told this story to the senior engineer team lead at my work, and he looked at me incredulously when I related Stack Overflow's feedback. "But Python wasnt part of your requirements? What the heck?!?"
Sorry, but that's BS. I've been on there for over 10 years and I have experienced that sort of response (and read it elsewhere) probably less than once per year. Most people are probably like me: if the questioner doesn't put effort into the question, he won't get a response, at least not from me. My time is limited and precious and I've got work and family. So I only reply if I have some knowledge about it and if the error us properly described, ideally along with a minimal reproducible sample (CSS, JS, Java, Typescript, C# and a few frameworks).
@@igordasunddas3377 Okay that is fine if you don't want to answer that is on you. Some people are new to programming and I would argue that what seems like a dumb question with zero effort to you with experience is a thought-out question to them. I have been programming for 20+ years now and when someone is just starting out they have questions to me that seem like common sense but I have 20 years of experience and they have maybe 20 days. Let's say I keep seeing these symbols in example code in C++ ( |, |=, &, &=, ^, ~, >>,
Guys, Igor said in his comment that he doesn't leave snarky comments on poor questions, he just moves on. He's behaving exactly as you would like him to. Now you're the ones behaving like StackOverflow mods haha
Unfortunately there are too many neckbeard gatekeepers on stack overflow. Yourself on the other hand, have a wealth of knowledge and you generously share it with others. They need to be more like yourself.
Thanks Rene! There are a lot of good moderators on Stack Overflow. Unfortunately they get drowned out by the neckbeards, but that's why we have Discord and other forums to talk with programmers :)
What's the deal with the "neckbeard" stereotype, anyway? Every man will have a neckbeard unless he shaves every day, and to be perfectly honest, I can't afford to lose that much blood.
@@deusexaethera I think it's more about them being so unfit and careless about their appearance that they will let their beard grow to a degree so that it won't show their rolls below the chin. It usually refers to the kind of guy who 'acts like a knight' on the internet, without a single spec of knighthood (politeness, care for appearances, etc.) irl.
They tend to be awful and understanding the nuance of problems let alone answering them. Thats why they a. have time to mod an internet forum and b.want to (i.e. the only way anyone is going to listen to them is if they are put in a position of pseudo power)
You are right. I agree with you on 50% of the answers. But some answers you diss are not that bad. Mostly the ones that try to point you to the right direction while ommiting the actual answer. Not ideal as an answer. Shame that they didn't include an actual answer, yes. But the information about how you would go about finding the answer on your own has a positive value as well. For example the one on JS event. Yes the condescending tone was there. But Suggesting console.log(e) is something that could be usefull in the future. I don't believe you haven't seen the c++ const ref syntax before. Tho I agree, the answers on that one was all bad. But it is more often used in functions: add(const int & a, const int & b) { return a + b; } int x = add(1, 2); From this the need for such syntax is apparent. Yes I agree that much more users get the condesending tone than is deserved. But sometimes the user just picks a bigger bite than is able to chew. In which case it should be pointed out (ideally in some feeling neutral way) that this is too broad of a question to be answered by a single paragraph on stack overflow and to understand it you should probably read a book. You can't expect an answer if you ask how to be a cpp programmer. People learn cpp for years to be able to understand it. Ideal question should have an answer that fits in the stack overflow answer. If you don't post ideal answer, people should at least help you to formulate better questions, and where to find answers to them. Yes that doesn't happen sometimes and that is wrong. But you showed some answers that do precisely that and talked about them the same. That's where I disagree.
I have a computer science degree and im a full time developer and the reasons you've described are why, past the first year of my degree, i did everything in my power to avoid stack overflow. Its become a haven for the most insufferable kind of people, the kind of people who care more about feeling smarter than someone else than being helpful or productive. Or rather, the kind of people companies spend a lot of time and money on weeding out of their recruitment pool because they're horrible to work with.
I remember I would use stack overflow all the time while getting my degree. The lack of support and negativity when I supposedly asked stupid questions gave me a serious case of imposter syndrome. I really doubted myself and my entire career path.
Also even if you take precautions, so that your question won't be closed as a duplicate, they still sometimes close it. For instance, I had a critical problem linking one proprietary library. I found a solution of using flag A. Then I encountered problem with another proprietary library. Solution was "remove flag A". I carefully stated in my question that I can't just use existing answers for this exact reason, still they closed as duplicate
I really hate when I spend hours googling a problem and keep finding a similar but unrelated problem. Then finally find someone had asked the right question on SO and it was closed as a duplicate and linked to the unrelated problem. I feel like this has happened to me several times.
and sometimes isnt even similar XD and the answer of the "similar" doesnt help with your problem since its not related... stack oveflow is crap... reddit more welcoming as more incredible as it sounds
Yes! Sometimes I'm googling for a *very* specific solution, and I finally find someone with the same question, but it's marked as a duplicate because of some similarities with other questions. lel
When I got started with programming 9 years ago, my SO account got banned because I was "asking too many questions and not responding to enough questions". Literally makes no sense why I should've answered as a beginner.
no no you're getting it wrong, you have to keep the snarky comment quota! even if you don't know the answer, pretend you do and make noobs feel bad about themselves! (this is sarcasm obviously, but better be safe than sorry)
I stopped answering because I didn't have the rep required to make non-answer comments on harder questions, and the easy questions got immediately answered by full-timers who spend 8 hours a day on SO. Fucking stupid system. I've been an RTFM user for almost two decades and SO cemented that. Fucking useless site.
That’s a trap set on purpose. It’s a give & take bounty system. They knew what they were doing letting new users ask a question first - that’s not the type of person they want contributing to the site.
My experience with Stack Overflow has been: Ask a good expert level super specific technical question and get no response or ask an easy beginner question for a new framework because I can't find the answer in the docs and get ridiculed for it.
Too basic questions won't be answered won't be answered because... well, rtfm. On the other hand, SO members are just fellow humans who don't have the answer to everything. The more specific and technical your question is, the less likely it is to be answered (partly because of all the crap that pollute the feed and lower the chances of someone who would have the answer to actually see your question).
Been on StackOverflow for almost 10 years. I have 423 badges and over 11k reputation points. But in the last year or so every 2nd question I ask gets down voted. It's becoming so futile.
Stackoverflow is ripe for being disrupted, we don't need to be judged for asking a questions, we're all trying to fix weird unreasonable error that only can be solve if you sacrifice 15 hours of your life, if you don't feel like answering question, then don't answer anything. we don't need your prejudice. everyone here just trying to get their job done. if someone have the guts to ask a question on stackoverflow and risking shaming themself, it's because they're already google it for the past 3 hours, and still can't solve the problem. and they probably already did some kind of testing, and still hit a wall. sure you can solve that problem if you spend more time on it, but why? if you can solve it in 2 hours, why solve it in 15 hours? i used a wide range of forums before like polycount for 3d artist, music stack exchange, unreal forum, etc. they're all enthusiastic, helpful, warm, although there are ton of world class pro out there helping the amateur, even though a lot of the questions are a super basic questions, they still answer it with high energy they didn't have the god complex unlike the people at stackoverflow. who look down on everything, even though they didn't have the competencies to back it Stackoverflow is the most toxic by far, it even more toxic than reddit. that's why you shouldn't let ton of INTJ run your platform. no INTJ, you're not a god, there are ton of humble people who could suckerpunch you.
@Enareess sure, mbti have no real basis. but, i use the INTJ, because it describe their behavior accurately, it nailed the stereotype And also other people did the test and believe that they're an INTJ will act more like the stereotye INTJ like as well. There are ton of programmer out there bragging about how rare and superior their INTJ mbti are and how idiot everyone are. I don't want to use INTJ stereotype, but there are a lot of programmer out there calling themself a proud INTJ, and embracing their toxic behavior so, there you go
@@jensenraylight8011 If you think INTJs are bad, you ought to check out forums run by INTPs. (Personally, I suspect "that's an opinion" is more of an INTP pattern than INTJ, but yeah they can both be pretty arrogant.) More generally, this is a problem often found in communities/workplaces of very smart people, and there's a constant ego-battle to prove who is smarter. Invariably the not-so-smart people who think they're really smart tend to get in charge, because the truly intelligent (and wise) people just leave.
it's unfortunate that the people don't realize that by giving a helpful answer, they are creating the reference material that will enable people in the future to "do their own research"
yep. by giving shitty snarky non-answers, they are also adding to the number of links that will lead anybody looking for an answer to such a post where they don't get an answer. Many first links google will give you will lead you to such a post instead of one where they did answer it. Instead of closing those posts, they should at least also remove them. but they let them stay, so you have to go through link after link with no real answers.
@@maythesciencebewithyou which is what is making ChatGPT almost a first port-of-call instead of google for some kinds of questions. Unfortunately a lot of the answers it gives are massively inaccurate. At least it gives you quick feedback and can generally be relied on not to be rude.
@@5omebody Newbie may not understand terminology, newbie may not see correlation between his question ans reference material that you see as available, newbie is a newbie and has a right to be lost. It costs time to answer someone and be a bitch about it, but it costs nothing to just ignore the question if you feel "too high and mighty" to help someone. If someone asks respectfully, there is 0 reason to be a dick
My favourite moment on StackOverflow was getting to go and answer my own question which had attracted a bunch of downvotes and "This is impossible" answers. Turns out people have confused niche and unusual, and not easily Googleable with "impossible". But with some digging I'd found a Windows API to do exactly what I needed. In fairness, my answer did get upvoted which was nice
Hacky stuff like reading/writing another process's memory is one of those things that is supposedly impossible according to SO, however it's obviously possible (e.g. cheat engine) and Windows provides a relatively straightforward API to do this. Took a couple days to get it working, and SO was mostly useless on that journey. There's a weird disconnect where beginners are not understood enough to be given understandable answers, while experienced programmers are not trusted with anything and you just get "don't do it" as answer. There are times when you have to use void pointers even if SO might lead you to believe otherwise. Just let me learn. I don't even have an SO account, but naturally I've found tons of info there over the years.
@@Epicraatti Hah, yep you're in *exactly* my ball park. I think, like a lot of the Internet, the SO denizens are completely short sighted as to the fact there is entire universe of jobs, companies, requirements and projects out there. The classic being answers around how your company is doing it wrong and they should change - sure, let me just get the CTO of this Fortune 100 on the phone and tell him he's an idiot. The other thing I see a LOT on SO (and other places to b fair) is huge amounts of regurgitated 'received wisdom' by people who don't actually really know what you're asking, or how to answer, but they've seen somebody else say $x so they'll just repeat that answer to you
A lot of people on StackOverflow here in Brazil try to justify themselves saying that giving the answer would decrease the programmers' ability to find the answers themselves, but it's just a justification for not giving answers, because it would be quite possible to answer by giving a brief explanation of the answer and a link to an article or quote from a book going deeper into the subject. Great video, it's very important to talk about what StackOverflow has become.
That's why I avoid giving the answer directly. I usually tell them what they need to look into and what logic to follow. I only provide 'valid' code when it's a complex question and code actually makes it simpler. Teaching somehow how to solve their questions is better than to just give them the answer.
Why adopt such a paternal position, though? Answer the question or don't and move on. There's no stakes or returns to this sort of "pedagogical" approach. It's not going to make a community of better programmers, it's only going to reinforce the culture of gatekeeping by legitimizing abuse. IMHO.
When I was new to the stackoverflow platform the same thing happened to me. So I started apologizing before asking a question that puzzled me and seemed legit to me because I was not happy with the amount of backlash I got from my previous questions. This didn't help much either. Now that I have enough reputation I vowed myself to help anyone who asks a question (even though that it might sound very basic). If the question is not clear enough I will initiate a conversation in the comments and ask them to provide more context about the question so I can be helpful to them. If the question seems basic I will answer it in the comment section and if I find a similar answer I will point them towards that without belittling them in public. Just be nice to people. It's not that hard. If you think the question is not genuine just ignore. Why waste your time commenting mean shit to put them down?
Unfortunately theres a big chunck of people who are only fixated on being superior to others but the only way they know how is by tearing others around them down. Glad that there are people like you who enjoy building others up!
That's what I did as well, but I quickly discovered that you get downvoted a lot when you try to stick up for the newbies. I've pretty much left, apart from using it as a resource myself sometimes, and I only post when I happen to come across something. Like when I'm searching for something but land on a question that I wasn't looking for but for which I do happen to know the answer or something useful to add.
Mods on forums are akin to the "prison guards" in that famous Stanford experiment, where ordinary people given authority and power over others just went nuts and became more and more bullying and cruel with time.
There was once a question on stack overflow about how to use a Linux kernel interface I’ve written. It was a new driver and not a commonly used at that so the question sat with no answers. When I saw that I’ve created an account and replied explaining what the header file the user cited meant and how to use it. I then got promptly downvoted by people who clearly had no idea what the question was about and why the solution used syntax it did. I deleted my account soon after.
I think this whole situation explains the problems with Stack Overflow in a nutshell. It's pretty ironic how the site has such great answers, and then situations like this :)
haha yup that really sums it up. "The mods know more than the dev who wrote the thing..." I really miss older forum culture. Nobody really cared and it was the wild west in a way... certainly it was so much more challenging to find answers but it didn't matter because someone would write out a solution on a thread, someone would screenshot it and start a blog with a write-up. Why are there so many power tripping mods on Reddit and SO? I really think the currency system has its benefits but OH-BOY does it have its draw backs as well. Imaginary internet points are at the center of the lives of these people...
3:35 I think experienced devs really underestimate the usefulness of these kind of questions. When I was learning (and I'm sure we've all been there), I felt completely overwhelmed by how many options I had for almost anything I wanted to do. Want to do a website? There's literally dozens of technology stacks. Want to make a 2d game? I can think of 10+ different stacks you can use. And the thing is, when you are a newbie, you have no clue which stack is better suited for your needs, or if a technology is obsolete, or if we (the community) have found certain technology to be troublesome. Without these questions, newbies find themselves developing with completely idiotic stacks who are based more on their personal preferences than on what we know is better suited for their project. Taking similar projects (such as uber's page if you want to do a similar page) as a reference to what you may want to use for yours is a good thing to do. And btw, answering things like "it's obvious to me" or other condescending stuff is an assholey thing to do. Things are not so obvious when you are learning. I'm a master of Java and C# today but I still remember when I was a newbie and got confused at the concept of "static variables". These things are only obvious once you already know how to use them. If stackoverflow is so concerned about "stupid newbie questions", they should have a "newbie" section to place them all on.
For a site that depends on web traffic and user generated content, I can't think of anything more asinine than telling your users to look elsewhere for answers. It's like a dentist referring you elsewhere because you have too few teeth. Those newbie questions, no matter how trivial, become part of the searchable knowledge-base driving traffic to your site. Less user traffic always means less advertisement revenue.
There are resources for those things though. There are answers on SO that already list popular stacks for every purpose. The idea that SO is foreclosing the ability to learn anything by limiting the quantity of scattered low-quality answers is just not true. They are doing the opposite. They are pushing you toward the resources you need, not making bespoke resources for every asker specifically. It's a choice and it's the right choice.
@@bobweiram6321 Sometimes noobs don't want to hear the correct answer. "Learn this language before you try to use it" is a good answer. "Learn to read docs instead of asking us to read them to you" is a good answer. "This has been answered 500 times and I can prove it with a cursory search" is a good answer. I get why those answers are annoying. It's frustrating to learn stuff. It's doubly frustrating if you're too lazy to read. Luckily there's an answer to literally any question you can think of on SO. That's why it's bad for SO to take your very generous business advice. That's what Quora and Yahoo Answers did. They both turned into garbage and then one of them died.
StackOverflow is extremely conflicting. On one hand it is undoubtedly valuable. I have referenced it many times and will continue to do so in the future. On the other hand the community and moderation is absolute dogshit. I asked a question once and no one gave an answer. So I kept researching and developed an answer myself. So I posted it as an accepted answer to my own question, hoping it would help someone else. Later, a random person commented that my answer is in an unacceptable format and suggested I change it another way. Nobody helped me, I came up with my own answer, and I still got reprimanded for some reason. Furious, I deleted my own answer and question. FUCK. STACK. OVERFLOW.
lol, I've had similar things where I spend ages researching and laying out possible solutions I've tried, then people downvote me and comment "Have you tried X?" (X being the first thing I discussed in my question). Then I solve it myself and post the answer for posterity in case somebody else finds it useful, downvoted again. Then like 6 months later the answer gets to +10 because of people googling my problem
It's always the same case. To mods naturally bad people are gravitating. They are fine to do free work, but in exchange they want power tripping over everyone to boost their egos. Karma and downvotes facilitate that a lot. StackOverflow looks very similar to Reddit here. In order for a service to be good, it should be designed differently. So it won't attract bad people, but actually only the helpful ones.
Probably wasn't written in OOP, you need to make it 10 times longer and at least 5 times more complicated... to be in the 'simple' 'readable OOP way. So it can also run nice and slow! 🙃 I was probably writing decent 'working' commercial code before most of those 'moderators' were born.... I don't like OPP because of the way a lot of people use it!
Agreed. I got question banned. I tried everything. I edited everything. Read the documentation of "How to ask" and other links associated a ton of times. Applied all these things. Nothing changed. Still question banned for a year. It's like I can't afford mistakes as a beginner. At this stage, I have enough reputation to REVIEW other people's questions, report other people's questions, and I have 90 helpful flags so far. How do I have the perms to do these things if I can't even ask a question myself?
When I asked a question at Stack Overflow, I was really scared because the answers were real shit and they start to downvote me for some reason and started to close the question. Then I realized I didn't ask questions "properly". I read the rules and asked properly, and then they closed my question again. Lol. Never again. Even the Reddit community is better. I thought I was the only one who thinks Stack Overflow is getting extremely aggressive towards developers but glad I wasn't the only one.
If the reddit community is better, than this whole ship is going down. I literally would ask a clear and researched question, or specifically state "I'm not sure what to ask, but here is the problem, can I get guidance" and get downvoted. If you're already know the answer, why ask a question, and if you have no intension to help, why participate in a help forum?
I've encountered the stack overflow culture on various different websites. I remember asking a question on matlab as a professional electrical engineer, and I posted my code, and was promptly given a "Learn to code properly" response. I reported it as off topic and insulting, to which the rest of the responses were other people defending the original person and telling me to leave the forum. I've also encountered these people in real life, where they openly insult others and act as if they're the most valuable person in the world, and that you're blessed by their presence.
Im an EE and SW engineer also. Just funny they dont see, you learn to write good code by writting bad code and asking questions. Before I was ten I had read a number of programming books for computers I didnt even own. I didnt really learn until i was on a project with 110k lines of code of spaghetti that was breaking platform paradigms to pull off cutting edge things.
I used to work as an IT tech at a school. A lot of the teachers gave me praise for being really patient and kind, and I never really understood it, even if it was appreciated. All I did was help them out and answer their questions, maybe also explain why the problem they were having happened so they could fix it themselves next time. I get it now, though.
It is weird I tried stack overflow and math overflow the experiences was completely different. On the math one, I took picture of my homework with explanations and where I was stuck. Got a very nice answer to help me go further in my math problem. On programming, it was similar experience as the video
Math has actually highly intelligent, competent experts. Stack has garbage pseudo experts making tons of errors who dislike people who criticize old, accepted yet incorrect answers.
@@cainabel2553 I don't know, maybe it is due to their lack of social skills (I am not defending them), but the whole moderating stuff should be changed in there
@@miepmaster25 whole post-Soviet space where Russian is a spoken language. To be precise, it's called a "door-keeper syndrome", by name of those people who have small power to let you or not let you in.
I remember once asking a question on stack overflow about something (cant remember anymore), and i made sure to follow the guidelines as closely as possible, also providing proof that i had tried to research the problem to no avail. Once it was posted, it was literally MINUTES after that i got an e-mail saying that my question was declined, because it didn't "follow the guidelines". I literally was reading the ENTIRE guidelines for longer than an hour before posting. Same thing happened on a scammy tech support subreddit too.
@@AmodeusR I picked up coding again not too long ago and chatGPT is incredibly good... It's basically what "Personal assistants" were meant to be. Paste a bit of your code in there, "Can you explain what this does? and how would I implement that, give me some examples" and boom it does everything in seconds... Incredible really
@@m.ddacertutorials1017 tho i agree with you depending on chatGPT or GitHub co-pilot is not useful at all especially for students who are new to coding but it does help on explaining things and errors and the reasons for ig
I think he needed to elaborate a bit more into solving the stack overflow problems, the simple answer is that it is not possible to solve. Jesus, even reddit, discord and quaora suffer from the same issue toxicity towards beginners mistakes and fucked ups is common, why? I don't know, that is the answer that I was looking for in the video, but he only appointed the issues.
Thanks for actually having the courage to highlight this trend, which sadly isn't confined to SO but certainly is a cornerstone of their culture. What puzzles me is why people who think a question is too elementary to be answered just don't ignore it instead of either downvoting it or closing it. I think the answer is because the "high priests" of programming need constant reassurance that they are indeed geniuses and the rest of us are unworthy. Mods who act this way are simply broadcasting their own personal insecurities.
Thanks for the comment John! And I 100% agree with you, I think there are probably a lot of good moderators on Stack Overflow, but there are a few "high priests" that unfortunately ruin it for everyone :/
That's kinda born of necessity. If you want to rank high in search engine results, you need unique, high quality content. If you allow these questions that are too simple, SO will eventually end up duplicating the full documentation of every programming language in existence (but cut into small, disorganized pieces). Now that the majority of content on SO is junk you can find in a hundred different places (and better), it will get pushed back in search results, which means less traffic, which means less revenue, which means SO goes bey bey.
@@hellterminator You're in complete denial. If anything, it would help stack overflow. If people are asking novice questions, which they are, and there are more and more people joining the software development industry, which they are, the questions asked, no matter at what level, if having a proper answer to them, will bring traffic and help others that have exactly the same question. By being an asshole for no reason, you're only motivating people to stay off your toxic shit and SO will no doubt fail quite soon if they follow with this trend. Now what a novice programmer learns, compared to 10 years ago is not "Go to the StackOverflow, create an account and ask" instead they are told "Avoid SO if you can. Don't let them discourage you"
@@ScrewTSW I'm not advocating the berating, bullying and general toxicity, just explaining why novice questions are not allowed. You seem to be under the impression that SO is a support site. That is not - and has never been - the case. SO was built with the explicit intention of becoming a reference/knowledge base. The Q&A format is merely means to that end. And if _that_ is the product you're trying to build, you simply can't have 20,000 questions asking what operator is used in python for exponentiation or how to write a string out to console in C#.
What's even worse these days is the insane obsession with shutting down every new question as a "duplicate" even if it's qualitatively very different and/or the original is over a decade out of date.
The worst part of stack overflow is the fact that I know someone out there has probably had the question I currently have but I can’t find it because they were too afraid to ask. I don’t blame them though, I got mocked for missing a very simple mistake in my code years prior while going through college.
Or they did ask and only got snarky comments and downvotes. And those posts are the one Google will link you to when you look for an answer. I search for an answer and when I click on a link I often see posts that were closed with bunch of negative comments and no answers. At least remove those.
Having used SO in the past, I posted 1 question asking about the purposes of certain CSS elements and how despite being deprecated, theyre still in official texts, following it up with "whats the modern and correct methods of implementing these old deprecated functions ability?" My question received 1 answer telling me I didn't google enough, -10 votes, and my account being shut down from answering or asking questions, effectively locking me out of the website. Since that day years ago I now resort 100% to discord and friends.
your account was shut down from posing or answering question? lmao that's bullshit 😂 except if you were banned, which happens if you cross the line _waaaay_ harder than you just described. You could just open an account to ask questions again, why would they do that?
@@Merthalophor If you get a certain cumulative negative rep on your questions, 10 total I believe when I tried using SO, you get banned from asking questions until you can raise your score again. which you do by answering questions.
I don't know why it happens. On questions like yours I usually just copy paste the documentation page alongside some 10-20 word justification and it's good. Why would somehow waste energy ranting about how 'less experienced' you are? We've all been where you are now? Just ignore ot
@@Merthalophor Yeah, I have a notification saying "Asking questions is a privilege" and warning me I might get locked off if I dare ask any more. I've probably asked less than 10 ever, all in the -2 to +2 score range.
I used to work in a restaurant. And sure, you get the same questions from customers over and over. A common one I got asked a lot was if they should take the medium or large size dish... If I were to answer that question like one of those mods I would simply say "What a dumb question, how am I supposed to know how much you can eat? Figure it out for yourself." And of course that's just bad business. Customer is king. Even when you are much more knowledgeable and the king acts like a court jester that day.
well, there's a difference between payed service and voluntary community. I remember times when RTFM was quite common answer on forums. Nobody died from PTSD of getting such answer, probably. ))
@@adrianalexandrov7730 agreed. There's unfortunately a large spectrum of behaviors going on, so it's hard to pinpoint the problem without speaking in generalities. Stack Overflow has a lot of toxicity in mods and commenters and experts, but there's also at least some toxic levels of entitlement that some of those people are reacting to as well. Not every person asking a question means well, and not all of them are willing to do the work required to actually get any better. Some people just want you to do their homework for them, and see it as a volunteer service for them to pass a class, for example.
You hit the point. The community always find a way, and now the community is using everything, except Stack Overflow. I don't ask questions on Stack Overflow. The answers are often very condescending. There are some good people who had answer questions very precise, but that is also not the win of Stack Overflow. People had written the good answers and not Stack Overflow. I can see an enormous shift to Discord groups full of new programmers, who have many questions, and they get their answers.
any good python discords :) have to learn massive amounts of python related stuff. webservers, sockets, responsive stuff, real time telnet monitoring. those questions won't work on stack :)
I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years, and I still find myself googling questions that SO might consider basic or asking for someone else to do the research on a weekly basis. The whole point of SO is sharing expertise. No-one can remember absolutely everything about their field of expertise, and if you're not using a feature regularly, it's likely to go out the ears. There was a period where SO was fantastic, but that's long gone now. When I'm looking for answers these days, I usually ignore the SO results as they're almost never what I'm actually looking for, and I usually find myself on someone's personal blog or Medium, or just asking on Discord. It's a shame, they had a good thing going, and it's been ruined by _terrible_ moderation policies. (Twitter, much?) I hope they manage to figure this out, as the wealth of knowledge already on the side is invaluable, but I'm not optimistic about it. :/
And the differences between languages can be SO VAST, especially when you're expert in a high level language and need to do work in a low-level language. I've been programming for a decade and spent HOURS trying to figure out how to print to console in C++/WinRT in Visual Studio.
The first step to solving a problem is realising there is a problem, and then acknowledging it. Judging by the comments on this very page, and by the behaviour on StackOverflow itself, virtually no veteran SO user (let alone mods) seems to have accomplished even either of these relatively minor feats. So, yes, I too am quite pessimistic on the chances of StackOverflow fixing its myriad of problems before they fade into obscurity.
I swear to god nowaydays I never find useful answers on Stackoverflow, most of the time not even to basic java questions. And when I do find something you have to search through 3-4 answers that all somehow dont really solve the problem efficient or all in a different way. what the fuck are those moderators doing with their lives? having power trips like this makes me only think of them like jealous little children
As someone with 10k rep in SO (a good chunk of it gained from a question that probably didn't deserve that much attention), SO is awful. I've had people copy my answers and had theirs accepted instead, mods don't care. I've reported untold sarcastic comments because hell if you want to pretend to be inclusive at least discourage responding like an asshole... but no, all of those flags are denied because apparently responding "it's so obvious it's not even worth responding" is a perfectly good comment. Moderator queues are full of such garbage edits done by people grinding badges... mods seem drunk with power and close stuff because they feel like it. Now, there definitely are questions that deserve being closed, AS LONG AS they're duplicate or something. You just cannot allow "how do I print hello world" to be repeated 1000 times; the point of SO is to have somewhat canonical answers, and there's no benefit in repeating them again and again... but then mods will close "What is 3*4" as a dupe of "What is 3+4" because they don't have the time to actually read a question.
Hey Tordek, I completely agree with you. I have been intending to make a part 2 to this video at some point detailing some of the pain that the moderators have to go through to sift through garbage questions. I definitely feel like there are some different features SO could implement to make it a more welcoming community, while continuing to keep the high quality of Q&A it currently has. I think more and more people are realizing that SO is pretty toxic though, and I have a feeling it will catch up with them one way or another :)
Ohh yea, literally every time I asked a question on Stack Overflow I get thrown "duplicate question" yet when searching I don't find it. The few times people at least send a link of the question I'm supposedly duplicating it's a question that's either slightly related and the answer doesn't answer my question or not related at all. Even something simple as someone reporting it as a duplicate requiring a link to the duplicate and the ability to contest that would already help a lot.
Also don't forget OP: "How do I do X in Y?" MOD: "Closed. See this 10 year old duplicate on how to do X in Y where Y was completely different back then"
@@dejfcold The one I hate the most is when people ask "How do I X with library Y?" and EVERYONE is replying "you can just use library Z, like this: ". Yeah that's not what he asked though, is it? Like, if OP's specifically looking to do it with this _one_ library there's probably a reason for it that is irrelevant to the question at hand and isn't negotiable, usually because it's what's already used in a project. It's especially annoying when libY is free and libZ is not (or it's not for commercial purposes).
I've been accused of farming points because I've made a self answer question for a problem that didn't have a good answer, and the mod said "have you tried google?".
I had an extensive conversation with the moderators about this exact problem a few years ago. And they told me this: *"StackOverflow is not a Q&A or helpdesk site. It's a reference site."* I had to do a double take when I saw that, but they legitimately believed and argued that perspective to me, despite the design of the website. That their goal with StackOverflow was NOT to be helpful, but was instead to be technical reference, which explains a lot of their animosity toward "opinion" or "what is the best method" style questions. The kinds of questions they want are the kinds of questions that can be answered like a textbook talking about the languages and libraries. They don't want questions about problems that need solved, or questions about niche syntactic wizardry, or questions about standard practice. Only pure reference. Completely contrary to the design of the website as a whole. That is the reason it's a toxic cesspool these days. Power tripping mods want the website to be something that it is not designed to be, and when people use the website the way it IS designed, the mods get mad and close everything.
I remember finding very old declaration from stack overflow saying the goal is to build up a reference site. I'd also argue that the reason I'd rather click a stack overflow link than any other when searching up something is precisely because it does work like that. The questions and answer are a method to get there. I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that, quite the opposite, it seems to be of a lot of value. The problem, to me, is that 1) that's not communicated very well; 2) some people form an ingroup and mount a mighty horse and act like assholes. Those are the real problems, wanting a platform to not be a opinion based forum or a helpdesk is fine.
I have basically specialised in being someone who answers closed questions, I edit the really bad questions (surprisingly beginners don't know how to format a question like a professional, and granted sometimes if they asked correctly then they will have answered their question, but they're a beginner and don't know specific terms) and then I answer them. I'm an admin and defacto head of a programming server on Discord with over 5'000 members and I joined the server because of how much I hate SO and that I wanted to contribute more to beginners and never let them feel scared about asking. I have my main account with thousands of rep and then I have a second anonymous account because I'm scared of asking questions, and I've been programming for 10 years, 6 years professionally (as professional as you can get when starting at 14). I don't answer dead or closed questions for rep, generally they don't understand to rep my answer and mark it as correct, I do it because I'm not only helping someone get to grips with something brand new but I also hope that I have been part of a reason why someone hasn't given up. SO is a cesspool and I have to recommend that you shouldn't ask questions there, I haven't come across a Discord programming server that I dislike. Admin of one and I'm a frequent helper in 5 others (2 general, Rust, Rust Serenity, Python). There is also a gender issue, if you are female, don't let anyone know until you have a thousand rep and know your way around the site, I actually had 3 SO accounts and the first one I used my name and face and I was insulted and talked down to - I remember asking a high level question and then being talked down to as if I knew nothing and putting words in my mouth, I created a new account and stayed anonymous and asked safely and helpped others and I was at 3k rep before I put my name and face on my account (I feel it is important for other women who are asking questions in a space that seems so dominated by women to see other women). Also, don't put your name on your new account because if your question gets enough views you can't delete it and I requested that my account be stripped from the cringe question and it was denied, it was a massive pain to get my account stripped from it, only use your real name once you've learnt the ropes. I go into questions assuming that the user has tried to find the answer before but they lack the terminology to find the answer, with programming help yeah it's really easy to find answers to questions if you know the specific word but there are so many different kinds of problems there are blurred lines. For 6:08 I searched "addEventListener what is e", w3schools is first result and there's no mention of "e" (not what is it, no mention at all), the second result is freecodecamp which the description does show "e" but it's in the format "(e) =>{...}" (a beginner won't know what an arrow function is or if it's even the same as what they were asking. It would answer the question but it's still blurry and it's at the bottom of a long article). I find this question to be a completely suitable question that doesn't exist on StackOverflow in my search results and it would have been nice if that question could have been upvoted for the novilty and answered properly so it would be first result and help everyone. SO is meant to be Q&A, someone asks "what is e?", someone tells them, that's the end of it - it's like 2 minutes to answer the question and it helps the other person who might be in a spin and has been looking for an hour. SO should be a place for simple questions. It angers me that people on SO are expecting beginners to ask questions like a professional, it really shouldn't be like this. It's so easy to answer questions properly and to not downvote questions, it's demoralising to do that, I am very liberal with upvoting (giving people +10 is satisfying to do and I hope it makes them feel a little better about their score). They get personally offended when someone asks them a question they deem to be below them, the thing is I have known developers who are a SO douche and they're generally pretty bad themselves - they don't have the ability to be a good developer so they need to assert themselves over the only people they can, absolute beginners who have less than a month of experience.
Wow, thank you Skylark for your efforts! I promise you they don't go unnoticed and we need way more people in the industry like you. I've found that the truly intelligent people are often very humble and more than willing to help out beginners because they remember what it was like. It's usually the people who aren't confident in their abilities that tend to bully and harass. Once again, thank you, and I wish you the best in your career :)
@@GamesWithGabe It's my duty to help, I have an admiration towards beginners because it's taking on a task like no other. We've all been there, we've all had that spark to do it and I am perfectly fine hand holding to get everyone I can through the first few months and beyond.
Apparently, the moderators think that Stack Overflow is purely a reference site, not a Q&A site, which is not what the original goal of this website was.
ive been using c++ for 8 years now and i've never understood the reason WHY you could bind a rvalue reference to a const like that. Solid information, great expose on the topic of the video. I may have found out later, but only learning now because of diligence.
@@tomaszwota1465 1. "const" means "doesn't change". 2. An lvalue is any value that you can assign to. E.g. for `x = 5;`, x must be an lvalue. 3. An rvalue is anything that can appear to the right of an assignment operator. 4. All lvalues are rvalues, but not all rvalues are lvalues. E.g. you can do `x = 5;` and `y = x;`, but you can't do `5 = x;`. 5. Because a const does not change (by definition), any const can be an rvalue. `const int &x = 5;` creates a const reference to the number 5, which is an rvalue.
I changed my major the summer before my sophomore year of college in 2021. I had never programmed before and I was taking an accelerated summer course so I could graduate in 4 years. Basically was learning C in like 6 week. It was tough, especially since I never programmed before. I remember scouring for answers to this question about C which I couldn’t find in my book or online (again I was new, I didn’t know exactly what to search to find it). So i asked on Stack Overflow, I remember getting berated why these people for not doing enough research or not showing enough effort. These people didn’t even know me? Yet they still believed they knew everything about it. Really frustrated me and I didn’t touch the site until last semester when I really needed some questions answered.
I had a bit of a fight with someone on a server about this. A beginner had asked why his code wasn't working. His code had lots of syntax errors, so I fixed them up and explained what he'd done wrong and how to do it right. He was building a game, so I imagined the syntax I gave him might act as a template. Then I get a message "Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners". It annoyed me. In the end the beginner messaged me to say that the code had helped him keep motivation in his project and that he was grateful for that 🥲
"Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners" "sorry I thought this was a site to answer questions. My apologies, I'll join the smug self congratulating circle jerk right now!"
"Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners" -because the site isn't here to help, it's here to teach as if it's a classroom Imagine the solution being something simple like a semicolon missing and a person that saw the problem answering "did you check all your lines one by one" instead of just saying "there is a semicolon missing at line 69" and be done with it...
@Mike Iversen Assuming both are adults there is no real reason as to why teaching them instead of just giving them the answer is better. Especialy the whole "give a man a fish" vs "teaching a man to fish" doesn't apply here as in coding getting the answer also teaches you the answer (even if it doesn't teach the theory, IF there is any theory to teach based on the question) Also, you can't know what a person knows and doesn't know and also you don't know what knowledge they are lacking that made a person ask a question, so you might teach them things they already know or don't care about, so in the end, if they ask a question, the only correct answer, is the answer to that question. Now obviously the person answering is not forced to spoonfeed or give the info right away, they can play pretend a teacher if they want, but that is on them. PS: Obviously there are people who also care about the theory behind the answer and want to improve themselves, but that is most of the time obvious based on the phrasing used while asking the question. EX: -"I don't know why this code doesn't run, any help?" -"Well that is because ABC... Try XYZ" vs -"Anybody knows how to make this run?" -"Try XYZ"
The problem with Stack Overflow I think stems from rewarding recognition to the most prolific contributors. My pet hate, always done by a multiple-thousand point contributor, is closing questions as duplicates when they are not. These people, skim read the problem without any understanding of the essence of the question and use their 'vast knowledge' to cite another problem that might have included (often irrelevant) overlap with it. Whenever I, rarely as I have decades of experience, ask a question, I generally (or at least used to) include an example to illustrate the underlying issue. Almost always, the trigger-happy, point-seeking 'expert' will assume the question to be the example given and cites another question that addresses the example and not the underlying problem. Obviously, I now leave out the example and have to instead give arcane, specific lines of code where the problem was encounterd only to be met with the expected know-it-all 'experts' who say "why would you do it like that... a better way..." While that might be helpful on rare occasions, it does not answer the question (which the 'expert' probably doesn't even understand). I think the bext solution is simply to remove any form of recognition, helpful people will still answer questions while glory hunters (who assume 10,000 points strenghtens their cv, while for me at least it would count against them, revealling their underlying flaws) would lose interest.
This is closer to what I have experienced. I am genuinely curious as to how something works, but people answer as if they are taking orders at the drive-through. Mind you, I only ask when I haven’t found any good tutorials or explanations elsewhere.
Yes, making people's point scores private would definitely help. A lot of these moderators have nothing going on in they're lives because they sit behind a computer all day, either on stackoverflow or writing code pretending they're the next john carmack. They need recognition from somewhere so that they can feel validated that they're smart, so they get it from stackoverflow by dunking on people who they think are dumber. They're actually pretty similar to the snobs in academia, especially the computer science snobs (the worst academic field of them all)
If you have that much reputation on a topic (I do) you can not also unilaterally close questions but unilaterally open them. I've done that a few times
Wow, this is annoying. Some of these people act like learning programming is a breeze and you're an idiot for not automatically knowing where to look to find your answer. There's a version of this site for Blender and I really hope it isn't this bad.
Blenders community is amazing, and the blender stack exchange is really good. Most of the questions or problems I've encountered already have had answers on there without me even having to ask...
blender is superior, though they removed my answer that had images embedded and converted it into a comment despite me mentioning the version. Making confusing for readers who read it. I hate those nerds so much
The people here have said that blender's stack exchange is better - it does appear to fluctuate depending on topic. There are still the underlying issues though of the awful rewarding for moderation system. On my most used ones, world building and writing SE, it can be super hit or miss what is allowed and what isn't. I'll examine critically everything I can, go to bed hoping for answers in the morning, and find my question closed with unhelpful mocking comments - all while a poorly done question has not issues raised about it whatsoever.
I've been speaking about this for years, thank god people are finally starting to make noise about this. The future with AI and QA services will be the bane of sites that are poor in responses and mannerisms.
I've allready bought a subscription to ChatGPT expressly because it politely and correctly answers my programming questions. StackOverflow is so toxic I will pay 20 bucks a month on the off chance I DO NOT have to use.
You hit the nail on the head man. I've been a casual programmer for ages, I don't know best practice or have mentors/teachers. If I ask on StackOverflow it's because I just have no clue what I am doing and just want to be pointed in the right direction. I've read the books and don't understand them because I've no one to discuss/explain them to me, or I lack the institutional knowledge that some have from knowing other languages. This means I can't think of other ways to do things or draw from that experience that others might have. The place was awful, just asking basic questions got you mocked by a bunch of self righteous losers who just wanted to see you burn. Sad place. Luckily for me I now work in a great team of devs who are really kind and actually seem to enjoy sharing their knowledge.
That's so good to see that someone self-taught like you is doing great on the dev path. I'm a pretty novice programmer and I'll try to learn Java with Deitel books for Data Structure on University's vacations.
@@FableBlaze A shame because there is no right or wrong. Just as an example, should I use CSS Flex or Grid in my layout? Can I use grid inside flex? (or vice versa) These are healthy discussions that get people talking about the topic and overall understanding things more.
I can say best practice is a constantly changing thing. Its really, what makes sense in this situation. Its very easy to over engineer something if you worry too much about "this is best practice".
How else will people know if ur smart unless you show them? As someone with outlier intelligence i can say it doesnt matter how right u are if noone can understand your answer. As someone critiqued my EE professor with " SCott, you dont remember what it was to not know this stuff" Something any professional should keep in mind. Computing is too vast for anyone to know it all to a high degree.
"Nah, those people just don't know an opinion when it smacks them in the face" :D Well done. A few years ago when I was still very much beginning programming I dared ask a question on SO, it got downvoted to oblivion because it was an "obvious answer" or something like that... It wasn't clear to me though, and I eventually was forced to delete my question and all of the meager reputation I had earned was wiped away by downvotes. Since then I have managed to collect about 80 rep which is enough for basic permissions. I rarely post on SO now, and I find it sad that it is so unfriendly to new users.
Haha thanks Asher! And yea I had a similar experience. It's funny because when I was asking questions about Roblox development when I started programming, I had the nicest people on Stack Overflow help me out. But once I started coding in C++, I got really mean responses and gave up lol
@@GamesWithGabe I have seen the things that people say on stack overflow and decided that it wasn't worth my time to ask a question on C++ there because I would likely be met with some hostility in it, sometimes I find an answer to my question somewhere on stack overflow but it could have been more efficient for me if the community was more welcoming on there.
You automatically get 100 rep on all StackExchange sites if you have an account on any of them with enough rep. I have maybe ~1k rep on another SE, so I can immediately comment, vote, etc on any other SE site too.
Honestly, I've gotten this treatment from a ton of people in the industry over the years. Which is why I try to be nice to people who don't have as much experience as I do. We were all newbies once.
A bit late to this, but wanted to say that unfortunately it's not just SO that has this problem - my experiences in pretty much any tech forum, including electronics, results in the same kind of egotistical behaviour from moderators or the more experienced users. It's a kind of power trip from those that have been members for many years, who'll see a newbie (like me) coming in with what I think is a valid question (and I do tend to search first to see if I can find the answer, which of course occasionally I can't), and will go on the attack. It's almost like asking a question is wasting their time, which begs the question (ahem) - why are they there? One example I saw on an electronics forum had one senior member throw down some scorn on a new user, and a second quickly chiming in with words to the effect of "Oh good - another newbie for my blocked list". Pathetic and unnecessary. Anyway - great video - good for you for shedding some light on it. Thanks.
There are some good ones. The arduino discord is actually very helpful for me, and the mods there have been nothing but kind to me. I asked one of them questions about my circuit for like 3 hours and he just sat there and gave me advice, and when I eventually just said “this is too complicated for me, I need to start smaller” he and others advised me on how to learn EE online. But for most tech forums this isn’t the case.
@@Uvuv6969 I've had a good experience with Discord as well, the "C & C++ Together" server specifically. I started learning programming a few weeks ago, so of course my questions had an obvious answer *for them*. Five minutes or so after posting my question, we talked about the problem I have, and after half an hour or so, we figured out that the entire problem was that putting several calculations inside one cout command is not good, and it messes the order up. All that was happening in a friendly atmosphere, in one little thread in Discord.
This seems to be a common thing ... alot of people now days seem to think that they are superior and people that dont understand at their level are beneath them. This is a wide spread issue. I get it even in other mediums. I dont ask the question right and at best i get ignored .... at worst i get told to remove the question because it was not in the format they wanted. These people get offended as though they have better things to do ... yet they hang around in help discord rooms ...
Yep, I don't understand it haha. It stinks because if Stack Overflow had a good flagging system this probably wouldn't be a problem. Fortunately, it's a good thing we have Discord, Reddit, Quora, and other forums to use instead of having to go to Stack Overflow :)
@@GamesWithGabe well i know why they do it, its a dopamine high, comment on a post no matter what you get a number that grows ... bigger numbers = bigger dopamine hit. humanity cant have nice things. i bet you most of them have no idea how to actually answer the questions that they post on, so they give dumb ones like "study more" and "its easy for me"
When I started to learn to code, I found a lot of things on StackOverflow, but I've never asked something for these problems, these people have issues with their ego, they are finally good at something in their lives and have to ruin it for other or I don't know. It's terrible to see how the programming community is toxic to each other... Really nice video, the saddest thing is, it's over a year old :( I hope one day it will hit a new peak and open the debate about StackOverflow.
It's still not as vile as the paid site Experts Exchange. I was an Experts Exchange Master there in several topics. The admins of a topic would give people a red strike if they felt you threatened their point scoring ability (if you answered a question before they did). One time I called in the mods to help with a troll that was wrecking a question I asked and the mods almost banned me for it instead of the troll. Stack Overflow is a beautiful place by comparison to the cess pit that is Experts Exchange 😂
Asking questions often upsets me for similar reasons: the concept of obviousness, the assumed lack of effort or stupidity (instead of a legitimate reason), and the harm resulted from the dismissive reaction. Just makes me want to isolate.
This reminds me of MathOverflow. Many years ago someone had trouble understanding a very difficult math book. Good luck for him, since I read the book, fixed some errors and even wrote it all down. I answered him where I uploaded it. I thought this is good because other readers could find the source. This got voted down! A moderator deleted it, while other users gave answers without ever reading the book. I really had the feeling that the moderator and the highly reputed users had a huge problem that I was answering something they could not. They never answered my question if they ever had read the book and my comments.
@@irrelevant_noob No Copyright problems. But the link was a problem. This was risky. Some exactly wrote that. But some also wrote that they do not take me for real. I fear again if I call the name of the book, people will start throwing rocks at me. I am done ...
It's mind blowing the const reference question got that reaction. Particularly the answer. They did a very good job at following up with a good answer when they found one for their own question and still got slammed for it.
This video is gonna blow up. I've seen this a lot in my own debugging- so much so that I have never asked a question on Stack Overflow myself. I've rewritten significant areas of code just to avoid an obscure issue that, in all likelihood, probably has a simple fix.
I’ve found it to be quite toxic too. The worst when there are mods out there who seem to be just trying to farm reputation. On the normal stack overflow and even on the DSP stack overflow I’ve asked some complicated questions after thinking about them for quite a while, only to have some mod who obviously doesn’t know the answer, change my question slightly to make it simpler and then answers the question. It’s infuriating
@@hdbrot @HDB Nope. It's happened to me several times. I do not remember the questions, nor want to go there to find them. The mods also like to ruin questions by editing them. They then turn around and attack the question for not fitting the template or being too vague. Great answers roll in before the mods can close the question for being "too vague" or whatever. Punks and cowards. Not to mention the time they deep-sixed my polite response to to their inquiry of users about what could be better. They then attacked my profile in such a way as to reduce my point score. Another mod put a stop to it and restored my points and answer, but I got the message: F off! So I did. The last time I posted a question was 2019. The Spanish forum. Oh, man. The mods went on a tear. I got good answers, and great discussion, before the mods closed the question for "off topic." The mods even berated me for not responding to their nonsense. I may end up on the site when researching a problem, but I do not dare ask or answer a question. Now that I am further along in my programming abilities, I would like to contribute as other contributed to me. But life's too short to expose oneself to the mods' incivility there.
This isn't just an issue with stackoverflow in my experience, it's an issue with EVERY forum for programming help. Programmers seem to get off on berating others for not being as skilled and knowledgeable as them. Granted there are some wonderfully helpful programmers out there as well, and I wouldn't know as much as I do today without the help I've received from those people, but sometimes it feels like they're a minority.
Its - based on my experience - sadly a problem with every forum - from physics, math (for instance matheplanet (German)) and programming to gardening :( It seems friendliness is mistaken with toxicity
its really strange. personally i use lua because roblox's studio is really easy to get into and it uses lua by default, and their forums (basically lua with roblox-specific code and suggestions) are really chill, for a community infamous for either being made up of kids, or for exploiting kids for money, and its not a small community either
I'm going to be controversial here and say a large part of the problem is autistic people. I'm autistic, but I've put a quite a lot of work into learning tact and social skills. A lot of geeks just don't make the effort to be kind or humble.
stackoverflow is _not_ a forum. people seem to have this mindset that they can just go and ask their question there without spending any significant time trying to figure it out by themselves
A friend of mine offered another insight: he explained how a young guy would join a company, be given all the shit work and treated like scum, but eventually work his way up. But instead of helping others who recently joined, he would say "Ah, now it's my turn" and treat them just as viciously. Tough love? That's one justification. But revenge is powerful too.
Close, but not the same. There are internal company things that you sometimes must ask a co-worker for help on because it's not something anybody outside the system would know. In the ideal scenario, much of this is documented on the company's intranet, but documentation is always at the bottom of the list of priorities. Also, with SO, people who have nothing to contribute but snarky answers can simply NOT respond. When you as a co-worker a question, they sort of have to respond, even if that's a snarky answer. People on SO go out of their way to post snarky responses, lol.
@@addanametocontinue They were probably crapped on as kids or yelled at by teachers/parents. Or maybe it's elitism: I've known guys that took a university course, and after graduating became insufferable snobs. There are even a few on open source projects who insult contributors asking questions.
When I started out programming, I asked alot of questions on SO. But because it was so toxic to my lack of knowledge I abandoned the site. These days im a senior software engineer and your video resonated with me strongly
To be honest, it seems that this is highly dependent on the language... I was starting with haskell last year and the SO community for haskel was ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, seriously... always answered even the most basic question with love and care The c/c++ community, on the other hand, is literally one of the most passive aggressive, toxic people in the world... even though i'm a fairly experienced c++ programmer, the only time i asked anything there(which i don't even remember what that was, but was not something obvious at all) they acted like i should know it, and i'm not a worthy human being enough to their sacred better than thou programming language and i should go make programs in Basic, cuz that's the only language i'm capable of learning
I've seen this so many time on different niche forums. (One that springs to mind was the geocaching forum back in the day, wow what a cesspool). A lot of the people (not all) who have the spare time to become forum mods don't have a lot else going on in their lives. You get an over representation of people who perhaps don't have many friends or don't have a good job and so the moderator position becomes very important to them. They take it super serious. Add to that whatever personality defects and character flaws that led to their lack of social/professional status in the real world, plus the kind of self-important mindset that caused them to seek out the position of power in the forum. Now you have a bunch of these kinds of people welding influence in the forum, and they're all looking for problems to moderate. You have a lot of inadequate hammers looking for nails. The rules get stricter and stricter, reasonable users leave for less toxic communities. The people that stick around are themselves probably as toxic and snarky as the mods. Its a fun place to hang out.
Thank you for this video!!! When I was in college first starting I had a lot of questions and they dragged me over coals for what I still feel were rather fair questions. I was 18 at the time just starting out and I couldn't understand why... I defaulted to okay I'm just not trying hard enough. After that, I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out the questions I had and I couldn't come up with the answer to some. So I spent an hour on trying to figure out the best way to formulate the question that pleases the mods. I think I did this a few times and my account got blocked from posting... I was so frustrated with their replies and how they literally prevented my account from posting anymore that I created a new account and posted the same question but I worded it pretty rudely in response to the moderators. I probably shouldn't have done it and after about an hour I deleted it. After that, I stopped asking questions.
I use physics stackoverflow all the time because I like to answer questions. I can help people and I also enjoy doing it, also learning a lot myself in the meantime. The toxicity you mention also pervades on physics stackoverflow and I hate it. Some bad experiences in the past make me less eager to ask questions myself in fear that I waste time asking a question that is closed anyways. I've also seen some poor new users get downvoted/closed to oblivion while they just needed some help. I will be a mod soon (just need 230 more rep) and I hope I will contribute against this toxicity.
Back in the day, there was no Stack Overflow, we had this thing called technical documentation, provided by software and hardware manufacturers. Nowadays, you're expected to figure everything out for yourself, as if an internet search engine is all anyone should ever need. In reality, the shelf life of crowd sourced documentation is only as long as the next round of "continuous integration".
This is a real problem, you google some problem in a programming language and find solutions with many upvotes, but the language has evolved since then and the answer is now outdated.
@@terriplays1726 Similarly there are questions which answers use all the brand new language features that most people aren't familiar with yet and possibly can't even use because they're stuck using an older version cause they're using Unity or some other toolchain that isn't on the most up to date version of the language.
@@blisterfingers8169 Yes, or you can’t install the newest version because you don’t have the rights on the machine. Happens all the time to me since I mostly use a managed compute cluster.
The real shitty part is that when you google something chances are your first results will be somebody else with the same question being told to google it.
That’s not really true. Technical documentation still exists but doesn’t point you in the right direction. Technical books are not as prevalent anymore as say 10 or 20 years ago, and a lot of tools have become free or open source and those *may* not have the same quality in some cases, but overall popular tools, frameworks and languages have overall great technical documentation.
As a programmer, I'm gonna call out my fellow programmers. Most programmers still fall under the "basement dweller" stereotype and their lack of social skills/basic human empathy is painfully obvious. Lots of entitlement, not much showers.
And how is judging people based on their physique stereotype any better than whatever they're doing on SO. . . That's another issue in modern SWE experience, you pick up enough people attracted by big money, they bring other like minded people and suddenly noone cares about tech anymore but rather dressing well and "having impact" ~ I make meetings to feel important and useful instead of actually working
They could be basement dweller if at least they had the traits of autistic high IQ people, high rigor, excellent reading skills, etc. They have none of that. They are mediocrity dwellers. They accept the many incorrect and misleading ACCEPTED answers on C++. They reject what they don't understand (like volatile).
ChatGPT has successfully answered all the programming questions I've ever had ever since I started using it, without the judgement or rudeness. There is a very pervasive culture of condescendence on there, from my experience and observation that is.
I have good experiences getting answers on stack overflow. I have two basic rules for this: 1. Never talk bad about anyone or anything. I got downvoted about one question, and even got a warning about "you have posted questions not well received". I searched and it came from one single comment about gcc "not handling a feature the best way". That's all it took. I had insulted someones god. 2. Never argue. I often get answers/comments where they CLEARLY didn't actually read what I posted, but immediately started to dis my code or what I said. I tried to correct them, but people have an amazing capacity to argue about irrelevant details. What I found is the thread got hijacked by the argument over trivia, and I was not getting any real answers anymore. Lesson: just let it slide. Wait for reasonable posters to answer who actually read what you wrote and ignore the others. A last feature I have found from SO is there are a huge number of folks who live and die by the "credit" system there. Me I don't care, I just don't want to get the "you can't comment on this because you are still a dweeb" type restrictions. So when I get answer ( that actually does answer the question), I mark it as such. If I get an answer as a comment, I offer the commenter to write up what he/she said as an answer and I will check it as an answer.
This is a problem in so many communities, people who feel they know more than others feel the need to "assert dominance" by making other people feel stupid. Its toxic, I dont understand why people who get upset by a question take the time to spread negativity as opposed to just not interacting. Its huge in the automotive universe as well. I call it small PP syndrome.
I've dealt with this many times in the blender community. The moment I sense some one veering into the direction of "just Google it" after I've only asked one question. I immediately know where it is going. And other people just use your level to shit on you in worse cases. For example I asked about how exactly cgi works, like how do they get such high detailed models to animate and the like without bogging for the computer. Literally all the person could have said was that it requires a retopology and bake which would send me on the right path. But instead they told me "if you're asking this question then don't expect to learn it at all". Like what ? Who tf made these people the dictators of what I can and can't learn ?
@@alexh2665 Maybe they wouldn't go that far, but they would probably try to justify watching loli h**tai by using the classic "she looks like a child but is actually a few centuries old" excuse.
The hilarious counterproductivity of not giving a straight answer to questions is as follows: Newbie A. asks a simple question. His post is downvoted and he is slandered. Newbie B can’t see Newbie A’s post because it was downvoted. Newbie B. Asks the same simple question. His post is downvoted and called a duplicate post and slandered. Newbie C can’t see Newbie B’s or Newbie A’s post. Ad infinite. Their own reluctance to answer literally begs the question.
When StackOverflow first split in two, one of my questions got migrated by the mods to ServerFault. Then after several years, when they added more and more sites to their collection, it got deleted as off-topic. It was certainly not off-topic at the time, they just didn't have the very specific topic for it to live in that they do now. Edit: Another one. I answered someone's question, explained in detail what they were missing and how it worked, and got accepted. Good, right? Well, time marches on and libraries change and my answer was eventually shouted at for "not working" then flagged and deleted along with all the upvotes. Someone also copied another one of my answers and got over 10x the upvotes as mine because it was on a more visible question. So, I hardly ever contribute to that site anymore.
These people make my blood boil. I remember back when I was a beginner all I would get would be snarky comments and no responses. The sad worms that act like this were 1000% bullied in school and love the illusion of power this gives them.
Then again it's the other people, who made them that way. Some might've been bullied so much, that they never forget and whenever they are (or feel like they are) good at something, they put up that attitude, because nobody took care of their bullies, so no one will take care of them. I approach it a bit differently: if I see, that a person hasn't out much effort into researching and formatting the question, I simply ignore it.
Yup. No power over their actual lives so they flex on online forums where they can't get called a loser for it. Thankfully, SO powerusers are usually proud enough to advertise their SO accounts in resumes. Makes it really easy to throw their application in the trash.
My own SO experience was less than stellar, so I never ask questions there anymore. But the prejudice you are showing towards victims of bullying disgusts me.
@@martinelzen5127 It's valid to be prejudiced against them when they themselves go out of their way to bring others down, even more so since they know how it feels. Sympathy should immediately go straight out the window when they make the decision to continue a cycle like that.
I used to work in a call centre for a UK public body (no sales etc, purely a helpline for the general public). My anecdotal observation of my large number of colleagues was that significantly less than half actually enjoyed helping people. The much more popular attitude was to despise the callers. Those people had many more angry customers and arguments as a result. I had occasional nutters call but generally had a good and positive relationship with the callers because I actually enjoy helping people, because I get a sense of satisfaction from solving problems and I have a generally positive view of humanity. Many people find it very hard to put themselves in someone else's shoes. It seems many people weirdly put themselves in the position of effectively being a help desk at Stack Overflow but having the negative attitude to the people asking questions. Why would you even do that? My colleagues were at least there for the money.
Thank you for making this video. The quality of life and basic usefulness of Stack Overflow has tanked in recent years; it used to be the goto source for me, my students, and basically programmer I know, but now I honestly find it less than useful due to this exact problem, and seek my engineering answers elsewhere. This problem desperately needed (and honestly still needs) more spotlighting.
Judging by Google's algorithm, it's still one of the most visited sites programmers will end up on. Multiple times, on a daily basis. Still, I think what is getting more common is looking for a _discussion_ on different sites if the result on SO didn't make things clear. I don't know anyone that has an account on Stack Overflow. It might be among the lowest ranking when it comes to community engagement relative to active readers.
It's so nice to see a video on this issue, I've straight up just stopped using the site because you can ask a simple question and get an answer such as "I wouldn't do it this way, do it this way" and that's it, dispite expalining your understanding of the situation and needing a very specific solution. It's so ironic how they stop opinion questions, but it's completely okay to answer based on opinion and not give an actual alternative or just suggestion to how to solve the issue. simple solution; give the answer and recommend what they think may be better for them, it's not that difficult.
The people who pounce on an opportunity to question and criticize your methodology rather than helping to find your solution are the worst. Then you have to go down a rabbit hole of explaining your dev environment and the dependencies that require you to do things in that specific way. On the other hand, sometimes snarky comments questioning your methodology reveal a new path to an easier solution. I find this is much more rare than when such comments are hurtful, destructive, and pointless, however.
There is a fundemental problem with Q+A sites and that is repetition. People will ask the same questions over and over again, and the "experts" will get sick of answering them. It's like musicians and audiences - at some point there is a fundamental disconnect where the audience wants to hear the same old songs again and again; while the musicians are sick of playing them. If the musicians are in a position to ignore audience demands and just play what THEY think to be interested, they'll lose listeners fast, but if they keep playing "Oh when the saints" for the 10000th time, being a musician becomes a grating chore and a career in accounting suddenly seems enticing.
I've learned that no matter the situation and no matter what your choices and actions are you can not please everyone. With that in mind, I'll do what I do the way I choose to and if others don't like it then that's their problem not mine and I'll continue as I typically will do.
Other than Musicans Mods on SO could encourage ppl to join and participate in the community. So they wouldn't have to answer those questions again and again as there where enough new mods to help out... But if they discourage them to post even a second question they run into a self built wall... again and again...
This phenomenon isn't exactly exclusive to Stack Overflow either, you will see similar kind of behavior on open source projects where toxic developers, moderators and even experienced community supporters will berate users for perfectly fine questions or submitting bug reports. It basically turns into a huge circle jerk around "their" project and not the end-product and the audience were targeting it for in the first place.
Yess! At least with an open source project you can in theory fork it, though I'm too scared of the work involved and learning an unfamiliar code base to try that. But it boggles my mind how many people that create software for others to use, then even release the code for others to see and contribute to, have such disrespect to those same users asking questions or raising issues...
open source in a nutshell, i refuse to work on any open source project anymore after i had poor issues with the godot community and asking about possible bugs
Yep. I had this happen with a certain software I was trying to use. To be fair, I was trying to use the software in a way that was *technically* not supported, but the method did exist and just needed some polish. I was berated by many of the moderators and staff members of this FOSS project for simply asking noob questions and providing suggestions to improve the software as a whole. Then when I gave them a similar berating back, I was banned from their Discord.
Quora is the same in a way, but the egotism is dialed up even more sometimes. It’s like there can’t be a successful answer that doesn’t involve belittling the asker. Some people think they are entitled to information that they probably learned from someone else. It’s an extremely toxic phenomenon and the people are wasting more time and energy polluting the website with nothing rather than simply answering the question.
The part that drives me (most) nuts is that most of the "Related" sidebar questions with high rank (and thus presumed worth) are the exact kinds of questions they instinctually auto-close for "not enough research", "lack of focus", "no attempt shown", etc; for ex, in JS: "How do i refresh the page?", "Scroll to top of page?", "How do I trim a string?", etc...
The problem with the "not enough research" answer is that if you don't understand the problem or terminology it can be almost impossible to write a search request for google or know what to look for in a book. People are good at understanding idiot speak or maybe something being asked by somebody that doesn't have english as their first language. I've been a professional coder for over 30 years and still hit terminology or concepts I'm not familiar with on a regular basis. One thing that experience teaches you is how little you actually know.
I think it's important to point out that "Moderators" are just users with high enough reputation (>500 or >2k depending on the type of review). And some people review questions just to get the badge you get for doing a lot of reviews. There's even one for flagging questions! Maybe part of the reason moderators are so bad is because just about anyone can moderate. In fact, moderators are basically chosen at random.
The problem is that the elected moderators are just as bad. Upper management sometimes would admit to there being a problem with the moderation and culture in general, but rarely anyone else.
That's the worst part - they're giving power to people who are knee-deep in the dominant groupthink. It's slowly devolving/devolved from a flourishing knowledge base to a clubhouse of petty gatekeepers.
When I started out programming, I always had questions about how to do certain things and got stuck on the same problems for days. I knew about SO, I have seen questions on there before, but the unclear responses, downvotes, people telling others to read books and that they are stupid and programming is not meant for them made me very scared of asking a question on SO. So I never did. Can't imagine how many potential programmers lost interest in learning code just because they had questions and either got berated or were too afraid of asking the question in this toxic environment in the first place
It doesn't matter how polite or thorough you try to be. There's always a pretty good chance a degrading as*hat sadist will pounce on the opportunity to degrade and humiliate you, now that you've made yourself vulnerable by publicly admitting you don't know something.
@@akpokemon Lmao. I asked a question about something in JS that behaved differently from its equivalent in other languages, and got a comment about being held at gunpoint.
Well, ugly truth is, you need to read those books, and if you can't get used to process then not engage in programming professionally as you will always struggle and I think SO is more people with professional experience so that might be why. Being able to read the docs is the bare minimum you have to know to even dream about getting a job. So maybe Stack Overflow for less experienced and hobbists should be created
It takes no effort to just pass over the question and a little bit of effort to provide a duplicate link. These people actually take the time and emotional energy to create this environment. Just why? Great video! Summarizes very well how I feel about the site. There are other stack exchange sites that are rampant with these same issues like the DIY one.
Some of this is explained by listening to the original Stack Overflow podcast, where Jeff and Joel explain the intended philosophy of the site. The goal, essentially, was to be the top search result for pretty much any problem, with the correct answer at the top. This means they didn't want duplicates, they didn't want questions that couldn't have a correct answer and they didn't want questions that only one person would ever care about. The thing is: they were both very heavily focused on providing a friendly environment for users new and old, and were quick to point out that the rules were often more guidelines: its fine to have a few opinion questions if they're of wide interest, a very specialized question that is still interesting to answerers obviously isn't hurting anyone and could encourage the questioner to stick around and answer other hard questions, that sort of thing. They would hate all of these. I noticed that it's mostly comments on the question that are the problem. I find that interesting, as I would have expected flaming to be on answers?
@@nicolaid99 I do agree to some extent. The core idea, as Simon explained, definitely has some merit. It likely contributed towards why SO became the top search result on pretty much any coding question). Conversely, there's countless other forums with more open moderation that result in more duplicates and lower quality answers. SO shouldn't become more of that. It should however less aggressive and dismissive towards unassuming beginners.
I think the flaming is mostly on comments because they are not as visibly moderated as answers. Iirc, you can flag an "answer" for not being an answer, but a comment gets a pass.
Me, learning CSS a few weeks ago: "Hmmm what's the difference between margin and padding they seem to do similar things and all the guides seem to use them arbitrarily." 11:16: "Q: When to use margin or padding in CSS [closed]" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Guess I'll never know. Thank you mods for protecting me from this forbidden knowledge. Off to read a textbook I guess. xD
Short answer, most HTML objects are in an invisible box, margin is a distance of how far the outer part of this should be from other objects, padding is the distance from the inner part, to precise, how far this invisible box's interior from the objects it holds.
Completely agree. I found it extremely helpful and welcoming when learning to code ten years ago, but now I never post to it if I can help it for fear of being berated as an idiot. Every SO posting experience I’ve had in the last few years has been absolutely awful, toxic, and just makes me feel shit about myself.
I agree with moderators that opinion-based questions do not fit with Stack Overflow's goal of giving a single canonical answer to a question, however they are very useful to users. Similarly, I've seen questions basically asking for code reviews, which would be better-suited to the code review stackexchange. Perhaps rather than closing these questions, a system where moderators can vote to transfer the question to a more appropriate site could be implemented?
I agree, I think this sounds like a much better solution then what Stack Overflow is doing right now. I might do a follow-up video on this with proposed solutions and I think this recommending users to the correct sites is a great solution :)
I agree! Also, I think the "Stack Sites" should implement different levels for Q/A that range from Novice to Journeyman! This way when people are less experienced they can ask the entry level questions such as: "I have this kind of data, what would be the appropriate container to use in this situation?" Where this might be at an intermediate level. Or, How to properly utilize cache hits while using vector intrinsics to maximize efficiency at an Expert level... This way people especially beginners wouldn't be discouraged from using the site. Then you could progress on the site not just by reputation alone but by also proving yourself as you learn and perfect various topics and techniques within the site. You would then move up in rank and class from novice to the highest level. As for answering questions you would only be able to answer questions at your own reputation and rank or lower. Something like this could potentially yield more fruit. Also, they should add another section separate from the technical Q&A side to an actual opinion / discussion based Q&A page... This could potentially open up various doors for people to learn, excel and succeed.
Migration exists though! Moderators can move questions to other sites when needed, unfortunately it's rarely done because it requires an actual mod, and most reviewing is done by ordinary users.
@@GamesWithGabe Why not propose it on Meta instead, where it can be discussed and possibly implemented? SO is built from community feedback. (Warning: What you've mentioned so far sounds like it already exists, questions can be migrated to other sites on the network).
The cool thing about these "opinion based questions" is that they can be based on facts! It's not just a random opinion, if we're talking about the best JSON parser for Java a.e Some have more features, some are faster, this is OBJECTIVELY visible. You should be allowed to tell an user those differences, since it's objective constructed by facts. But it seems that facts aren't allowed on SO, which is cringe imo
Got this on my YT home today. The major problem undressed by this video is repetition, the quantity of people learning generally will be larger than the people able to reply them. So, chances are that a "replyer" will see a lot of question about the same stuff, and get tired quite quickly... Another point is the habit that some people has to ask instead of researching. I guess it has to do with the way people learn in school, so they tend to feel more secure when someone take time to reply to them and any further questions they may derive from the reply. SO folks tend to focus on more advanced topics, but lack guidelines on how to point people to the right resources to get some basic knowledge, and a place for people to talk about more fundamental concepts. I have my own share of complaints about SO, but I'd rather have it as-is than go back to the time when it didn't exist...
I never was a too active user of SO, however, I have been a Moderator (and eventually, Administrator) of a pretty big tech board. While SO takes this to the extreme with reputation based privileges and users being able to edit/close/reopen questions, even in a good old bulletin board you will have some users who seem enjoy stressing that particular questions are not well put, show lack of research or effort. As a Moderator I always tried to answer those in a way like "If you had checked google with this terms, you would have found these links which are useful. Please try to do this for your next question. And by the way, here is the answer for your concrete example." 😁
I think everyone has that experience of their first Stack Overflow question. Worrying that no one will answer and then the shock of receiving 11 downvotes and being horrifically scolded within 15 minutes of asking it.
Totally feel you on this, seemed to have changed kinda recently. The other half posted a fairly innocent question and got blasted by 3 different people...just over a little bit of JavaScript
I had a similar experience over at the Pi-Hole forums. I was trying to setup a DNS solution to bypass my ISP's DNS caching system (they intercept all outgoing packets on port 53 and direct them to their own servers). So I posted and a moderator chimed in and actually helped me to setup a recursive DNS solution on my Pi-Hole machine. Afterwards I went looking at the other solutions, I was happy with the recursive setup but I wanted to explore the others so I could get familiar with them and learn. So I also tried to setup a secure DNS proxy on the Pi-Hole and posted about that too. After which the moderator became incensed and started on a tirade of "Why are you doing this" and "What I told you was the best solution" and all sorts of triggered bullcrap. To which I simply replied telling him that I was just trying to learn about it, I would be using the recursive solution and that I found his outburst unprofessional, immature and inappropriate and that I would not be returning to the forum again. I reported the post and left. Never been back since.
What’s incredible is that when it just opened, SO used to be a place where it was literally hard to not get a good answer to your question. You could post a shit question, and within a few minutes someone would give a really good “this is the best I can do with what you provided” answer. This is what the site needs to get back to.
as someone too scared to use stackoverflow, i can appreciate what it is. Sooo muich less clutter searching there vs unity3d forums or discords does seem like they are going overboard tho. anything that ends in less unique answers is bad fore veryone
I started to learn node and python on June of this year and I wanted to implement a feature on my code but couldn't find how. Then, I asked it on SO, and, of course, got destroyed for not knowing how to adapt a existing code I couldn't even find. Thanks for the video, loved it.
The reputation system also makes it very hard for new users. The rep system rewards behavior that SO wants (useful questions and useful answers), but it doesn't necessarily reward good people or good programmers. I think it's also important to point out that "Moderators" are just users with high enough reputation (>500 or >2k depending on the type of review). And some people review questions just to get the badge you get for doing a lot of reviews. There's even one for flagging questions! Naturally, I want rep because it's internet points. I also need rep in order to contribute to the site, though, via comments and other actions. But the system as it is means that people who ask question about new frameworks have a much better chance than people who are using existing frameworks that there are plenty of existing answers for. And existing answers just continue to get more and more reputation because they show up in searches. People with high rep aren't necessarily knowledgeable or good programmers. But people tend to think they are smart because they have so much more internet points than you. I've had people downvote my correct answers and tell me I'm dumb because they didn't understand the answer or it was counterintuitive and I had lower rep than them. It's annoying, and it's not the type of behavior SO should be encouraging or rewarding, imo.
Omg yes. I remember asking how to change some server settings on an old application that was modified by some random guy over 10 years ago and the response was basically like "you didn't create this application, you should ask the company who did" IT WAS MADE BY MICROSOFT OVER A DECADE AGO AND THERE'S NO MORE SUPPORT.
When online forums are uncommunicative to the point that some people prefer to use chatgpt, the fact that people rely more on ai than another human for help is saying something concerning about the outlook of humans in the modern age to the possible future
Similar trends happen in many other communities. I remember a forum with a terrible search engine that would normally report hundreds of unrelated posts in the results making the answer you were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Searching manually was also terrible because the forum had years and some sections had a list of more than one hundred topics. The number one rule was "never ask a question that was already answered" and new users that dared to ask something (even those that tried to explain that they had tried to search for the answer but couldn't find it) regularly got their discussion closed with only a message like "This was already asked.". Once I managed to reply to one of this discussion before a mod, my answer was something like "Hi, you can find the answer to your question here" followed by a link to the old discussion. The mod that closed the discussion made sure to add a few extra lines of text to publicly scold me. Curiously, the forum was pretty much running on _opinion based_ topics as it was pretty much impossible to find new questions to ask.
Stack overflow is very unwelcoming to new programmers and it is very sad to say that. It is scary to think how many would-be coders have gone on to do other things because they had a bad experience on SO
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I wonder how many people just gave up on programming after posting their first SO question. Negative rep is soul crushing as a beginner.
inb4 Fireship makes his own SO
I had a very similar experience to what you described on stack overflow. Novice questions about simple syntax I usually didn't understand. Met with downvotes and my questions then fell to the bottom of the void to never be answered. Luckily I stuck with it and most of my projects could live without whatever it was I needed help with, but it boggles my mind how bad things really are there for inexperienced developers. Anyways, thanks for all your great content. Learning flutter right now because of you videos, hopefully I wont have to go to stack overflow....
I give up asking questions in SO and start looking for courses instead. Even though SO is a great quick-way to get answers of the problem I'm having, most of the time what I'm looking for does not satisfy my needs or the code provided are lack of context (e.g. only one line but no examples of how to). I manage to solve some of the problems myself by using interactive code playgrounds to test and get basic understanding of them with lots of trial and errors.
My first questing got negative rep since then i never asked again but i didnt stop with programming
I did. I was trying to learn WPF and C#, and couldn't figure out some things. About 5 questions that were closed within hours later I couldn't find beginner friendly answers to what I needed and eventually gave up. I didn't give up on programming completely (I still use JS and HTML a ton) but I haven't returned to C# since
Recruiter: Why do you want to work as a mod for StackOverflow?
Applicant: That's a stupid question, flagged as duplicate
Recruiter: You're hired!
lmao I lol'd so hard. Deserves more upvotes
Couldn't be more true
@@mkontent r/ihavereddit
edit: 1 year later i realise it's probably about stackoverflow upvotes not reddit upvotes
Gosh I hate those ones on world building SE. I ask a question about structuring cities for an aquatic species, and it gets marked as duplicate when the question I am "duplicating" only tangentially is related.
Golden 💔😂
If reddit is more welcoming than your community, then you're doing things wrong
Oh my god so true
Definetly. I hate reddit as a platform and I don't use it often, but atleast the few subs (tech and photography related mostly) I follow have a pretty cool, helpful communities.
@@TrifectaMonkey I joined a subreddit of japanese tv show contents, they're full of very nice people. Most subreddit that I joined are very welcoming and very helpful too, especially those with smaller subs counts. But if you joined a football/soccer subreddit tho..... lol
I seem to find a lot of programming answers on Reddit, some subs are pretty active!
I am a member of several programming/tech - related subreddits and I now go there first because if redditors think it's dumb or a waste of time or just don't want to answer it, it just gets ignored. I think only one comment has ever been negative, but on SO, I have to do crazy gymnastics just to figure out how to ask a serious question and have someone answer it in a not-so-demeaning way.
These mods need to touch some grass, why do they have to be so rude for no reason lol
Lol I agree
Hi, Dani
dani i drink milk with grass
We have Dani, Fireship, Randy, 3b1b and The Horizon now :o
nice
@@asherhaun this is epic indeed
Reminds me of the Stackoverflow meme:
[-5] User: How do I do A?
[+10] Mod: you do B.
[-2] User: But that doesn't do A.
[+5] Mod: Yeah nobody does A.
that just feels like bots upvoting and downvoting lmao
"Yeah nobody does A."
could this be.. an opinion? :p
U: I need to use A to...
M: Use B.
U: But imy company uses A so I can't just change framewo-
M: A is a bad practice (). Use B.
this is valid sometimes. although the mod should explain why doing A is bad in this case.
@@anbi7418 B is not part of the requirements! If it was I would be using B! My requirements are A! So I asked a question about A!
I am still angry about how SO did me. If I had a question about Python, I would ask a question about Python! But Python isnt POSIX compliant so its not a valid solution now is it!? I told this story to the senior engineer team lead at my work, and he looked at me incredulously when I related Stack Overflow's feedback.
"But Python wasnt part of your requirements? What the heck?!?"
"How dare you ask a question to which I already know the answer" - average StackOverflow response
Sorry, but that's BS. I've been on there for over 10 years and I have experienced that sort of response (and read it elsewhere) probably less than once per year.
Most people are probably like me: if the questioner doesn't put effort into the question, he won't get a response, at least not from me. My time is limited and precious and I've got work and family. So I only reply if I have some knowledge about it and if the error us properly described, ideally along with a minimal reproducible sample (CSS, JS, Java, Typescript, C# and a few frameworks).
@@igordasunddas3377 Okay that is fine if you don't want to answer that is on you. Some people are new to programming and I would argue that what seems like a dumb question with zero effort to you with experience is a thought-out question to them. I have been programming for 20+ years now and when someone is just starting out they have questions to me that seem like common sense but I have 20 years of experience and they have maybe 20 days. Let's say I keep seeing these symbols in example code in C++ ( |, |=, &, &=, ^, ~, >>,
@@igordasunddas3377if you don't want to answer a question, why not just leave it for someone else
@igordasunddas3377
Here is a news flash. Answering questions is voluntary. Nobody is wasting your "oh so precious time" with their genuine questions.
Guys, Igor said in his comment that he doesn't leave snarky comments on poor questions, he just moves on. He's behaving exactly as you would like him to. Now you're the ones behaving like StackOverflow mods haha
Unfortunately there are too many neckbeard gatekeepers on stack overflow. Yourself on the other hand, have a wealth of knowledge and you generously share it with others. They need to be more like yourself.
Thanks Rene! There are a lot of good moderators on Stack Overflow. Unfortunately they get drowned out by the neckbeards, but that's why we have Discord and other forums to talk with programmers :)
What's the deal with the "neckbeard" stereotype, anyway? Every man will have a neckbeard unless he shaves every day, and to be perfectly honest, I can't afford to lose that much blood.
@@deusexaethera I think it's more about them being so unfit and careless about their appearance that they will let their beard grow to a degree so that it won't show their rolls below the chin.
It usually refers to the kind of guy who 'acts like a knight' on the internet, without a single spec of knighthood (politeness, care for appearances, etc.) irl.
They tend to be awful and understanding the nuance of problems let alone answering them. Thats why they a. have time to mod an internet forum and b.want to (i.e. the only way anyone is going to listen to them is if they are put in a position of pseudo power)
You are right. I agree with you on 50% of the answers. But some answers you diss are not that bad. Mostly the ones that try to point you to the right direction while ommiting the actual answer. Not ideal as an answer. Shame that they didn't include an actual answer, yes. But the information about how you would go about finding the answer on your own has a positive value as well.
For example the one on JS event. Yes the condescending tone was there. But Suggesting console.log(e) is something that could be usefull in the future.
I don't believe you haven't seen the c++ const ref syntax before. Tho I agree, the answers on that one was all bad. But it is more often used in functions: add(const int & a, const int & b) { return a + b; } int x = add(1, 2); From this the need for such syntax is apparent.
Yes I agree that much more users get the condesending tone than is deserved. But sometimes the user just picks a bigger bite than is able to chew. In which case it should be pointed out (ideally in some feeling neutral way) that this is too broad of a question to be answered by a single paragraph on stack overflow and to understand it you should probably read a book. You can't expect an answer if you ask how to be a cpp programmer. People learn cpp for years to be able to understand it.
Ideal question should have an answer that fits in the stack overflow answer.
If you don't post ideal answer, people should at least help you to formulate better questions, and where to find answers to them. Yes that doesn't happen sometimes and that is wrong. But you showed some answers that do precisely that and talked about them the same. That's where I disagree.
I have a computer science degree and im a full time developer and the reasons you've described are why, past the first year of my degree, i did everything in my power to avoid stack overflow. Its become a haven for the most insufferable kind of people, the kind of people who care more about feeling smarter than someone else than being helpful or productive.
Or rather, the kind of people companies spend a lot of time and money on weeding out of their recruitment pool because they're horrible to work with.
Ii
I remember I would use stack overflow all the time while getting my degree. The lack of support and negativity when I supposedly asked stupid questions gave me a serious case of imposter syndrome. I really doubted myself and my entire career path.
>> companies spend a lot of time and money on weeding out of their recruitment pool
If only they did ...
@@SnijtraM They do. Act uptight or like a smartass and you probably won't last long in a company, unless the company is run/managed by assholes.
@@DLBBALL Yeah well .. that "unless" clause isn't a marginal or small thing, you know ...
the worst thing on stackoverflow is when a question gets closed for being similar and you don't understand how it's similar
Also even if you take precautions, so that your question won't be closed as a duplicate, they still sometimes close it.
For instance, I had a critical problem linking one proprietary library. I found a solution of using flag A.
Then I encountered problem with another proprietary library. Solution was "remove flag A".
I carefully stated in my question that I can't just use existing answers for this exact reason, still they closed as duplicate
I really hate when I spend hours googling a problem and keep finding a similar but unrelated problem. Then finally find someone had asked the right question on SO and it was closed as a duplicate and linked to the unrelated problem. I feel like this has happened to me several times.
and sometimes isnt even similar XD and the answer of the "similar" doesnt help with your problem since its not related... stack oveflow is crap... reddit more welcoming as more incredible as it sounds
indeed, ive seen alot of closed questions without answers, & the answers were nowere to find, lmao...
Yes! Sometimes I'm googling for a *very* specific solution, and I finally find someone with the same question, but it's marked as a duplicate because of some similarities with other questions. lel
When I got started with programming 9 years ago, my SO account got banned because I was "asking too many questions and not responding to enough questions". Literally makes no sense why I should've answered as a beginner.
no no you're getting it wrong, you have to keep the snarky comment quota! even if you don't know the answer, pretend you do and make noobs feel bad about themselves!
(this is sarcasm obviously, but better be safe than sorry)
Even a beginner can snarkily ask if they've Googled for an answer and tell them the site isn't there to write code for n00bs.
That sounds like a skill issue and a you problem IMO. What is StackOverflow, a Q&A site? Get out of here. /s
I stopped answering because I didn't have the rep required to make non-answer comments on harder questions, and the easy questions got immediately answered by full-timers who spend 8 hours a day on SO. Fucking stupid system. I've been an RTFM user for almost two decades and SO cemented that. Fucking useless site.
That’s a trap set on purpose. It’s a give & take bounty system.
They knew what they were doing letting new users ask a question first - that’s not the type of person they want contributing to the site.
My experience with Stack Overflow has been: Ask a good expert level super specific technical question and get no response or ask an easy beginner question for a new framework because I can't find the answer in the docs and get ridiculed for it.
word
i heard the trick is to have 2 accounts, 1 asks the question, and another one to post wrong answer to trigger these people to post the real answer..
Oh I had many questions flagged as too specific :facepalm
Too basic questions won't be answered won't be answered because... well, rtfm.
On the other hand, SO members are just fellow humans who don't have the answer to everything. The more specific and technical your question is, the less likely it is to be answered (partly because of all the crap that pollute the feed and lower the chances of someone who would have the answer to actually see your question).
@@Stevexupen ahahahahah I love you... I have been doing that for soo long ...............
Been on StackOverflow for almost 10 years. I have 423 badges and over 11k reputation points.
But in the last year or so every 2nd question I ask gets down voted. It's becoming so futile.
Have you posted on meta to ask why you're being downvoted/what you can do to improve your questions?
@@thefungusamongus3958 Yes. Twice. They got downvoted too.
Stackoverflow is ripe for being disrupted,
we don't need to be judged for asking a questions,
we're all trying to fix weird unreasonable error that only can be solve if you sacrifice 15 hours of your life,
if you don't feel like answering question, then don't answer anything.
we don't need your prejudice.
everyone here just trying to get their job done.
if someone have the guts to ask a question on stackoverflow and risking shaming themself,
it's because they're already google it for the past 3 hours, and still can't solve the problem.
and they probably already did some kind of testing, and still hit a wall.
sure you can solve that problem if you spend more time on it, but why?
if you can solve it in 2 hours, why solve it in 15 hours?
i used a wide range of forums before like polycount for 3d artist, music stack exchange, unreal forum, etc.
they're all enthusiastic, helpful, warm, although there are ton of world class pro out there helping the amateur,
even though a lot of the questions are a super basic questions, they still answer it with high energy
they didn't have the god complex unlike the people at stackoverflow. who look down on everything,
even though they didn't have the competencies to back it
Stackoverflow is the most toxic by far, it even more toxic than reddit.
that's why you shouldn't let ton of INTJ run your platform.
no INTJ, you're not a god, there are ton of humble people who could suckerpunch you.
@Enareess sure, mbti have no real basis.
but, i use the INTJ, because it describe their behavior accurately, it nailed the stereotype
And also other people did the test and
believe that they're an INTJ will act more like the stereotye INTJ like as well.
There are ton of programmer out there bragging about how rare and superior their INTJ mbti are and how idiot everyone are.
I don't want to use INTJ stereotype, but there are a lot of programmer out there calling themself a proud INTJ, and embracing their toxic behavior
so, there you go
@@jensenraylight8011 If you think INTJs are bad, you ought to check out forums run by INTPs. (Personally, I suspect "that's an opinion" is more of an INTP pattern than INTJ, but yeah they can both be pretty arrogant.)
More generally, this is a problem often found in communities/workplaces of very smart people, and there's a constant ego-battle to prove who is smarter. Invariably the not-so-smart people who think they're really smart tend to get in charge, because the truly intelligent (and wise) people just leave.
it's unfortunate that the people don't realize that by giving a helpful answer, they are creating the reference material that will enable people in the future to "do their own research"
yep. by giving shitty snarky non-answers, they are also adding to the number of links that will lead anybody looking for an answer to such a post where they don't get an answer. Many first links google will give you will lead you to such a post instead of one where they did answer it. Instead of closing those posts, they should at least also remove them. but they let them stay, so you have to go through link after link with no real answers.
@@maythesciencebewithyou which is what is making ChatGPT almost a first port-of-call instead of google for some kinds of questions. Unfortunately a lot of the answers it gives are massively inaccurate. At least it gives you quick feedback and can generally be relied on not to be rude.
true
the issue is that usually, the reference material exists. 1000 times over.
@@5omebody Newbie may not understand terminology, newbie may not see correlation between his question ans reference material that you see as available, newbie is a newbie and has a right to be lost. It costs time to answer someone and be a bitch about it, but it costs nothing to just ignore the question if you feel "too high and mighty" to help someone. If someone asks respectfully, there is 0 reason to be a dick
My favourite moment on StackOverflow was getting to go and answer my own question which had attracted a bunch of downvotes and "This is impossible" answers. Turns out people have confused niche and unusual, and not easily Googleable with "impossible". But with some digging I'd found a Windows API to do exactly what I needed. In fairness, my answer did get upvoted which was nice
What were you trying to do that was "impossible?" Get a decent answer on stackoverflow?
Hacky stuff like reading/writing another process's memory is one of those things that is supposedly impossible according to SO, however it's obviously possible (e.g. cheat engine) and Windows provides a relatively straightforward API to do this. Took a couple days to get it working, and SO was mostly useless on that journey.
There's a weird disconnect where beginners are not understood enough to be given understandable answers, while experienced programmers are not trusted with anything and you just get "don't do it" as answer. There are times when you have to use void pointers even if SO might lead you to believe otherwise. Just let me learn.
I don't even have an SO account, but naturally I've found tons of info there over the years.
@@Epicraatti Hah, yep you're in *exactly* my ball park. I think, like a lot of the Internet, the SO denizens are completely short sighted as to the fact there is entire universe of jobs, companies, requirements and projects out there. The classic being answers around how your company is doing it wrong and they should change - sure, let me just get the CTO of this Fortune 100 on the phone and tell him he's an idiot.
The other thing I see a LOT on SO (and other places to b fair) is huge amounts of regurgitated 'received wisdom' by people who don't actually really know what you're asking, or how to answer, but they've seen somebody else say $x so they'll just repeat that answer to you
I hate them. I hope they burn in hell.
A lot of people on StackOverflow here in Brazil try to justify themselves saying that giving the answer would decrease the programmers' ability to find the answers themselves, but it's just a justification for not giving answers, because it would be quite possible to answer by giving a brief explanation of the answer and a link to an article or quote from a book going deeper into the subject. Great video, it's very important to talk about what StackOverflow has become.
What a strange view. The truth is, when you help others, you usually learn something new yourself.
That's why I avoid giving the answer directly. I usually tell them what they need to look into and what logic to follow. I only provide 'valid' code when it's a complex question and code actually makes it simpler.
Teaching somehow how to solve their questions is better than to just give them the answer.
Why adopt such a paternal position, though? Answer the question or don't and move on. There's no stakes or returns to this sort of "pedagogical" approach. It's not going to make a community of better programmers, it's only going to reinforce the culture of gatekeeping by legitimizing abuse. IMHO.
@@JR-mk6ow when I ask for help, I'm looking for exactly that kind of answer
Asking questions and getting answers is part of learning. People who aren't afraid to ask questions learn faster. We shouldn't discourage curiosity.
When I was new to the stackoverflow platform the same thing happened to me. So I started apologizing before asking a question that puzzled me and seemed legit to me because I was not happy with the amount of backlash I got from my previous questions. This didn't help much either.
Now that I have enough reputation I vowed myself to help anyone who asks a question (even though that it might sound very basic). If the question is not clear enough I will initiate a conversation in the comments and ask them to provide more context about the question so I can be helpful to them. If the question seems basic I will answer it in the comment section and if I find a similar answer I will point them towards that without belittling them in public.
Just be nice to people. It's not that hard. If you think the question is not genuine just ignore. Why waste your time commenting mean shit to put them down?
admirable atitude
Unfortunately theres a big chunck of people who are only fixated on being superior to others but the only way they know how is by tearing others around them down. Glad that there are people like you who enjoy building others up!
Yeah, but then you don't get to feel superior and smart
That's what I did as well, but I quickly discovered that you get downvoted a lot when you try to stick up for the newbies. I've pretty much left, apart from using it as a resource myself sometimes, and I only post when I happen to come across something. Like when I'm searching for something but land on a question that I wasn't looking for but for which I do happen to know the answer or something useful to add.
Mods on forums are akin to the "prison guards" in that famous Stanford experiment, where ordinary people given authority and power over others just went nuts and became more and more bullying and cruel with time.
There was once a question on stack overflow about how to use a Linux kernel interface I’ve written. It was a new driver and not a commonly used at that so the question sat with no answers. When I saw that I’ve created an account and replied explaining what the header file the user cited meant and how to use it. I then got promptly downvoted by people who clearly had no idea what the question was about and why the solution used syntax it did. I deleted my account soon after.
I think this whole situation explains the problems with Stack Overflow in a nutshell. It's pretty ironic how the site has such great answers, and then situations like this :)
That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry that happened to you.
This is almost comical,if it weren't tragical.
Public anonymous vote counts are a terrible, terrible proxy for quality.
haha yup that really sums it up.
"The mods know more than the dev who wrote the thing..."
I really miss older forum culture. Nobody really cared and it was the wild west in a way... certainly it was so much more challenging to find answers but it didn't matter because someone would write out a solution on a thread, someone would screenshot it and start a blog with a write-up. Why are there so many power tripping mods on Reddit and SO? I really think the currency system has its benefits but OH-BOY does it have its draw backs as well. Imaginary internet points are at the center of the lives of these people...
3:35 I think experienced devs really underestimate the usefulness of these kind of questions. When I was learning (and I'm sure we've all been there), I felt completely overwhelmed by how many options I had for almost anything I wanted to do. Want to do a website? There's literally dozens of technology stacks. Want to make a 2d game? I can think of 10+ different stacks you can use. And the thing is, when you are a newbie, you have no clue which stack is better suited for your needs, or if a technology is obsolete, or if we (the community) have found certain technology to be troublesome.
Without these questions, newbies find themselves developing with completely idiotic stacks who are based more on their personal preferences than on what we know is better suited for their project. Taking similar projects (such as uber's page if you want to do a similar page) as a reference to what you may want to use for yours is a good thing to do.
And btw, answering things like "it's obvious to me" or other condescending stuff is an assholey thing to do. Things are not so obvious when you are learning. I'm a master of Java and C# today but I still remember when I was a newbie and got confused at the concept of "static variables". These things are only obvious once you already know how to use them.
If stackoverflow is so concerned about "stupid newbie questions", they should have a "newbie" section to place them all on.
For a site that depends on web traffic and user generated content, I can't think of anything more asinine than telling your users to look elsewhere for answers. It's like a dentist referring you elsewhere because you have too few teeth.
Those newbie questions, no matter how trivial, become part of the searchable knowledge-base driving traffic to your site. Less user traffic always means less advertisement revenue.
@@jenniferchaulam whyd you go there in first place xD
There are resources for those things though. There are answers on SO that already list popular stacks for every purpose. The idea that SO is foreclosing the ability to learn anything by limiting the quantity of scattered low-quality answers is just not true. They are doing the opposite. They are pushing you toward the resources you need, not making bespoke resources for every asker specifically. It's a choice and it's the right choice.
No they don't care and they want u off the site.
@@bobweiram6321 Sometimes noobs don't want to hear the correct answer. "Learn this language before you try to use it" is a good answer. "Learn to read docs instead of asking us to read them to you" is a good answer. "This has been answered 500 times and I can prove it with a cursory search" is a good answer. I get why those answers are annoying. It's frustrating to learn stuff. It's doubly frustrating if you're too lazy to read. Luckily there's an answer to literally any question you can think of on SO. That's why it's bad for SO to take your very generous business advice. That's what Quora and Yahoo Answers did. They both turned into garbage and then one of them died.
StackOverflow is extremely conflicting. On one hand it is undoubtedly valuable. I have referenced it many times and will continue to do so in the future. On the other hand the community and moderation is absolute dogshit.
I asked a question once and no one gave an answer. So I kept researching and developed an answer myself. So I posted it as an accepted answer to my own question, hoping it would help someone else. Later, a random person commented that my answer is in an unacceptable format and suggested I change it another way. Nobody helped me, I came up with my own answer, and I still got reprimanded for some reason. Furious, I deleted my own answer and question.
FUCK. STACK. OVERFLOW.
lol, I've had similar things where I spend ages researching and laying out possible solutions I've tried, then people downvote me and comment "Have you tried X?" (X being the first thing I discussed in my question).
Then I solve it myself and post the answer for posterity in case somebody else finds it useful, downvoted again.
Then like 6 months later the answer gets to +10 because of people googling my problem
It's always the same case. To mods naturally bad people are gravitating. They are fine to do free work, but in exchange they want power tripping over everyone to boost their egos. Karma and downvotes facilitate that a lot. StackOverflow looks very similar to Reddit here.
In order for a service to be good, it should be designed differently. So it won't attract bad people, but actually only the helpful ones.
Probably wasn't written in OOP, you need to make it 10 times longer and at least 5 times more complicated... to be in the 'simple' 'readable OOP way. So it can also run nice and slow! 🙃
I was probably writing decent 'working' commercial code before most of those 'moderators' were born....
I don't like OPP because of the way a lot of people use it!
Agreed. I got question banned. I tried everything. I edited everything. Read the documentation of "How to ask" and other links associated a ton of times. Applied all these things. Nothing changed. Still question banned for a year. It's like I can't afford mistakes as a beginner. At this stage, I have enough reputation to REVIEW other people's questions, report other people's questions, and I have 90 helpful flags so far. How do I have the perms to do these things if I can't even ask a question myself?
They Hate answering, but Love it when they get to correct users
When I asked a question at Stack Overflow, I was really scared because the answers were real shit and they start to downvote me for some reason and started to close the question. Then I realized I didn't ask questions "properly". I read the rules and asked properly, and then they closed my question again. Lol. Never again. Even the Reddit community is better. I thought I was the only one who thinks Stack Overflow is getting extremely aggressive towards developers but glad I wasn't the only one.
I don't even ask anything on there when I was down voted for a simple question. That site scarred me for life.
If the reddit community is better, than this whole ship is going down. I literally would ask a clear and researched question, or specifically state "I'm not sure what to ask, but here is the problem, can I get guidance" and get downvoted. If you're already know the answer, why ask a question, and if you have no intension to help, why participate in a help forum?
@@cocoan-s-e-a Really? What language? Kotlin and Rust are relatively new and people are already being elitists.
You know it's bad when even Reddit is better
@AKINTILO Steeven yep. I even ask some unrelated coding question in my modding channels, and I get better answers.
I've encountered the stack overflow culture on various different websites. I remember asking a question on matlab as a professional electrical engineer, and I posted my code, and was promptly given a "Learn to code properly" response. I reported it as off topic and insulting, to which the rest of the responses were other people defending the original person and telling me to leave the forum.
I've also encountered these people in real life, where they openly insult others and act as if they're the most valuable person in the world, and that you're blessed by their presence.
Im an EE and SW engineer also. Just funny they dont see, you learn to write good code by writting bad code and asking questions.
Before I was ten I had read a number of programming books for computers I didnt even own.
I didnt really learn until i was on a project with 110k lines of code of spaghetti that was breaking platform paradigms to pull off cutting edge things.
Normalize percussive maintenance.
I used to work as an IT tech at a school. A lot of the teachers gave me praise for being really patient and kind, and I never really understood it, even if it was appreciated. All I did was help them out and answer their questions, maybe also explain why the problem they were having happened so they could fix it themselves next time. I get it now, though.
@@vienlacrose On bad people, preferrably.
It is weird I tried stack overflow and math overflow the experiences was completely different. On the math one, I took picture of my homework with explanations and where I was stuck. Got a very nice answer to help me go further in my math problem.
On programming, it was similar experience as the video
Math has actually highly intelligent, competent experts. Stack has garbage pseudo experts making tons of errors who dislike people who criticize old, accepted yet incorrect answers.
@@cainabel2553 I don't know, maybe it is due to their lack of social skills (I am not defending them), but the whole moderating stuff should be changed in there
In my country we have a name for this kind of behavior: syndrome of small authority
You must be one of us post-soviet folks?
Sounds more like syndrome of small... well, you can fill in the blank 😅
yeah, small "authority" ;)
which country is that?
@@miepmaster25 whole post-Soviet space where Russian is a spoken language. To be precise, it's called a "door-keeper syndrome", by name of those people who have small power to let you or not let you in.
I remember once asking a question on stack overflow about something (cant remember anymore), and i made sure to follow the guidelines as closely as possible, also providing proof that i had tried to research the problem to no avail. Once it was posted, it was literally MINUTES after that i got an e-mail saying that my question was declined, because it didn't "follow the guidelines". I literally was reading the ENTIRE guidelines for longer than an hour before posting. Same thing happened on a scammy tech support subreddit too.
Happy to see ChatGPT challenging toxic coders
ChatGPT helps a lot with answering coding issues. I had one and it was simple and quick the solution, no hate, pitiful behavior or sarcasm 👌
@@AmodeusR I picked up coding again not too long ago and chatGPT is incredibly good... It's basically what "Personal assistants" were meant to be. Paste a bit of your code in there, "Can you explain what this does? and how would I implement that, give me some examples" and boom it does everything in seconds... Incredible really
ChatGPT is ten times better than these insecure kids who they are gods gift
not recommend to use all the time, students using chatGPT will be dumber
@@m.ddacertutorials1017 tho i agree with you depending on chatGPT or GitHub co-pilot is not useful at all especially for students who are new to coding but it does help on explaining things and errors and the reasons for ig
This video is wayyyy too underrated
Thanks 1NilusNilus :)
100% Agree. I also agree with 100% of what was said in this video.
This video is wayyyy too overrated
I think he needed to elaborate a bit more into solving the stack overflow problems, the simple answer is that it is not possible to solve. Jesus, even reddit, discord and quaora suffer from the same issue toxicity towards beginners mistakes and fucked ups is common, why? I don't know, that is the answer that I was looking for in the video, but he only appointed the issues.
Yup
Thanks for actually having the courage to highlight this trend, which sadly isn't confined to SO but certainly is a cornerstone of their culture. What puzzles me is why people who think a question is too elementary to be answered just don't ignore it instead of either downvoting it or closing it. I think the answer is because the "high priests" of programming need constant reassurance that they are indeed geniuses and the rest of us are unworthy. Mods who act this way are simply broadcasting their own personal insecurities.
Thanks for the comment John! And I 100% agree with you, I think there are probably a lot of good moderators on Stack Overflow, but there are a few "high priests" that unfortunately ruin it for everyone :/
That's kinda born of necessity. If you want to rank high in search engine results, you need unique, high quality content. If you allow these questions that are too simple, SO will eventually end up duplicating the full documentation of every programming language in existence (but cut into small, disorganized pieces). Now that the majority of content on SO is junk you can find in a hundred different places (and better), it will get pushed back in search results, which means less traffic, which means less revenue, which means SO goes bey bey.
@@hellterminator You're in complete denial. If anything, it would help stack overflow.
If people are asking novice questions, which they are, and there are more and more people joining the software development industry, which they are, the questions asked, no matter at what level, if having a proper answer to them, will bring traffic and help others that have exactly the same question.
By being an asshole for no reason, you're only motivating people to stay off your toxic shit and SO will no doubt fail quite soon if they follow with this trend.
Now what a novice programmer learns, compared to 10 years ago is not "Go to the StackOverflow, create an account and ask" instead they are told "Avoid SO if you can. Don't let them discourage you"
@@hellterminator you cant be fucking serious? Holy hell
@@ScrewTSW I'm not advocating the berating, bullying and general toxicity, just explaining why novice questions are not allowed.
You seem to be under the impression that SO is a support site. That is not - and has never been - the case. SO was built with the explicit intention of becoming a reference/knowledge base. The Q&A format is merely means to that end.
And if _that_ is the product you're trying to build, you simply can't have 20,000 questions asking what operator is used in python for exponentiation or how to write a string out to console in C#.
What's even worse these days is the insane obsession with shutting down every new question as a "duplicate" even if it's qualitatively very different and/or the original is over a decade out of date.
The worst part of stack overflow is the fact that I know someone out there has probably had the question I currently have but I can’t find it because they were too afraid to ask. I don’t blame them though, I got mocked for missing a very simple mistake in my code years prior while going through college.
Or they did ask and only got snarky comments and downvotes. And those posts are the one Google will link you to when you look for an answer. I search for an answer and when I click on a link I often see posts that were closed with bunch of negative comments and no answers. At least remove those.
Having used SO in the past, I posted 1 question asking about the purposes of certain CSS elements and how despite being deprecated, theyre still in official texts, following it up with "whats the modern and correct methods of implementing these old deprecated functions ability?" My question received 1 answer telling me I didn't google enough, -10 votes, and my account being shut down from answering or asking questions, effectively locking me out of the website. Since that day years ago I now resort 100% to discord and friends.
your account was shut down from posing or answering question? lmao that's bullshit 😂 except if you were banned, which happens if you cross the line _waaaay_ harder than you just described. You could just open an account to ask questions again, why would they do that?
@@Merthalophor If you get a certain cumulative negative rep on your questions, 10 total I believe when I tried using SO, you get banned from asking questions until you can raise your score again. which you do by answering questions.
I don't know why it happens. On questions like yours I usually just copy paste the documentation page alongside some 10-20 word justification and it's good. Why would somehow waste energy ranting about how 'less experienced' you are? We've all been where you are now? Just ignore ot
@@Merthalophor Yeah, I have a notification saying "Asking questions is a privilege" and warning me I might get locked off if I dare ask any more. I've probably asked less than 10 ever, all in the -2 to +2 score range.
I used to work in a restaurant. And sure, you get the same questions from customers over and over. A common one I got asked a lot was if they should take the medium or large size dish...
If I were to answer that question like one of those mods I would simply say "What a dumb question, how am I supposed to know how much you can eat? Figure it out for yourself."
And of course that's just bad business. Customer is king. Even when you are much more knowledgeable and the king acts like a court jester that day.
well, there's a difference between payed service and voluntary community.
I remember times when RTFM was quite common answer on forums. Nobody died from PTSD of getting such answer, probably. ))
@@adrianalexandrov7730 agreed. There's unfortunately a large spectrum of behaviors going on, so it's hard to pinpoint the problem without speaking in generalities. Stack Overflow has a lot of toxicity in mods and commenters and experts, but there's also at least some toxic levels of entitlement that some of those people are reacting to as well. Not every person asking a question means well, and not all of them are willing to do the work required to actually get any better. Some people just want you to do their homework for them, and see it as a volunteer service for them to pass a class, for example.
You get paid for your job. SO is all volunteers.
Most of the bitching comes from lazy askers that never consider what it's like on the other side.
@@crackwitz If it's unpaid work, why do it if you find it tiring lol? Total waste of time making a useless reply that's just rude on SO.
@@DLBBALL It's all about the ego boost they can get from punching someone through the keyboard.
You hit the point. The community always find a way, and now the community is using everything, except Stack Overflow. I don't ask questions on Stack Overflow. The answers are often very condescending. There are some good people who had answer questions very precise, but that is also not the win of Stack Overflow. People had written the good answers and not Stack Overflow. I can see an enormous shift to Discord groups full of new programmers, who have many questions, and they get their answers.
and IRC
any good python discords :) have to learn massive amounts of python related stuff. webservers, sockets, responsive stuff, real time telnet monitoring.
those questions won't work on stack :)
Unfortunately, Discord chats are not googleable :(
i shifted to exclusively discord after stack overflow banned me for not putting punctuation on the end of my post
@@Draconicrose but they are searchable
I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years, and I still find myself googling questions that SO might consider basic or asking for someone else to do the research on a weekly basis. The whole point of SO is sharing expertise. No-one can remember absolutely everything about their field of expertise, and if you're not using a feature regularly, it's likely to go out the ears. There was a period where SO was fantastic, but that's long gone now.
When I'm looking for answers these days, I usually ignore the SO results as they're almost never what I'm actually looking for, and I usually find myself on someone's personal blog or Medium, or just asking on Discord. It's a shame, they had a good thing going, and it's been ruined by _terrible_ moderation policies. (Twitter, much?) I hope they manage to figure this out, as the wealth of knowledge already on the side is invaluable, but I'm not optimistic about it. :/
And the differences between languages can be SO VAST, especially when you're expert in a high level language and need to do work in a low-level language. I've been programming for a decade and spent HOURS trying to figure out how to print to console in C++/WinRT in Visual Studio.
The first step to solving a problem is realising there is a problem, and then acknowledging it. Judging by the comments on this very page, and by the behaviour on StackOverflow itself, virtually no veteran SO user (let alone mods) seems to have accomplished even either of these relatively minor feats.
So, yes, I too am quite pessimistic on the chances of StackOverflow fixing its myriad of problems before they fade into obscurity.
I swear to god nowaydays I never find useful answers on Stackoverflow, most of the time not even to basic java questions. And when I do find something you have to search through 3-4 answers that all somehow dont really solve the problem efficient or all in a different way. what the fuck are those moderators doing with their lives? having power trips like this makes me only think of them like jealous little children
As someone with 10k rep in SO (a good chunk of it gained from a question that probably didn't deserve that much attention), SO is awful. I've had people copy my answers and had theirs accepted instead, mods don't care. I've reported untold sarcastic comments because hell if you want to pretend to be inclusive at least discourage responding like an asshole... but no, all of those flags are denied because apparently responding "it's so obvious it's not even worth responding" is a perfectly good comment. Moderator queues are full of such garbage edits done by people grinding badges... mods seem drunk with power and close stuff because they feel like it.
Now, there definitely are questions that deserve being closed, AS LONG AS they're duplicate or something. You just cannot allow "how do I print hello world" to be repeated 1000 times; the point of SO is to have somewhat canonical answers, and there's no benefit in repeating them again and again... but then mods will close "What is 3*4" as a dupe of "What is 3+4" because they don't have the time to actually read a question.
Hey Tordek, I completely agree with you. I have been intending to make a part 2 to this video at some point detailing some of the pain that the moderators have to go through to sift through garbage questions. I definitely feel like there are some different features SO could implement to make it a more welcoming community, while continuing to keep the high quality of Q&A it currently has. I think more and more people are realizing that SO is pretty toxic though, and I have a feeling it will catch up with them one way or another :)
Ohh yea, literally every time I asked a question on Stack Overflow I get thrown "duplicate question" yet when searching I don't find it. The few times people at least send a link of the question I'm supposedly duplicating it's a question that's either slightly related and the answer doesn't answer my question or not related at all. Even something simple as someone reporting it as a duplicate requiring a link to the duplicate and the ability to contest that would already help a lot.
Also don't forget
OP: "How do I do X in Y?"
MOD: "Closed. See this 10 year old duplicate on how to do X in Y where Y was completely different back then"
@@dejfcold The one I hate the most is when people ask "How do I X with library Y?" and EVERYONE is replying "you can just use library Z, like this: ".
Yeah that's not what he asked though, is it?
Like, if OP's specifically looking to do it with this _one_ library there's probably a reason for it that is irrelevant to the question at hand and isn't negotiable, usually because it's what's already used in a project.
It's especially annoying when libY is free and libZ is not (or it's not for commercial purposes).
I've been accused of farming points because I've made a self answer question for a problem that didn't have a good answer, and the mod said "have you tried google?".
I had an extensive conversation with the moderators about this exact problem a few years ago. And they told me this: *"StackOverflow is not a Q&A or helpdesk site. It's a reference site."*
I had to do a double take when I saw that, but they legitimately believed and argued that perspective to me, despite the design of the website. That their goal with StackOverflow was NOT to be helpful, but was instead to be technical reference, which explains a lot of their animosity toward "opinion" or "what is the best method" style questions.
The kinds of questions they want are the kinds of questions that can be answered like a textbook talking about the languages and libraries. They don't want questions about problems that need solved, or questions about niche syntactic wizardry, or questions about standard practice. Only pure reference. Completely contrary to the design of the website as a whole.
That is the reason it's a toxic cesspool these days. Power tripping mods want the website to be something that it is not designed to be, and when people use the website the way it IS designed, the mods get mad and close everything.
power thirsty basement dwellers create question-banning site disguised as question-asking site, claims it's an encyclopedia
"StackOverflow is not a Q&A or helpdesk site. It's a reference site."
That would be weird, because it's a Q&A, a curated Q&A at that.
Well, it seems their answer is _opinion based_
It sure as hell 300% LOOKS like a Q&A site, what the hell are users supposed to think? What a fool
I remember finding very old declaration from stack overflow saying the goal is to build up a reference site. I'd also argue that the reason I'd rather click a stack overflow link than any other when searching up something is precisely because it does work like that. The questions and answer are a method to get there.
I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that, quite the opposite, it seems to be of a lot of value. The problem, to me, is that 1) that's not communicated very well; 2) some people form an ingroup and mount a mighty horse and act like assholes. Those are the real problems, wanting a platform to not be a opinion based forum or a helpdesk is fine.
I have basically specialised in being someone who answers closed questions, I edit the really bad questions (surprisingly beginners don't know how to format a question like a professional, and granted sometimes if they asked correctly then they will have answered their question, but they're a beginner and don't know specific terms) and then I answer them.
I'm an admin and defacto head of a programming server on Discord with over 5'000 members and I joined the server because of how much I hate SO and that I wanted to contribute more to beginners and never let them feel scared about asking. I have my main account with thousands of rep and then I have a second anonymous account because I'm scared of asking questions, and I've been programming for 10 years, 6 years professionally (as professional as you can get when starting at 14).
I don't answer dead or closed questions for rep, generally they don't understand to rep my answer and mark it as correct, I do it because I'm not only helping someone get to grips with something brand new but I also hope that I have been part of a reason why someone hasn't given up.
SO is a cesspool and I have to recommend that you shouldn't ask questions there, I haven't come across a Discord programming server that I dislike. Admin of one and I'm a frequent helper in 5 others (2 general, Rust, Rust Serenity, Python). There is also a gender issue, if you are female, don't let anyone know until you have a thousand rep and know your way around the site, I actually had 3 SO accounts and the first one I used my name and face and I was insulted and talked down to - I remember asking a high level question and then being talked down to as if I knew nothing and putting words in my mouth, I created a new account and stayed anonymous and asked safely and helpped others and I was at 3k rep before I put my name and face on my account (I feel it is important for other women who are asking questions in a space that seems so dominated by women to see other women). Also, don't put your name on your new account because if your question gets enough views you can't delete it and I requested that my account be stripped from the cringe question and it was denied, it was a massive pain to get my account stripped from it, only use your real name once you've learnt the ropes.
I go into questions assuming that the user has tried to find the answer before but they lack the terminology to find the answer, with programming help yeah it's really easy to find answers to questions if you know the specific word but there are so many different kinds of problems there are blurred lines. For 6:08 I searched "addEventListener what is e", w3schools is first result and there's no mention of "e" (not what is it, no mention at all), the second result is freecodecamp which the description does show "e" but it's in the format "(e) =>{...}" (a beginner won't know what an arrow function is or if it's even the same as what they were asking. It would answer the question but it's still blurry and it's at the bottom of a long article). I find this question to be a completely suitable question that doesn't exist on StackOverflow in my search results and it would have been nice if that question could have been upvoted for the novilty and answered properly so it would be first result and help everyone. SO is meant to be Q&A, someone asks "what is e?", someone tells them, that's the end of it - it's like 2 minutes to answer the question and it helps the other person who might be in a spin and has been looking for an hour. SO should be a place for simple questions.
It angers me that people on SO are expecting beginners to ask questions like a professional, it really shouldn't be like this. It's so easy to answer questions properly and to not downvote questions, it's demoralising to do that, I am very liberal with upvoting (giving people +10 is satisfying to do and I hope it makes them feel a little better about their score). They get personally offended when someone asks them a question they deem to be below them, the thing is I have known developers who are a SO douche and they're generally pretty bad themselves - they don't have the ability to be a good developer so they need to assert themselves over the only people they can, absolute beginners who have less than a month of experience.
Wow, thank you Skylark for your efforts! I promise you they don't go unnoticed and we need way more people in the industry like you. I've found that the truly intelligent people are often very humble and more than willing to help out beginners because they remember what it was like. It's usually the people who aren't confident in their abilities that tend to bully and harass. Once again, thank you, and I wish you the best in your career :)
@@GamesWithGabe It's my duty to help, I have an admiration towards beginners because it's taking on a task like no other. We've all been there, we've all had that spark to do it and I am perfectly fine hand holding to get everyone I can through the first few months and beyond.
You're awesome.
Apparently, the moderators think that Stack Overflow is purely a reference site, not a Q&A site, which is not what the original goal of this website was.
Which discord servers do you recommend to join for java or c/c++?
ive been using c++ for 8 years now and i've never understood the reason WHY you could bind a rvalue reference to a const like that. Solid information, great expose on the topic of the video. I may have found out later, but only learning now because of diligence.
to be able to use literals at calltime?
You can bind an rvalue reference to a const because (almost by definition) an rvalue cannot appear on the left hand side of an assignment operator.
@@bitskit3476 wait, what? Your explanation is clear as mud.
@@tomaszwota1465
1. "const" means "doesn't change".
2. An lvalue is any value that you can assign to. E.g. for `x = 5;`, x must be an lvalue.
3. An rvalue is anything that can appear to the right of an assignment operator.
4. All lvalues are rvalues, but not all rvalues are lvalues. E.g. you can do `x = 5;` and `y = x;`, but you can't do `5 = x;`.
5. Because a const does not change (by definition), any const can be an rvalue.
`const int &x = 5;` creates a const reference to the number 5, which is an rvalue.
@@bitskit3476 And now read your previous comment. I fail to see logical connection there. ;)
I changed my major the summer before my sophomore year of college in 2021. I had never programmed before and I was taking an accelerated summer course so I could graduate in 4 years. Basically was learning C in like 6 week. It was tough, especially since I never programmed before. I remember scouring for answers to this question about C which I couldn’t find in my book or online (again I was new, I didn’t know exactly what to search to find it). So i asked on Stack Overflow, I remember getting berated why these people for not doing enough research or not showing enough effort. These people didn’t even know me? Yet they still believed they knew everything about it. Really frustrated me and I didn’t touch the site until last semester when I really needed some questions answered.
I had a bit of a fight with someone on a server about this. A beginner had asked why his code wasn't working. His code had lots of syntax errors, so I fixed them up and explained what he'd done wrong and how to do it right. He was building a game, so I imagined the syntax I gave him might act as a template. Then I get a message "Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners". It annoyed me. In the end the beginner messaged me to say that the code had helped him keep motivation in his project and that he was grateful for that 🥲
You're a legend!
Hell ya, that's awesome.
"Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners"
"sorry I thought this was a site to answer questions. My apologies, I'll join the smug self congratulating circle jerk right now!"
"Please avoid spoonfeeding beginners"
-because the site isn't here to help, it's here to teach as if it's a classroom
Imagine the solution being something simple like a semicolon missing and a person that saw the problem answering "did you check all your lines one by one" instead of just saying "there is a semicolon missing at line 69" and be done with it...
@Mike Iversen Assuming both are adults there is no real reason as to why teaching them instead of just giving them the answer is better.
Especialy the whole "give a man a fish" vs "teaching a man to fish" doesn't apply here as in coding getting the answer also teaches you the answer (even if it doesn't teach the theory, IF there is any theory to teach based on the question)
Also, you can't know what a person knows and doesn't know and also you don't know what knowledge they are lacking that made a person ask a question, so you might teach them things they already know or don't care about, so in the end, if they ask a question, the only correct answer, is the answer to that question.
Now obviously the person answering is not forced to spoonfeed or give the info right away, they can play pretend a teacher if they want, but that is on them.
PS: Obviously there are people who also care about the theory behind the answer and want to improve themselves, but that is most of the time obvious based on the phrasing used while asking the question.
EX:
-"I don't know why this code doesn't run, any help?"
-"Well that is because ABC... Try XYZ"
vs
-"Anybody knows how to make this run?"
-"Try XYZ"
The problem with Stack Overflow I think stems from rewarding recognition to the most prolific contributors. My pet hate, always done by a multiple-thousand point contributor, is closing questions as duplicates when they are not. These people, skim read the problem without any understanding of the essence of the question and use their 'vast knowledge' to cite another problem that might have included (often irrelevant) overlap with it. Whenever I, rarely as I have decades of experience, ask a question, I generally (or at least used to) include an example to illustrate the underlying issue. Almost always, the trigger-happy, point-seeking 'expert' will assume the question to be the example given and cites another question that addresses the example and not the underlying problem. Obviously, I now leave out the example and have to instead give arcane, specific lines of code where the problem was encounterd only to be met with the expected know-it-all 'experts' who say "why would you do it like that... a better way..." While that might be helpful on rare occasions, it does not answer the question (which the 'expert' probably doesn't even understand). I think the bext solution is simply to remove any form of recognition, helpful people will still answer questions while glory hunters (who assume 10,000 points strenghtens their cv, while for me at least it would count against them, revealling their underlying flaws) would lose interest.
I link similar-seeming questions at the bottom of my post and explicitly explain why they're not dupes.
This is closer to what I have experienced. I am genuinely curious as to how something works, but people answer as if they are taking orders at the drive-through. Mind you, I only ask when I haven’t found any good tutorials or explanations elsewhere.
Yes, making people's point scores private would definitely help. A lot of these moderators have nothing going on in they're lives because they sit behind a computer all day, either on stackoverflow or writing code pretending they're the next john carmack. They need recognition from somewhere so that they can feel validated that they're smart, so they get it from stackoverflow by dunking on people who they think are dumber. They're actually pretty similar to the snobs in academia, especially the computer science snobs (the worst academic field of them all)
If you have that much reputation on a topic (I do) you can not also unilaterally close questions but unilaterally open them. I've done that a few times
Wow, this is annoying. Some of these people act like learning programming is a breeze and you're an idiot for not automatically knowing where to look to find your answer. There's a version of this site for Blender and I really hope it isn't this bad.
I've never experienced issues with the blender version. I'd recommend joining the blender community discord though, it's easier to get help
The Blender version isn't bad at all. I've been reading answers for help and have never once seen any problems
Blenders community is amazing, and the blender stack exchange is really good. Most of the questions or problems I've encountered already have had answers on there without me even having to ask...
blender is superior, though they removed my answer that had images embedded and converted it into a comment despite me mentioning the version. Making confusing for readers who read it.
I hate those nerds so much
The people here have said that blender's stack exchange is better - it does appear to fluctuate depending on topic.
There are still the underlying issues though of the awful rewarding for moderation system. On my most used ones, world building and writing SE, it can be super hit or miss what is allowed and what isn't. I'll examine critically everything I can, go to bed hoping for answers in the morning, and find my question closed with unhelpful mocking comments - all while a poorly done question has not issues raised about it whatsoever.
I've been speaking about this for years, thank god people are finally starting to make noise about this. The future with AI and QA services will be the bane of sites that are poor in responses and mannerisms.
I've allready bought a subscription to ChatGPT expressly because it politely and correctly answers my programming questions. StackOverflow is so toxic I will pay 20 bucks a month on the off chance I DO NOT have to use.
You hit the nail on the head man. I've been a casual programmer for ages, I don't know best practice or have mentors/teachers. If I ask on StackOverflow it's because I just have no clue what I am doing and just want to be pointed in the right direction. I've read the books and don't understand them because I've no one to discuss/explain them to me, or I lack the institutional knowledge that some have from knowing other languages. This means I can't think of other ways to do things or draw from that experience that others might have. The place was awful, just asking basic questions got you mocked by a bunch of self righteous losers who just wanted to see you burn. Sad place.
Luckily for me I now work in a great team of devs who are really kind and actually seem to enjoy sharing their knowledge.
That's so good to see that someone self-taught like you is doing great on the dev path. I'm a pretty novice programmer and I'll try to learn Java with Deitel books for Data Structure on University's vacations.
@@FableBlaze A shame because there is no right or wrong. Just as an example, should I use CSS Flex or Grid in my layout? Can I use grid inside flex? (or vice versa)
These are healthy discussions that get people talking about the topic and overall understanding things more.
@@samueo7033 Thanks, glad you're a little inspired.
I can say best practice is a constantly changing thing. Its really, what makes sense in this situation.
Its very easy to over engineer something if you worry too much about "this is best practice".
How else will people know if ur smart unless you show them?
As someone with outlier intelligence i can say it doesnt matter how right u are if noone can understand your answer.
As someone critiqued my EE professor with " SCott, you dont remember what it was to not know this stuff"
Something any professional should keep in mind.
Computing is too vast for anyone to know it all to a high degree.
"Nah, those people just don't know an opinion when it smacks them in the face" :D
Well done.
A few years ago when I was still very much beginning programming I dared ask a question on SO, it got downvoted to oblivion because it was an "obvious answer" or something like that...
It wasn't clear to me though, and I eventually was forced to delete my question and all of the meager reputation I had earned was wiped away by downvotes.
Since then I have managed to collect about 80 rep which is enough for basic permissions.
I rarely post on SO now, and I find it sad that it is so unfriendly to new users.
Haha thanks Asher! And yea I had a similar experience. It's funny because when I was asking questions about Roblox development when I started programming, I had the nicest people on Stack Overflow help me out. But once I started coding in C++, I got really mean responses and gave up lol
@@GamesWithGabe I have seen the things that people say on stack overflow and decided that it wasn't worth my time to ask a question on C++ there because I would likely be met with some hostility in it, sometimes I find an answer to my question somewhere on stack overflow but it could have been more efficient for me if the community was more welcoming on there.
You automatically get 100 rep on all StackExchange sites if you have an account on any of them with enough rep.
I have maybe ~1k rep on another SE, so I can immediately comment, vote, etc on any other SE site too.
Honestly, I've gotten this treatment from a ton of people in the industry over the years. Which is why I try to be nice to people who don't have as much experience as I do. We were all newbies once.
Do you feel the more senior people are really excellent and expect high intelligence and good work, or that they are play pretend sorcerers?
@Cain Abel I don't like to generalize, but it's usually not senior people I get blowback from.
A bit late to this, but wanted to say that unfortunately it's not just SO that has this problem - my experiences in pretty much any tech forum, including electronics, results in the same kind of egotistical behaviour from moderators or the more experienced users. It's a kind of power trip from those that have been members for many years, who'll see a newbie (like me) coming in with what I think is a valid question (and I do tend to search first to see if I can find the answer, which of course occasionally I can't), and will go on the attack. It's almost like asking a question is wasting their time, which begs the question (ahem) - why are they there? One example I saw on an electronics forum had one senior member throw down some scorn on a new user, and a second quickly chiming in with words to the effect of "Oh good - another newbie for my blocked list". Pathetic and unnecessary. Anyway - great video - good for you for shedding some light on it. Thanks.
they are there to put you down. They clearly have the time to write jerk replies, instead of just ignoring you
There are some good ones. The arduino discord is actually very helpful for me, and the mods there have been nothing but kind to me. I asked one of them questions about my circuit for like 3 hours and he just sat there and gave me advice, and when I eventually just said “this is too complicated for me, I need to start smaller” he and others advised me on how to learn EE online. But for most tech forums this isn’t the case.
@@Uvuv6969 I've had a good experience with Discord as well, the "C & C++ Together" server specifically. I started learning programming a few weeks ago, so of course my questions had an obvious answer *for them*. Five minutes or so after posting my question, we talked about the problem I have, and after half an hour or so, we figured out that the entire problem was that putting several calculations inside one cout command is not good, and it messes the order up. All that was happening in a friendly atmosphere, in one little thread in Discord.
The cognitive dissonance is unreal with those people.
@@DLBBALL The most ironic reply those people can give you is "This is a QnA site, stop asking questions".
This seems to be a common thing ... alot of people now days seem to think that they are superior and people that dont understand at their level are beneath them. This is a wide spread issue. I get it even in other mediums. I dont ask the question right and at best i get ignored .... at worst i get told to remove the question because it was not in the format they wanted. These people get offended as though they have better things to do ... yet they hang around in help discord rooms ...
Yep, I don't understand it haha. It stinks because if Stack Overflow had a good flagging system this probably wouldn't be a problem. Fortunately, it's a good thing we have Discord, Reddit, Quora, and other forums to use instead of having to go to Stack Overflow :)
@@GamesWithGabe well i know why they do it, its a dopamine high, comment on a post no matter what you get a number that grows ... bigger numbers = bigger dopamine hit. humanity cant have nice things. i bet you most of them have no idea how to actually answer the questions that they post on, so they give dumb ones like "study more" and "its easy for me"
When I started to learn to code, I found a lot of things on StackOverflow, but I've never asked something for these problems, these people have issues with their ego, they are finally good at something in their lives and have to ruin it for other or I don't know. It's terrible to see how the programming community is toxic to each other... Really nice video, the saddest thing is, it's over a year old :( I hope one day it will hit a new peak and open the debate about StackOverflow.
It's still not as vile as the paid site Experts Exchange. I was an Experts Exchange Master there in several topics. The admins of a topic would give people a red strike if they felt you threatened their point scoring ability (if you answered a question before they did). One time I called in the mods to help with a troll that was wrecking a question I asked and the mods almost banned me for it instead of the troll. Stack Overflow is a beautiful place by comparison to the cess pit that is Experts Exchange 😂
Asking questions often upsets me for similar reasons: the concept of obviousness, the assumed lack of effort or stupidity (instead of a legitimate reason), and the harm resulted from the dismissive reaction. Just makes me want to isolate.
This reminds me of MathOverflow. Many years ago someone had trouble understanding a very difficult math book. Good luck for him, since I read the book, fixed some errors and even wrote it all down. I answered him where I uploaded it. I thought this is good because other readers could find the source. This got voted down! A moderator deleted it, while other users gave answers without ever reading the book. I really had the feeling that the moderator and the highly reputed users had a huge problem that I was answering something they could not. They never answered my question if they ever had read the book and my comments.
@@irrelevant_noob No Copyright problems. But the link was a problem. This was risky. Some exactly wrote that. But some also wrote that they do not take me for real. I fear again if I call the name of the book, people will start throwing rocks at me. I am done ...
It's mind blowing the const reference question got that reaction. Particularly the answer. They did a very good job at following up with a good answer when they found one for their own question and still got slammed for it.
This video is gonna blow up.
I've seen this a lot in my own debugging- so much so that I have never asked a question on Stack Overflow myself. I've rewritten significant areas of code just to avoid an obscure issue that, in all likelihood, probably has a simple fix.
I’ve found it to be quite toxic too. The worst when there are mods out there who seem to be just trying to farm reputation. On the normal stack overflow and even on the DSP stack overflow I’ve asked some complicated questions after thinking about them for quite a while, only to have some mod who obviously doesn’t know the answer, change my question slightly to make it simpler and then answers the question. It’s infuriating
They also like to “edit” questions to incomprehensible then down-vote and close the question because of it.
@@k.chriscaldwell4141 Can you give an example?
@@hdbrot @HDB Nope. It's happened to me several times. I do not remember the questions, nor want to go there to find them.
The mods also like to ruin questions by editing them. They then turn around and attack the question for not fitting the template or being too vague. Great answers roll in before the mods can close the question for being "too vague" or whatever. Punks and cowards.
Not to mention the time they deep-sixed my polite response to to their inquiry of users about what could be better. They then attacked my profile in such a way as to reduce my point score. Another mod put a stop to it and restored my points and answer, but I got the message: F off! So I did.
The last time I posted a question was 2019. The Spanish forum. Oh, man. The mods went on a tear. I got good answers, and great discussion, before the mods closed the question for "off topic." The mods even berated me for not responding to their nonsense.
I may end up on the site when researching a problem, but I do not dare ask or answer a question. Now that I am further along in my programming abilities, I would like to contribute as other contributed to me. But life's too short to expose oneself to the mods' incivility there.
This isn't just an issue with stackoverflow in my experience, it's an issue with EVERY forum for programming help. Programmers seem to get off on berating others for not being as skilled and knowledgeable as them.
Granted there are some wonderfully helpful programmers out there as well, and I wouldn't know as much as I do today without the help I've received from those people, but sometimes it feels like they're a minority.
Its - based on my experience - sadly a problem with every forum - from physics, math (for instance matheplanet (German)) and programming to gardening :( It seems friendliness is mistaken with toxicity
its really strange. personally i use lua because roblox's studio is really easy to get into and it uses lua by default, and their forums (basically lua with roblox-specific code and suggestions) are really chill, for a community infamous for either being made up of kids, or for exploiting kids for money, and its not a small community either
It's not programmers. It's humans. We're dealing with other humans.
I'm going to be controversial here and say a large part of the problem is autistic people. I'm autistic, but I've put a quite a lot of work into learning tact and social skills. A lot of geeks just don't make the effort to be kind or humble.
stackoverflow is _not_ a forum. people seem to have this mindset that they can just go and ask their question there without spending any significant time trying to figure it out by themselves
A friend of mine offered another insight: he explained how a young guy would join a company, be given all the shit work and treated like scum, but eventually work his way up. But instead of helping others who recently joined, he would say "Ah, now it's my turn" and treat them just as viciously. Tough love? That's one justification. But revenge is powerful too.
Close, but not the same. There are internal company things that you sometimes must ask a co-worker for help on because it's not something anybody outside the system would know. In the ideal scenario, much of this is documented on the company's intranet, but documentation is always at the bottom of the list of priorities. Also, with SO, people who have nothing to contribute but snarky answers can simply NOT respond. When you as a co-worker a question, they sort of have to respond, even if that's a snarky answer. People on SO go out of their way to post snarky responses, lol.
@@addanametocontinue They were probably crapped on as kids or yelled at by teachers/parents. Or maybe it's elitism: I've known guys that took a university course, and after graduating became insufferable snobs. There are even a few on open source projects who insult contributors asking questions.
It's the monkey and the ladder psychology. It's toxic and primitive. Look it up if you haven't yet, you can see it mirrored in many facets of life.
That's not revenge though.
@@RaizerZ that's true, because they're taking it out on someone else. What is the word for that though?
When I started out programming, I asked alot of questions on SO. But because it was so toxic to my lack of knowledge I abandoned the site.
These days im a senior software engineer and your video resonated with me strongly
To be honest, it seems that this is highly dependent on the language...
I was starting with haskell last year and the SO community for haskel was ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, seriously... always answered even the most basic question with love and care
The c/c++ community, on the other hand, is literally one of the most passive aggressive, toxic people in the world... even though i'm a fairly experienced c++ programmer, the only time i asked anything there(which i don't even remember what that was, but was not something obvious at all) they acted like i should know it, and i'm not a worthy human being enough to their sacred better than thou programming language and i should go make programs in Basic, cuz that's the only language i'm capable of learning
"WHY DO YOU WASTE OXYGEN?"
rEaD tHe bOoKs
I just want to say that discord and reddit c++ communities aren't like that, there's plenty nice people
Why would anyone ever go tell somone to program in Basic? I would never wish that torture upon anyone
Chaotic! I miss that show.
I've seen this so many time on different niche forums. (One that springs to mind was the geocaching forum back in the day, wow what a cesspool).
A lot of the people (not all) who have the spare time to become forum mods don't have a lot else going on in their lives. You get an over representation of people who perhaps don't have many friends or don't have a good job and so the moderator position becomes very important to them. They take it super serious.
Add to that whatever personality defects and character flaws that led to their lack of social/professional status in the real world, plus the kind of self-important mindset that caused them to seek out the position of power in the forum.
Now you have a bunch of these kinds of people welding influence in the forum, and they're all looking for problems to moderate. You have a lot of inadequate hammers looking for nails.
The rules get stricter and stricter, reasonable users leave for less toxic communities. The people that stick around are themselves probably as toxic and snarky as the mods.
Its a fun place to hang out.
Hit the nail on the head!
Wow, it's such a relief that this phenomenon is retricted to forums. Imagine if it spread to Twitter,FB, or Instagram, maybe even TikTok!! Yikes
@@ronsargeant8371 lol indeed. Except with social media its more likely to be some AI algorithm bot thing instead of a real person
Thank you for this video!!! When I was in college first starting I had a lot of questions and they dragged me over coals for what I still feel were rather fair questions. I was 18 at the time just starting out and I couldn't understand why... I defaulted to okay I'm just not trying hard enough. After that, I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out the questions I had and I couldn't come up with the answer to some. So I spent an hour on trying to figure out the best way to formulate the question that pleases the mods. I think I did this a few times and my account got blocked from posting... I was so frustrated with their replies and how they literally prevented my account from posting anymore that I created a new account and posted the same question but I worded it pretty rudely in response to the moderators. I probably shouldn't have done it and after about an hour I deleted it. After that, I stopped asking questions.
I use physics stackoverflow all the time because I like to answer questions. I can help people and I also enjoy doing it, also learning a lot myself in the meantime. The toxicity you mention also pervades on physics stackoverflow and I hate it. Some bad experiences in the past make me less eager to ask questions myself in fear that I waste time asking a question that is closed anyways. I've also seen some poor new users get downvoted/closed to oblivion while they just needed some help. I will be a mod soon (just need 230 more rep) and I hope I will contribute against this toxicity.
Back in the day, there was no Stack Overflow, we had this thing called technical documentation, provided by software and hardware manufacturers. Nowadays, you're expected to figure everything out for yourself, as if an internet search engine is all anyone should ever need. In reality, the shelf life of crowd sourced documentation is only as long as the next round of "continuous integration".
This is a real problem, you google some problem in a programming language and find solutions with many upvotes, but the language has evolved since then and the answer is now outdated.
@@terriplays1726 Similarly there are questions which answers use all the brand new language features that most people aren't familiar with yet and possibly can't even use because they're stuck using an older version cause they're using Unity or some other toolchain that isn't on the most up to date version of the language.
@@blisterfingers8169 Yes, or you can’t install the newest version because you don’t have the rights on the machine. Happens all the time to me since I mostly use a managed compute cluster.
The real shitty part is that when you google something chances are your first results will be somebody else with the same question being told to google it.
That’s not really true. Technical documentation still exists but doesn’t point you in the right direction. Technical books are not as prevalent anymore as say 10 or 20 years ago, and a lot of tools have become free or open source and those *may* not have the same quality in some cases, but overall popular tools, frameworks and languages have overall great technical documentation.
As a programmer, I'm gonna call out my fellow programmers. Most programmers still fall under the "basement dweller" stereotype and their lack of social skills/basic human empathy is painfully obvious. Lots of entitlement, not much showers.
Or physical contact with grass.
@@TrifectaMonkey hahaha that one is currently me
And how is judging people based on their physique stereotype any better than whatever they're doing on SO. . . That's another issue in modern SWE experience, you pick up enough people attracted by big money, they bring other like minded people and suddenly noone cares about tech anymore but rather dressing well and "having impact" ~ I make meetings to feel important and useful instead of actually working
@@bananesalee7086 Because these StackOverflow basement dwellers / neckbeards desperately need a wake-up call. And sometimes, the truth hurts.
They could be basement dweller if at least they had the traits of autistic high IQ people, high rigor, excellent reading skills, etc. They have none of that. They are mediocrity dwellers. They accept the many incorrect and misleading ACCEPTED answers on C++. They reject what they don't understand (like volatile).
ChatGPT has successfully answered all the programming questions I've ever had ever since I started using it, without the judgement or rudeness. There is a very pervasive culture of condescendence on there, from my experience and observation that is.
I have good experiences getting answers on stack overflow. I have two basic rules for this:
1. Never talk bad about anyone or anything. I got downvoted about one question, and even got a warning about "you have posted questions not well received". I searched and it came from one single comment about gcc "not handling a feature the best way". That's all it took. I had insulted someones god.
2. Never argue. I often get answers/comments where they CLEARLY didn't actually read what I posted, but immediately started to dis my code or what I said. I tried to correct them, but people have an amazing capacity to argue about irrelevant details. What I found is the thread got hijacked by the argument over trivia, and I was not getting any real answers anymore. Lesson: just let it slide. Wait for reasonable posters to answer who actually read what you wrote and ignore the others.
A last feature I have found from SO is there are a huge number of folks who live and die by the "credit" system there. Me I don't care, I just don't want to get the "you can't comment on this because you are still a dweeb" type restrictions. So when I get answer ( that actually does answer the question), I mark it as such. If I get an answer as a comment, I offer the commenter to write up what he/she said as an answer and I will check it as an answer.
Nonsense, why do we have to walk on eggshells just to have a barely decent user experience?!
@@carldrogo9492
I don't think the original commenter was excusing stack, or implying that it isn't bad, just sharing their experience and some tips
What you say might be true. But it simply should be the case.
I dont bother. I go literally anywhere else to ask a question. Just easier that way. FUCK SO.
This is a problem in so many communities, people who feel they know more than others feel the need to "assert dominance" by making other people feel stupid. Its toxic, I dont understand why people who get upset by a question take the time to spread negativity as opposed to just not interacting. Its huge in the automotive universe as well. I call it small PP syndrome.
I've dealt with this many times in the blender community. The moment I sense some one veering into the direction of "just Google it" after I've only asked one question. I immediately know where it is going. And other people just use your level to shit on you in worse cases. For example I asked about how exactly cgi works, like how do they get such high detailed models to animate and the like without bogging for the computer. Literally all the person could have said was that it requires a retopology and bake which would send me on the right path. But instead they told me "if you're asking this question then don't expect to learn it at all". Like what ? Who tf made these people the dictators of what I can and can't learn ?
It's a character trait known as "narcissism." Yes, it is highly toxic, dangerous even.
@@alexh2665 Maybe they wouldn't go that far, but they would probably try to justify watching loli h**tai by using the classic "she looks like a child but is actually a few centuries old" excuse.
@@DLBBALL LMAOOO
The hilarious counterproductivity of not giving a straight answer to questions is as follows:
Newbie A. asks a simple question.
His post is downvoted and he is slandered.
Newbie B can’t see Newbie A’s post because it was downvoted.
Newbie B. Asks the same simple question.
His post is downvoted and called a duplicate post and slandered.
Newbie C can’t see Newbie B’s or Newbie A’s post.
Ad infinite.
Their own reluctance to answer literally begs the question.
When StackOverflow first split in two, one of my questions got migrated by the mods to ServerFault. Then after several years, when they added more and more sites to their collection, it got deleted as off-topic. It was certainly not off-topic at the time, they just didn't have the very specific topic for it to live in that they do now.
Edit: Another one. I answered someone's question, explained in detail what they were missing and how it worked, and got accepted. Good, right? Well, time marches on and libraries change and my answer was eventually shouted at for "not working" then flagged and deleted along with all the upvotes.
Someone also copied another one of my answers and got over 10x the upvotes as mine because it was on a more visible question.
So, I hardly ever contribute to that site anymore.
These people make my blood boil. I remember back when I was a beginner all I would get would be snarky comments and no responses. The sad worms that act like this were 1000% bullied in school and love the illusion of power this gives them.
Then again it's the other people, who made them that way. Some might've been bullied so much, that they never forget and whenever they are (or feel like they are) good at something, they put up that attitude, because nobody took care of their bullies, so no one will take care of them.
I approach it a bit differently: if I see, that a person hasn't out much effort into researching and formatting the question, I simply ignore it.
Yup. No power over their actual lives so they flex on online forums where they can't get called a loser for it. Thankfully, SO powerusers are usually proud enough to advertise their SO accounts in resumes. Makes it really easy to throw their application in the trash.
My own SO experience was less than stellar, so I never ask questions there anymore. But the prejudice you are showing towards victims of bullying disgusts me.
@@martinelzen5127 It's valid to be prejudiced against them when they themselves go out of their way to bring others down, even more so since they know how it feels. Sympathy should immediately go straight out the window when they make the decision to continue a cycle like that.
I used to work in a call centre for a UK public body (no sales etc, purely a helpline for the general public). My anecdotal observation of my large number of colleagues was that significantly less than half actually enjoyed helping people. The much more popular attitude was to despise the callers. Those people had many more angry customers and arguments as a result. I had occasional nutters call but generally had a good and positive relationship with the callers because I actually enjoy helping people, because I get a sense of satisfaction from solving problems and I have a generally positive view of humanity.
Many people find it very hard to put themselves in someone else's shoes. It seems many people weirdly put themselves in the position of effectively being a help desk at Stack Overflow but having the negative attitude to the people asking questions. Why would you even do that? My colleagues were at least there for the money.
Thank you for making this video. The quality of life and basic usefulness of Stack Overflow has tanked in recent years; it used to be the goto source for me, my students, and basically programmer I know, but now I honestly find it less than useful due to this exact problem, and seek my engineering answers elsewhere. This problem desperately needed (and honestly still needs) more spotlighting.
Judging by Google's algorithm, it's still one of the most visited sites programmers will end up on. Multiple times, on a daily basis.
Still, I think what is getting more common is looking for a _discussion_ on different sites if the result on SO didn't make things clear.
I don't know anyone that has an account on Stack Overflow. It might be among the lowest ranking when it comes to community engagement relative to active readers.
I have an account for pretty much any online site to comment on. SO isn't one of them.
It's so nice to see a video on this issue, I've straight up just stopped using the site because you can ask a simple question and get an answer such as "I wouldn't do it this way, do it this way" and that's it, dispite expalining your understanding of the situation and needing a very specific solution. It's so ironic how they stop opinion questions, but it's completely okay to answer based on opinion and not give an actual alternative or just suggestion to how to solve the issue. simple solution; give the answer and recommend what they think may be better for them, it's not that difficult.
The people who pounce on an opportunity to question and criticize your methodology rather than helping to find your solution are the worst. Then you have to go down a rabbit hole of explaining your dev environment and the dependencies that require you to do things in that specific way.
On the other hand, sometimes snarky comments questioning your methodology reveal a new path to an easier solution. I find this is much more rare than when such comments are hurtful, destructive, and pointless, however.
I am convinced that snarky and non-responsive comments should be deleted
There is a fundemental problem with Q+A sites and that is repetition. People will ask the same questions over and over again, and the "experts" will get sick of answering them. It's like musicians and audiences - at some point there is a fundamental disconnect where the audience wants to hear the same old songs again and again; while the musicians are sick of playing them. If the musicians are in a position to ignore audience demands and just play what THEY think to be interested, they'll lose listeners fast, but if they keep playing "Oh when the saints" for the 10000th time, being a musician becomes a grating chore and a career in accounting suddenly seems enticing.
I've learned that no matter the situation and no matter what your choices and actions are you can not please everyone. With that in mind, I'll do what I do the way I choose to and if others don't like it then that's their problem not mine and I'll continue as I typically will do.
Other than Musicans Mods on SO could encourage ppl to join and participate in the community. So they wouldn't have to answer those questions again and again as there where enough new mods to help out... But if they discourage them to post even a second question they run into a self built wall... again and again...
This phenomenon isn't exactly exclusive to Stack Overflow either, you will see similar kind of behavior on open source projects where toxic developers, moderators and even experienced community supporters will berate users for perfectly fine questions or submitting bug reports. It basically turns into a huge circle jerk around "their" project and not the end-product and the audience were targeting it for in the first place.
When you can't be a furnace operator at Auschwitz all you have left is getting a moderator job at r*ddit or SC.
Yess! At least with an open source project you can in theory fork it, though I'm too scared of the work involved and learning an unfamiliar code base to try that. But it boggles my mind how many people that create software for others to use, then even release the code for others to see and contribute to, have such disrespect to those same users asking questions or raising issues...
open source in a nutshell, i refuse to work on any open source project anymore after i had poor issues with the godot community and asking about possible bugs
Yep. I had this happen with a certain software I was trying to use. To be fair, I was trying to use the software in a way that was *technically* not supported, but the method did exist and just needed some polish.
I was berated by many of the moderators and staff members of this FOSS project for simply asking noob questions and providing suggestions to improve the software as a whole. Then when I gave them a similar berating back, I was banned from their Discord.
Quora is the same in a way, but the egotism is dialed up even more sometimes. It’s like there can’t be a successful answer that doesn’t involve belittling the asker. Some people think they are entitled to information that they probably learned from someone else. It’s an extremely toxic phenomenon and the people are wasting more time and energy polluting the website with nothing rather than simply answering the question.
The part that drives me (most) nuts is that most of the "Related" sidebar questions with high rank (and thus presumed worth) are the exact kinds of questions they instinctually auto-close for "not enough research", "lack of focus", "no attempt shown", etc; for ex, in JS: "How do i refresh the page?", "Scroll to top of page?", "How do I trim a string?", etc...
The problem with the "not enough research" answer is that if you don't understand the problem or terminology it can be almost impossible to write a search request for google or know what to look for in a book. People are good at understanding idiot speak or maybe something being asked by somebody that doesn't have english as their first language. I've been a professional coder for over 30 years and still hit terminology or concepts I'm not familiar with on a regular basis. One thing that experience teaches you is how little you actually know.
I think it's important to point out that "Moderators" are just users with high enough reputation (>500 or >2k depending on the type of review). And some people review questions just to get the badge you get for doing a lot of reviews. There's even one for flagging questions! Maybe part of the reason moderators are so bad is because just about anyone can moderate. In fact, moderators are basically chosen at random.
The problem is that the elected moderators are just as bad. Upper management sometimes would admit to there being a problem with the moderation and culture in general, but rarely anyone else.
That's the worst part - they're giving power to people who are knee-deep in the dominant groupthink. It's slowly devolving/devolved from a flourishing knowledge base to a clubhouse of petty gatekeepers.
@@reinux reddit has the same problem
@@mycelia_ow Some subs are really bad, yeah.
@@reinux I've yet to see a sub on Reddit that isn't caught up in this recent wave of anti-chinese racism. It's disappointing.
When I started out programming, I always had questions about how to do certain things and got stuck on the same problems for days. I knew about SO, I have seen questions on there before, but the unclear responses, downvotes, people telling others to read books and that they are stupid and programming is not meant for them made me very scared of asking a question on SO. So I never did. Can't imagine how many potential programmers lost interest in learning code just because they had questions and either got berated or were too afraid of asking the question in this toxic environment in the first place
It doesn't matter how polite or thorough you try to be. There's always a pretty good chance a degrading as*hat sadist will pounce on the opportunity to degrade and humiliate you, now that you've made yourself vulnerable by publicly admitting you don't know something.
Mission accomplished, I guess.
@@akpokemon Lmao. I asked a question about something in JS that behaved differently from its equivalent in other languages, and got a comment about being held at gunpoint.
Well, ugly truth is, you need to read those books, and if you can't get used to process then not engage in programming professionally as you will always struggle and I think SO is more people with professional experience so that might be why. Being able to read the docs is the bare minimum you have to know to even dream about getting a job. So maybe Stack Overflow for less experienced and hobbists should be created
@@jakubrogacz6829 found an SO mod
It takes no effort to just pass over the question and a little bit of effort to provide a duplicate link. These people actually take the time and emotional energy to create this environment. Just why?
Great video! Summarizes very well how I feel about the site. There are other stack exchange sites that are rampant with these same issues like the DIY one.
Some of this is explained by listening to the original Stack Overflow podcast, where Jeff and Joel explain the intended philosophy of the site.
The goal, essentially, was to be the top search result for pretty much any problem, with the correct answer at the top. This means they didn't want duplicates, they didn't want questions that couldn't have a correct answer and they didn't want questions that only one person would ever care about.
The thing is: they were both very heavily focused on providing a friendly environment for users new and old, and were quick to point out that the rules were often more guidelines: its fine to have a few opinion questions if they're of wide interest, a very specialized question that is still interesting to answerers obviously isn't hurting anyone and could encourage the questioner to stick around and answer other hard questions, that sort of thing.
They would hate all of these.
I noticed that it's mostly comments on the question that are the problem. I find that interesting, as I would have expected flaming to be on answers?
Any specific episode where I can find it? Thanks for the suggestion (please don't close).
@@Rotwold hah, pretty much every single one, from memory! It seemed to be the main topic.
They should just allow duplicates. And show a list of similar posts ordered by highest upvotes.
And they should remove the reputation system.
@@nicolaid99 I do agree to some extent.
The core idea, as Simon explained, definitely has some merit.
It likely contributed towards why SO became the top search result on pretty much any coding question).
Conversely, there's countless other forums with more open moderation that result in more duplicates and lower quality answers.
SO shouldn't become more of that. It should however less aggressive and dismissive towards unassuming beginners.
I think the flaming is mostly on comments because they are not as visibly moderated as answers. Iirc, you can flag an "answer" for not being an answer, but a comment gets a pass.
Me, learning CSS a few weeks ago: "Hmmm what's the difference between margin and padding they seem to do similar things and all the guides seem to use them arbitrarily."
11:16: "Q: When to use margin or padding in CSS [closed]"
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Guess I'll never know. Thank you mods for protecting me from this forbidden knowledge. Off to read a textbook I guess. xD
Short answer, most HTML objects are in an invisible box, margin is a distance of how far the outer part of this should be from other objects, padding is the distance from the inner part, to precise, how far this invisible box's interior from the objects it holds.
@@orionivx Thanks!
Completely agree. I found it extremely helpful and welcoming when learning to code ten years ago, but now I never post to it if I can help it for fear of being berated as an idiot. Every SO posting experience I’ve had in the last few years has been absolutely awful, toxic, and just makes me feel shit about myself.
I agree with moderators that opinion-based questions do not fit with Stack Overflow's goal of giving a single canonical answer to a question, however they are very useful to users. Similarly, I've seen questions basically asking for code reviews, which would be better-suited to the code review stackexchange. Perhaps rather than closing these questions, a system where moderators can vote to transfer the question to a more appropriate site could be implemented?
I agree, I think this sounds like a much better solution then what Stack Overflow is doing right now. I might do a follow-up video on this with proposed solutions and I think this recommending users to the correct sites is a great solution :)
I agree! Also, I think the "Stack Sites" should implement different levels for Q/A that range from Novice to Journeyman! This way when people are less experienced they can ask the entry level questions such as: "I have this kind of data, what would be the appropriate container to use in this situation?" Where this might be at an intermediate level. Or, How to properly utilize cache hits while using vector intrinsics to maximize efficiency at an Expert level... This way people especially beginners wouldn't be discouraged from using the site. Then you could progress on the site not just by reputation alone but by also proving yourself as you learn and perfect various topics and techniques within the site. You would then move up in rank and class from novice to the highest level. As for answering questions you would only be able to answer questions at your own reputation and rank or lower. Something like this could potentially yield more fruit. Also, they should add another section separate from the technical Q&A side to an actual opinion / discussion based Q&A page... This could potentially open up various doors for people to learn, excel and succeed.
Migration exists though! Moderators can move questions to other sites when needed, unfortunately it's rarely done because it requires an actual mod, and most reviewing is done by ordinary users.
@@GamesWithGabe Why not propose it on Meta instead, where it can be discussed and possibly implemented? SO is built from community feedback. (Warning: What you've mentioned so far sounds like it already exists, questions can be migrated to other sites on the network).
The cool thing about these "opinion based questions" is that they can be based on facts!
It's not just a random opinion, if we're talking about the best JSON parser for Java a.e
Some have more features, some are faster, this is OBJECTIVELY visible.
You should be allowed to tell an user those differences, since it's objective constructed by facts.
But it seems that facts aren't allowed on SO, which is cringe imo
Got this on my YT home today. The major problem undressed by this video is repetition, the quantity of people learning generally will be larger than the people able to reply them. So, chances are that a "replyer" will see a lot of question about the same stuff, and get tired quite quickly... Another point is the habit that some people has to ask instead of researching. I guess it has to do with the way people learn in school, so they tend to feel more secure when someone take time to reply to them and any further questions they may derive from the reply. SO folks tend to focus on more advanced topics, but lack guidelines on how to point people to the right resources to get some basic knowledge, and a place for people to talk about more fundamental concepts. I have my own share of complaints about SO, but I'd rather have it as-is than go back to the time when it didn't exist...
I lost the "asking a question" right a couple of weeks ago because the holy moderators thought my question was stupid lmao
Lol yea, I think I lost that privilege too :D
I never was a too active user of SO, however, I have been a Moderator (and eventually, Administrator) of a pretty big tech board. While SO takes this to the extreme with reputation based privileges and users being able to edit/close/reopen questions, even in a good old bulletin board you will have some users who seem enjoy stressing that particular questions are not well put, show lack of research or effort.
As a Moderator I always tried to answer those in a way like "If you had checked google with this terms, you would have found these links which are useful. Please try to do this for your next question. And by the way, here is the answer for your concrete example." 😁
I think everyone has that experience of their first Stack Overflow question. Worrying that no one will answer and then the shock of receiving 11 downvotes and being horrifically scolded within 15 minutes of asking it.
15 minutes?! Must have been a slow day.
Totally feel you on this, seemed to have changed kinda recently. The other half posted a fairly innocent question and got blasted by 3 different people...just over a little bit of JavaScript
I had a similar experience over at the Pi-Hole forums. I was trying to setup a DNS solution to bypass my ISP's DNS caching system (they intercept all outgoing packets on port 53 and direct them to their own servers). So I posted and a moderator chimed in and actually helped me to setup a recursive DNS solution on my Pi-Hole machine. Afterwards I went looking at the other solutions, I was happy with the recursive setup but I wanted to explore the others so I could get familiar with them and learn. So I also tried to setup a secure DNS proxy on the Pi-Hole and posted about that too. After which the moderator became incensed and started on a tirade of "Why are you doing this" and "What I told you was the best solution" and all sorts of triggered bullcrap. To which I simply replied telling him that I was just trying to learn about it, I would be using the recursive solution and that I found his outburst unprofessional, immature and inappropriate and that I would not be returning to the forum again. I reported the post and left. Never been back since.
Plcaes like that are very full of dunning kreuger asshats in my xp.
tbh you shouldn't be bypassing isp restrictions, it's their responsibility to keep people safe
@@notthatntg I can keep myself safe mate.
What’s incredible is that when it just opened, SO used to be a place where it was literally hard to not get a good answer to your question. You could post a shit question, and within a few minutes someone would give a really good “this is the best I can do with what you provided” answer. This is what the site needs to get back to.
as someone too scared to use stackoverflow, i can appreciate what it is. Sooo muich less clutter searching there vs unity3d forums or discords
does seem like they are going overboard tho. anything that ends in less unique answers is bad fore veryone
I started to learn node and python on June of this year and I wanted to implement a feature on my code but couldn't find how. Then, I asked it on SO, and, of course, got destroyed for not knowing how to adapt a existing code I couldn't even find. Thanks for the video, loved it.
The reputation system also makes it very hard for new users. The rep system rewards behavior that SO wants (useful questions and useful answers), but it doesn't necessarily reward good people or good programmers.
I think it's also important to point out that "Moderators" are just users with high enough reputation (>500 or >2k depending on the type of review). And some people review questions just to get the badge you get for doing a lot of reviews. There's even one for flagging questions!
Naturally, I want rep because it's internet points. I also need rep in order to contribute to the site, though, via comments and other actions. But the system as it is means that people who ask question about new frameworks have a much better chance than people who are using existing frameworks that there are plenty of existing answers for. And existing answers just continue to get more and more reputation because they show up in searches. People with high rep aren't necessarily knowledgeable or good programmers. But people tend to think they are smart because they have so much more internet points than you.
I've had people downvote my correct answers and tell me I'm dumb because they didn't understand the answer or it was counterintuitive and I had lower rep than them. It's annoying, and it's not the type of behavior SO should be encouraging or rewarding, imo.
Omg yes. I remember asking how to change some server settings on an old application that was modified by some random guy over 10 years ago and the response was basically like "you didn't create this application, you should ask the company who did"
IT WAS MADE BY MICROSOFT OVER A DECADE AGO AND THERE'S NO MORE SUPPORT.
When online forums are uncommunicative to the point that some people prefer to use chatgpt, the fact that people rely more on ai than another human for help is saying something concerning about the outlook of humans in the modern age to the possible future
Similar trends happen in many other communities.
I remember a forum with a terrible search engine that would normally report hundreds of unrelated posts in the results making the answer you were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Searching manually was also terrible because the forum had years and some sections had a list of more than one hundred topics. The number one rule was "never ask a question that was already answered" and new users that dared to ask something (even those that tried to explain that they had tried to search for the answer but couldn't find it) regularly got their discussion closed with only a message like "This was already asked.". Once I managed to reply to one of this discussion before a mod, my answer was something like "Hi, you can find the answer to your question here" followed by a link to the old discussion. The mod that closed the discussion made sure to add a few extra lines of text to publicly scold me.
Curiously, the forum was pretty much running on _opinion based_ topics as it was pretty much impossible to find new questions to ask.
This video has been marked as Duplicate.
Lol, you had me there for a second
I'm downvoting and running away without any feedback...
When you first find stackoverflow it seems so amazing! But then you ask your first question....
Stack overflow is very unwelcoming to new programmers and it is very sad to say that. It is scary to think how many would-be coders have gone on to do other things because they had a bad experience on SO