I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is it :)
Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean that other people can't benefit from changes like this.
The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for programmers or reddit?
The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.
Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.
Even if it is a Q&A site where most users are read-only, it's still very bad to be sending the signal to the lurkers that if you ever ask a question, there's a high chance you're gonna get shat upon.
Wikipedia can be pretty hostile to new users as well (especially in languages with fewer speakers). Some people think they own articles and are very territorial about them. The result is that domain experts are scared away while the prolific editors are those who are good at arcane formatting rules, editing conventions etc.
Sure, it's unwelcoming, like most support forums. But how does having more ways to upvote an answer address this at all? The problem with stackoverflow isn't lack of feedback.
There is a miscommunication /somewhere/ about what the motivation for high rep users is.
Even in this exchange there is someone who stated that people get points for closing posts (that's wrong).
With that set of preconceptions about how Stack Overflow works, the "someone down voted me" and "someone closed my question" become attacks on the person meant to increase the points of the other person.
The actions of curation aren't intended to be unwelcoming - but when held in the "all actions on my posts are judgements about me" it becomes a question of "can this be solved?"
One of the things that is disappointing is that someone who can speak with the voice of Stack Overflow corporate isn't actively pursuing social media (HN, Reddit, etc...) and helping to correct these misperceptions.
It's kind of crazy for something claiming to be a "community" to crack down on basic human niceties and politeness. If you say "thank you", your comment will be deleted.
At least on a standard forum, you can say "hello" and "thank you".
The early adopters of Stack Overflow saw it as something closer to Wikipedia. A source of technical documentation. This still exists in the closest thing to a mission statement that one can find: https://stackoverflow.com/tour
This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.
One similarly doesn't see "hello" or "thank you" in encyclopedias or technical documentation.
There are places for human interaction (chat in particular) - but in a question, answer, or comments it isn't useful.
Consider that the summary part of a question that shows up shows the first line or so of the text.
Hello. I am a new user with Java but I know C#. I have searched everywhere but I cannot ...
Compared to:
When using Java, I am trying to use a stream to select some data and write it out as a file ...
Having comments - especially trivial comments - means that voting doesn't happen as much and that then impacts the ability to get a signal to curate on.
You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem.
Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal.
Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.
At the beginning of StackOverflow there was a very strong opinion held by the founders, particularly Jeff Atwood, that the longevity of a site was determined by the signal to noise ratio. The emphasis at the outset was to eliminate as much noise as possible. Automated systems were put in place that went way too far, in my opinion. The whole Chat system was put into place to get comments off the main pages. Even though Jeff Atwood hasn't been at the company for years, the philosophy still seems very entrenched.
I'm well aware but SO isn't the last word on peer support.
i) We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information.
ii) I believe there is much more human motivation potential to be found in "personal connection" than there is in fake karma. I want to be thanked, I want to know how I mattered, I want to know what the user was building just as much as I want to be gracious and share how much they helped me.
iii) They are trying to use the same rules for wildly different situations. There are two faces to SO: very high traffic questions better directed to maintained documentation/tutorials, and a very long tail of 1:1 interactions that get less than 100 views and no votes. Right now SO doesn't serve either very well: the high traffic do not benefit from 10 years of highly voted bad answers and the low traffic do not benefit from the interventions of jack-booted deletionists.
iv) IMHO you often get a better experience and treated with more respect in a discussion on a GitHub issue. We don't have to turn github issues into a highly constrained impersonal experience to be effective.
We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information
I agree with this sentence, but when actually implemented it often results in fake upbeat corporate marketing cheerfulness niceties that goes in the opposite direction.
To your other points: I think SO should be used when you can reasonably expect at least one other person to ask your question down the line. It's not about your particular issue, the idea is you are entering something into a knowledge bank for easy retrieval by others later on. This is why it's also encouraged to answer your own questions! It's not a discussion site, but a mapping of questions a person may have to the answer.
Indeed, if you want to discuss back and forth, you are better served by the project Github or a project mailing list or the forums of old. If you want to focus on the personal connection: there are tons of Discord servers, Slack workspaces, subreddits, I guess some forums and IRC channels are also alive etc.
The problem that many people have with the new cultural shift is that the expectations are just different. Not everything has to turn into a social site with followers, likes, shares, news feeds etc. There is simply an influx of people with a different culture/value system compared to the original hacker ethos. The problem is, it was the hacker ethos that made the site so efficient, usable and popular.
Sure, hacker culture is also known for its flame wars and shouting RTFM and being unwelcoming, and it should be improved, but the problem is, that you cannot scale personal one-on-one mentoring when the influx of novices is so fast. There is tons of low effort "this code does not work, give me solution plz thx" and a dump of random code from some app. You can't do handholding guidance with everyone. Many of them are not receptive to anything and expect to be served with an answer because they deserve it and if they are told to put in some work, they say it's too elitist.
The thing is, SO's biggest value comes from the contributor base. And as we can see from the meta posts, the contributors are not appreciative of the new direction.
If it's stretched too far, at some point it will come to a fork with some stronger filtering and a different culture and many of the people who take their time to answer questions will move.
You can't force people to interact in a way you prescribe from the top down. It has to come organically from the community itself.
The people who "got" the community on SO and how it worked have long since left or had their ability to advocate get squashed in the corporate structure.
The people who are there with influence on direction have a very different view of what SO (and the rest of SE) should be. Most employees at corporate do not use any of the public sites in any way, shape or form and are disconnected about what the users and curators there need.
And so, you get continuous improvement - on a vision that the unpaid volunteers who maintain the sites feel is wrong or counter productive.
Comments
I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is it :)
Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean that other people can't benefit from changes like this.
The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for programmers or reddit?
The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.
Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.
Even if it is a Q&A site where most users are read-only, it's still very bad to be sending the signal to the lurkers that if you ever ask a question, there's a high chance you're gonna get shat upon.
Wikipedia can be pretty hostile to new users as well (especially in languages with fewer speakers). Some people think they own articles and are very territorial about them. The result is that domain experts are scared away while the prolific editors are those who are good at arcane formatting rules, editing conventions etc.
Sure, it's unwelcoming, like most support forums. But how does having more ways to upvote an answer address this at all? The problem with stackoverflow isn't lack of feedback.
Having another way to upvote doesn't help. You're right.
But being unwelcoming is a problem, and it needs solved. This just doesn't solve it.
There is a miscommunication /somewhere/ about what the motivation for high rep users is.
Even in this exchange there is someone who stated that people get points for closing posts (that's wrong).
With that set of preconceptions about how Stack Overflow works, the "someone down voted me" and "someone closed my question" become attacks on the person meant to increase the points of the other person.
The actions of curation aren't intended to be unwelcoming - but when held in the "all actions on my posts are judgements about me" it becomes a question of "can this be solved?"
One of the things that is disappointing is that someone who can speak with the voice of Stack Overflow corporate isn't actively pursuing social media (HN, Reddit, etc...) and helping to correct these misperceptions.
It's kind of crazy for something claiming to be a "community" to crack down on basic human niceties and politeness. If you say "thank you", your comment will be deleted.
At least on a standard forum, you can say "hello" and "thank you".
A forum is for discussion.
The early adopters of Stack Overflow saw it as something closer to Wikipedia. A source of technical documentation. This still exists in the closest thing to a mission statement that one can find: https://stackoverflow.com/tour
One similarly doesn't see "hello" or "thank you" in encyclopedias or technical documentation.
There are places for human interaction (chat in particular) - but in a question, answer, or comments it isn't useful.
Consider that the summary part of a question that shows up shows the first line or so of the text.
Compared to:
For comments, this has been looked at in the past - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... and https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210265/how-can-we-m...
Having comments - especially trivial comments - means that voting doesn't happen as much and that then impacts the ability to get a signal to curate on.
You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem.
Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal.
Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.
At the beginning of StackOverflow there was a very strong opinion held by the founders, particularly Jeff Atwood, that the longevity of a site was determined by the signal to noise ratio. The emphasis at the outset was to eliminate as much noise as possible. Automated systems were put in place that went way too far, in my opinion. The whole Chat system was put into place to get comments off the main pages. Even though Jeff Atwood hasn't been at the company for years, the philosophy still seems very entrenched.
I'm well aware but SO isn't the last word on peer support.
i) We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information.
ii) I believe there is much more human motivation potential to be found in "personal connection" than there is in fake karma. I want to be thanked, I want to know how I mattered, I want to know what the user was building just as much as I want to be gracious and share how much they helped me.
iii) They are trying to use the same rules for wildly different situations. There are two faces to SO: very high traffic questions better directed to maintained documentation/tutorials, and a very long tail of 1:1 interactions that get less than 100 views and no votes. Right now SO doesn't serve either very well: the high traffic do not benefit from 10 years of highly voted bad answers and the low traffic do not benefit from the interventions of jack-booted deletionists.
iv) IMHO you often get a better experience and treated with more respect in a discussion on a GitHub issue. We don't have to turn github issues into a highly constrained impersonal experience to be effective.
I agree with this sentence, but when actually implemented it often results in fake upbeat corporate marketing cheerfulness niceties that goes in the opposite direction.
To your other points: I think SO should be used when you can reasonably expect at least one other person to ask your question down the line. It's not about your particular issue, the idea is you are entering something into a knowledge bank for easy retrieval by others later on. This is why it's also encouraged to answer your own questions! It's not a discussion site, but a mapping of questions a person may have to the answer.
Indeed, if you want to discuss back and forth, you are better served by the project Github or a project mailing list or the forums of old. If you want to focus on the personal connection: there are tons of Discord servers, Slack workspaces, subreddits, I guess some forums and IRC channels are also alive etc.
The problem that many people have with the new cultural shift is that the expectations are just different. Not everything has to turn into a social site with followers, likes, shares, news feeds etc. There is simply an influx of people with a different culture/value system compared to the original hacker ethos. The problem is, it was the hacker ethos that made the site so efficient, usable and popular.
Sure, hacker culture is also known for its flame wars and shouting RTFM and being unwelcoming, and it should be improved, but the problem is, that you cannot scale personal one-on-one mentoring when the influx of novices is so fast. There is tons of low effort "this code does not work, give me solution plz thx" and a dump of random code from some app. You can't do handholding guidance with everyone. Many of them are not receptive to anything and expect to be served with an answer because they deserve it and if they are told to put in some work, they say it's too elitist.
The thing is, SO's biggest value comes from the contributor base. And as we can see from the meta posts, the contributors are not appreciative of the new direction.
If it's stretched too far, at some point it will come to a fork with some stronger filtering and a different culture and many of the people who take their time to answer questions will move.
You can't force people to interact in a way you prescribe from the top down. It has to come organically from the community itself.
They had metrics for the "thank you" stuff as well.
Continuous improvement is what happens...
The people who "got" the community on SO and how it worked have long since left or had their ability to advocate get squashed in the corporate structure.
The people who are there with influence on direction have a very different view of what SO (and the rest of SE) should be. Most employees at corporate do not use any of the public sites in any way, shape or form and are disconnected about what the users and curators there need.
And so, you get continuous improvement - on a vision that the unpaid volunteers who maintain the sites feel is wrong or counter productive.