I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They deserve credit for that.
There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO.
Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.
1. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a rectangle with lit-up points...
2. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.
Comments
I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They deserve credit for that.
There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO.
Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.
1. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a rectangle with lit-up points...
2. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.
The way you say "thank you" as a human is by saying "thank you"-- preferably with an interesting explanation or side-bar.