Timeline for answer to How can we stop failing the users who we actually want to join, and remain as, members of our community? by Salvatore Ambulando
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 20, 2020 at 10:46 | comment | added | philipxy | "people who knew the answer didn't bother reading it" You are jumping to conclusions. PS A solution is needed so askers of poor questions don't feel so bad, but allowing bad questions isn't it. | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 16:24 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | @PeterMortensen Yes, it is a bit exaggerated. I felt it unnecessary to calculate the exact percentage of moderators with Monica in their name, and I thought it would sound like an awfully strange way of speaking. Your three comments are all technically correct and do nothing to address the point I was making. Another great example of why building rewards for grammatical corrections that don't change the content of a post doesn't help build knowledge. You get what you measure. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:26 | comment | added | Scratte | @Appleguysnake Thank you. In all honesty, this answer by deceze ♦ shows the real giant though :) It made me go "Ah! Eureka.." | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:17 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | Re "I have no reason to edit posts I don't know the answer to": If that is your criterion, then no. But in most cases it is more about fixing broken English in (otherwise good) questions. That doesn't require much programming skill (and there are tools). | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:17 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | Re "I can't answer questions because I'm still learning": You can. Some questions only require sufficient research, not own skill. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:17 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | Re "everyone has": Isn't that a bit exaggerated? | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:13 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Third iteration [<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/upvote>].
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 21:05 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Second iteration.
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 20:57 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Active reading [<http://stackoverflow.com/legal/trademark-guidance> (the last section) ].
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| Jun 14, 2020 at 20:40 | comment | added | user1937198 | To follow the analogy, crosshead screws where invented because of scaling issues with plain screwdrivers. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 19:05 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | @user1937198 Screws weren't invented because we had to find a use for screwdrivers. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 19:03 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | @Scratte Glad I could give someone a positive outcome with this :) Your explanation was really well written and helped me understand the site and what was frustrating me a lot. Standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were. Understanding the problem better sadly led me to the conclusion that it's not worth trying to become more involved, but seeing other people articulate the same issues at least made me feel like I wasn't alone, and that goes a long way. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 11:19 | comment | added | user1937198 | I'd say its a different view. What sort of questions do we want to curate because that is influenced by which ones we can build scalable answering workflows for. We can't just say we want to answer X types of problems, we need to work out if we can answer them as well. History has taught us that forums and newsgroups don't scale. What new alternative workflow do we have? | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 3:41 | comment | added | Scratte | "It's a paperclip maximizer" made me laugh :) But you're right. The goal is not clear, the rules are vague and lacking consensus, and there's a huge backlog of stuff that only gets cleaned up when there's new activity. (I'm impressed that you only spent four hours to reach this though. I spent a lot longer.) | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:14 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | " you can't effectively influence culture through discussions, but by shaping the interactions through the technical implementation of the site" You can't influence culture with technical implementations until you decide in what way you want to influence the culture, otherwise you're just throwing sh*t at a wall to see what sticks. You've fixated on how to efficiently curate questions for answerers without discussing the core issue of what types of questions are being curated. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:10 | comment | added | user1937198 | I totally agree on the disagreement. It's just this answer doesn't convey that effectively. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:09 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | "Automatically removing old questions doesn't solve the problem" see this is what I was talking about in my next sentence. Any time I give a simple example, it's nitpicked and the actual point is completely ignored. I ended my comment with (continued) because I hit the character limit and I'm not using a text editor to proof my comments first, but you didn't bother waiting to see the rest of my thought. It's a perfect distillation of the SO experience. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:09 | comment | added | user1937198 | I the scale of stackoverflow, you can't effectively influence culture through discussions, but by shaping the interactions through the technical implementation of the site. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:06 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | Cultural problems: Everyone has a different idea of what the site is for. Any site with millions of users and a lot of volunteer moderation will run into that. So when you have those disagreements, you fall back on the rules and established norms. Except the rules are opaque, vague, and hard to find - and they're largely focused on the minutiae of how to write questions. So the rules lawyers win by default by virtue of having something concrete to point to and everyone gets stuck arguing about if we should call questions closed or hidden, or what the close workflow should be. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:06 | comment | added | user1937198 | Automatically removing old questions doesn't solve the problem because we need to get these questions out of answers views so they can focus on the ones they most effectively answer | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 2:02 | comment | added | user1937198 | But those cultural problems are at least partially routed in technical solutions to the answering problem. There is a complex interplay where the way technical solutions to problems are implemented influences culture, and culture influences how those solutions are used. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 1:57 | comment | added | Salvatore Ambulando | There are a variety of technical answers to those questions. For example, right now if you find an old unanswered question and answer it, you can often find it immediately get closed. Just automatically close or delete old questions that get no answers. Whatever. I didn't talk about the technical solutions because (especially here) people get bogged down in implementation details that don't matter. There's no technical problem here, there are cultural problems. (continued) | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 0:07 | comment | added | user1937198 | Or are there alternatives to the front page for answering that would allow us to handle that? Because one of the key original reasons for the close system is it takes a lot less specific knowledge to know that something is not a question that will require expert answering than it does to answer such a question. | |
| Jun 14, 2020 at 0:01 | comment | added | user1937198 | And so this leads to the big question: with 8000 questions a day, how can you make it effective for people to answer questions? Because we could stop closing questions, that has massive impacts on the ability of things like the front page and similar questions lists to show more challenging questions to the people who can answer them. Is the ability to answer expert questions with current tooling what is in conflict with welcoming newbies? | |
| Jun 13, 2020 at 19:44 | history | answered | Salvatore Ambulando | CC BY-SA 4.0 |