Stackoverflow (SO) is the premiere question and answer site for programmers. It's a joke now that when SO goes down, programmers go home because no work can get done. It is their mission to make life better for programmers, and the men and women working behind the scenes at SO have poured much sweat and tears into growing a useful community for programmers to share solutions to various problems encountered in their algorithm-laden lives.
That is not to say there aren't issues, though. As the site has grown (and it is bit on the huge side now) SO has had to make decisions that define (and refine) the site's character, and not all of these desicions have passed without detractors. They have also had to try addressing criticism of the site, and one of the most common criticisms seems to be related to how (un)welcoming the site can be for newcomers.
I think I can relate to this. I am not a programmer by trade, but I do try to create useful utilities for use in my day job and enjoy programming in at least a hobbyist capacity. I am not very confident in my abilities, though, and definitely do not need someone to remind me of an obvious skill gap (why do you think I'm asking the question in the first place?)
I do not have the answers regarding how to make SO more welcoming to beginners. Perhaps once a community grows to a certain point it naturally fractures into a strata of people who are skilled to a point where they aren't aware of their own bias against lesser-experienced individuals. Or maybe there are rules in the system that encourage what one person interprets to be a "man up, you snowflake!" mentality while an insecure individual interprets the same feedback system to be validation that they don't have what it takes to join with programming peers.
I suppose that when so much of the technology culture centers on a "Brogrammer" mentality rife with competition using knowledge and perceived cleverness as a ranking system, it's natural for some snark to become ingrained in interactions among programmer peers. It's not hard when reading some comments and answers to a SO question to sense a tone of judgement, that the questioner must pass some bar of having earned an answer before they may have one, something beyond the basic search of the site for the same problem before duplicating it.
There have been cases where people will take more time to criticize the questioner than it would have taken to edit or refine the question into something useful and post an answer.
Sometimes it seems you can do everything seemingly right but still fall short in someone's judgement; the ability to down vote a question while leaving no constructive feedback and incurring no penalty in the process (except to the question-asker) seems like a pretty obvious way to discourage interacting with the community for help.
Note that I'm not saying down votes are necessarily bad, although I do wonder if alternative feedback methods could be useful. I'm saying that one of the more frustrating interactions on the site, in my experience, stems from being penalized and not knowing why; if you down vote, maybe you should have to leave some constructive feedback or enhancement to fix the problem or take some penalty to your own Internet-points reputation score.
For example, I recently had trouble with an intermittent panic when exiting a Go utility and posted to StackOverflow for help. I posted a title that succinctly summarized the issue. I posted the panic message. I posted the function definition. The panic had a line number from the definition that seemed to trigger the intermittent error; I posted the specific "line X is..." followed by the line of code so there was no question what snippet triggered the panic. I tagged it with appropriate tags. There were a couple of comments, and I posted a link to another question citing some code to explain (justify?) why I implemented the function call the way I did. What happened?
I took two down votes of penalty to my reputation.
In the comments I asked if the down voters could explain what I could do to improve the question for future reference. After all, SO may be for answering questions related to your immediate problems, but it's also supposed to be of use to future questioners looking to solve similar problems. Last time I checked no one explained why they did it.
The nearest I got to helpful feedback on the down votes was from one of the helpful people who submitted an answer to my question; that person speculated that it was because I had not RTFM'd to the satisfaction of some of the other users since the problematic line was in the panic and the source code for a function call used in my definition shows it probably didn't like a nil context parameter.
So as a relatively insecure beginner, I crafted a question with lots of context, source code, and clarification, only to get dinged with damage (negative reputation) by anonymous clicks from people who couldn't leave a reason why or offer feedback on improving the reference value of the question.
It shouldn't be difficult to understand why this would be discouraging to some people, especially when the goal (I thought) was to build a useful reference for many people, not (possibly) penalize someone for not meeting some arbitrary criteria for having passed a bar of RTFM to be blessed with community membership in order to be assisted without a passive aggressive backhand.
I don't count myself as a detractor of StackOverflow. I have found help from members of their community to be invaluable. I do wonder if some of the feedback mechanisms sometimes encourages certain behaviors that deter less experienced and less thick-skinned programmers from interacting while enabling programmers with the "rock star" or "ninja brogrammer" mindset to set a less friendly tone. There comes a point where it's less commiserating and sharing with a community and more a necessary chore to solve a problem, and I suspect the gray area of that transition is where new users begin complaining about the tone of the site.
Posted with Blogsy
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