[kde-community] stackexange site for krita

jQM Consultant jqmconsultant at gmail.com
Thu Feb 26 09:56:37 GMT 2015


Hi everyone,

I had spent over two years helping people on SE network in different
topics/fields. My observations during through that period are as follows.


   - SE is not a suitable place to exchange knowledge nor to expand your
   knowledge.
   - It lacks friendly environment, especially for new comers/help seekers.
   - Having a micro-community inside a macro-community will have a negative
   impact on the micro-community.
   - You won't have your own rules nor will you have your own personality
   (as a community).
   - You (community) will have to abide by SE's "community managers" and
   "moderators" rules; most likely none of them is well experienced with your
   technology. Simply, SE has the upper hand!
   - The voting system is abusive and misused, which sometimes keeps people
   from asking or answering to avoid being "down-voted".
   - It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to delete answer/question or disassociate of
   your name. Once you have your question answered or your answer accepted,
   you can't delete it.
   - The majority of contributors are after fake points (reputation) and
   badges, and the majority of answers/questions are repeated and/or of low
   quality.
   - The community (SE) is full of ignorant, rude, arrogant and
   narrow-minded moderators and users.
   - Regarding "googleability" a one year old blog can beat SE to hit first
   results in search page. I have a "free WP" blog also 800 answers on SO, my
   blog beats SO results as well as documentations.
   - Most of google search's first results are either out-dated or
   unhelpful SO answers.


In short, I really don't recommend to be part of SE. It's just not the
right place to share knowledge or help others. There are many places,
endless number of ways to gather others under one roof.

I hope I have been of help.

Omar

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 9:20 AM, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 7:57 AM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> >
> >> El Dimecres, 25 de febrer de 2015, a les 17:09:09, Boudewijn Rempt va
> >> escriure:
> >>>
> >>> This is a question that came up on the #krita channel today. Our forums
> >>> are awesome, but not the best place for question and answer type of
> >>> exchanges. We even see questions appear on yahoo answers!
> >>>
> >>> One proposal was to create a krita.stackexchange.com, like
> >>> http://blender.stackexchange.com/. However, this is infra that's
> outside
> >>> of KDE. I don't know of anything equivalent, though!
> >>
> >>
> >> What's important of StackExchange, the non-wiki, non-forum type of
> >> software they have or the users they have?
> >>
> >
> > The software -- the way it invites people to ask questions, give answers
> and
> > to a large extent also the way stack exchange answers show up in google.
> I
> > mean... Try googling for a Qt programming question these days. You get
> > stackexchange before the Qt documentation.
>
> I think you are referring to Stack Overflow in there and not Stack
> Exchange, at least with the Qt example, but that is just details, yes.
>
> Let me speak up as one of the all time (top) contributors who made the
> Qt tag "so successful" on Stack Exchange. I am not trying to claim
> this out of pride, but more like indicating that I have some
> experience about what I am talking about. I am not trying to throw
> empty words out of the thin air.
>
> Your statement seems to be very attracting to a newbie person to Stack
> Exchange to read, but let me explain, based on my experience, your
> statement is and should not be used as a rebruttal reasoning as how
> good the site is.
>
> First of all, as I indicated earlier, the content is many times very
> low on Stack Exchange. That is due to the decline in proper moderation
> Stack Exchange provides for Qt experts, or any other for that matter.
>
> There are annoyingly the same questions asked over, over and all over
> again. More often than not, there is no proper duplicate with thorough
> explanation for the same question so that the rest could be closed
> with redirection to it. Sometimes, newcomers would look for reputation
> as part of the gaming process and so they would answer
> many-times-asked questions just to get reputation, usualy with much
> lower quality answers. Real experts do not get enough power to deal
> with this mess, especially in not completely mainstream tags, e.g. Qt.
>
> There are many occasions where you would need to go through 5-10 Stack
> Exchange urls and yet you would not find a good answer!
>
> However, It is worse than that: you would find many times misleading
> and/or wrong answers which are even heavily upvoted. Upvoting is easy
> and there are many robo upvoters, people using puppets and all that.
> Yes, there is some minimal defense mechanism against puppets, but it
> is really just very minimal. The algorithm is very poor.
>
> As I mentioned, it is more of a gaming site without proper power to
> eliminate well-known "rep-whore" aspect of the site in favor of
> quality. Let me just point you out with one thread, the well-known
> "Fastest Gun in the West Problem" among the expert "stack exchangers".
> I have gone through the same problems myself many times. Just to give
> you a random example, there was a question about qdoc and there was
> only one answer talking about doxygen. It was highly upvoted until I
> raised the issue among us, Qt contributors on Stack Exchange.
> Seriously, the answer was talking about something completely
> different, yet it was heavily upvoted. Some newbie even told me that
> it was upvoted, so "it must have been good". Before you start claiming
> that this was an exception, I am instantly writing that it was not!
>
>
> http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem
>
> Please try to understand that getting to the top of Google does not
> imply quality, nor free software. It implies lots of visits, etc. How
> that happens and whether via quality measures and free software
> channels, that is another question. You can always do a project, put a
> lot of effort on marketing and apply similar tricky, but without
> empowering real technology experts, you will not get quality from that
> angle.
>
> Overall, I and many people stopped contributing on Stack Exchange due
> to the obvious decline in moderation. When I left answering questions,
> before deciding to write a book about Qt 5 instead, the unanswered
> question rate was around 37.5% and it is now around 60+%. Some fellow
> Qt chaps also left around the time I did.
>
> Oh, and have I emphasized it enough that they allow to downvote post
> without reasoning on Stack Exchange? Many have spoken up against that
> destructive policy and it cannot be changed. It would not be possible
> to change it for KDE either since it is in the core of its operation.
> I heavily and strongly disagree with that. When I get a -1 (downvote)
> for a well-researched post, I would like to see the problem about it.
> You know, we would be collaborating to have a useful knowledge base
> for the posterity?
>
> I mind not getting feedback just minus one and that is not just my
> opinion. Not infrequently, such downvotes come from people who tried
> to make some revenge after getting downvotes and explanation for their
> low-quality contributions. Again, I completely disagree with some
> Stack Exchange policies like that. It goes against the healthy
> contribution atmosphere in my opinion.
>
> I would have much more to share, but I do not want to bore you with
> even more text in one email...
>
> >
> >
> >> I.e. we're on twitter because of the users they have, having
> twitter-like
> >> software on kde.org wouldn't work.
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-community mailing list
> > kde-community at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
> _______________________________________________
> kde-community mailing list
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>
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