[kde-community] stackexange site for krita

Thu Feb 26 13:39:30 GMT 2015

Let me add my $0.01 to this topic, just for the sake of diversity.

Formerly, I've been a long-time contributor on Stack Overflow (I was going
by the name H2CO3); I've used it for about three and a half years. When I
first encountered the site, I was impressed about the amount of good
scientific discussion happening there. I've learnt a lot from the questions
others asked and the answers a lot of deeply passionate and very
knowledgeable programmers have contributed.

I haven't asked a lot of questions myself (since Stack Overflow was already
a well-established site by the time I've got to know it); however, as I've
developed my own programming skills, I gradually answered more and more
questions, primarily in the C, Objective-C, iOS (formerly iPhone), C++ tags
and occasionally elsewhere. During the years, I've reached the magic 100
000 reputation points, but my appetite for answering questions and
contributing to the community has begun to decrease quickly.

And that certainly had a well-defined reason behind it. I've noticed over
the course of the years that the majority of users and questions in my
preferred topics has become extremely, utterly *lazy.* Just that: plain,
old lazy. A lot of users seemingly didn't make the slightest effort to do
any sort of basic research before asking their questions, and often, they
also lacked fundamental knowledge about the languages they were using. I
remember being a beginner programmer and making the stupidest mistakes
possible, and I remember the amount of struggling it took me to google all
the answers to all my easy problems. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't that
hard (let alone impossible) either, it just took a bit of effort and
persistence.

However, during the time I've spent on Stack Overflow, I've seen that the
majority of users weren't even willing to follow this approach. For
instance, when they encountered a common compiler error, the first thing
they did was to run to SO and ask a badly-formulated, hard-to-comprehend,
grammatically screwed-up duplicate question – more ofthen than not, an N-th
order duplicate, actually… there were identical questions asked literally
more than a hundred times. Honestly, I don't even understand this attitude
– it would have taken less time to google the error message than ask a
question and wait for others to answer it.

Then there were the annoying college students who were too lazy to
participate in a course and/or to do their own homework, and then they
asked the community to explain in detail what, for example, a basic data
structure or a certain syntactic construct was. That's explicitly against
There have been endless requests to do one's homework as well. (Isn't that
just plain unashamed? asking a whole site to do your homework? simply
unbelievable…)

But this wasn't the worst problem of Stack Overflow. The two worst problems
were (and still are, from what I can tell) 1. moderators', community
managers' and other managerial staff's attitude towards the aforementioned
problems, and 2. the fact that personalities, non-professional arguing and
generally all sorts of evil machination has gradually overtaken
professional debate. The amount of "revenge" serial downvoting of good
answers and questions was continuously increasing; heated arguments were
frequent; and all this usually ended by a moderator intervening, but
supporting the wrong side. Instead of taking action against those who asked
off-topic/lazy/spammy/repeated questions by closing and/or deleting the
questions or banning these harmful users, they warned (often in a very
personal, ashaming tone) the more experienced, professional users who spoke
up against the allowance of such low-quality questions. There has been not
a single case whereby such an experienced, trusted user has been downright
*banned* from Stack Overflow. The usual (often ambiguous and non-helpful)
reasoning always went along the lines of "you have to be nice to
beginners". Which in itself is true, but completely misses the point.

This ultimately drove me into abandoning all contribution to Stack Overflow
and requesting the deletion of my account. It's some unfortunate and
seriously bad experience, but I just couldn't stand the amount of injustice
which was happening against the top contributors of the site. The worst
thing, in my opinion, is that the site staff were doing it deliberately. It
wasn't even an honest mistake.

So, that's about it – this is my story with regards to Stack Overflow. To
sum up, I can't really recommend it for anyone who is willing to live a
successful professional life, since instead of a place for "professional
and enthusiast programmers" (as its sub-title claims), it has become a
collection of endlessly-repeated questions and lazy wannabes, backed and
supported by the managers of the network.

Whether this is the situation on other sites in the Stack Exchange network
– I don't know, and in all honesty, I couldn't care less, at least not
anymore. I suspect that other sites don't have such a large number of
people asking and answering questions every day, so some of these problems
may be significantly less serious – but I don't know much about other
sites, so I can't sensibly have any sort of opinion on them.

Regards,
Árpád

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Dweeble <dweeble01103 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Feb 2015 07:38:48 -0500, Jaroslaw Staniek <staniek at kde.org>
> wrote:
>
>  On 26 February 2015 at 13:27, Dweeble <dweeble01103 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 26 Feb 2015 06:36:48 -0500, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>  On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Martin Klapetek
>>>> <martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyone btw. knows how the Ubuntu instance at askubuntu.com fits in?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It is part of the Stack Exchange system. You can easily check it by
>>>> going to a Stack Exchange account that has subaccounts on multiple
>>>> sites including AU. The "subdomains" are listed at the top of left an
>>>> account. Furthermore, the Stack Exchange logo is even in the "banner"
>>>> on the top left of the cover page for AU.
>>>>
>>>>  I wonder if it is hosted by Canonical or just by SE Inc. and running
>>>>> on its own domain...and if Ubuntu people got more power in the
>>>>> moderation
>>>>> and stuff.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, surely, they are slightly more empowered on a separate site, but
>>>> in the end of the day, as Omar also wrote, the big boss is Stack
>>>> Exchange. I want KDE to be the big boss for a KDE project. I really do
>>>> not want to compromise that.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Cheers
>>>>> --
>>>>> Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> kde-community mailing list
>>>>> kde-community at kde.org
>>>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> kde-community mailing list
>>>> kde-community at kde.org
>>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't see where this is so much better than what exists - to me it
>>> looks
>>> like a forum without sub-forums, where (at least on the LO and Ubuntu
>>> sites)
>>> not that many people vote and "answers" are basically posts. And
>>> surprisingly considering the size of the Ubuntu community there aren't as
>>> many answers as I would have expected.
>>>
>>> I would think making the existing facilities better would be more
>>> cost/labor
>>> efficient and imo and what would be a worthy  goal in supporting the
>>> community would be is to provide responses to all questions asked on the
>>> Forum, if one looks at the number of unanswered questions that number
>>> should
>>> not be considered acceptable.
>>>
>>>
>> Yeah, one example: search that actually works. On
>> https://forum.kde.org/kexi when I type TABLE I get results for Amarok,
>> KMail, Okular, even VDG. Maybe 3 for Kexi.
>>
>> People search, do not browse, especially if they're confronted with a
>> large hierarchy.
>>
>> Isn't that an idea for GSoC or whatever action?
>>
>>  You need to use the "search this forum ...." box which is at the bottom
> of the page, I agree that the placement isn't optimal and that the search
> box would be more useful if it was context aware:
> - if on the forum home page search all forums
> - if on a sub-forum parent home page (ex Kexi has multiple sub forums)
> search all the parent's sub-forums
> - if on a sub-forum  page search that sub-forum (or maybe all related
> sub-forums)
> - if on a thread search that thread
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kde-community mailing list
> kde-community at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
>

-- 
Author of the Sparkling language
http://h2co3.org/
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