[HN Gopher] My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blo...
___________________________________________________________________
My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about
CoreWCF
Author : eterm
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-05-08 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (richardcocks.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (richardcocks.github.io)
| eterm wrote:
| A post in which I try to rubber-duck a CoreWCF issue I've been
| having, because stackoverflow no longer seems suitable for asking
| questions about programming issues.
|
| Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for
| getting my SO question closed.
|
| And because I know you're all nosy, the SO question is here:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79605462/high-cpu-usage-... .
| Please feel free to point out more ways in which I screwed up
| asking my SO question.
| agos wrote:
| for what it's worth, I submitted the question as a candidate
| for reopening
| aflukasz wrote:
| FWIW seems open to me right now.
| eterm wrote:
| Thank you, it has now been re-opened.
| matsemann wrote:
| Honestly, I agree with it not being a good fit for a Q&A site.
| It's a debugging problem, probably needing a discussion, and
| might even not be of any use to others being that "high cpu" is
| kinda vague. Seems better suited for a bug report / issue
| tracker of the relevant library.
| jve wrote:
| A community site for multiplayer debugging... I like it! Some
| people like to tackle problems and feel rewarded when they
| crack the nut :)
| eterm wrote:
| Your'e right, "High CPU" just means more than zero. It was a
| symptom of the stream continuing to be written to. I've
| edited the title now to be better.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| How can a question that is:
|
| 1) clearly technical
|
| 2) reproducible
|
| 3) has a clear failure condition
|
| Not be a suitable candidate for S/O?
|
| Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I
| print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't
| watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer?
|
| Hard questions doesn't mean they're _bad_ , it just means
| many people _aren 't competent_ answer them. The same goes
| for obscure questions; there might just not be many people
| who _care_ , but the question itself is entirely valid.
|
| Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O?
|
| I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche
| problems are _too obscure_ or _too hard_ for S /O to be
| bothered to grace themselves with.
|
| It's absurd.
|
| It just baffles me that a question that might take some
| effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to
| S/O.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 2) reproducible
|
| Is it? What hardware and OS version should I use to
| reproduce the server?
| zahlman wrote:
| The problem with the question as originally asked is _not_
| the difficulty or "obscurity".
|
| The problem is _complexity and scope_.
|
| We don't debug code for others. We expect them to find the
| specific part of the code that is causing a problem and
| showcase a minimal reproducible example. For performance
| issues, we expect them to profile code and isolate
| bottlenecks - and then they can ask a hard, obscure
| question about the bottleneck. _Or_ a very easy one, as
| long as it 's something that could make sense to ask after
| putting in the effort.
|
| In short: we're looking for a _question_ , not a _problem_.
| Stack Overflow "can't be bothered to grace itself with"
| hard niche problems, or with easy common problems. But it
| _is_ about answering the _question that results from an
| analysis of_ a problem. Whether that 's understanding the
| exact semantics of argument passing, or just wanting to
| know how to concatenate lists.
|
| And we're looking for _one_ question at a time. If there
| are multiple issues in a piece of code, they need to be
| isolated and asked about separately. If the task clearly
| breaks down into a series of steps in one obvious way, then
| you need to figure out which of those steps is actually
| causing a problem first, and ask about whichever steps
| separately. (Or better yet, find the existing Q &A.)
|
| (Questions seeking to _figure out an algorithm_ are usually
| okay, but usually better asked on e.g.
| cs.stackexchange.com. And usually, an algorithm worth
| asking about isn 't just "do X, then do Y, then do Z".)
|
| Stack Overflow is full of highly competent people who are
| yearning for questions that demand their specific expertise
| - recently, not just in the 2010s.
|
| Most questions I've asked since 2020 were deliberate hooks
| to deal with common beginner-level issues or close FAQs
| that didn't already have a clear duplicate target. (I've
| stopped contributing new Q&A, but still occasionally help
| out with curation tasks like editing.) But I asked
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 because I
| actually wanted an answer, and it's an instructive example
| here.
|
| Answering it required detailed expert-level knowledge of
| modern CPU architectures and reverse engineering of the
| Python implementation. Asking it required noticing a
| performance issue, then putting extensive effort into
| simplifying the examples as much as possible and diagnosing
| the exact qualities of the input that degrade performance -
| as well as ruling out other simple explanations and citing
| the existing Q&A about those.
|
| But _demonstrating_ it requires nothing more than a few
| invocations of the `timeit` standard library module.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I could see it being useful to others. If there is an
| internal bug that causes the issue or even a code pitfall
| that causes this issue.
| balls187 wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong with your SO question (I am a long
| time contributor), and don't see why it would have been closed.
|
| I will say, this is a level of question that is too
| sophisticated for SO, and likely will only have an answer once
| you figure it out and go back and answer your question.
|
| Are you confident the code is the issue--have you repro'd it
| consistently with different versions of .NET? What about
| reproing on different machines? Locally?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Please feel free to point out more ways in which I screwed up
| asking my SO question.
|
| With pleasure! SO is definitely more of a distinct Q&A site and
| not a discursive, open-ended collaborate and problem-solve
| site.
| zahlman wrote:
| I fully expect nobody in this comment section to care about the
| CoreWCF content. (I don't even know offhand what that is.) In
| my experience, people _love_ talking about Stack Overflow in
| places that are about programming but aren 't Stack Overflow,
| so.
|
| (Edit: it seems people _do_ care about CoreWCF ITT. That 's
| nice to see.)
|
| > Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for
| getting my SO question closed.
|
| That's fine. _Almost everyone_ who comes to SO, in my
| experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site
| is intended to work. That includes people who don 't have a
| question and only want to post answers. Unfortunately, it's
| difficult to explain because people find the model unintuitive
| - the UI affords using the place just like many others, even
| though the site was created exactly to get away from
| frustrations caused by older models
| (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107). And the real
| objective is a synthesis of many not-always-compatible ideas
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). My personal
| sense is that the community didn't really get a handle on "what
| SO is" until around the time that new question volume peaked
| (way back in 2014).
|
| Even then, people can hang around for years and not really get
| it (e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224) - in
| large part because the policies have been inconsistently
| applied on a volunteer basis, and the people who are _allowed
| to_ e.g. cast close votes are vastly outnumbered.
|
| We generally don't care about people not liking the Stack
| Overflow model while discussing it off-site. There's far too
| much of that to worry about. But that doesn't mean we'll change
| to accommodate everyone else. The entire point is to provide
| something that _isn 't_ available everywhere you look: a
| polished artifact, an organized repository of commonly-needed,
| high-quality answers to clear, focused, practical questions.
|
| Do we _accomplish_ that goal? Hell no, not by a long shot. But
| there _are_ some real gems in there - and a few of them have
| millions of views. And as the rate of new questions slows,
| users who put on the "curator" hat become able to keep on top
| of the incoming queue, filter through for what's of value (and
| not a duplicate), and even turn attention towards the _old_ Q
| &A to improve it (incidentally, a _lot_ of that work is
| rounding up old duplicates that went unnoticed).
|
| > I had forgotten that any external links are a big no-no in SO
| land, so my question immediately attracted 2 close votes.
|
| The problem isn't simply including an external link (we'll
| happily just edit those out if they aren't necessary). The
| problem occurs when a question _appears to depend upon_ the
| externally linked content. We can 't accept that
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254428) because of
| link rot and licensing issues (someone who wants to answer you
| often needs to be able to cite the code; posting on-site
| automatically licenses the content appropriately, per the terms
| of service) but mainly because of _scope_ - a question that 's
| suitable for the Stack Exchange format would fit neatly within
| the actual question text.
|
| We don't want to do detailed analysis of the problem you
| encountered, even if we're capable of it, because _questions
| are for everyone_. They need to be able to reflect a problem
| that other people could a) have; b) plausibly search for; and
| c) recognize if they found it. Answers to a question need to
| make sense in general to people who would ask - not just in the
| specific context of one person 's original problem. In short,
| we _want a question, not a problem_ - and extracting a proper
| question _starts with_
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) your own
| analysis.
|
| "How do I do X?" questions are usually much easier to ask in
| the format, and are very valuable and can end up very well
| regarded, even when they're on very basic topics. But "what
| went wrong with Y code?" is not fully refined. What we're
| really looking for is more like "why does Y' code construct do
| Z?" - where the _specific, exact cause_ of failure
| (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example)
| is extracted from your own debugging session (along with
| reproducing input and actual vs expected output).
|
| > Two days later my question got it's third vote for closure,
| and remains unanswered and now closed forever.
|
| This is literally not how Stack Overflow works. The OP has at
| least (https://stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions) 9
| days to fix the question and nominate it for reopening until it
| gets "deleted"; but even then it's a soft deletion (delisting)
| which is still reversible - you can find the question from your
| personal listing (https://stackoverflow.com/users/deleted-
| questions/current while logged in; or replace 'current' with
| your user ID), edit and nominate for undeletion.
|
| The established policy is that we intentionally close questions
| that don't meet standards
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) _as quickly
| as possible_ (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263).
| The main point of this is to prevent the sort of people (notice
| that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271684 is over 10
| years old; and the original complaint
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731 is from _before
| the official launch_ , during the private beta) who would
| otherwise hang out on a traditional discussion forum 12 hours a
| day from trying to read the OP's mind, repost the same basic
| explanation of the same basic idea dozens of times, etc.
|
| (Unfortunately, the incentive system is completely broken -
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 - and the
| company's interests are not aligned with the community, so this
| is a losing battle.)
|
| And, in fact, your question _has been reopened_ , as of about
| 3/4 of an hour after your comment that I'm replying to. Stack
| Overflow is not at all immune to external pressure - after all,
| many regulars there are also _on_ HN and other usual-suspect
| sites.
|
| It also looks like your edits have actually improved the
| question. In particular, adding in a definite conclusion from
| your profiling attempt.
|
| (We understand that a lot of people in a situation like yours
| wouldn't necessarily know how to use a profiler and wouldn't
| necessarily be able to come up with a theory about what's
| wrong. That isn't our problem. We aren't offering tech support.
| It's a bitter pill for almost everyone, but Stack Overflow _by
| design is not there to make your code work_. It 's there to
| _answer questions that arise_ during your attempt. And a
| question like yours, properly refined, can help those other
| people.)
| npodbielski wrote:
| Hey mate is it your post? I did glanced at it and it does not
| stop because server is not notified that client is not there.
|
| Or at least that is my guess, since I stopped working with WCF
| about 2016 probably.
|
| Anyway in newer version of .net you CancellationToken
| everywhere what would do exactly that: tell your server that
| client disconnected. That would be my first try on fixing it.
|
| Use token that is sent via HTTP implementation to the endpoint,
| pass it to your stream and when it is cancelled, end the
| stream. Stream ends, endpoint finishes, not CPU load.
| the_clarence wrote:
| The same has happened on reddit a long time ago. Most users
| give up early because they get their forst posts (on any
| community) removed many times before they can manage (if they
| do manage) to post it. If the feedback loop was faster (you
| instantly get feedback on why the post doesn't go through) it
| would be better although you would already lose some users. The
| situation is so bad that I predict reddit is slowly dying
| already
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a general rule, I'm not going to take the time to donate
| free content to a site where moderators just delete it. This
| goes for S.O., Wikipedia, Reddit, Social Media, OSM, even HN.
| If my posts ever start getting flag-killed here, I'm not
| going to complain--I'm just going to leave, assuming the
| feelings are mutual. I used to habitually post to Fark.com,
| and when their moderators started going out of control and
| deleting my (and others') posts, I just canceled my
| subscription and went away. Who needs that grief?
|
| If S.O. believes that deleting everything users post there is
| somehow improving their site and going to make it relevant
| again, more power to them. It's their site. Let's see how
| that goes for them.
| palata wrote:
| I used to be very active on StackOverflow, it was a great
| platform.
|
| After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common
| frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of
| because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.
|
| What was becoming more common was that I would have a question
| similar to an existing unanswered one. Or that my question would
| never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were
| becoming more tricky/niche). So what I started doing was
| answering my own question (or answering those existing unanswered
| ones) after solving it on my own. Still, it was fine and I was
| contributing.
|
| And for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being
| closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it
| have no clue and think that it is invalid". Many times they
| closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer
| at the same time (as a way to help others)! The first few times,
| I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got
| a few tens of votes in the following year. Not so useless, eh?
|
| Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has
| gotten worse. So I stopped contributing to StackOverflow
| entirely. If I find information there, that's great, if not, I
| won't go and add it once I find a solution for myself. I am
| usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with
| the upstream project, bypassing StackOverflow's moderation.
|
| I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow
| badly. I'm here to say that what pushed me away was the toxic
| moderation, not LLMs.
| esafak wrote:
| The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have
| done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make
| moderation more democratic?
| agos wrote:
| maybe set different guidelines for moderation? have some form
| of meta moderation?
| hobs wrote:
| The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made
| it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask
| whatever questions I want."
|
| The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository,
| and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to
| make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much
| failed until recently, until its probably far too late) -
| this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously,
| and people using the site as questioners (not searchers)
| absolutely hate.
|
| You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too
| late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly,
| etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals
| of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be
| always in tension.
| gilleain wrote:
| Agreed. Some other points of tension in Stack Exchanges:
|
| 1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology,
| Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but
| that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an
| answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this
| niche.
|
| 2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion'
| questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer,
| which may be on the edge of known research.
|
| While I do understand why people get frustrated about these
| things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs)
| are 'for'.
| esafak wrote:
| This is an important problem. But most people are readers;
| that moderation is what made the site a valuable resource.
| Without it, they would have had to build a powerful search
| engine. Instead, they did it the old fashioned way, without
| ML.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I don't think this is charitable enough to the user's
| complaints, or even the person you are responding to.
|
| If the moderation was effective and limited, people would
| ultimately be fine with it.
|
| What people don't like is having a question closed as
| "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is
| very different, or any of the other myriad complaints.
|
| The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an
| agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively
| hostile to criticism.
| hobs wrote:
| I don't even consider what the user asks - simply that it
| was rejected and it was a question they wanted to ask -
| hence "whatever they wanted", and while I agree SO's
| moderation is overly burdensome (and was a mod myself
| once more than a decade ago) I don't agree that
| moderation that's effective and limited having users
| being "ultimately fine with it" - it totally depends on
| which users you ask.
| barrkel wrote:
| > _The original idea of SO was building a knowledge
| repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it
| endlessly_
|
| This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast,
| Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants
| of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was
| that if people didn't find the golden original question,
| there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real
| duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the
| problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed
| duplicate would mean that other people who search for it -
| and would similarly fail to find the golden original -
| would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win.
|
| But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was
| structured as a points economy, but in any case anything
| with points rewards motivates some people to play the game
| of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to
| ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or
| participate in an implicit network of people asking and
| answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have
| canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect
| people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
| shagie wrote:
| That tension existed.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-
| com/
|
| > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange
| (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search
| engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit.
| It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate
| intent of collectively increasing the sum total of _good_
| programming knowledge in the world. No matter what
| programming language you use, or what operating system
| you call home. Better programming is our goal.
|
| The emphasis on "good" is in the original.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-
| lau...
|
| > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to
| the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As
| long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it's
| okay to be off topic as long as what you're asking about
| is of interest to people who make software. But it does
| have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn't a good place
| for imponderables, or public service announcements, or
| vague complaints, or storytelling.
|
| ---
|
| And then, go to
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-
| move-th...
|
| I would draw your attention to its history and the
| original version:
| https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1
|
| and the action taken on September 17th, 2011.
| https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
| avereveard wrote:
| With standard fraud detection systems especially since
| you need to accumulate karma before interacting so by the
| time a user can do damage you have plenty information
| about its network that you can comb for anomalies and
| patterns
| palata wrote:
| > in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I
| want."
|
| As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my
| questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time
| their reason was "duplication", it was not _AT ALL_ a
| duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously
| very different) with two different answers. Hell, they
| closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both
| the question and the answer, and the answer was completely
| different from the one they were pointing to.
|
| This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's
| bad moderation.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Every single time their reason was "duplication", it
| was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions
| (sometimes obviously very different) with two different
| answers.
|
| Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be
| happy to try to explain the reasoning.
| fiskfiskfisk wrote:
| In my own experience it's not often the elected moderators
| that are the problem, but those with a golden tag in a
| specific tag. They're far too eager to close questions
| because they're the ones culling through a tag often - and
| then close the question as they quickly think "oh, it's that
| again".
|
| But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see
| nuance.
|
| And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that
| the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the
| asker can understand what the similarity is from their
| knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question
| is the same question).
| esafak wrote:
| How do you think they should have handled closing
| questions, if at all?
| bombcar wrote:
| Why close questions? Is there a limit on storage space?
|
| dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed
| submissions to HN, after all.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Why close questions?
|
| Because we're trying to build a _searchable reference_ ,
| such that if you try to look for an existing question,
| you a) find it; b) find the _right_ question; c) find the
| _best possible_ version of that question; d) can _readily
| tell_ that you found what you want.
|
| And because we are _explicitly not_ trying to build a
| discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for
| programming questions", or anything else like that.
|
| You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on
| Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?
| shagie wrote:
| Should all 10,000 questions (
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 )
| that are duplicates of
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/218384/what-is-a-
| nullpoi... be open and still allow people to try to
| answer each instance of the person's question?
| zahlman wrote:
| Heh, I hadn't realized the infamous null
| pointer/reference question was _that_ well cited. The
| most egregious cases in the Python tag only have about
| 3500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20109391) and
| 1500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1373164/) links
| respectively.
|
| ... Okay, I want to walk back something I said in some
| other comments here. There is definitely a class of SO
| questions that get closed as duplicates inappropriately.
| I tend to forget about the first of the questions because
| it 's not generally a suitable dupe target when it's
| used: it's a meta question, explaining how to fix your
| question, rather than actually answering it. But, as you
| might infer, that means _your question should still be
| closed_ - it lacks debugging details.
|
| I fought against this trend on meta:
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 .
| Unfortunately, there's another incentive misalignment
| here: dupe-hammering the question allows users with a
| gold badge to act more quickly on questions that don't
| meet site standards but are likely to attract a quick
| answer that interferes with keeping the site clean.
|
| The second one... honestly probably isn't the best
| version of the question, but it's attracted good answers
| and become "canonical". The problem is that thinking in
| terms of "variable variables" isn't necessarily the right
| way to think about the problem (dynamically modifying
| namespaces; or rather, the fact that Python's namespaces
| are reflected as objects that can in most cases be
| modified meaningfully) - but it does map pretty well to
| how a beginner would typically think about the problem.
| It just tends to overlap with other reasonable questions
| in a messy way.
|
| On Codidact, I've attempted to address the problem space
| more proactively, but I think I didn't complete the
| project I had in mind.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Perhaps duplicates could be classified as useful
| (therefore SEO indexed and pointing to original) or noise
| (not indexable)
| zahlman wrote:
| > In my own experience it's not often the elected
| moderators that are the problem, but those with a golden
| tag in a specific tag. They're far too eager to close
| questions because they're the ones culling through a tag
| often - and then close the question as they quickly think
| "oh, it's that again".
|
| > But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to
| see nuance.
|
| As a gold badge holder (for Python and a few other things),
| I see this complaint constantly. It is without merit ~90%
| of the time. The simple fact is that the "nuance" seen by
| the person asking the question is just not _relevant_ to
| us, because the point of the site is _not_ to give you a
| personalized answer, but to build a reference where the
| questions are useful to _everyone_. This entails collecting
| useful answers together so that people with fundamentally
| the same question can all find them, instead of it
| depending on how lucky their search engine of choice is
| feeling today.
|
| The meta site has historically been flooded with people
| trying to reopen blatant duplicates based on trivial
| distinctions, at the level of "no, I want to get the Nth
| item of a _list_ , not a _tuple_ ". That isn't a direct
| quote, but it's not an exaggeration either. I wish it were.
|
| We _do_ make mistakes, in part because there 's pressure to
| act quickly. It's much harder to keep the site clean when
| answers get posted where they shouldn't be. Closing
| questions prevents answers from coming in.
|
| > there is no way the asker can understand what the
| similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why
| the linked duplicate question is the same question).
|
| I try to leave a comment to explain the connection when it
| isn't obvious. (Another common thing that happens is that
| the problem someone wants to solve involves an obvious two-
| or three-step procedure, and each step is a matter of
| fundamental technique that's already been explained
| countless times.) But overall, it isn't our goal to teach.
| We answer very simple questions, and very difficult
| questions; but we aren't designed to teach. Sometimes it's
| hard to ask a simple question, because you have to _figure
| out what the question is_ first. It 's unfortunate that
| people who need the question answered often don't have that
| skill. But if we have a high quality version of that
| question already, we can direct people there.
|
| Sometimes the linked duplicate isn't the best choice. You
| can help by finding and promoting a better choice - on the
| meta site and in the chat rooms. You can also help by
| _editing_ common duplicate targets - both questions and
| answers - so that it _becomes_ more clear to people who
| would actually have the question, that they 're in the
| right place (and so that the information in answers is more
| readily applicable to them).
| moring wrote:
| > because the point of the site is not to give you a
| personalized answer, but to build a reference where the
| questions are useful to everyone
|
| This is a strawman. Marking two different questions as
| duplicates of each other has nothing to do with a
| personalized answer, and answering both would absolutely
| be useful to everyone because a subset of visitors will
| look for answers to one question, and another subset will
| be looking for answers to the other question.
|
| To emphasize the difference: Personalized answers would
| be about having a single question and giving different
| answers to different audiences. This is not at all the
| same as having two different _questions_.
| zahlman wrote:
| >This is a strawman. Marking two different questions as
| duplicates of each other has nothing to do with a
| personalized answer, and answering both would absolutely
| be useful to everyone because a subset of visitors will
| look for answers to one question, and another subset will
| be looking for answers to the other question.
|
| What you're missing: when a question is closed as a
| duplicate, the link to the duplicate target is
| automatically put at the top; furthermore, if there are
| no answers to the current question, logged-out users are
| automatically redirected to the target.
|
| The goal of closing duplicates promptly is to prevent
| them from being answered and enable that redirect. As a
| result, people who _search for_ the question and find a
| duplicate, actually find the target instead.
|
| It's important here to keep in mind that the site's own
| search doesn't work very well, and external search _doesn
| 't understand the site's voting system_. It happens all
| the time that poorly asked, hard-to-understand versions
| of a question nevertheless accidentally have better SEO.
| I know this because of years of experience trying to use
| external search to _find a duplicate target_ for the
| N+1th iteration of the same basic question.
|
| It _is_ , in the common case, about personalized answers
| when people reject duplicates - because _objectively the
| answers on the target answer their question_ and the OP
| is generally either refusing to accept this fact,
| refusing to accept that closing duplicates is part of our
| policy, or else is struggling to connect the answer to
| the question _because of a failure to do the expected
| investigative work first_
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| There should always be some sort of human to appeal to. Even
| Wikipedia has it this way at least formally [1], although
| "office actions" overruling community moderation decisions
| are extremely rare.
|
| [1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Fo
| und...
| zahlman wrote:
| There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and
| most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement
| between community members in the first place.
|
| If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed,
| you are generally expected to _edit it to fix the
| identified problem_ and submit it for re-evaluation. It
| gets put in a queue that other users can review; and
| everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote
| privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the
| question anew.
|
| If you believe the community has misunderstood something
| about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask
| about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when
| you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to
| have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what
| our goals are (hint: _not_ helping you, personally, make
| your code work), and to accept that you may have
| misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the
| fact that voting works differently on meta
| (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta).
|
| People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are
| explicitly not required to explain this (again for well
| considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment
| or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436).
| But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be
| obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the
| question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why
| they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll
| highlight the separate problems you're asking about or
| explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging
| details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls
| short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-
| reproducible-example standard.
|
| If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again
| ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and
| understanding (i.e. _don 't_ come in with the mindset that
| we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by
| having a site that works differently from other sites),
| we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best
| we can.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yes, they WERE elected, by the community (i.e. those asking
| and answering questions) and did a good job. Then those
| elected were dumped by the new owners and replaced by a bunch
| of yes-men. The people voting on closing submissions were not
| mods (in general) but ordinary users with sufficient rep.
| lolinder wrote:
| Look, I'm all for democracy in the real world, but this is a
| very bad use of democratic processes for a number of reasons:
|
| 1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout
| is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which
| would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either
| too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote
| mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the
| options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing
| attention if a democracy is to be called that.
|
| 2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a
| truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way
| to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently
| than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an
| option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.
|
| I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is
| really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature
| the only people who are likely to vote in this type of
| election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number
| of users that the site actually serves. A small core of
| contributors to a community resource invariably seems to
| develop a sense of "us against the world"--the thin blue line
| of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens
| when people view themselves as lone defenders of something
| they care about. And just like with police, that can result
| in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the
| plebian outgroup that they started out serving.
|
| I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy
| is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that
| Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout,
| and the problems caused by bad turnout have become
| catastrophic.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Then the answer is clear; copy paste a lot of dang to
| moderate. So this is clearly a management faulted no
| properly choosing a moderator.
| eru wrote:
| That's part of the reason that as an employer I don't like
| worker democracy anywhere I work.
|
| With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with
| management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make
| a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises).
|
| With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with
| that can tell me anything definitive.
| palata wrote:
| > as an employer I don't like worker democracy
|
| Well... obviously :-)
| esafak wrote:
| In real world terms, it is not that big a democracy, but
| the founders may have judged against mandatory voting.
| First, it would have added friction that could have impeded
| growth. Second, the voters may not have been qualified;
| they did not use the site enough to be able to or care to
| select one moderator over another.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not proposing mandatory voting, but you have to fix
| turnout somehow or just openly acknowledge that you're
| running on a non-democratic system.
|
| > Second, the voters may not have been qualified; they
| did not use the site enough to be able to or care to
| select one moderator over another.
|
| This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. I think
| the dedicated core actually does believe this: that
| nothing is broken, it's okay that the outgroup doesn't
| vote because they'd just ruin things if they did.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be
| a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a
| way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves
| differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote
| would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold
| a position.
|
| Notwithstanding everything else I said above about how
| "moderation" is actually almost completely irrelevant here,
| and the overwhelming majority of what people call
| "moderation" is in fact _curation_ done by community
| members in more or less a _direct_ democracy:
|
| We have elections annually
| (https://stackoverflow.com/election), and so does each
| Stack Exchange site generally. Moderators generally must
| voluntarily step down barring a major problem; but this was
| carefully considered at the start
| (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984).
| lolinder wrote:
| With all due respect, your (2 whole pages of) comments
| here are showing exactly the kind of in-group out-group
| aggression and defensiveness that I described, and it's
| that attitude that people are consistently complaining
| about. It's what started killing Stack Overflow long
| before LLMs.
| zahlman wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about.
| Should I not correct people when they say factually
| inaccurate things about a service I care about? Should I
| not point out that their use of a service is not aligned
| with the intended use of that service, or that a
| community already exists with differently aligned goals?
| Should I not point out that they are not in a position to
| override that community's purpose and vision?
|
| Because I absolutely will not agree that other people
| should get to change what Stack Overflow is, simply
| because they think it should work like the other sites it
| was explicitly intended to provide an alternative to.
|
| I'm trying my hardest here to be courteous and to
| consider all sides: the fact that the software doesn't
| work optimally for our goals; the fact that the site
| owners have unaligned interests (corporate ones around ad
| revenue and site traffic); the fact that key parts of the
| site software were poorly designed at the start and not
| properly re-evaluated and fixed (in particular, the
| reputation system, which saw only a passing attempt to
| invite meta-discussion and then no corresponding change);
| the fact that the site's UI affords misuse by _looking
| too much like_ a discussion forum (compare and contrast
| Wikipedia: there 's no sense that anyone is _replying to_
| anyone else except on the Talk and other meta pages, and
| the edit form is hidden behind a link).
|
| For what it's worth, alternatives exist, and I prefer
| them. In particular, I use Codidact
| (https://www.codidact.com) and I consider that its design
| has fixed many problems with the Stack Exchange network.
| But _fundamentally_ , these kinds of Q&A sites are meant
| to work a certain way in the main Q&A space (although
| Codidact opens up the possibility of parallel related
| spaces, not just meta). They are _fundamentally and
| crucially not_ a place to just ask something because it
| 's on your mind (or with the specific intent of getting
| out of a bind), without heed to existing questions, and
| hope that someone addresses you personally. That's how
| traditional forums work, and ultimately the cause of all
| the things that made experts fed up with them and
| motivated to try something new in 2008.
|
| I've written a lot ITT because there are a lot of
| misconceptions about Stack Overflow out there, and many
| of them are quite popular; and because the site itself is
| not very good at presenting the needed correct
| information.
| lolinder wrote:
| This. This is what I'm talking about. If you can't see
| it, nothing I will say can change it, but suffice it to
| say that I'm more convinced than ever that SO is
| culturally very sick.
|
| I'll just refer back to the key relevant part of my
| initial post:
|
| > A small core of contributors to a community resource
| invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the
| world"--the thin blue line of police lore isn't an
| isolated thing, it's what happens when people view
| themselves as lone defenders of something they care
| about. And just like with police, that can result in a
| toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian
| outgroup that they started out serving.
| zahlman wrote:
| I don't necessarily think you've misidentified the
| culture. I _disagree_ that it 's sick. I think it's not
| only exactly what we want to have, but a _huge
| improvement_ over what we started with in 2013-2014, when
| new question volume was peaking, curators and experts
| were getting increasingly frustrated, and the volume of
| discussion on meta exploded. (I 've noticed that whenever
| I need to refer people to Q&A on meta that's our highest-
| quality _meta_ content, to explain what Stack Overflow
| _is_ , a large fraction of it is from 2014.)
|
| In particular: we have always had what could broadly be
| called a code of conduct; it's become more refined and
| more like official codes of conduct over the years, for
| better or worse. But overall, over time, we've become
| much better at removing actually abusive, profane etc.
| comments, and editing off-handed details in questions to
| avoid giving needless offense. (By the way: a quite large
| fraction of curse words and insults come from new users
| who are upset at the realization that questions are
| subject to quality standards, or who take downvotes
| personally when we intend it purely as content rating.)
|
| When I say that I don't understand, it's because you
| describe "in-group out-group aggression and
| defensiveness" and I _don 't see it that way_. I'm not
| trying to protect other meta regulars. I'm _trying to
| help people integrate_ by explaining to them how we want
| them to approach the site instead.
|
| But it's impossible to do that without first informing
| people that their current approach is wrong, and trying
| to explain patiently why it's wrong.
|
| > it's what happens when people view themselves as lone
| defenders of something they care about.
|
| Because we _actually, objectively are_.
|
| And what's wrong with that?
|
| Why shouldn't we be able to have this thing?
|
| And why should it be considered an invalid thing when
| e.g. Wikipedia is not?
|
| If 29 million people want to use the "anyone can edit"
| property of Wikipedia to edit
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog and ask whether Rover's
| condition is serious enough to require veterinary
| attention, does that invalidate Wikipedia's model?
|
| > that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup
| that they started out serving.
|
| Stack Overflow started in a closed beta and was marketed
| from the start as being for people with a certain level
| of cluefulness. We had to argue among ourselves to get
| everyone to accept that a) easy questions are not only
| fine, but often the most valuable and b) the thing that
| experts tend to hate about beginner questions is _not_
| the fact that they 're beginner-level; it's _literally
| every other_ consequence of a beginner asking them.
|
| And acceptance of that is still not complete; sometimes
| long-standing members get yelled at on meta for trying to
| close good, easy questions because they're easy. And
| _they, too, are acting against consensus_ , and against
| Stack Overflow's vision. (They're just, you know, nowhere
| near as troublesome overall as the long-standing members
| who don't care about policy and just try to answer as
| many questions as they can figure out an answer to.)
|
| Stack Overflow was never intended to provide the kind of
| "service" that most newcomers ( _including newly arrived
| experts_ hoping to answer questions) expect. It was
| instead intended to show people that there 's another
| way, that's fundamentally different from the traditional
| forum experience.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| How about making it a site where only people who answer
| questions can even be eligible to be moderators?
|
| What if moderators had to actually have karma _from recently
| answering questions_ or they _lose mod privileges_?
|
| Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work
| to be a mod.
|
| ...
|
| It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make
| visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :(
|
| That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.
| bombcar wrote:
| Slashdot of all places basically solved the moderation
| problem, with random moderators selected from the pool of
| "know users" and then others selected to meta moderate.
| malfist wrote:
| I don't remember slashdot moderation being particularly
| good. Innovative yes, but not good. I got to be a moderator
| multiple times while I was a teen. I'm sure I didn't make
| good decisions.
| bombcar wrote:
| It worked surprisingly well long into "popularity" - at
| least for the purposes of getting spam removed and
| corralling flame bait away.
|
| For a "user-run" site it was pretty advanced at the time
| - you could choose your level to view at (5 was quick
| summary of the highlights, -1 if you wanted flamewars
| about NetBSD), stories were curated enough to prevent
| slop (at least at the beginning), and metamoderating
| removed the biggest abuses.
| malfist wrote:
| I think you misunderstand how stackoverflow works.
|
| Super moderators are elected, but not your regular
| "moderators". In stack overflow, regular folks you have
| enough karma are moderators and can cast votes, or initiate
| voting on moderation action. Enough votes and the action
| happens.
|
| The elected moderators aren't the problem, generally, it's
| that anyone with a bit of karma can go power tripping and if
| you get enough of those people on an ever growing platform,
| they reach a critical mass to stifle anything.
|
| So yes, some moderators are elected, and yes moderation is
| very democratic.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The moderators were elected.
|
| The _overwhelming majority_ of the actions people complain
| about in this context (never mind that they don 't understand
| the purpose of those actions or the underlying objectives)
| are _not performed by moderators_. They are _curation_
| actions taken by members of the community.
|
| The rights to do so are awarded based on reputation, in a
| very poorly thought out and fundamentally broken incentive
| system; but there are far more people involved than the
| moderators. You can query by reputation at https://data.stack
| exchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/c... : there are
| about 29 million total user accounts, 3.3 million which may
| upvote, 1.1 million which may downvote, 150 thousand which
| may unilaterally edit posts, 100 thousand which may vote to
| close questions, 28 thousand which may vote to soft-delete
| posts (and view soft-deleted posts), 9300 with access to
| internal site analytics...
|
| and _twenty-four_ moderators
| (https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators). Who are
| _not_ the highest-reputation users. (I have more reputation
| than over half of them, and I frequently complain about users
| with over ten times my reputation.)
| agos wrote:
| just a few months ago they closed a question of mine that I
| posted in 2010 (!), which in the meanwhile had gathered more
| than 1000 votes, nearly one million views, and 20 or so
| answers. I get it that it does not meet their most recent
| criteria, but closing a question after 15 years telling me to
| edit my question and read the comments on how it could be
| improved (there were none) sounds tone deaf and unnecessarily
| bureaucratic
| Larrikin wrote:
| What was the question?
|
| If it is from 2010 and was a relevant question or answer then
| but has since become irrelevant or even wrong because the
| framework or language has moved on I actually support this
| kind of clean up.
|
| There are a lot of best practices that just don't apply
| anymore that far down the line. Even simple things like whats
| the best way to use a variable inside of a string in Python
| would have an outdated (and to most users, wrong) answer if
| it was from 2010.
| palata wrote:
| > I actually support this kind of clean up.
|
| I don't understand the idea. Are you also in favour of
| deleting blog posts that are older than a couple years?
| There is a date next to the question...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Why would I want to go to a blog post that also describes
| the wrong way to do something?
|
| I never said delete anything, but deprecation warnings,
| closure, and subsequent SEO down ranking of formerly
| correct but now incorrect/irrelevant answers would be a
| huge improvement to StackOverflow. Somebody may need to
| to know the best way to handle permissions in Java on
| Android 6.0, but it absolutely should not be a top
| question or answer in 2025 unless somebody is
| specifically looking for it.
| zahlman wrote:
| Closing a question on Stack Overflow doesn't delete it or
| hide it from public view, so the comparison doesn't make
| sense. Closing an old, popular question _only_ prevents
| it from receiving new answers and puts a banner at the
| top. The point is to avoid setting bad examples for _new_
| questions. The fact that a question was well received
| many years ago does _not_ guarantee that it 's in
| agreement with current policy.
|
| Additionally, we generally do _not_ close old questions
| simply because they 're "outdated", e.g. refer to
| deprecated libraries etc. We recognize that people are
| often stuck maintaining unsupported legacy systems,
| effectively indefinitely. We sometimes close questions
| because they refer to services (especially web APIs) that
| are _no longer available_. But overwhelmingly, when old
| popular questions get closed, it 's because they're
| deemed to be _no longer on topic_ for the site. Since a
| lot of people will see the question, we don 't want them
| to get the wrong idea about what's topical.
|
| And, of course, it makes perfect sense to _downvote_
| things that used to be correct but are now incorrect.
| Practically speaking, _this doesn 't happen nearly
| enough_; upvotes have a kind of inertia, and wrong
| answers are often evaluated by people who don't know
| they're wrong.
|
| By the way: _about 89% of up /downvotes ever cast on
| Stack Overflow are up_ (https://data.stackexchange.com/st
| ackoverflow/query/492368/to...).
| trollbridge wrote:
| And the irony here is that much of what LLMs know is from
| training on StackOverflow.
| eru wrote:
| StackOverflow's content is contributed by regular folks under
| an open source license.
| trollbridge wrote:
| It is; however, I doubt most contributors would put in
| effort if they knew the main purpose of what they were
| typing out and researching would be grist for a for-profit
| (let's not kid ourselves) AI business.
| zahlman wrote:
| That's indeed a large part of why I stopped writing new
| questions and answers. But I do still edit, and redirect
| old duplicates to a better version of the question, etc.
| - because high quality information deserves to be
| highlighted, even if it may "fall into the wrong hands".
| shagie wrote:
| It's _always_ been typed out to further a for profit
| business. The AI part is new. Stack Overflow has never
| been shy about the fact that they 're trying to make
| money.
|
| If the AI changes things, then one should ask why the
| individual was contributing when Stack Overflow Inc was
| the business reaping the financial rewards of community
| contributions.
| devrandoom wrote:
| I stopped flagging things on SO when some of my flags were
| deemed unhelpful. They clearly weren't.
| zahlman wrote:
| The underlying system has some weird behaviours and
| moderators are sometimes compelled to mark flags they find
| helpful as unhelpful. This might happen, for example, if you
| report something as "rude or abusive" where they agree that
| the content should be removed, but disagree that the user
| should be penalized. But also, a lot of problems are better
| handled by just editing out objectionable content. When you
| flag a question as a duplicate or as "needs improvement",
| that goes to the community; but everything else is sent to a
| team of 24 volunteers overlooking a site that still receives
| thousands of questions a week and is still full of years-old
| comments that should be cleaned up but which nobody has
| gotten around to yet.
| handsclean wrote:
| I'd appreciate if somebody more familiar with SO would verify
| this, but I believe there's some low constant number of close
| votes required to close something, and this doesn't adapt to
| how many people are voting or to positive signals. Because
| there's an error rate in all things, this naturally means that
| things are wrongly closed all the time, especially content
| that's viewed a lot and not fought for.
| avereveard wrote:
| There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the
| system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.
|
| And because recourse is so hard and goes trough the same
| gatekeepers anyway, they don't get any signal about the
| accuracy of the maintenance.
|
| One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats wrecking
| havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these
| points.
|
| Peak of the fenomenon was 2014 when people started publishing
| their so scores on their resumes, but the platform never
| really recovered.
| palata wrote:
| > One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats
| wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to
| rack up these points.
|
| This. It is exactly the problem with incentives.
|
| At some point I was wondering why Tor was not offering
| incentives, which is something Nym was talking about. And I
| found an explanation on the Tor website that said something
| along those lines: "we thought about incentives, but we
| decided that we wanted contributions from people who cared,
| not from interested people". Makes sense to me.
| shagie wrote:
| > There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the
| system is biased toward the side of closing and
| duplicating.
|
| Could you describe this? A lot of people seem to believe
| that closing or duplicating questions awards reputation. It
| doesn't.
|
| The complete list of reputation gain sources is at
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation
| avereveard wrote:
| The incentive is directing traffic to answers or
| questions of your profile ring. You can find plenty
| examples of question closed duplicate that brings you to
| a question asked later, plenty with an answer lifted from
| the original.
| shagie wrote:
| Hypothetically, if that was the case it _doesn 't_ cover
| the closing of questions that are not duplicates.
|
| I would contend that the "close as something that you
| have an answer on" is less driven by "I want more votes
| on the answer" but rather "I know where to find this
| answer."
|
| Alternatively, if the person _didn 't_ close it as an
| answer you would instead have the person copying and
| pasting the _same answer_ into the new question - which
| would accomplish the same thing (more votes for your
| answers) and further fragment the "one place to look"
| ideal.
|
| From the perspective of the site and curation of
| information, a given answer should appear in one and only
| one question. Closing a question as a duplicate serves to
| further that goal. Copying and pasting answers (
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320351/how-to-
| handl... ) to questions that would be duplicates is
| frowned upon. Diamond mods get such behavior raised to
| them as a system flag (
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317988/ ) - "Duplicate
| answers (auto) - raised on each duplicate answer"
| zahlman wrote:
| For what it's worth, users with a gold badge _are_
| incentivized to close something as a duplicate if
| possible, rather than marking it as unclear, unfocused
| etc. even if those things are also true. This increases
| the chance that the OP gets some useful information
| anyway, _and allows the curator to act unilaterally_ -
| avoiding the risk of someone trying to answer in the mean
| time.
|
| In general, answering a question that you're actively
| curating is looked down upon on meta (it raises suspicion
| of vote fraud; and yes, moderators do care about that
| quite a bit, even if they recognize how broken the
| reputation system is) _unless_ you 've also asked the
| question intentionally as a canonical duplicate target
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) and
| you're writing a new answer from scratch. And proper
| citations are _required_ for anything you get from
| someone else - whether it 's another SO answer or
| something elsewhere on the Internet.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The incentive is directing traffic to answers or
| questions of your profile ring. You can find plenty
| examples of question closed duplicate that brings you to
| a question asked later,
|
| New Q&A of this sort generally gets written because
| people recognize that a question is commonly asked about
| some basic material, but nobody who actually needs the
| question answers (and thus asks it anew) ever manages to
| come up with a high-quality phrasing. For example,
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 was
| intentionally crafted in 2017 to make it easier to direct
| beginners who have trivial issues with Python indentation
| to gain a basic understanding of how it's supposed to
| work. (There are a few key ways to get an
| IndentationError that _aren 't_ caused by general
| cluelessness; generally those are still duplicates, but
| should be directed somewhere else.) In 2023, I did some
| site searches and identified hundreds of old questions
| that are clearly low-quality duplicates - more beginners
| asking basic questions about Python indentation; there
| isn't enough daylight between them to consider them
| different, as the _underlying conceptual difficulty_ is
| the same.
|
| This has nothing to do with ego. I don't know the
| original author, "Chris", and have not otherwise
| knowingly interacted with that person. But I (and others)
| did extensively edit the question - to help make sure
| that other beginners can see their own problem in the
| question, and to help everyone - people with a more
| complex problem, and curators trying to point people in
| the right direction - to find other questions if they're
| more appropriate.
|
| The fact that a duplicate target was asked later is
| generally considered irrelevant. We want people to find
| the _best_ version of the question
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697,
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535). As a
| general principle, Stack Overflow curation doesn't care
| about when something was posted - only about how it holds
| up in the current moment.
|
| > plenty with an answer lifted from the original.
|
| Stack Overflow moderators take plagiarism very seriously.
| If you see a "lifted" answer anywhere on the site, please
| flag it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the
| system is biased toward the side of closing and
| duplicating.
|
| If only. Sorry to say, all of this curation effort happens
| purely by intrinsic motivation - a desire to see a better-
| curated site.
|
| It's objectively a good thing when more questions get
| closed (including marking duplicates) because the
| overwhelming majority of what gets posted is nowhere near
| meeting standards, and because those standards have been
| carefully considered with the site's goals in mind.
|
| Those goals just don't happen to match the goals of the
| overwhelming majority of people who come to ask a new
| question on Stack Overflow. That's because they don't
| understand the site's purpose. There is a tremendous amount
| of misinformation out there (and the site owners are at
| least complicit in this, because it drives traffic).
|
| In point of fact, my reputation increased the most during a
| period when I barely used the site at all, because I
| accumulated votes on answers I'd already written. And I
| didn't care about any of that, because it gets you
| _absolutely nothing_ past IIRC about 35000. (The last
| privilege - https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges - is
| awarded at 25000, but past that you can get an increase in
| the number of flags and votes you can cast daily. It would
| take an unimaginable level of obsession with the site to
| ever run out of validly raised flags, but I have run out of
| closure votes on several occasions.)
|
| When I came back, I started actually paying attention to
| the meta site and understanding how Stack Overflow is
| actually intended to work, instead of just being another
| random person trying to contribute expertise. And _my
| reputation has actually levelled off and declined_ , mainly
| because I award generous bounties for existing exceptional
| answers, or to promote the few high-quality questions I
| find that need a better answer (especially, questions that
| I'd like to use as a duplicate target, but wouldn't provide
| others asking the question with a good enough answer).
|
| > bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable
| answers trying to rack up these points.
|
| It's not bureaucracy and it isn't "trying to rack up
| points". You get _two_ reputation points for an accepted
| answer, _only if_ you don 't already have at least 1000
| points and _only if_ you get two out of three users with
| unilateral edit privileges to agree that it 's a good edit
| (and they, in turn, are incentivized to steal your edit -
| not for reputation, but because they can get it published
| unilaterally instead of waiting for someone else to
| approve). You _can 't even reach unilateral edit
| privileges_ this way, since you need 2000 points for that.
|
| Among people making edits unilaterally - both to questions
| and answers - this is overwhelmingly motivated by good
| faith attempts to improve quality. "Perfectly reasonable"
| is _not_ the standard. The standard is "as good as the
| available attention allows" (ideally, people focus on more
| popular content). When you post on Stack Overflow, _you
| license the content_ to the community (and separately also
| to the site and company) and they are absolutely within
| their rights to make good faith edits. If you want to share
| "your" ideas with the world and not allow others to touch,
| use a blog.
| palata wrote:
| In my case, the questions were closed _very quickly_. I
| opened votes to reopen a few times, one of which eventually
| passed, and then upvotes started to come regularly.
|
| As I said, those were pretty specialised questions, you can't
| expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for those.
| zahlman wrote:
| > In my case, the questions were closed very quickly.
|
| I'm happy to hear it. This is how it's supposed to work. If
| the system were properly designed, questions would start
| out closed - that is to say: the community would have a
| chance to fully refine the question and ensure that it
| meets the site's standards, _before_ people were allowed to
| write answers.
|
| (The new Staging Ground implements a form of this, for a
| small selection of new questions.)
|
| The point is to ensure that _everyone who has the same
| question_ can have an optimal experience by _finding it_ :
| they should see a question that's easy for them to read and
| understand; they should easily be able to verify that it's
| the same question (even though it came up in a radically
| different context for someone else); they should be able to
| come across it with a search engine (so the title should
| make sense, etc.); and it should be properly focused.
| _Then_ they can scroll down - ideally, not very far - and
| see the answers, _already written_ , without themselves
| having to ask again and wait.
|
| > you can't expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for
| those.
|
| Ultimately, the thing that gets a question 10 upvotes in
| the first day is off-site exposure. That's not how it's
| supposed to work, but the Internet is what it is.
| zerkten wrote:
| I had 15k reputation score at one time on SO. It recently
| dropped down to due to people deleting their accounts. There
| are review queues which appear on the top nav incentivizing
| power users with enough rep to go in and take action like
| closing requests.
|
| Having met many SO power users in group settings over the
| years, I feel that there is very little tolerance for
| questions that require effort to understand. If it's a simple
| question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some
| thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were
| introduced later.) The same goes for a deeper technical
| question where the author gets it all out but doesn't take
| the time to structure or format it. The volume of behavior
| like this differs based on the type of question and experts
| prepared to weigh in.
|
| This gets compounded by the up and comers on the reputation
| scale. They get their special powers and see this BOFH close
| behavior and replicate it. Over time it starts to become the
| norm. I had the ability to vote for reopens and these same
| people would argue about why this was a bad idea. They
| weren't prepared to admit they were wrong and felt they were
| doing God's work by ridding the site of poor questions when
| some of us even had the ability to make edits to clarify
| them.
|
| I just opened the site after some time away. At the top,
| pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation,
| Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks. The Interesting
| Posts for You question feed is below that and I have to go
| see how that is constructed. I only ever wanted the firehose
| of new questions with my tags highlighted.
|
| EDIT: The behavior I noted above is yet example of why I
| always want to know how a job candidate deals with ambiguity.
| In my experience, this has a massive impact on the ability to
| work independently, not piss off
| colleagues/clients/customers, and make good decisions.
| zahlman wrote:
| > If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker
| that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's
| why comments were introduced later.)
|
| No, that's not why. If we can understand the English, we
| edit to fix the English.
|
| We constantly get questions by native English speakers that
| are nevertheless barely comprehensible. Even when the
| problem is clearly described, it still needs to meet
| several other standards
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/). This is
| by design.
|
| We aren't closing questions because we want to close
| questions. We're closing questions because _they need to be
| improved by the OP (i.e., fixing the question requires OP
| 's perspective or knowledge) before they are compatible
| with the site's objectives_, which _do not necessarily
| align with yours_ as a person who has a question.
|
| This is _not_ a punishment and is _not_ in general a
| permanent state. Closed questions can be, and are, re-
| opened if the problem with the question is fixed (without
| fundamentally changing it).
|
| > I just opened the site after some time away. At the top,
| pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation,
| Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks.
|
| And the people doing the majority of the curation work _do
| not care in the slightest_ about reputation or badges. I
| certainly don 't.
|
| The users with the _most_ reputation are generally the ones
| who spend hours a day answering easy questions that don 't
| come anywhere close to meeting the site's standards ( _not_
| because they 're easy, but because they're terribly asked
| and probably duplicates) after doing a bit of mind-reading
| to figure out what the terribly-asked question is (or
| scanning through a couple dozen lines of code for trivial
| problems without really reading the question - because they
| usually don't need to) and getting a quick upvote and
| accept from the OP.
|
| _Questions like that have ruined the site and continue to
| make it worse_ - by diluting search results, by making it
| harder for curators to find the "canonical" targets for
| closing duplicates, by click-baiting away from questions
| other people actually want to find (e.g. by describing a
| completely different problem with all the same keywords, or
| by _completely misidentifying_ what 's wrong), and most of
| all by the broken-window effect (bad content examples
| overwhelm good ones).
|
| But the reputation system rewards people who answer those
| questions. (The obsessive answer writers I complain about
| the most in Stack Overflow chat often have 10x or more my
| reputation.)
|
| Curators have had a goal of closing bad new questions
| quickly (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263),
| trying to beat the answer to the punch. But answer-writers
| get a grace period, and can fill in a stub answer and edit
| it later; and they can act unilaterally while curators
| usually have to come to a consensus.
| zahlman wrote:
| Hi, I'm intimately familiar with Stack Overflow
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/523612).
|
| It requires either:
|
| * Three votes (it used to be 5) from community members with
| the close vote privilege (awarded at 3000 reputation)
|
| * Unilateral closure by a moderator (there are currently 24
| of these: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators -
| compare to _29 million_ user accounts: https://data.stackexch
| ange.com/stackoverflow/query/1877958/c... )
|
| * Unilateral closure _as a duplicate_ by a user with the
| close vote privilege who _also_ has a gold badge for one of
| the tags originally used on the question
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589)
|
| The thresholds are deliberately fairly low, mainly because
| closure of new bad questions _must_ happen _promptly_ for the
| site to work as intended
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). This is
| frankly a major fault in the site design; but the new Staging
| Ground feature
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430404) helps a
| lot, on the occasions when the site software actually decides
| to use it.
|
| However, "closing" content "that's viewed a lot" (this
| basically only ever means old questions; new questions rarely
| ever get a lot of views, regardless of quality, unless it's
| from spambots - see
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431084) is
| _emphatically not_ wrong. We close old, popular questions all
| the time, because they don 't currently meet site standards
| (usually, because they are no longer deemed on topic). This
| is at least partly to discourage new questions along the same
| lines; but the primary effect of closing a question is to
| prevent answers from being contributed. These old questions
| generally wouldn't need new answers (although edits to
| existing answers may be helpful - and are not blocked) even
| if they were still considered suitable.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I left SO a long time ago when it was really at its peak. Your
| SO score was starting to be used as a metric to get hired for
| jobs in the valley. At that time moderation was totally out of
| control. One contributor in particular* would find a post he
| didn't like, then go to chat rooms to rally a downvote brigade.
| It was so toxic I called it quits on the spot. I still use SO
| quite a bit, but through DDG. I search for something, it
| displays an answer that it scraped from SO. Some years ago I
| read that they made an effort to soften the atmosphere there
| because they realized it was chasing away female devs and other
| minority groups. I guess they couldn't turn it around.
|
| *Later he took over the Flask project and I was still bitter so
| I stopped using that too.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I have a rep that is based almost entirely on _questions_ , not
| answers. I learned to ask questions fairly well (to the point I
| seldom get answers -there's a price to pay, for questions that
| are very specific).
|
| In some cases, the question is a basic one, and doesn't need a
| code listing and sample project. It's still a perfectly valid,
| pertinent, thoughtful question, but not very verbose.
|
| Those questions almost always get closed.
|
| I have found that asking LLMs doesn't always get me the best
| answer, but I get an answer. In some cases, I can have an
| iterative refinement, where I keep adjusting the question,
| until I get a useful answer.
|
| I've never gotten code from SO, that I can use without
| modification, but I have gotten some great answers, over the
| years, and have expressed gratitude and respect.
|
| I have gotten quite annoyed with the "attitude" that is often
| expressed. There's no doubt that folks who ask questions, are
| considered "lesser beings" on SO. Just look at the question-to-
| answer ratio of the high-score individuals. Weird attitude, for
| a site that is pretty much completely reliant on questions.
|
| Basically, I have just given up on SO, and have found LLMs to
| give me what I used to get from it.
|
| In my opinion, they have killed SO.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The constant closing of questions isn't enough for them, very
| often they'll straight up delete content as well, thereby
| completely wasting any effort that you or others have put in.
| Closed questions with useful answers and comments and links?
| Gone.
|
| Why spend your own time and effort adding content to someone
| else's platform anyway? It's always a much better idea to write
| an article on your own website than a stackoverflow answer.
| Stackoverflow just takes a little less effort but that doesn't
| matter when your effort is likely to be invalidated anyway.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I had stopped interacting with SO as well, though the fact
| didn't really cross my mind. I had a few popular answers that
| got be enough points to be a moderator. The experience there is
| similar--possibly worse because the idiocy is unveiled. In the
| past I've often argued to reopen questions, sometimes even
| making edits to make it more agreeable to other mods.
|
| It's common for those to get shouted down based on some policy
| or other bureaucratic nonsense by those who have no idea what
| the question is actually about. The problem could be that many
| of those who don't do, moderate. It attracts different sorts of
| people than those that are actually working with the things
| being discussed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Somehow I never found the StackOverflow game to be worth
| playing.
|
| In retrospect it is a case study of a particular
| enshittification scenario: "benign neglect" Back when they
| published a data dump I had a project on my speculative list to
| clean up their database, take only the best answers, etc. For
| python, the numerous Python 2 examples print
| "something"
|
| would get rewritten to Python 3
| print("something")
|
| basically do the maintenance work they weren't doing.
| Personally I find their idea of what is a valid question to ask
| offensive. If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example,
| the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are
| probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed
| to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.
| zahlman wrote:
| > If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the
| question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are
| probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed
| to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.
|
| Over time we found that hardly anyone asking questions could
| achieve the kind of "good subjectivity" that we wanted.
| Questions like this attract flame wars (which are especially
| obnoxious in a format with answer posts with non-threaded
| comments) and advertising for alternatives, add-ons etc. that
| result in a completely derailed discussion in a place that
| isn't supposed to have a _discussion_ at all.
|
| If you want to ask "what factors should I take into
| consideration when choosing..." then I would agree that can
| in principle fit on a Q&A site. But open-endedness again
| makes it hard to choose the best answers and ensure they
| float to the top.
|
| The general principles are much the same at Codidact Software
| (https://software.codidact.com), but the scope is
| considerably wider than Stack Overflow's (https://software.co
| didact.com/posts/search?search=category%3...). You might have
| better luck with that kind of question there.
| zahlman wrote:
| > After a while, I stopped having to post questions about
| "common frameworks", either because I could do with the
| official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow
| answer for my question.
|
| _Good_. That 's the site _working as designed and intended_.
|
| > What was becoming more common was that I would have a
| question similar to an existing unanswered one.
|
| Then you should _improve the existing unanswered question_
| instead, and /or draw attention to it
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/265874 ;
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266338). Or, yes,
| answer it if you can. Thank you for doing so.
|
| > Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably
| because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche).
|
| That's a big presumption. I got an answer to
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825/ within hours.
|
| > for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being
| closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it
| have no clue and think that it is invalid"
|
| This is absolutely not what happened. First off, when your
| question is closed, you get a banner at the top of your
| question indicating which of the few standard close reasons was
| chosen. The wording isn't always a great fit (especially in the
| cases where people voted for more than one close reason -
| please keep in mind that _we neither write this explanation nor
| get to choose the text_ ; it's pulled from a database following
| simple mapping rules, and even moderators have only very
| indirect influence over that database) but it does normally
| point you in the right direction.
|
| Second, "I don't know the answer" is not a valid close reason.
| People constantly accuse (on the meta site and elsewhere) that
| someone else's close vote was motivated by this; there's never
| any real way to evidence that, and this kind of accusation is
| in fact what we consider toxic behaviour (an assumption of bad
| faith).
|
| > Many times they closed even though I had posted both the
| question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help
| others)!
|
| The fact that you provide your own answer weighs exactly zero
| in the calculation of closing a question. It must meet the site
| standards. Part of the purpose of a question is to _index_ the
| information in the answer - so no matter how brilliant your
| explanation of the underlying problem might be, your
| _exposition_ of the problem is a limiting factor.
|
| > The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and
| guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following
| year.
|
| The community does make mistakes, in both directions. The meta
| site exists for a reason.
|
| But part of "fighting to get a question reopened" is editing
| it. Changes you might think are trivial might be crucial
| according to our standards. Some questions fundamentally can't
| be fixed; but when they can, closing a question signals that
| _the OP 's perspective is needed_ to fix the problem, no matter
| how minor. If we could fix it (without worrying about trampling
| on your authorial intent), we would.
|
| >Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it
| has gotten worse.
|
| It's not moderation, but curation. It's overwhelmingly done by
| a community of volunteers - not by the two dozen or so
| moderators (also volunteers) looking over an accumulation of
| literally millions of users and questions.
|
| And it isn't "toxic". Overwhelmingly, people aren't doing it
| out of any kind of vendetta or a desire to cause you or anyone
| else a problem. They're doing it to uphold a standard
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/) designed
| (really, developed over many years by community discussion on
| the meta site) to accomplish particular goals
| (https://stackoverflow.com/tour ;
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770).
|
| > I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion
| directly with the upstream project
|
| If it's something that makes sense to handle this way, it
| probably doesn't also make sense in the Q&A format. We can't do
| anything about your bug report.
|
| > I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting
| StackOverflow badly.
|
| A lot of people think so because the volume of questions has
| dropped off dramatically, and there's good evidence that people
| will ask an LLM instead of asking on Stack Overflow.
|
| But this is _not at all_ "hurting Stack Overflow", unless
| you're a staff member at the company and you specifically worry
| about the effect of this decline on ad revenue.
|
| If asking an LLM - trained on millions of existing Stack
| Overflow questions, along with the rest of the Internet - gives
| you an actually working answer (and you're either in a position
| where you can deal with AI hallucinations, or are lucky enough
| not to experience one), then that is, almost certainly, not a
| question that helps improve the existing resource that is Stack
| Overflow. It's most likely a duplicate or near-duplicate.
|
| Duplicate questions on Stack Overflow are not inherently bad;
| sometimes rephrasing a question helps by providing a "signpost"
| so that people who think about a problem in a different way can
| realize that it's still the same problem, and there's still the
| same fundamental question to answer about it. But we want
| everyone who has that question to find the same collection of
| answers; and we want that collection of answers to be high
| quality, not redundant, and categorized under a high quality
| version of the question. That way, when you use a search engine
| and find Stack Overflow Q&A, you get the best possible result,
| as quickly as possible.
|
| Nowadays, there are about _three times_ as many publicly
| available questions on Stack Overflow as there are _articles on
| Wikipedia_. Considering that the scope of Stack Overflow is
| "practical questions about programming", while the scope of
| Wikipedia is "literally any noteworthy real-world object or
| phenomenon", that's _clearly_ too many already. So why worry
| about the influx of new questions slowing down?
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Looks like the framework is just going to keep reading to the end
| of the random number stream, but of course there isnt an end to
| it.
|
| Is there some kind of `IClosableStream` you can implement? That'd
| give you a `Closed` method, which you can then use to let either
| your server or stream know that it's time to stop reading (or the
| stream reached EOF) - even if it's done with a flag that's set
| when the client disconnects.
|
| Maybe there's already an optional `Close` method you're not
| overriding?
| __s wrote:
| Stupid idea: throttle stream by putting Sleep in Read
| eterm wrote:
| Thanks for trying to help.
|
| On the client side, randomStream.Close will get called when
| it's disposed.
|
| On the server side, I'm not sure what I could put into an
| overriden Close that wouldn't just be base.Close()?
| RandomStream itself doesn't own any resources that need
| cleaning up.
|
| I could force WCF to use Session mode, and then add flow-
| control through a side-channel, so other messages could prepare
| the stream to internally buffer and then rewrite in requested
| chunks?
|
| But at that point I might as well just use an apprpriately
| sized GetRandomBlock(ValueWithSequence[]), and chunk requests
| that way and abandon using a stream for this at all.
|
| I'll have an experiment with that approach to try to find the
| best buffer size and whether streaming the buffer actually
| helps vs just having it as the message and letting WCF control
| the sending.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| What if your Close implementation sets a flag in the stream
| that, if set to true, causes it to respond to Read calls with
| an EOF?
|
| There'd be some bookkeeping to keep track of the stream (so
| you can set its flag) then replace it with a new one the next
| time a client connects, effectively making each stream
| single-use. But you seem to be optimizing for rate of reads,
| not number of opens and closes you can do, so it seems that
| shouldn't be a blocker..
| yakz wrote:
| There are some events you can handle:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.servicem...
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.servicem...
|
| Could you use these to cancel the stream?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > This is confusing enough for humans, let alone a machine that
| will happily reproduce calls and configuration from something
| that is almost identical, yet subtly different and incompatible.
|
| Interesting point. I'm going to see if they similarly struggle
| generating VBA code vs generating Visual Basic code.
| phkahler wrote:
| Stackoverflow is no longer a Q&A site. It's trying to become a
| curated information source. Like wikipedia or the kind of thing
| you'd train AI with. As such it isn't great for answering
| question any more.
|
| Another old problem was notable users. There was a guy famous for
| his presence and answering tons of question (I forgot his name).
| He was actually pretty good but... he was not an expert in all
| the areas he'd participate in, but his answers would sometimes
| win because he was articulate, not because it was the best.
| nicce wrote:
| Likely this summarises the shift:
|
| https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
| zahlman wrote:
| On the contrary, the people trying to keep the site a useful,
| curated source of information (rather than a dumping ground
| for people trying to get others to debug code for them) are
| on balance _strongly against_ every kind of AI involvement
| with the site, including the use of that information for
| training AI (although we can 't do anything about that). We
| curate a repository of high quality questions and answer
| (which _is_ a "Q&A site", and is _specifically_ what the
| site is supposed to be, so as to _distinguish it from_
| traditional forums) _exactly because_ we want it to be a
| place where you get information from humans that reflects
| original human insight.
|
| Which is also the reason for the ban on GenAI content
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831).
| nicce wrote:
| The primary question is that _who_ is deciding that what
| kind of information is _curated_ and whether the arguments
| have been properly voted, and the process itself is
| transparent.
|
| I guess nobody could disagree, that it benefits all if the
| site is useful and whether the content is factually correct
| and up-to-date and follows Q&A format.
|
| I admit, I haven't followed what happens closely for some
| time, but here is some older example post:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389834/statement-
| fr...
| zahlman wrote:
| > The primary question is that who is deciding that what
| kind of information is curated and whether the arguments
| have been properly voted, and the process itself is
| transparent.
|
| You already seem aware of the existence of the meta site
| - which contains reams of useful information and prior
| discussion and explanation of policy - so I assume you
| are simply complaining about others disagreeing with you,
| rather than genuinely wondering.
| nicce wrote:
| Instead of linking how the process is transparent, you
| chose to attack me. I guess it hasn't changed then.
| zahlman wrote:
| I am not attacking you; I am questioning your bona fides.
| I didn't link you because you have already demonstrated
| awareness of the only reasonable links to give you in
| context.
| neonsunset wrote:
| If the author reads HN comments - findings like these are
| probably better to be submitted at
| https://github.com/CoreWCF/CoreWCF instead
|
| (although I have no idea how active CoreWCF owners are w.r.t
| this)
| shagie wrote:
| ... and https://github.com/CoreWCF/CoreWCF/discussions
| eterm wrote:
| Thanks. In my experience the CoreWCF team are fairly active,
| but I didn't want to bother them until I can understand if this
| is a problem with CoreWCF.
|
| This might also be a problem WCF client, which is maintained by
| others elsewhere in a different repo:
| https://github.com/dotnet/wcf for the nuget package version.
|
| But this might just be how WCF is designed. I'll try a version
| of this within .NET Framework, but even that might change
| depending on whether it's via IIS or started via ASP.NET Core,
| and whether it uses the built in System.ServiceModel or the
| nuget version.
|
| ( You can probably tell I'm a bit frustrated with MS for making
| a bit of a mess in the way they hurried away from .NET
| Framework especially with respect to WCF. )
| neonsunset wrote:
| > Thanks. In my experience the CoreWCF team are fairly
| active, but I didn't want to bother them until I can
| understand if this is a problem with CoreWCF.
|
| It may not be necessarily a problem but, ideally, the less
| users have to care about gotchas and knowing how to exactly
| use the API the better. There are some constraints to this
| but chances are at least documentation can be improved.
|
| Plus, especially if there are not that many issues, it
| signals interest and active usage.
| xyst wrote:
| C# is not my primary language but have the misfortune of
| debugging C#/.Net junk.
|
| Seems like an issue with not closing resources properly. Looking
| at your server code, seems the Close and Dispose methods are not
| overridden. Try that?
| eterm wrote:
| What resources do you think should or could be handled in an
| overriden close method on RandomService?
|
| It'll be calling base.Close(), and doing what else?
| bitbasher wrote:
| I'm curious-- did you feed this into an LLM to see what it thinks
| the issue is?
| eterm wrote:
| I didn't, but I've not had much previous success with these
| kinds of issues.
|
| Just for the sake of it, I've now tried pasting this whole blog
| into claude.
|
| It has some strange suggestions, including many things that
| don't work, such as adding to the client:
| // Important: Properly close the stream
| randomStream.Close();
|
| I read the Stream documentation (
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.strea...
| ), and it points out:
|
| > This method calls Dispose, specifying true to release all
| resources. You do not have to specifically call the Close
| method. Instead, ensure that every Stream object is properly
| disposed.
|
| My stream is properly disposed.
|
| Claude also sticks in things like:
| // Simulate some work or add a small delay to prevent CPU
| spinning Thread.Sleep(1);
|
| I can't see how that do anything to solve my issue. I suppose I
| should humour the machine, go full-vibe and try everything it
| suggests, and if I end up with a working solution go back from
| there, but I fear that would just leave me more confused about
| the underlying mechanisms here.
|
| On the client side it not only rewrites my reading to read
| multiple times, but adds in:
| await Task.Delay(500, cts.Token); // Small delay between reads
|
| I didn't ask it to re-introduce the loop, and a 500ms delay
| between reads is horribly long for reading successive bytes
| from a stream.
|
| The only thing that was interesting was creaitng a linked
| cancellation token source on the service to pass to the
| underlying stream and cancelling it on server shutdown.
|
| That's a useful thing to keep in mind to help with helping to
| shutdown the services, but doesn't actually address the issue
| for a server you want to keep running.
|
| It does also add send/receive timeouts too, and they're also
| worth keeping in mind, but that doesn't seem like a good
| mechanism for dealing with this issue. If anything, it would
| just mask the issue by having it write to the stream for the
| duration of the timeout period instead, which if short could
| cause a problem like this to go unnoticed until it's actually
| under more load.
| zahlman wrote:
| All of that is very much in line with what I'd expect Claude
| to suggest - because it's exactly what I'd expect to see on
| the garbage blogs that LLMs trained off of, in turn oriented
| towards fixing _common_ problems from people who don 't know
| what they're doing.
| hakunin wrote:
| My most recent (nearly 3 years ago) StackOverflow story:
|
| I posted a question[1]. Got some answers, but not quite complete.
| Then someone came along and provided a good detailed answer. A
| couple of upvotes later, that answer got deleted by Community
| Bot. I voted to undelete it, but it still needs another vote to
| undelete. So I ended up copying it into my own notes blog[2].
|
| I'm not sure why the best answer was deleted. It would've been a
| loss if it wasn't preserved somewhere I think.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/73954228/155351
|
| [2]: https://notes.max.engineer/creating-common-interfaces-in-
| gol...
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| That user was using AI to autogenerate answers. Most of his
| answers posted in a certain period were deleted in bulk. If you
| think this was not something AI generated then you can raise a
| flag for it to be undeleted
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/430072
| zahlman wrote:
| For reference: almost all deletion on Stack Overflow is "soft",
| and deleted Q&A can be viewed by users with at least 10,000
| reputation. These users can vote for undeletion, and the author
| can edit and submit for undeletion.
|
| It looks like the answer you're talking about is now undeleted,
| with yours among the three necessary votes. (It also looks like
| you accepted, and awarded a bounty to, a different answer back
| when you asked, and the answer you're now calling "best" was
| posted months later. So it goes.)
|
| The explanation for the original deletion is exactly as
| ayhanfuat says. LLM and other GenAI content is forbidden on
| Stack Overflow
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/), since
| before that answer was posted, and the author (one of the
| site's most prolific contributors) got in trouble for a flood
| of such answers. (It took quite a while for the problem to be
| noticed and acted upon, in large part because of a moderation
| strike in June 2023 which ended up creating a large backlog of
| flags for AI content, and in part because custom flags are
| required to report this. The strike, in turn, was largely about
| the company/staff trying to interfere with moderators
| attempting to detect AI content, with the site owners being
| unwilling to accept false positives because it would be
| "unfriendly". So it goes.)
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| I've found the _real_ answer in deleted answers multiple times.
|
| Thank goodness I can see it because I have enough reputation.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I opened my SO account 15 years ago and I was liking the dynamics
| very much.
|
| Now at 200k+ rep I cannot stand it anymore. Whenever I ask a
| question that does not make me bow backwards or discuss how my
| Python code looks in assembly it gets downvoted almost
| immediately. Go and Typescript are tags that being frustration.
|
| Now compare this with many other Stack Exchange sites.
|
| A question about cooking or LaTeX gets nice, coloriant answers,
| even when they are basic.
|
| I get it that they are one or two orders of magnitude less
| crowded but this may mean that SO passed its scale limit and is
| done.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have been an SO user for 13 years with around 9k karma. I have
| recently started having similar negative experiences.
|
| I posted this iOS Swift Programming question today:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79612931/ios-custom-oper...
|
| and was instantly downvoted and then voted to closed. I do not
| think this question was worth downvoting or closing. There's no
| hits on the warning I was getting.
|
| People on SO nowadays seem way too eager to downvote and close.
| zahlman wrote:
| > and was instantly downvoted and then voted to closed.
|
| The outstanding vote to close is on the grounds of "needs
| details or clarity". Based on the comment that was left, I
| assume that the other party doesn't understand _why you are
| asking a question_ , because it comes across that your
| motivation for asking is that you don't understand what to do,
| but it also comes across that the error message is already
| telling you exactly what to do.
|
| If you have a different question - for example, why you should
| have to do the thing being suggested, or you don't understand
| how to do the thing being described - then you should edit the
| question to clarify that. With this clarification, it may be
| that your question is identified as a duplicate (of a more
| general question regarding why such "inherited conformance"
| must be restated in Swift, or what that means, etc.). I don't
| know Swift, so I can't advise there - I can only rely on my
| general understanding of programming languages in this general
| syntax family.
|
| Regardless, the question would be improved by a proper minimal
| reproducible example (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-
| reproducible-example). _Minimal_ is a key component of this;
| please proactively try to remove irrelevant parts of the code
| example, so that you show _only what directly causes_ the
| reported problem. This helps
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/333952) other people
| understand and _recognize_ the question - not just people who
| might answer it, but other people who have the same question
| who are looking for an existing Q &A.
|
| > There's no hits on the warning I was getting.
|
| I guess you mean that you tried searching for the warning and
| came up empty handed. I'm not sure why this happened for you.
| If I try copying and pasting into a search engine - e.g.
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Class+must+restate+inherited+%27Cl...
| - I get seemingly useful results off the top - including issues
| in the GitHub repository for Swift itself, such as one
| proposing and automatic "fix-it" for this error (I assume this
| concept is meaningful to Swift developers generally). I also
| see official Apple documentation at
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/sendable ,
| several blog posts talking about the use of `@unchecked
| Sendable` with fully worked examples, etc.
|
| > I do not think this question was worth downvoting or closing.
| People on SO nowadays seem way too eager to downvote and close.
|
| Nobody ever thinks their own questions are worth downvoting or
| closure - they wouldn't ask if they did. But the standards
| aren't set by the OP; they're set by policy and surrounding
| discussion such as
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 and
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252677 and
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions and
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/why-vote and
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808. And they're
| set this way because the site _isn 't about_ answering your
| question in the moment; it's about building up a searchable,
| useful repository of high quality questions and answers.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| Stack Overflow is like online gaming -- lots of toxic people, but
| I still get value out of it.
|
| Ask a question.
|
| Ignore the trolls.
|
| Get a question answered that would have taken you another day to
| solve.
|
| Make money.
| dkackman11 wrote:
| SO community def not reading the room
| incoming1211 wrote:
| StackOverflows days are numbered, the site isn't like it used to
| be, it used to be useful, but over time people spend more time
| trying to game the system or enforce their own interpretation of
| rules.
|
| SO is trash now-a-days.
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