I've been using Stack Overflow for a few years, and initially most questions you asked got a positive reception: happy comments and answers, people that tried to help you out regardless of the way you worded it. Of late the tendency is to simply close or put on hold most questions, or downvote them, or make fun of the writing or the style.

I use GameDev SE too, and I find it much more positively minded. As a simple metric, compare my questions on GameDev vs my questions on Stack Overflow. See the multitude of closed questions and/or downvotes on Stack Overflow, while on GameDev every question was well received and has at least one answer.

Now I don't have files of hard facts to prove anything apart from a growing feeling that Stack Overflow is becoming very negative of late. Pretty much every intelligent question I've tried to ask of late gets downvotes, while silly technical issues get well received.

Firstly, why is this? Is it that moderators are getting egoistic about their powers and like to close or "put on hold" questions as a kind of power display? Is it growing frustration with "noobs" who ask "silly questions" that "should be deleted"? Or is it just that programming is a tough job and makes once happy people into irritable people because they're facing horrid technical issues day in, day out?

Secondly, whatever the case, whatever the cause, what can be done to improve the attitude (positivity) of the Stack Overflow users/moderators such that you don't feel scared to ask a question?

I'm not trying to criticize anybody or make a statement, I'm actually asking this out of desperation. The most useful, incredible programming community on the web is turning sour, and I really don't know what I should change (even in myself) to help make it work.


locked by animuson May 9 at 23:07


closed as primarily opinion-based by Kaz, Toon Krijthe, vba4all, brasofilo, DVK May 8 at 3:32


Moderator Note: If you have an answer, please post it as such. If you'd like to go off and have an internet argument in the comments -- we have chatrooms for that. –  George Stocker Apr 23 at 11:46
I think the number of upvotes here are giving a strong signal which should be receipt from the community. –  Revious Apr 23 at 12:08
For many people here, being helpful is just not as important as "appearing to be helpful". E.g. they are not here to primarily learn and teach, which IMO is the primary purpose of a Q/A site, but to cultivate an image of "all-knowing" and helpful individuals who should be praised and admired. –  ddriver Apr 23 at 12:31
I think the problem is the fact that people don't post comments with the downvote. Your question (stackoverflow.com/questions/22957350/…) have a close-vote for "unclear what you're asking" but no comments.. but if he instead of downvote comment with "What you mean? Can you clarify your question?" and then downvote if after x (hours/days or i don't know) the question is still unclear (maybe because the author don't want) downvote it. –  Marco Acierno Apr 23 at 13:26
I get tired of seeing trivial questions (that are more often than not duplicates) getting answered. The questions do not add any value to the aggregate content. They get 7-10 duplicate answers and the asker often does not accept an answer. Ever since the minimum understanding flag got removed it is harder to get rid of the scourge. –  Romoku Apr 23 at 14:37
It's the help vampires. Low quality questions drive away regulars. I'm actually surprised how well Stack Overflow endures this. –  ntoskrnl Apr 23 at 14:59
@MarcoAcierno People don't downvote AND comment because it attracts retaliatory downvotes. I've been hit by this in the past and I rapidly learned the lesson that you need to either flag, downvote OR comment –  Clara Onager Apr 23 at 15:02
@ntoskrnl, help vampires are not new, we're quite used to them. The problem lies more with the increasingly overwhelming number of really bad questions and the users who answer them. –  Frédéric Hamidi Apr 23 at 15:02
@KateGregory I think this one which is linked, with the first sentence There is a distinct decline in the level of civility here which was written 5 years ago is my fave, which people say every once in a while –  Conrad Frix Apr 23 at 18:37
@Cupcake: I voted to close this question because 1. I'ts been discussed many times before, and 2. The level of overall discourse on Stack Overflow has actually improved over time, not declined. The "attitude" of community members in this question seems to be measured by what kinds of questions are left open or closed, not by the usual standards of discourse. The vast variety of answers suggests strongly that the question is Primarily Opinion-Based. –  Robert Harvey Apr 23 at 19:04
possible duplicate of the recency illusion –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 20:35
There isn't a vast variety in answers @Robert. The top 7 by votes all say that the site is deluged in crap, the more experienced members are fighting back but losing and giving up (to reduce them all to a sentence). They all have different ways of saying it, different examples, different measurements but the core messages are not dissimilar. –  Ben Apr 23 at 20:44
As the answers have borne out, this question is primarily opinion based. Because of that and because we've now hit 47 answers, this question is being closed to new answers (If your viewpoint hasn't been covered in the 47 different opinions thrown out, well.. I rest my case). –  George Stocker Apr 25 at 14:40
@TobyAllen - The VC++ question got voted "-3" on the first day, when it was a perfectly valid question. After I posted this meta question, it got the "+27" votes that it currently has! –  Geotarget Apr 26 at 8:08
You should have to add a comment when downvoting and the site should then anonymize the commenter. –  Jason Apr 26 at 11:19

54 Answers 54

up vote 319 down vote accepted

Thank you for this discussion!

As a clear noob, I have a few suggestions which would be very helpful for me (as a noob) to understand how not to annoy people so much.

  1. HIGH-REP PEOPLE: I came here to get better at something very difficult. I look up to you and think you are awesome. I am not trying to annoy you. Don't make the mistake of treating me like a child by simply anonymously downvoting something I ask that you don't like. Tell me, please. I don't care - say something MEAN if you have to: "too long", "already asked" "google search this", "obvious homework problem". I would rather be embarrassed five times in a row and finally GET IT than annoying everyone forever.

    Which brings me to my concrete requests …

  2. A mandatory voting dropdown menu should be required for ALL DOWNVOTING. This should not affect overall rep points, but if people simply cannot be bothered to say why a question/answer is bad, offenders will NEVER get better. The menu should be simple; again, it would just be helpful to know "too long", "already asked", "too general", "too short", "not clear", "bad grammar", "other" …anything is better than nothing. Please consider this! It does not need to be anything fancy, but if someone can click once to downvote, they can click twice to select an option from a dropdown.

  3. A ranking feature, in addition, or in place of or in addition to the voting. Simple ranks maybe - beginner, moderate, and expert. That way, if I am a noob, I can easily find all the noob questions to answer. When I become moderate I can look at those. Then, for all you experts out there complaining of repeated questions - you won't have to be BORED! If you answer noob ranked questions, you will know what you are signing up for.

    I would not mind getting downvotes so much if they could actually be USEFUL. I have other noob friends on this site and sometimes it feels like people downvote solely because of rep point bias. I don't care as much about "negative" or "grumpy" attitudes as I do that this site and community ADAPTS and PROGRESSES with the changing circumstances.

    If the only presence that a noob can have on here is a burden then this site and community has already failed and you are going to be responsible for that, not the noobs.

Please note I've "accepted" this answer only as a way for it to get a broader audience. I humbly ask everyone to review his points carefully and with minimal bias. They really could work. –  Geotarget Apr 26 at 5:04
The problem with "ranking" questions by difficulty is that someone still has to read and review the question to determine its difficulty. Unless you propose that the asker make that determination, but will they always be qualified to do so, and do so accurately? But stepping back a moment from even that to look at the bigger picture, Stack Overflow was never meant to be a help forum, a place to flood with "easy" questions that have no value to anyone but the original poster. I don't know :/ –  Cupcake Apr 26 at 5:37
As for #1, I'd be open to anonymously adding a reason for a downvote. But I'm not sure how necessary it is to have to give any reason, even anonymously. The help center explains clearly what questions are on-topic, and How to Ask explains how to write a good question, which shouldn't be shocking to anyone who's ever had to write a research paper for school, like, ever. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out why someone is downvoting a poor question, and if they do downvote you, then consider that there's still something to be improved. –  Cupcake Apr 26 at 5:48
@ambigram_maker I disagree. Not everybody is at the same level of skill. As this site's repository of useful information grows, it becomes more and more difficult to ask questions that have NEVER been asked before. Almost every question has to be somehow localized to something implementation-specific. You can't expect users to ask perfect questions right off the bat. –  rpg711 Apr 26 at 6:28
You should learn the difference between a noob and a newbie. If you are a noob, I will just tell you to get the hell away from the site. Also for 1), I'd just end up writing a script that automagically inserts a "you suck" comment into it. Implementing such a thing would annoy me more than the silly questions I am trying to downvote, really. –  Griwes Apr 26 at 7:07
ranking feature has been many times discussed before: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/difficulty –  gnat Apr 26 at 8:10
"say something MEAN if you have to" ... No. Just, no. You might not like downvotes without a comment. You might not see the direct cause for it. But comments should only ever be made if you have something constructive to say. If you can't, simply shut up. Sure, you might be able to handle a couple of rough comments. My skin is thick enough as well. But plenty of users can't. Plenty of users have complained about such comments and have quit because of them. And it paints a very poor picture for casual visitors on top of that. So I'm sorry, but mean comments are a nono. –  Bart Apr 26 at 11:48
I do agree with the points you raise, a new user should certainly receive feedback for what he did "wrong". However, I believe this is already happening with the existing system. Rarely if ever do I see a downvoted question in which nobody left any clue as to what was "wrong". Also, downvotes already have a meaning: "Shows no research effort or is not useful", read the tooltip of the downvote arrow. This plus any comments that are left plus a possible close reason plus the SO help/FAQ should clue anybody in as to what was "wrong". I don't believe we need any more mechanisms for this. –  deceze Apr 26 at 12:17
If you actually make me write boilerplate "You should show more research" yadda yadda, when many of these explanations are banned for their curtness, when I downvote, then I'll just stop downvoting. Period. If users can't be bothered to read the How to Ask, FAQ, etc., then why am I coerced into spoonfeeding those pages to them in my own crappy verbiage? In any case, I won't. Downvotes will now be meaningless since only some sort of deserving bad questions will get downvotes. –  AAA Apr 26 at 17:02
I guess the problem I have with this ... why do I have to treat new users as if they were 5 years old? The first time a new user gets their (non) question downvoted and closed, there's an explicit message that explains why this occurred, and links to the information they explicitly agreed to and should have read before they posted. I enjoy helping people, and donate a fairly good bit of my spare time to doing so on SO. Why shouldn't I expect that people looking for free, expert advice and help spend 5 minutes before posting to understand how they should be using the site? –  Brian Roach Apr 26 at 18:48
I've seen first-time users post perfectly good questions, so obviously it's not impossible. –  Brian Roach Apr 26 at 18:49
@BrianRoach agreed. Adding to this, the problem I have with this is that for some reason, certain new users either feel entitled to make mistake after mistake after mistake without learning, or they are truly so ignorant as to what it actually takes to ask coherent, good questions that they cannot even begin to understand. It doesn't take a doctorate in english to ask a question with a clear purpose. –  rpg711 Apr 26 at 19:58
@rpg711 I think they're encouraged to do so by the users of this site that answer their questions even though they're obviously and blatantly below the standard and should aggressively be downvoted and closed with impunity. For me, one of the reasons I tend to get "negative" on SO is the frustration caused by this. –  Brian Roach Apr 26 at 20:04
My opinion is all these suggestions in this answer are part of the problem; wanting to be spoon fed, instead of spending the effort yourself. I don't have time to tell the thousands of people that can't be bothered to do a modicum of research, even on how to use the site! There are already quick and easy mechanisms to get feedback, the up/down votes and close votes. –  Jarrod Roberson Apr 28 at 23:01

Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

I hate to pile on, but I couldn't resist summarizing the problem. And I apologize ahead of time for any potentially offensive language that I might use.

Basically there are 4 camps of users on Stack Overflow:

  3. The "repwhores" who answer everything they can (or can't).
  4. The ones who no longer give a shit.

These camps are not mutually exclusive. Personally, I started as a 3. Now, I'm half-way between 1 and 4.

But for the most part:

  • 2 and 3 love each other. They should get married.
  • 1 hates 2 because they're flooding the site making good questions impossible to find.
  • 1 hates 3 because they're encouraging 2 to keep going.
  • 2 hates 1 because 1 constantly downvotes/closes/deletes/flames 2.
  • 3 hates 1 because they keep closing/deleting the questions that 3 likes to answer.
  • 1 and 3 have all the moderation powers, but only 1 cares to use them.
  • 4 is sitting on the sideline shaking their heads...
  • 1 hates 4 because 4 isn't helping the situation.

With so much hate, there's going to be conflict.

Artist's impression added with permission (dot source)

Image credit to sehe.

Begging for a diagram :) (Also love the self-referential entrance: "I hate to"... :)) –  sehe Apr 24 at 22:33
I am not a number; I am a free man! –  R. Martinho Fernandes Apr 24 at 22:43
@R.MartinhoFernandes A free robot, you mean. –  Etienne de Martel Apr 24 at 22:43
I've been 1, 3 and 4 at various times. I keep meaning to get around to trying out 2, but I'm just too lazy. –  Shog9 Apr 24 at 22:46
Need to drive a stake right through the heart of that diagram. –  Travis J Apr 24 at 23:03
@mysticial So how should it be fixed? –  Clara Onager Apr 25 at 8:47
The solution is obviously to remove 1 and 4. Then only love is left. –  Jules Apr 26 at 9:39
I think you are missing a camp: 5. Those users who visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others. Like 1 they want to have nice content, but their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the deletionism of 1. They dont't care much about 2, answer the questions if it is not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't care about 3 either, and find the grudge of 1 against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and contributing useful content. –  jdm Apr 26 at 9:42
I'm in #4, formerly #3, and the reason is because some of #1 are "drone caretakers" who follow the rules a bit too closely rather than using common sense when deciding to shut down questions. I'm repeatedly prevented from answering questions that shouldn't be closed - either because they have a slight "subjective" tone to them, or because they're "similar" to a previous question, but the idiots haven't taken the time to analyse both questions and realize they are not the same. –  Mark H Apr 26 at 10:20
@jdm Yeah, I'm aware that my "4 camps" is an oversimplification. It's was something I threw together in about 5 minutes and wrote it in a way to make everyone the bad guy. –  Mysticial Apr 26 at 10:43
There is a fair solution: apply all current rules retrospectively and remove points for early high-rep open-ended questions. –  Den Apr 26 at 11:11
People are taking this answer way too seriously. –  BoltClock Apr 27 at 4:12
this may be the best answer ever posted on MSO –  Jeff Atwood Apr 27 at 7:05
@jdm by your definition, "camp #5" is really just camps 2 & 3 :P –  Cupcake Apr 27 at 7:11

I interacted with SQL : Select Lowest 20 Record yesterday.

  • The OP had done so little research that it was answered correctly, without enough information to answer it correctly, in 49 seconds
  • A 70k and a 30k user interacted without voting to close
  • It got 3 answers, 2 incorrect (one of these because the OP didn't provide enough information)
  • The question got 5 upvotes
  • Both incorrect answers got an upvote

This is extremely depressing. Acutely depressing. To the point of "I quit".

This site was meant to provide a canonical resource for programmers to find answers to their questions. It's becoming a place where people who should never have been employed as a programmer, and who can't even be bothered to read the documentation, post mind-numbingly awful questions asking the community to debug their code. Here's my code dump, fix it for me.

That's not to say that these people can't be rescued. I think I may have rescued someone yesterday - they responded well in the comments and now have a chance of creating decent questions. However, it took me probably 15 minutes over the course of a few hours to maybe rescue one person. There simply isn't the resources to do this with everyone - especially as most don't seem to want to be rescued.

Add into this mix the race to get reputation, which leads people to answer everything, however crap. Everyone's done this on occasion, myself included, but it's depressing to see moderators continually answering duplicates. Because even the high-rep users do this, and they're normally better at answering questions, and doing so quickly, the lower rep users have a smaller chance of gaining reputation. So, they emulate their supposed betters and type something in the hope of eking out that little bit of reputation.

Hence, rudeness.

There are maybe at most 30,000 users trying to stem the tide of unbelievably poor questions and answers crafted by hundreds of thousands in a vain effort to keep this site the way it was originally imagined to be and the way they'd like it to remain. They're failing and slowly giving up.

I really care about this, about this site being a good community; somewhere where people can come and get answers to their questions. I've learnt so much from here and helped so many other people that I'm proud of this place. The perceived negativity is just an attempt to keep it that way.

Or I might be being overly dramatic.

please.. allow me to say that depression often lead to strong sentence. When you believe that "people who should never have been employed as a programmer" should be not allowed to write (for example), you are making a really, really strong assumption. We should agree that this could lead to problems and try to find a right, non drastic, working solution. Nothing should never justify drastic solutions. Because human make errors. Always –  Revious Apr 23 at 12:13
I'm well known for being grumpy, but I have to agree with Ben. To the extent that the ability to express thoughts in a clear manner is a requirement for being a programer, then there are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who should not be programmers. I blame the Internet copy-paste-from-an-example culture for this. More copying, less reading, less intelligence. How much intelligence does it take to copy and paste? –  John Saunders Apr 23 at 12:18
@Revious "people who should never have been employed as a programmer" should be allowed to write, but they also should have a requirement to think. When I see a question like "I have no experience with A,B and C and I am currently writing an application which should handle millions of users per second and also do an online payment. How to make it secure and fast", my whole soul is crying and the only think I can tell is "quit this job". May be this is rude, but imagine a doctor who is treating your child and tells "I have to do important operation. By the way where is the heart located?" –  Salvador Dali Apr 26 at 6:37
As someone who started programming at ~11 and totally self-taught, I find this "people who shouldn't be programmers" really offensive. I participate on SO a bit (not so much these days, moslty because of lack of time) and I answered myself my only question. I'd been browsing SO for years before, but I never felt the need to post a question because they were so many resources. –  Ven Apr 26 at 11:02
Why do you find it offensive @Ven? There's absolutely no reason for you to decide it applies to you at all. In fact, the chances of it applying to any one of the thousands of people who've viewed this question are minimal in the extreme - they're all interested enough to view it in the first place so almost be definition it doesn't apply. P.S. some moderator's deleted about 30 comments from this answer for some reason so I'm going over everything again :-(. –  Ben Apr 26 at 12:02
@Ben: the slight problem that I see with that sentence is: who are you to state who can be a programmer and who shouldn't? Always try to consider how bad went the extreme examples of this kind of way of thinking to understand the possible problem lead by it. I could say a very similar sentence to the author of that sentence: "who judges so easily shouldn't be allowed to express his judgement at all". Do you understand why it can be a very very bad kind of sentence now? It is the base which can lead to censurship of any justification of "this people is worst than me so he deserves less than me" –  Revious Apr 26 at 12:54
We've been through this already @Revious with another few people in this comment thread, now that those comments have (annoyingly) been deleted is not a reason to have the same conversation again. –  Ben Apr 26 at 13:14
@Revious: I'm not not sure what your native language is, but you seem to be arguing about a common English idiom, rather than the topic. When someone says "who should never have been employed as a programmer" you have to notice that it is past tense, and exaggerated for effect. It is not a statement that someone is not good enough to become a programmer (future tense), and as such it is not a permanent quality judgement on them as a person. I would guess that you come from a high context culture (Italy?), while the author is from a low context culture, but you are arguing at cross-purposes. –  Amoss Apr 27 at 7:34
Many people just downvotes whenever they like, neither tries to improve the question nor even ask the asker to improve the question. Downvoting doesn't hurt the one who did, but the one who received (again, despite the truth that the downvoter needs to pay 1 reputation). Having a good question, with enough research, didn't get an answer, I'm sure that people will still downvote it. Off course, that was because downvoting on question is FREE. Why shouldn't they do so? They won't get hurt! And the biggest problem is : who downvoted my question? –  Jamie Apr 27 at 8:14
All I can say is URGENT!!!! PLZ SEND TEH CODEZ –  Peter Wone Apr 28 at 7:40
There are individuals who are just not cut out to be programmers. I know I'm being blunt but this is the truth. With a lot of time and a sense of altruism, we may be able to bring a disastrous programmer to an average one, but this isn't utopia. Practically speaking, we cannot correct every individual. Humans make errors yes, but we have to draw a line. –  l46kok Apr 28 at 9:36
I think you hit it on the head with This site was meant to provide a canonical resource for programmers to find answers to their questions. Entire (and very good) books are begging to be written based on the content of the very best questions / answers posted here. Unfortunately they are getting drowned in a sea of drivel. The success of the site drives anyone with a programming question to it (so many hits on Google). This strains the system's capacity to self-moderate. It is almost as though there ought to be an "entrance exam" before anyone can post a question. –  Floris Apr 28 at 18:36
I too want StackOverflow to be a welcoming place, but I agree with Ben. The most disturbing trend I've seen on StackOverflow lately isn't the unfriendliness, it's the constant inundation with "Do my work/homework for me" type of questions. I don't mind (much) the beginner programmers posting their awful, confused code and asking the vague question "What's wrong with my code?". We've all been there. We all had to start somewhere. But there are far too many questions where the asker doesn't even bother to make an attempt, and too many users who think S.O. is here to do their work for them. –  Mike Holt Apr 28 at 18:43
oh gawd, too many comments to ensure i'm not duplicating but what if the folks who "Both incorrect answers got an upvote", found something useful in the incorrect answers, or had a great idea/inspiration from a crappy question? Should those ppl go search for a well-worded question or "correct" answer & upvote there? More broadly, is the purpose of the SO community to (relatively efficiently) improve programmers' skills, or exist to perpetuate its own increasingly insulated & exacting culture? the line is obviously very broad & fuzzy. or maybe i read into that bullet point too much... –  Niubius Apr 28 at 23:23

In two words: because crap.

Now to be serious, keep in mind that there is a limited set of "regulars" who actually answer all the questions. They make the core of Stack Overflow and they see hundreds and thousands of questions, then they answer what they can.

Once upon a time, there were not many questions being asked, so it was easy to pick the good questions, give proper answer and continue happily ever after.

But as Stack Overflow becomes more and more popular, more and more questions are being asked and naturally, major part of them are, plainly put, crap. Too trivial, shows no efforts whatsoever, unclear, pick your choice. Finding the good questions that can actually be answered becomes harder every day.

So those regular users do their best to preserve quality by attacking the bad posts and trying to educate the users, sometimes being harsh while doing so.

I fear it's an endless loop and honestly can't see any improvement in the future, so those who want real help and do ask proper questions will have to grow thick skin to pass the initial sting and all will be good.

"So those regular users do their best to preserve quality by attacking the bad posts and trying to educate the users, sometimes being harsh while doing so." - I don't quite agree on this part. The problem, as I see it, is that the vast majority of these "regulars" don't appear to care about quality of posts / this site at all. If they did, these questions won't often get answers and we'd likely weed them out quite quickly. –  Dukeling Apr 23 at 9:04
@Dukeling valid point, but I am talking about those who do care and thus pushed to a corner and becoming negative. (I'm not one of them, just sharing my personal insight from years of reading and taking part) –  Shadow Wizard Apr 23 at 9:13
Don't forget that sometimes its hard to decide which of the 20 duplicates to use in the duplicate-close-vote –  PlasmaHH Apr 23 at 10:21
-1; Too much easy to say because of crap. Add to your answer what you told me about the impossibility of discussing stuff on the community. About the lack of fairness, about the harsh behavior. Are you proud enough to write here what you wrote in the chat? Of course not. Since here the "community" is too much harsh to allow people to express freely. –  Revious Apr 23 at 10:44
It is true that in time duplicates grow, but duplicates are just one of the sides of the problem. There are plenty of good questions being closed in a haste for rep and badges, quite often while people are actually typing an answer. I've experienced this myself about a dozen times, almost finished typing an answer to a proper question and all of the sudden, chain voting to close the question renders my efforts to answer the question wasted... –  ddriver Apr 23 at 10:46
@Revious it's clear from my answer that I do think harsh behavior exist. I don't share my own opinion about it (fair or unfair) because it's not relevant to this specific question, I just state facts and explain why it is like that. Feel free to link to what I said in chat here in the comments, I'm not changing my mind or running away from anything I said in the past. –  Shadow Wizard Apr 23 at 10:57
I have to agree with both @Liam and Shadow here. If I have to ask a question on SO, I've not done my research - because almost everything these days has been asked before). It would be nice for low rep users (<= 500?) to be rewarded for finding duplicates so that their first questions aren't crap. Once they get to grips with asking (> 500 rep) then hopefully they'd ask better questions. –  RGraham Apr 23 at 10:57
That doesn't explain why some users are harsh on posts where the user actually has shown effort and made the problem clear. I feel there's a kind of one upmanship going on where people will vote to close for their own personal gratification. Too many times I see a question which exactly matches what I'm looking for but the question has been closed. Usually these questions have comments from other poor souls who didn't get their answer either. Just what is SO for? Collecting rep points, boosting ego's or maybe helping one another? –  Ben Thurley Apr 23 at 14:40
Crap is only half of the story. I think the real problem is that SO doesn't really take enough effort to prevent the users seeing all that crap. Posting rules should be more stringent, and most of the crap should be filtered out by an automated system, and not by poor humans.... –  Karoly Horvath Apr 23 at 18:09
@ddriver There are plenty of good questions being closed in a haste for rep and badges how does that work, seeing as closing gives you neither rep nor badges? –  Pekka 웃 Apr 23 at 22:01
I don't agree with this. The number of people answering questions grows along with the number of people asking questions. There are a few people who like to answer every question, but to be honest, I cringe when I see them because their attitude is usually like yours - EVERYTHING is crap. They don't tend to give quality answers anymore - just negative ones, like they are sick of answering but don't know how to stop. Meanwhile, I've seen a LOT of questions closed lately for the opposite reason - people's reading skills are crap and they don't bother to understand the question before closing. –  dallin Apr 23 at 22:25
@dallin sorry to hear that and personally I'm not posting any negative answers nor quality answers, I answer when I can with what I can, sticking to code only. Guess I can't force you to see my point of view, so best is if we agree to disagree on the matter. –  Shadow Wizard Apr 23 at 22:33
@hanxue Stack Overflow gets 7,000 new questions every day. Where would you get the volunteers from to improve every one of them, and explain to them what they need to do differently? While I'm on board with fighting snark, a modicum of expertise and competence will always needed to participate here, there simply is no other way to make it work. –  Pekka 웃 Apr 24 at 12:47
The sad fact is that SO is now riddled with questions from bone-idle deadbeat developers who enjoy writing code and getting it to build, but can't be bothered with the really hard work of debugging it and getting out the more obvious bugs before posting their wall of crap on SO. After all, why should they when they can get someone else to do it for free? –  Martin James Apr 28 at 1:56
I don't know how this got this far without someone referencing Sturgeon's Law. –  David Conrad Apr 30 at 18:22


Yes, that's what we are supposed to do with poor questions.

or make fun of the writing or the style.

No, that's what the community used to do, back before the "Summer of Love" campaign started to outlaw the practice. I see no evidence myself that this is coming back. It is a self-protection mechanism of any community, meant to make newcomers feel unwelcome.

Outlawing the practice certainly has been quite effective, SO has changed a great deal since then with a glut of help-desk questions being asked every day. Especially noticeable, to me anyway, in the past 6 months. I spend an excessive amount of time as of late trying to find a question that interests me enough to do the research to answer it. And the number of downvotes I have in my profile caught up with the number of upvotes, all on poor questions.

I don't think it is just me that's noticing this. I also see other experts leaving. This is a death-knell for any community that relies on such users to answer the hard technical questions and their unusual productivity. This sobering trend is visible in SEDE data I collected for 12 high rep users that are still active, plotting the number of answers they posted by month:

enter image description here

I eliminated the vacation months and the last month with incomplete data (March 2014). Clearly this is not a problem caused by a lack of questions, I posit that it is caused by the kind of questions we allow to enter the system.

There are other side-effects as well, SO has experienced geometric growth since its inception. That has stopped in fall of last year, something you can see from the quantcast.com statistics.

Sobering stuff, I see no good ways to turn this around and still stay in line with the goals set by the StackExchange owners and enforced by the moderators. Hopefully they are aware of it.

I am not in your league or the top 12 people you mention, but I do post a fair amount of answers. The problem I encounter is this, I spend an excessive amount of time as of late trying to find a question that interests me enough to do the research to answer it. I would really like to answer, dissect, and work through complex well researched issues but they are a diamond in the rough. I was unaware that this was a larger problem because I thought "must be the wrong time of day", or "everyone must have already gone home", or something along the lines of a third-party not being involved. –  Travis J Apr 23 at 15:17
Could the decline be due to more users answering questions correctly, leaving fewer questions needing answering by the 12 in question? –  podiluska Apr 23 at 15:25
There are multiple theories to explain the decline, pretty hard to disprove them. I certainly see no evidence that it is because other users started contributing more. The average number of answers per question has been on a steep decline as well, it is below 1.5 today. –  Hans Passant Apr 23 at 15:28
A longitudinal plot of just 12 users doesn't seem very credible. Any number of personal reasons could explain decline of individual usage. More useful would be a survey of top users, to which you have contributed your input here. –  A. Webb Apr 23 at 15:47
This. This is a beautiful answer, thanks. Anecdotally, I've seen massive drop-offs in the amount of answers people at the top of tags I'm active in answering questions. It doesn't bode well for the future. –  Ben Apr 23 at 15:59
My value of answers per hour invested has fallen dramatically. I feel like I have written about every piece of wisdom that I have to offer at least once. Now there is nothing interesting left to say. Boring. Makes for a good careers profile, though :) –  usr Apr 23 at 21:45
Would you consider posting this as a separate thread? Being under a question with such a contrary stance isn't good for it, and it's a much more important issue IMO. –  AAA Apr 23 at 22:20
"Yes, that's what we are supposed to do with poor questions" - the problem is not that we as a community disagree on what to do with poor questions but on what constitutes a poor question. If the general sentiment is that there is too much negativity, downvoting, etc., on StackOverflow, perhaps the problem is not that the questions are poor but people's attitudes towards the questions in general are poor. I'm not saying there are not poor questions, but I've seen an alarming trend of people downvoting and closing good questions without even taking the time to understand the question. –  dallin Apr 23 at 22:40
I've had the privilege of receiving a few answers from Hans and coming across many others. Hopefully this trend doesn't propagate to valuable members like yourself, sir. –  Qix Apr 24 at 0:31
Downvotes are exactly for marking problematic answers, @Herr_Doktor; they're not about you. If someone downvoted your answer because it was incorrect, and you got upset about it, that's an adjustment you need to make: the downvote is being used as designed. If you edit your answer to correct it, the downvote might be removed. You might also get an upvote which will put the score of your post back at zero. –  Josh Caswell Apr 24 at 7:51
@Herr_Doktor What Josh said; also, don't forget that a downvote is worth -2, an (answer) upvote is worth +10. Even if you don't get the original downvoter to remove the DV, and you attract just one UV by correcting the mistake, you're at net +8. Also, decent downvoters leave a comment as to why they do so, and if you fix the reason, pinging them can get them to remove the DV. –  Angew Apr 24 at 9:00
I stopped posting answers long ago. The problem is that new questions only fall into one of two buckets: too specific to the OP, e.g. specific to some domain or some mistake the OP made, or already answered. –  Puppy Apr 24 at 19:55
I don't know whether I'm in your graph, but I can confirm I've pretty much stopped answering and commenting on SO - partly because I'm tired and bored to death by crap and dupes, although it's not so much the dupes themselves but the utter pointlessness of investing energy in closing them (i.e. finding a good original that will genuinely help the OP). I could see myself becoming motivated again if something like Shog's dupe-handling suggestion would finally be implemented. –  Pekka 웃 Apr 25 at 19:43
@Pekka - sorry, you are not. I only took stats only for active users and I assumed you quit 2 years ago. Getting bored with the grind is quite normal, not really what I wanted to highlight here. Your proposal is decent, doesn't do anything to avoid the grind however. I'd hate losing a minute of life seeing that answer and having to vote for it. –  Hans Passant Apr 25 at 21:47
I don't have evidence for this but if at least some active users get very enthusiastic about the site, reach a peak in their activity and eventually move-on, wouldn't you always see something like this even if the community as a whole isn't changing? If that's true, high-rep users will mostly be found on the downward slopping part of the curve and selecting users by reputation (even filtering those that are completely inactive out) will yield a curve like that. Today's active users are tomorrow's high-rep users, it could just be that other people are taking each role over time. –  Gala Apr 26 at 11:24

A summary of what's been said so far

Have you ever met someone who used to believe in Utopia? Someone who bought into the inherent goodness of human nature, the potential of humanity to create their own heaven on earth, in the inevitable triumph of peace, love and all that other hippie crap... Only to have it burned out of them by repeated exposure to the reality of human nature?

Good lord, ain't they bitter!

So we have folks who expect to be greeted with open arms, their contributions lauded and all their needs met. And they're disappointed, because not every question gets an answer, and not every answer gets immediate recognition.

And we have folks who expect every post to be useful and informative, the folks asking questions to have done their research and those posting answers to elaborate on how they arrived at the solution. And they're disappointed, because this isn't the case either.

Some of them leave, searching for greener pastures. Others stick around, making sure everyone learns just how disappointed they are that things aren't the way they used to be and never were.

And some accept that there's value in what we're doing, even if it's done by and for a bunch of selfish, bigoted, short-sighted jackasses.

None of this is going to change. The conversion of wide-eyed idealists into bitter, angry militants is as inevitable as it is pointless. But there are things we can change...

Solvable problems

There are two huge problems facing Stack Overflow right now, and they are not unrelated:

  • Information is poorly organized. Yes, I'm talking about duplicates. No one in their right mind should be asking about "headers already sent" (though of course, they still are), but there are thousands of more obscure topics that are duplicated without being marked as such, and useful information is obscured as a result.

    Solution: divorce duplicate-marking from closing, provide rewards for solving someone's problem by pointing to an existing question.

  • Too many low-quality questions. By which I mean, questions that are useful to no one else. This isn't about effort, or even research (although lack of effort can lead to this, and lack of research clearly exacerbates #1) - in many cases, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what these sites are for, a tragedy of the commons leading to "personal advice" questions whose answers will never be found or used by anyone else.

    Solution: Treat question-creation as a shared resource, limit access to those who do not make good use of it. Existing limits attempt to strike a balance between generous enough for those contributing constructively and those behaving abusively; new, more strict limits should be enacted and loosened for those who actually demonstrate constructive behavior.

Will these changes make Stack Overflow less "negative"? Absolutely not; people are awful, and there are a lot of people on Stack Overflow. But if successful, they will make the site more accommodating for those willing to take a positive attitude in spite of that.

Thanks, this made me smile a lot. Especially you insulting everyone, therefore being insulting yourself. It's a meta-meta-meta insult or something. Yes, duplicates is a big problem and if something like Pekka's old request could be done that'd be fantastic. It's still not enough, I think. A duplicate needs to be easy to find and "close". –  Ben Apr 23 at 22:03
Oh man, am I glad to see your bullet point number one. Can't wait to see what comes of that. –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 22:04
This was a pretty depressing discussion but your suggestions bring some much needed light. Rewarding finding duplicates sounds like a step in the right direction and I would like to hear more details about your second bullet. –  Shafik Yaghmour Apr 23 at 22:05
Have you heard of Distropia? 1984? Every attempt of a group of person (main contributors? Orwellian's Pigs?) to decide what should be right for everyone has been strongly analyzed and found to be really a bad idea. Movies (i.e. Equilibrium and Divergent) as well as Psychology, History, Politic, Philosophy and many other sources have dealt with it. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Also, in real life examples, the effort in similar directions often proved really badly. I believe that a deepenig on this stuff would be nice, but it's only my idea. –  Revious Apr 23 at 23:43
Speaking to the first point, which is a great endeavor - I think that improvement to the Stack Exchange search engine could really improve duplication handling. –  Travis J Apr 23 at 23:46
The entire history of human civilization is the story of our efforts to find a collective definition for what is right, @Revious. Generally, folks do better in this search when they share goals and values - hence, the tendency for animosity toward outsiders who do not share these values and are unlikely to respect the (often tacit) agreements and compromises that have arisen from them. We are no different now than we were centuries ago - so ignoring this history is foolish. –  Shog9 Apr 23 at 23:49
Some further suggestions for reducing low-quality content. (1): make it even harder to ask poor questions by adding an extra step after hitting the "Ask Question" button that shows users a list of official documentation for the language that they want to ask a question about, and make it so that you have to click through that step before finally posting your question. Or if that is too extreme, then just show the list alongside the question editor or something. Help users to rubber duck their own problems first. –  Cupcake Apr 24 at 4:49
Throttling questions like that might be a way to improve question quality. Or it might be a terrible idea. (2): instead of showing users a list of questions that are similar to their own using Stack Overflow's search engine (I think it uses Elastic Search or something, correct?), show them results from Google instead. Google's search engine continues to be far superior to the one built-into Stack Overflow itself. –  Cupcake Apr 24 at 4:52
Regarding your 2nd Solvable Problem: Can we please have something like an "I'm a beginner at this" box on the Ask Question page, and a "Don't show me noobie questions" filter option? It won't be perfect, but it will help. If I care that much about post quality that I'm going to be an ass about it, give me a way to filter those out. And if I just want easy rep, or want to "give back" to the community by helping beginners out, leave them in. –  Rachel Apr 24 at 19:51
Noob questions aren't necessarily a problem, @Rachel. Most of what I see sparking frustration are questions from working programmers who simply do a very bad job of expressing themselves: poor titles, lack of explanation for what they're trying to accomplish, on topics that've been covered ad nauseam already. –  Shog9 Apr 24 at 19:53
@Shog9 Personally I don't mind those problems. I sometimes have them myself. SO's question database is huge, and if you don't know what to look for its easier to ask a question. Frequently all the user needs is a pointer in the right direction, and they're happy. I don't think we need to stamp out these questions, or close them all. Its too huge of a task. I think we just need to file them into another bucket for a different set of users to answer, where the expected question quality is lower. SO's vision of "high quality questions/answers" is great, but it doesn't scale well –  Rachel Apr 24 at 20:00
I agree that closing these doesn't scale, @Rachel - not the way we've implemented it at least. But neither does the sort of one-on-one hand-holding you (and others) are suggesting; that eventually leads to a sort of ghetto where questions go to die. The only way Stack Overflow has managed to scale this far has been by relentlessly trying to drive folks seeking knowledge toward existing knowledge - where we're failing is in taking folks in the situation you describe and extracting enough information to drive the next person in that situation to the solution without further investment. –  Shog9 Apr 24 at 20:44
Downvoting is ridiculously effective, @Chris - but it's like picking up litter: if everyone stops doing it, the problem quickly gets out of control. That's where we start to see "broken window" issues: when folks get the notion that their vote doesn't help because it's such a small action in the face of such a large mess... –  Shog9 Apr 24 at 21:22
Scrolling down, I was already losing hope that there'd be an answer recognising that these are symptoms of shortcomings of the SE software as well as suggesting changes to mitigate those shortcomings. We really need to focus more on solutions instead of just explaining the symptoms. –  lime Apr 25 at 8:40
As Pekka notes, the hardest part boils down to convincing folks that 1) there's a problem and 2) that it's solvable. Sometimes, things have to get really, really bad before there's any will to fix them... –  Shog9 Apr 25 at 21:04

I think one thing that adds significantly to the negative trend is the flood of homework questions. Homework questions tend to be of a poor quality and have many problems: no research or effort made by the poster, the poster is unwilling to actually learn anything, outright code begging with copy/paste of homework assignment, "what's wrong with this huge blob of code" etc etc.

SO used to have a homework tag, which you were supposed to tag your homework questions with, thereby allowing people who were deadly tired of them to ignore that tag. But the tag was removed in some policy change and deemed irrelevant.

Then there was another strange, sneaky update recently that changed the available close reasons. The close reason saying that the poster must demonstrate minimum knowledge about the topic was removed. It was replaced with "there is not enough details to answer the question", which for some reason needs to co-exist with the the already present close reason "unclear what you are asking".

Generally, the trend of the site seems to be to expect less out of new users. We are supposed to manually educate everyone and their mother about how to use the site, instead of expecting them to put some minimum effort of their own into it, such as reading the fundamental "about" page.

A veteran user who spends many hours on the site is supposed to spend even more time in "educating" some kid who just posts a copy/paste of his homework, completely ignorant to site policies and completely unwilling to learn anything, or even stay on the site once his homework is done. Chances are, it's a hopeless case and the new user adds nothing of value to the community, so why waste time on them? The sensible thing to do would be just to delete the crap question and move on.

People come to the site to learn/teach about programming, not to teach people how to interact with other human beings. That's what schools and parents are for.

Many years ago, tired of homework questions on USENET, I wrote a web page that is designed to be helpful to people who want to do their own programming homework, but could not even see how to get started. It's now at (patriciashanahan.com/beginner.html). If you can't get started, you can't write a good question by SO terms. –  Patricia Shanahan Apr 23 at 23:26
I miss the "minimum knowledge" option too; I think a vast majority of the questions are something like "If I'll have to drive to the moon, should I use regular or premium gas? The others are answered in 35 seconds. I kind of see why it's supposed to be discouraging, but maybe the kids actually need to put some actual effort before they can become app-billionaires. Maybe the tags could be associated with "beginners" links to tutorials that could be shown if the questions was closed with the "minimum knowledge" vote. –  KarlP Apr 26 at 12:47

It all started with the Summer of Love






So we were nice. We were welcoming. We flagged the snarky old-timers into submission and we welcomed the first-timers with hugs and quick bug fixes. We were so nice that we forgot the core values of the site:


The site became a place where anyone was welcome, regardless of skill level or desire to learn. And the user base grew.

I went to the Summer of Love and all I got was this nasty itch

Predictably, the fundamental character of the site changed. It is no longer a place for professional or enthusiast programmers. Some of them are still around, but they are being drowned in a sea of unenthusiastic, rather-be-using-Excel users who ask dull, uninformed questions over and over again. Their dullness has transformed the community from a vibrant interesting place to one where the experts are either bored, angry, or absent.

We need a Winter of Death

If this site is to become vibrant and useful again, it must return to its core values. We must reject the non-enthusiasts and kill their questions. We must wound their spirits and make them stop posting drivel. We must disabuse them of the notion that SO is a free help desk designed to solve their particular problems. By doing so, we will help to ensure that the enthusiasts get the attention they deserve and their good questions will re-energize the professionals. The site will be saved.

We will help them even as we reject their input

The stated goal of the site is to publish useful question and answer pairs. Those pairings, if done right, will answer the casual Googlers' questions before they even create a StackExchange account. We will stem the tide of duplicate and half-closed questions that crowd out the good questions and answers. To make it work, we need intelligent askers and informed answerers working together. Everyone else should simply enjoy the show.

You have the power to solve the problem

Gamification is a big part of this site. We reward people when we:

  • answer their questions
  • upvote their questions, answers, and posts
  • view their questions (the view counter increments)

We express our disapproval when we:

  • downvote
  • comment to explain why they were wrong

Closing is useful too, but that is mostly for us and future site visitors and often takes a long time to have an effect. If you want to send a message to the ones who are causing the problem, actively downvote their bad posts. This includes:

  • Uninformed questions. If they could get the answer by searching our site or Google, downvote. The question isn't useful and shows no research effort.
  • Uninformed answers. If the answer is wrong or incomplete, it isn't useful.
  • Correct answers to uninformed questions. This one is controversial, but stick with me for a minute: When we answer bad questions, we reward the bad askers. Most of the site regulars know not to answer bad questions, but we should help inform other users of the site by downvoting their answers, too even when they are technically correct. The downvote tab says "This answer is not useful." If the answer encourages bad behavior, it is definitely not useful.

Forget the love. This site is special and unique. When the non-enthusiasts post their drivel, smack their little hands and express your disapproval; remind them that they are allowed to look and admire, but they may not handle it lest they break it.

Of course, the way to do this is by mercilessly downvoting/closing/deleting the bad questions, not by posting insulting or offensive comments. Not being mean doesn't mean putting up with crap. Getting rid of crap doesn't require being mean. –  Servy Apr 24 at 19:52
+1: Couldn't have said it better myself. –  Lightness Races in Orbit Apr 24 at 19:54
I hated the Summer of L*** too, but I can't blame it for the flood of crap; honestly, I don't give it credit for doing anything at all. But I do appreciate your call to arms! Reject the non-enthusiasts! (We need a better word than "non-enthusiasts".) –  Josh Caswell Apr 24 at 20:08
@JoshCaswell They are muggles and should be treated with disdain (when they must be treated at all). /snark –  George Cummins Apr 24 at 21:01
@BrianRoach FWIW, I'm with you, and fourteen others are as well. If we all throw all of our pebbles in the ocean and encourage others to do the same, we might just turn the tide. –  George Cummins Apr 24 at 22:35
@wruckie You ask a good question that is worthy of its own topic. For one reasonable suggestion, see the "What might be done?" section of A. Webb's answer on this page. However, keep in mind that we want to keep the doors open wide for programmers and enthusiasts; they are still out there and we want them to come in. –  George Cummins Apr 25 at 2:51
@GeorgeCummins Keeping the doors wide open does not make SO a welcoming place, Welcoming people make SO a welcoming place. I admit down votes, corrective comments, and declined edits have taught me more about being a productive member of SO than any upvotes and commendations have. Still, as a relative newbie, I have seen a lot of megaton bombs used on new/naive users when a gentle nudge might have been all that was needed. In my opinion, their decision to stay and grow with the community is necessary to ensure SO's future success. –  wruckie Apr 25 at 3:32
@GeorgeCummins You and the people that upvoted this are terrible people for making and promoting this mean spirited and spiteful answer. You're all part of the problem. –  Clara Onager Apr 25 at 8:45
@ClaraOnager What "problem" would that be, exactly? The influx of cargo-culting morons I constantly have to dismiss from interviews because they can't actually solve problems / write code pretty much reflects the problem. SO has turned into 98% "Give me teh fish" with people who don't care about the site gleefully handing out fish because of imaginary internet points. That's not what the core values and guidelines of the site supposedly state / represent. –  Brian Roach Apr 25 at 9:43
@Brian this. So, so much. –  Pekka 웃 Apr 25 at 20:41
Everything you say is very excellent, but I wish you didn't mention "All answers to bad questions should be downvoted, whether they are correct or not". It's just too controversial, and the only thing I disagree with in this Answer. –  Tshepang Apr 26 at 8:23
"It is no longer a place for professional or enthusiast programmers." I have thought much of this lately. Places like MathOverflow and Linguistics for two have an environment where basically non-PhD level questions get immediately closed. Then other sites, like Parenting, well even if having a child is a requirement, so many people qualify. So what are we? Are we a professional community, an enthusiast community, or a community of students getting poor marks in their beginning programming classes and trying to avoid the reality of changing fields? –  demongolem Apr 28 at 19:17
George has provided the "right answer" to this post. Even if it's not motivated by the right reasons, we should consider the fact that time well spent learning something on your own is more valuable than asking someone else to do it for you. I think the review process should include an RTFM option. –  brontech.com May 2 at 13:30
"We need a Winter of Death". Exactly! SO wants eyeballs (it's a business - more eyeballs = more advertising $), but is killing the golden goose with its current policies. Discouraging new users from posting trivial questions is strictly a good thing. In order to get answers, they will be forced to (heaven forbid) actually Google their question, and the regular users can focus more of their time on crafting higher quality questions and answers. –  Gerrat May 2 at 21:51

My take: (largely speaking from experience ... unfortunately)

  • Too many very low quality posts and too many people encouraging it (with answers and/or upvotes), leading to an overall more negative outlook by those who view the posts as very low quality (i.e. more downvoting / close voting or flagging for those who don't really deserve it, and more negative comments).

  • People downvote instead of voting / flagging to close because:

    • They think that's 'nicer' (... ?).

    • They think the question should be closed but either can't find the correct close reason (due to the somewhat recent changes to the close reasons) and / or the question needs a custom close reason, which they're unable to provide (short of using a custom moderator flag) as they have < 3k reputation ... or they're feeling lazy.

  • People comment to indicate what's wrong with posts rather than or in addition to downvoting / voting or flagging to close (ironically generally making very little impact to the overall quality of posts). And trying to lead the endless masses onto the right path in vain (because most people just don't seem to want to improve) can make one negative.

    These people might eventually give up and just resort to downvoting / voting or flagging to close (without the comment), perhaps more generously than one should.

how can anyone improve their questions now or in the future if nobody comments on downvotes? If someone downvotes me, tell me why so i can learn and improve. Isn't that what Stack Overflow is all about? –  Sumit Apr 23 at 10:35
Dukeling everything in the world are just opinion. Ask on cogSci for better psychological and scientific explanation. You should read your answer as: "People here believe that is a positive things to close what they believe to be low quality posts and to take drastic measures against who opens this kind of questions." –  Revious Apr 23 at 10:46
I guess people prefer downvoting to flagging because there is no "too trivial" flag, other than the very wide "other reasons" flag. –  kat0r Apr 23 at 10:52
@Revious If everything is opinions, is there any point to pointing that out at any time other than during a philosophical discussion? (I imagine it's more of a philosophical issue than a scientific one). "Drastic measures" - that's definitely also an opinion - I personally don't see taking a few imaginary points away from someone, preventing someone from getting answers on a site they chose to be on or even eventually banning someone from said site if they can't manage to follow the presented guidelines as particularly drastic. –  Dukeling Apr 23 at 11:06
@Revious I, for one, always try to keep an open mind and understand others' points of view (although I might sometimes be too lazy to explicitly ask what it is and/or assume someone will defend their point even if not explicitly asked). I'm not sure what gave you the idea that I don't. Unless you're talking about trying to find out why people would post what I deem low quality posts, which can easily be justified - I believe that any attempt I could make for trying to figure out the motivation behind some aspect of a post would likely come across sarcastically / offensively. –  Dukeling Apr 23 at 12:30
@Revious More reputation (up to 20k) gives you a louder voice in the community (more privileges), that's absolutely true, but it's also justified - more reputation means you post the type of things the community likes, thus keeping you is in its best interest. Not contributing to Meta is one's own choice - if we instead shove any issue we deem important into users' faces (... or do you have an idea that doesn't involve that?), that's likely to alienate more users than those who'd prefer it, and we now have the "Community Bulletin" to display popular Meta issues on the site. –  Dukeling Apr 23 at 12:42
@Dukeling: mmm... not always the stuff are intuitive. For example, did you know that perfectionism relates to obsessive trait of personality (cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5844/…;? Also, do you think that the exponential suspension length is a fair measure? Or that the "negativity" on high-rep contributors leads to a balanced effort when they make "louder voice"? I see a really strong lack of dialogue. I've collected tons of evidence after some ban, suspension and so on. Who cares? People just care about their personal stress at seeing low quality q. –  Revious Apr 23 at 12:53
@Revious Should we just keep banning them for the same period over and over again? That doesn't make too much sense to me ("insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Einstein). Not sure how respond to the rest of your comment - I merely pointed out the reason behind the negativity, but one can do a per-user analysis of any contribution, and ban them if appropriate. Keep in mind that the SE staff need to change things regarding bans, not the community (and you need to propose changes, not just point out problems). –  Dukeling Apr 23 at 13:20
@Dukeling: I will only answer to this sentence: "Should we just keep banning them for the same period over and over again?" => no. You should open a dialogue or simply try to ban people in a linear growing duration model. The exponential growing is a drastic measure which should be really justified. And saying: "I get bored if I don't use exponential growing ban" is not something which sounds good. As well as "the community will become worse if we don't use exponential growing ban" => my answer would be: "have you tried a linear growing model? have you tried dialogue? have you some evidence?" –  Revious Apr 23 at 13:25
Interestingly, I rarely hit the downvote button on a poor question; I either comment if I think it's salvageable by the OP, or just vote to close (for whichever reason is most apt). I do downvote answers when they're spectacularly bad, though. –  Eight-Bit Guru Apr 23 at 15:24
"People downvote instead of voting / flagging to close because they think that's 'nicer'." or because the close reasons that fit many of these low quality questions no longer exist. –  Kevin B Apr 23 at 15:54
@Sumit I couldn't agree more with your comment. This has been a major frustration for me. I try extremely hard to write good questions and answers, and sometimes they just get downvoted. More often than not, no explanation is left and I never have any idea why. As a result, nothing is fixed. –  dallin Apr 24 at 18:04

It's not the moderators to blame [for this].

It's because the initial [wrong] decision to choose an ochlocracy as a ruling force for this site.

On Stack Overflow we have a mob rule at its best:

Apparently, experienced users are outnumbered by noobs. Either because experts are scarce in general and because they don't have time to hang around all day long. As a result we have a site filled with uneducated "enthusiasts", and thus we can see all that mess:

  • Uneducated folks tend to flood the site with pointless questions, making rare good questions sink so fast that only a bounty, manually attached to the latter, can give it a chance.
  • Uneducated folks tend to answer mostly simple and repetitive questions
  • Uneducated folks tend to vote on mostly obvious answers
  • Uneducated folks tend to give a kick to a question they don't understand - your case.

The problem is: this site is attracting them in great numbers. With all these shiny badges and rep points that never attract a mature person but always make a teenager inspired.

If you take another example of extremely popular collaborative-edited site - Wikipedia - you will see that there is not a trace of ochlocracy! There is a community of trusted editors who keeps an eye on the quality. This is how things have to be done.

Yet I bear no illusion towards Stack Overflow. It will keep the same way. Live with it or leave it (or get thrown out by the mods will watch silently at your struggle with ignorant folks, never giving a hand, but who never lose an opportunity if you lose your temper at last).

YES! "THE TRUTH HURTS" –  vba4all Apr 23 at 12:55
Do you believe that there is any alternative to such a system that would be more suitable, or is this site doomed anyway? –  Qantas 94 Heavy Apr 23 at 13:05
@OneKitten I think to have off topic questions to be cleared out of the way, but NOT via closure could make a reasonable start –  gnat Apr 23 at 13:15
@OneKitten "There is always two possibilities" one old lady used to say. I think the situation is pretty salvageable. Only one little thing is needed: people need to stop talking slogans and good intentions - and face the facts instead. I offered a possible solution once, in the style of "if you can't beat them, join them" - if people are so eager to answer find-my-bug question - why not to let them? But without polluting the main site –  Your Common Sense Apr 23 at 13:17
@OneKitten - no alternative exists, but not because it is impossible to. In fact, this opens up quite the niche to provide a service that is fair and absent of needless arrogance, attention and rep whoring and people who assume everyone should praise them and kiss their asses just because they happen waste their time in an unhealthy obsession for attention and recognition. SO is exactly the place one would expect a "nerd kingdom" to be. Nerds are good employes but terrible managers... –  ddriver Apr 23 at 13:18
@YourCommonSense - you can only wish it was a (common) mob rule. A mob would incorporate all kinds of people who will result in more balanced management. I am afraid all the people selected to be involved in managing SO are of a very particular "breed", which explains a lot... –  ddriver Apr 23 at 13:27
@Revious I don't know. I myself and the guy I linked to both were trying to introduce a tag to mark questions we would like not to read - and both managed to get an official warning. –  Your Common Sense Apr 23 at 13:35
Hey. I like the points and badges, and I'm over 40. –  Almo Apr 23 at 15:13
There is a very thin line between mobs and morons. –  devnull Apr 23 at 16:30
I had a heavy chuckle at your use of [for this] - fortunately, I was still able to swallow my coffee and not clean it off my screen. –  Tim Post Apr 24 at 4:09
@TimPost I am glad it worked :) On a serious note you may scroll down to my other answer which explains why I was little upset by the mods at the time. –  Your Common Sense Apr 24 at 12:38

Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

You are generalizing. This is certainly not true of some sub-communities in less popular tags.

Why is Stack Overflow popular tag X sub-community so negative of late?

The Stack Overflow model with fixed parameters for privileges does not always scale well.

  1. No threshold to ask questions: Asking questions is the most important privilege, but Stack Overflow requires nothing to ask a question. Therefore, there is very little vested interest in asking a good question, which includes not asking duplicates. As long as it costs them nothing but the time it takes type/copy the question, there will always be bad questions from new users. The popular languages/technologies attract a lot of new users. The followers of related tags are overrun by bad questions.

  2. Fixed thresholds for other privileges: Take close votes for example. No matter how popular the tag is, it takes the same 5 votes and the same rep threshold to cast a vote. This means it takes relatively few votes from relatively low rep users in popular tags as compared to less popular tags to close a question. This help does balance #1, but not in an ideal manner. In a popular tag, you will always have many users that misuse privileges.

What might be done?

  1. Require some cost to ask questions to encourage more vested interest. A minimal cost would be the effort to register. A minimal cost would be clicking through the two-minute tour. Give some rep points for these activities and require minimal rep to ask a question. You registered or took the tour? Now you have the rep to ask a question. You got downvoted and lost that privilege? Take the tour if registered or visa versa to gain it back. Or answer a little quiz about the FAQ and gain it back one time. Right now we have no cost to the new user to ask but an investment of the community to weed out or educate bad new users. These costs need to be reversed.

  2. Consider assigning some privileges on a per tag basis, first tag prevailing, with different thresholds so that (a) sub-communities are protected (b) large communities scale.

    • Example of (a): New users ask a Clojure question that relates to Java interop. Woe unto thee, new user, that tags ! For you have brought down all of the Java followers upon yourself with all their close votes that may find your question dealing with Clojure specifics unclear. So, perhaps the Java users should be given the privilege to edit out the Java tag if it does not pertain, but not close the question unless they also have some experience/rep with Clojure?

What can I do?

Answer more questions, and/or eventually perform more moderation duties yourself. If you have a large ratio of questions to answers, you may find yourself with different opinions if you were to try to even out that ratio. You can also get a little perspective on why an answerer might need a timeout if you spend some time in the review queues and can help weed out some of the frustrating questions.

In fact, registration is required to post a question (on Stack Overflow, not other SE sites). And there is a badge for looking through the FAQ. –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 21:21
Good. Now make the question ban transparent by tying it to rep. Most new users aren't even aware such a thing exists and therefore don't know the stakes of asking bad questions. For example, set the rep floor to -15 and require -10 to ask a question. Give clear warnings, "Your reputation is low. At least -10 reputation is required to post questions. Read the FAQ for help writing better questions and other ways to gain reputation. As a bonus, we'll give you +10 reputation for taking a short quiz at the end." –  A. Webb Apr 24 at 0:02
+1 for This is certainly not true of some sub-communities in less popular tags –  dirkk Apr 24 at 9:29

I'm a somewhat high-rep user (approaching 90k now) who long ago posted many answers (thousands) but now hardly posts any.

From my perspective, the simple fact is that pretty much all of the well-written well-asked generic questions have already been answered. This leads to only two kinds of questions: the kind where the asker didn't do their due diligence, cause if they did they'd have found the duplicate, and the kind where they didn't find an answer because it's too specific. There are a few more questions running through the cracks between these two but hardly any.

In addition, the high popularity of the site means it attracts all comers- even the ones we don't want, the ones who treat it like Google or a book or something.

Therefore, I believe the only effective solutions will either offer a kind of Code Google, where you put in some code and you get back existing questions/answers that are similar, or offer proper discussion functionality- for example, have a button to ask a question in a tag-specific chatroom. (Please, dear God, keep the C++ room and the Lounge separate) or a forum or both.

Edit: There's always the broken window of how chat never, ever gets any new features or bugfixes. It's a big reminder of how nobody gives a shit every time you log in and you see the same old broken flag system and stuff.


Here is perspective of a relatively new programmer.

One of the hardest part about learning how to program is figuring out how to ask the right question.

Many times what I ask and what I need are not the same thing. Nothing is more frustrating then sifting through hundreds of pages of documentation looking for solution that sounds right. In short, asking good questions requires having proper context which is very, very difficult.

So, yes. Having a guide that says, "Hey, you are asking the wrong question. I'm closing this question for now, but come back after you read this" is extremely valuable feedback to the user and it helps the community. First, the link to the reference will help the original poster and other new users. Second, follow-up questions will be more focused and contextually relevant.

My modest proposal is that the community should assume the better nature of the poster. Instead of implying they are lazy, assume they lack context to ask good questions. That attitude shift alone would help a lot.

And for the 1% of you making English competency an issue.... 90% of programming literature is written in English. Imagine having to learn a spoken language before you could even begin to address your technical issues. Then, when you finally do ask a question your technical issues get dismissed because you used the wrong verb tense in your sentences. Is it too much to help the poor guy out? Edit their questions and point them to the right resource so they know what to get translated. The amount of gratitude felt by the poster for your small gesture is impossible for Westerners to comprehend. The conditions I have observed Indians and Asians learning how to code would surprise you. In many cases they are literally coding their way out of poverty.

And yet SO is not designed to be a tutoring service that helps to guide new programmers throughout the learning process. It's just not what the site was built to do, designed to support, or the problem it wishes to solve. –  Servy Apr 23 at 21:01
Some folks take it too far, but English competency is an issue. We get support requests daily that are difficult if not impossible to understand - and they're just asking for help merging accounts or getting out of a quality-ban, so you can imagine what happens when they try to explain something moderately technical. It's not their fault, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. –  Shog9 Apr 23 at 21:01
@shog9, I agree a certain level of competency has to be there. See no issues deleting Indecipherable questions. Servy, SO is no longer a niche website. The mods have to decide if they want to stay true to original intent or embrace the role thrust upon it. Straddling the fence is the problem. –  jwogrady Apr 23 at 21:21
For a huge fraction of the questions on here, someone who knows how to post the right question is going to see how to find the answer themselves, as well. The exception are the things that are really obscure and require specialized knowledge - sometimes so obscure and specialized that they get closed as "off topic" or "unclear" by high rep regulars or moderators who simply don't have enough specific background to understand the subject matter. –  Chris Stratton Apr 24 at 18:41
@Chris Stratton, couldn't agree more. The act of writing helps define the problem. When I figure out a solution on my own I like to go back to the original question to see why no one responded. I'm unusually embarrassed because my questions demonstrate how clueless I was when I wrote it. In that case, it sure would be nice to be able to edit my post and submit an answer for someone with reputation to approve. That role reversal does two thing... a.) encourages me to share my knowledge, b.) prevents me from gaming the system. Didn't SO use to have that? –  jwogrady Apr 24 at 20:18
I have twice seen 'obscure and specialized' questions closed when I knew exactly what was going on and how to fix it, so preventing me from easily saving the OP the days of pain I had already been through fixing exactly the same issue. I'm not going grubbing around for reopen votes. –  Martin James Apr 24 at 20:21
In my experience, users that have actually registered with a non-system generated user name tend to ask better questions, to spend a little time on them, and to provide feedback as to whether it was helpful (either with a check mark or notes). On the other hand, users with a generated name (eg. user91933193) often do hit-and-run questions for some issue they haven't thought through (I see a lot of PHP syntax and SQL query questions in this vein). This suggests to me that if we made it a bit more difficult to initially register, the median question quality would improve markedly. –  Curt May 4 at 2:38

This is not the first time this has been discussed. "Why so mean?"

The answer always turns out to be the same: The influx of crap is too high. We know the answer to this question.

Now, let's rather discuss how to build tools to manage the "crap stream" more efficiently. We will not find a perfect solution but we'll be able to mitigate the problem partially.

Here are some ideas:

  1. Reduce the vote-to-close count from 5 to 3. In my experience, almost all questions reaching 3 votes also reach 5 eventually. Reduce the burden and close faster.
  2. Detect questions likely to be closed using Bayes machine learning and reduce the close barrier further to just 2 close votes.
  3. A/B test multiple text messages for educating askers before they ask. Determine which one is best.
  4. Reinstate the close reason "lack of minimal understanding". It might not be pristine but it addresses the bigger problem: Closing off crap.
  5. Make closing as duplicate less time consuming. At the moment I personally never bother to find a duplicate although it must clearly exist.

With these ideas I just want to show that it is possible to mitigate the crap problem partially. I do not endorse any specific idea from this list. That's not the point.

+1, for actually trying to solve the problems WITH THE SITE, which are leading users to be frustrated and angry with each other, rather than blaming humans for human nature. If a site for humans doesn't work when faced with human nature, then it needs to be fixed. But similarly, I do not endorse any specific idea from your list. That's not the point. –  user1024732 Apr 26 at 17:23
+1 I really miss the "lack of minimal understanding" reason. –  Ali Apr 30 at 14:09

I think part of it is resource exhaustion, analogous to mining for natural resources. Think of unanswered topics as oil, and rep as money that you can get by drilling for the oil (asking/answering).

When SO first started, it had the last forty years or so of software development to mine for useful questions and turn them in to rep by answering them. The community has done a great job covering all these topics, and those big reserves of unanswered topics are rather well exploited at this point. Truly new topics are only going to pop up at the rate of technological change or novel applications of our existing software tech. So potential rep is more scarce than it used to be.

At the same time our user population is growing. Like with natural commodities, more people competing over scarce resources could make things turn nasty, especially in the face of highly visible "wealth" inequality. To a new user, SO might look like a post-mining-boom economy, with the incumbents sitting on a bunch of rep wealth that they made back during the initial boom time when those reserves were there for the taking. And because the territory is pretty well staked out and exhausted now, there's not much way for them to catch up.

Well said. Any thoughts on fixing it? –  Clara Onager Apr 25 at 8:39
Not really. In the "real world", you get sub-communities that separate along lines of wealth, which can reduce the tensions of visible inequality. That seems like an ugly sort of solution for SO. But maybe there are a couple gentler approaches to provide more distinct roles or paths toward rep in the community. Maybe a simple filter in the Questions list to only display questions from users with, say, >50 rep so grumpy senior members don't have to wade through a large slush pile of newbie questions. –  Andrew Janke Apr 28 at 2:29

I can only offer some additional statistics illustrating the voting behaviour change over time.

The first vote on StackOverflow questions and answers was usually "up" in 95% of cases between Aug-2008 and Apr-2011 but has been steadily declining since then.

The first vote on answers has always been up in roughly 95% of cases.


enter image description here

Of course this doesn't explain why the behaviour has changed.

The OP compared SO to GameDev so here is the same graph for that site:

enter image description here

P.S. "all" includes non-question, non-answer post types too.

2011-05-12: Question downvotes are "free" to the downvoter and will not be subject to a -1 rep penalty. Downvotes to answers are unaffected and still "cost" 1 reputation to cast. (SE features changelog) –  gnat Apr 25 at 13:44
@gnat so that presumably explains the initial deviation down from 95% around May-2011. I guess we would expect a trend downwards as more people get used to down voting questions for free. But what about the large change in 2014? –  Daniel Renshaw Apr 25 at 13:47
this is likely combined effect of burning down CV queue and LQ review queue changes. Note that question closed with VLQ flag, automatically gets downvote from a system –  gnat Apr 25 at 13:54
It might also be useful to understand the volume of questions being asked over time. –  Cupcake Apr 27 at 8:48

I do not know for sure if things are getting more negative(that is pretty subjective obviously) - but I will admit that I am having a lot harder time answering/understanding questions in the past year or so.

I remember when I started answering questions in the Excel tag it was actually a lot of fun. I learned a lot - from people like Siddharth Rout, brettdj, barry houdini and Tim Williams. I gained reputation very easily. I figured if I spent a couple years on here I would be well over 10,000 rep points. (I don't care about rep but that was just my prediction at the time).

But recently, the questions seem (to me) to have become lower and lower in quality. By "lower and lower in quality" I mean a few different things:

  1. the question is poorly written/explained - often showing very poor English grammar skills.

  2. the question (or a very similar one) has already been answered an innumerable number of times - which could have been found out with a simple web search

  3. the question shows such little knowledge of basic Excel functionality that I often feel it is more useful to the question asker to suggest that they should "learn excel" before they try to do anything else with it. (in reality I don't say this because it would be dickish - but that is what I am thinking)

The Excel tag is somewhat unique compared to other tags - there are many people who don't consider Excel a proper programming subject. I do certainly. But I do feel it is being overwhelmed by people who would be better off going on superuser because their questions are not computer science by any standard. You could probably move a good percentage of the questions to superuser.

I do notice the same trend in the VBA and Excel VBA tags - so it might not be unique to just the Excel tag.

Another problem that is related but somewhat separate from just being "stupid" are the people who basically want you to do their work for them. These people are not "stupid" - they are often quite intelligent - which makes their exploitation of the system all the more "criminal".

I honestly don't care about reputation as much as I care about improving/learning new things - and that has somewhat declined on stack overflow - I find I learn much more from the Mr. Excel forums.

I think people like myself could do more good for stack overflow as moderators than by answering questions - but frankly I started using stack overflow for selfish reasons(to learn more) and being a mod is not a task/job that I envy or would ever be willing to do. Especially not for free.

I am glad this question has gotten up voted so much. It seems many people are starting to feel the same way.


Sorry, going meta here, because apparently there is nothing new under the sun.

This is typical of the way that online communities evolve.

Experienced users get fed up with new users because they're not experienced, and make the same mistakes because they don't know they're mistakes yet. Participating becomes less and less fun, and more and more like Work. G*d Forbid. And the newbies feel unfairly excluded because they're not part of The Club.

It was true in the days of Wild West Usenet, and it happens even now. It's a "FAQ entry" you will have internalized if you've ever participated in online communities before.

I've been involved in several over the decades, and they have without exception trended in this direction. Everything I've read in this discussion has had its analogue in the events of those others.

A humorous take on this can be found at http://everything2.com/title/E2+is+unfriendly+to+New+Order

"Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot." –  Spencer Simpson Apr 23 at 18:07
I fail to see the point you're trying to make. SO has never really tried to be a place where just anyone can come and participate. Poor quality questions are supposed to be swiftly and efficiently removed until their authors manage to spend the time/effort to ask quality questions. This is not new. –  Servy Apr 23 at 18:10
And yet this discussion now exists. To address your point directly, it's more than a little conceited to imagine SO as the first community that thought they had quality control built in. That's what the moderated Usenet groups were intended for. And yet flamewars happened even there, often among the regulars arguing over what was "quality" and what was "crap". The first time a question was asked and answered, it was "quality"; the 50th time it was asked (because the poster entered the wrong search term) it was "crap". –  Spencer Simpson Apr 23 at 18:31
If you haven't read the essay A Group is its Own Worst Enemy, @SpencerSimpson, I think you will enjoy it. –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 21:08

Subjective comment warning!

I can appreciate your view. I remember when I first joined SE it seemed there were far more questions which prompted more thought, were more subjective etc, the community felt 'more engaged'- it certainly 'felt' like there was more discussion and willingness to help. Is is a bad thing this feels less the case now? I'd argue no; I'd go so far to say it is actually better now.

As already noted here, SE has changed heavily in terms of the sheer number of questions, answers, traffic and...active users. Not only that, the network has expanded considerably so there are often more appropriate sites for some types of question to be asked.

There are clearly defined rules for asking questions (the oft quoted 'off topic' section for example) and the position and purpose of SE has been clarified and focussed in order to mean dealing with the increased traffic has stayed possible.

What this means is that it may feel a little more 'abrupt', but that more users can be served better, more concise answers, faster. Not only that, but the content of the site is kept relatively 'clean' in terms of its principles.

Although in the glory old days (!) through my rose tinted spectacles I feel there were many more interesting questions, there probably weren't as many as I think. I am actively engaged in SE, and review every question coming in for a few of the tags.... and you wouldn't believe how many are poorly asked- imagine trying to solve a coding question off the back of only having a screenshot of the output? I don't joke, this happens many times a day.

As such, I empathise with your feelings but I have to say I think it creates an environment better suited to higher quality QA. Albeit one which continues to need to grow and learn (and has done thus far).

One thing I would say though- is I do tend to avoid getting into discussion on SE as sometimes it does turn sour, but this is simply a function of the vastly increased number of people and personalities involved (have you got on well with every person you have ever met in life?). The whole point is SE has recognised the need for division of purpose in order to maintain its strengths, which is why not only do we now have more network sites, but SE specifically for Q/A, chat for, well....chat and Meta for more interesting discussion..

"prompted more thought, were more subjective" isn't subjective now a thing that will get your question closed –  puser Apr 23 at 14:26

If the problem is poor questions by new users, then maybe new users need a more guided approach to asking a question. Some kind of wizard, perhaps, with more boxes to fill in

  • This is my problem
  • This is the relevant code
  • This is my desired result
  • This is what I have tried
  • It applies to [these tags]

Then, when the user has a certain reputation, then they can opt to use the standard single box question?

(Perhaps this is a question for http://ux.stackexchange.com/ ...?)


I'm surprised that nobody mentioned that Stack Overflow rules have changed over the years. The broad but interesting questions (those closed for "historical significance") that are now instantly downvoted were what made me so addicted to this website.

The rules as they are today almost induces low quality questions and answers. Why is it rare to see a good question nowadays? I would say because there are almost no good questions that fits the rules.

People will downvote and tell you to avoid broad questions, search more before asking, debug properly, or narrow down the issue, but if you do that then you don't have to ask the question because you will probably find the issue by yourself, which is great, but if everyone did that then SO would be almost dead. There are very few tough questions that you can't solve without searching or debugging.

Each time I see a user who knows how Stack Overflow works, what questions should be asked, and look at his profile, I see that he hasn't even asked 10 questions even though he's been there for two years.

I know, Stack Exchange is a vast network and there are now other places to ask these questions. But these restrictive rules have IMO reduced the overall quality of Stack Overflow.

I read GameDev from time to time and noticed that the rules aren't as restrictive. The most upvoted question is How can I effectively manage a hobby game project?. Ask the same question on Stack Overflow, and it will get downvoted to hell in five minutes. But these are the kind of questions that anyone likes to read.

My thought is that creating specialized sites like "Super User" or "Server Fault" were great, but it wasn't a good idea to create other Stack Exchange sites for opinion-based or broad programming questions.

Let me explain it a bit better. The problem is that even if we successfully teached all Stack Overflow users how to write good questions, 100 bad questions will not become 100 good questions but rather one good question. When going through the process of writing a good question you have to try different solutions, do some research, and so on. So most of them will find the solution by themselves and will not need to ask the question anymore.

So what would be left? Stack Overflow with 50-100 times less questions would become less active than other Stack Exchange sites, which is why I say that the rules are too restrictive.

I also think that experts enjoy reading, asking or answering broad and opinion-based questions, which may be why they are leaving as these questions are now considered bad.

So my suggestion would be to merge "Programmers" with Stack Overflow, or whatever site that will allow these questions closed for "historical significance" to become on-topic again. I know it's a big change, but my opinion is that small changes will not be enough to stop the process that is going on.

@KevinB But anyone who knows how to ask good questions will say that he has almost no questions to ask because he solves most of his problems on his own. I have edited my answer to explain it better. –  Dalmas May 3 at 11:10
"100 bad questions will not become 100 good questions but rather 1 good question" - WIN! And 99 people will have a better understanding of how the stuff they're doing works. And will gradually take less and less time to solve their problems. And in time, will be capable of answering that one hard question left. –  Mat May 3 at 11:20
@Shog9 I think the questions I'm talking about are more questions that aren't asked at all because they don't fit the rules anymore. The bad ones are still there, but the users who would be able to write good ones don't ask anything or they go to another StackExchange sites. The ones in the 10K tools that I wouldn't close/downvote are questions that are kind of duplicates but not exactly. I often see questions getting closed as a duplicate even though I know the answer to one but not the other. –  Dalmas May 3 at 11:20

First I'd like to say that I really like that question. I sometime have the same feeling but I must also admit that I don't hesitate to downvote a question and a bit more to downvote an answer.

Here are my 2 cents on that topic:

Downvoting/closing questions

IMHO most negative feelings on downvotes seem to come from the fact that some people just downvote or vote to close without caring to provide a reason.

It's true that there are some questions which have obvious flaws (just code being pasted, a single sentence with no obvious effort put into it, assignments being pasted etc.) and closing those really helps reduce the clutter in between the good questions. In most cases the close reason is simple enough to provide feedback on why a question has been closed.

In other cases the reasons are less obvious especially if the confusion comes from the fact that some users are new or less proficient in their writing or use of the English language. In those cases it would be really helpful to at least provide a short comment on why the question is closed or downvoted.

To sum it up, I tend to downvote/close-vote questions which display a real lack of effort. If questions suffer from lack of skill I try to help the OP first and only downvote or vote to close if the OP doesn't display any will to improve.

Downvoting answers

Downvoting answers is a slightly different story IMHO. Those who write an answer put at least some effort into it and thus don't deserve downvotes for the same reasons. A downvote would be justified if an answer is plainly wrong but in every but the most obvious cases (answers that don't even match the question) the downvoters should give a comment on the reasons. Only that way one can improve on their answers.

Btw, it should be obvious that if an answer is improved the downvotes should be reconsidered.

In any case the primary goal of voting on answers should be to promote good and helpful answers that others can find easily. In some cases there are several good answers which cover different aspects of the problem, but unfortunately you can accept only one.

A secondary goal would be to reward people who are positive and really want to help the community, especially if they put effort into their answers.

"Making fun of questions"

... make fun of the writing or the style

Well, that's a hard and controversal topic. Without going too much into detail I'd say that some of us try to be positive and when they stumble over a funny formulation they tend to give a comment that is not meant to make fun of the OP but to maintain a positive spirit.

GameDev SE vs. SO

IMHO a main reason for the difference in attitude comes from the fact that GameDev SE is more specialized, i.e. you have less questions in general, less non-effort questions and more specialized topics in general. People who hang out there and answer questions often have more in common with those who ask questions (e.g. some interest in game development) than is the case at SO.

SO has such a huge and diverse user base that it's more probable to find questions that lot of people can't relate to and thus you'll get more seemingly negative response here.


I am a relatively newb user of this site(I like to think only in account age). Only recently have I begun to take notice and care about the health and how this site works (after I had admittedly commited the rep-whoring everybody is guilty of). I too have already become rather disgruntled at the utter lack of "care" that some users of this site show, both new and old.

It seems that the other newbie, ma-at, is one of the only answers that actually suggest possible solutions to the problem we have at hand. Perhaps we want to better define the actual problem first and then brainstorm solutions?

I don't think the problem is as simple as a because crap, or poor programmers, or homework questions, or even laziness*. These merely skirt around the problem. From my brief stay here, it is clear that these are merely side effects of the problem that this site seems to be experiencing.

It seems to me that the extreme low quality questions that seem to comprise a great majority of the currently asked questions are asked by people that show absolutely no care for the charter of this site or its rules to the point where they do not even display the capability to learn. This, to me, is the initial problem that serves as a catalyst driving certain people to respond to such low quality questions in hopes for easy reps, and the related chain of hate that awesome diagram shows. Even though I might not be the most active on this site, I still see that there are obviously more questions that seem to fail to actually diagnose a problem such that answerers can actually answer them. This conceivably causes experienced users, or heck, even newbie users such as me that actually RTFM to become frustrated with the community.

So this lack of care is spreading, people are becoming lazy. Good questions are sometimes burned because people either a) don't spend the time to read them, assuming that they are just a repeat of "how i debug this" or "give me the codes" or b) actually lack the understanding, but may carry high rep and the possibly associated high ego.

Now, I have actually experienced this first hand in kind. I asked this question once before the currently linked question, but it merely lacked the preface telling our fellow downvoters to not downvote my question because it's actually a good question and not a pasted "how do I debug my homework" question. That question was downvoted to oblivion and recieved TWO close votes. Having been literally the 4th question I asked, I almost lost it there and then and wanted to rant on and on. Even though this is just one example of the negativity that I have been seeing and sometimes am guilty of exhibiting, just this one example happening, to me, is completely unacceptable. We cannot be so lazy as to shoo away newer users that ask good questions. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word here, a more fitting word would be that it seems that the community lacks confidence in newer users' ability to ask coherent questions

How do we solve this? Well, I have one possible solution. Instead of attempting to address the problem that exists with the CURRENT active userbase, how about being slightly more selective as to who is allowed to participate on this site? A short and sweet 10-20 min "Introduction to StackOverflow" course that EVERY new (and existing user that is under some calculated cutoff) must take before they have the privilege of asking questions on the site? This course could have a quiz in the end, with questions that test the understanding of the charter of this site, and how to ask questions. I do not believe this is too much to ask from new users, because frankly, as a new user (unless you have been browsing SO for a long time, in which case you probably don't really even need to read the manual at all) you are NOT capable of asking a coherent question that follows this site's rules UNLESS you read the manual. If certain new users are not even willing to do that, then do they REALLY deserve to even belong in our great community? Conversely, if they DID care, then EVEN if they did ask trivial and stupid questions, they would respond well to feedback(however harsh that feedback is) and learn, slowly. Slowly and steadily, the general sense of a real community of programmers asking questions and giving answers to programming questions will return to the masses. Running with this idea, the moderating/review community could be given greater powers to maybe infract/warn new users that are STILL not exhibiting the bare-minimum qualities of a SO user, with a system that resembles that of many forums.

Regarding *: and this laziness would not be exhibited in such great frequency if the new users were FORCED to be educated in the ways of SO.


Just an interesting piece from my absolutely riveting question (not really). I am astounded. In case it is deleted

This is just the type of thing that makes you ask : "are you kidding me, SO community member?"

For the record, I think "because crap" is a terrible answer. Just 2 words, too short, too vague, doesn't explain anything. I downvoted that one :P –  Cupcake Apr 26 at 7:08
That answer to your question is clearly not an answer, and was promptly downvoted, then deleted by a mod in less than an hour. Not a great example of pervasive negativity, to my mind. –  Josh Caswell Apr 26 at 19:05
@JoshCaswell think about it this way, we do not necessarily need to prove that there is pervasive negativity among our community to realize that there has been a MASSIVE amount of people that do NOT care about the system, and are here to use us as a free code writing/debugging service. If we addressed THIS, which really is the actual problem, the quality of the community would improve. I'm not saying we need everyone to be extremely skilled programmers, but everybody that enters a QA site should at LEAST be willing to learn –  rpg711 Apr 26 at 19:14
Oh, I most definitely agree with you that there are lots of people posting questions (and answers to some degree) who aren't interested in learning or contributing constructively. I just don't really see how that example fits in. –  Josh Caswell Apr 26 at 19:16


I try not to be negative on this site but I easily could be on poorly researched and poorly communicated questions. Based on reading in this topic, this seems to be one of the common issues.

How to improve the situation?

The most effective first step I can think of is to bake much more guidance into the question asking process. When I want to point new users to guidance on asking good questions, I always wonder why it isn't just built into the process. So here is one potential way to do that:

Example: Non-binding, Scored Checklist

When asking a question, we add a very visible and clickable check-list + score. The checklist covers the fundamentals of asking a good question. As they check off steps, the score increases. The question can be submitted without the checklist, but it will encourage people in a constructive way to submit excellent questions.

Please remember what it is like to be a beginner or new to a community.

If SO is your first programming community, you probably aren't aware of the expectations or impact of your (lack of) forethought when asking a question. I like to think that many people will work harder to do what is needed when the expectations are more obvious. By non-intrusively guiding askers through some fundamentals, I think we can raise the quality of questions, reduce the number of duplicates, increase happiness of answering users, etc.


I'm sad that the top answers to this question all seem to be some variation of "Well then people should stop asking stupid questions if they don't want us to be negative."

The problem we're talking about is the trend of overzealous downvoting and closing, not deserved downvoting or closing. It's beginning to be difficult to ask any question on SO without someone downvoting or voting to close it. Often if they explain their reasoning, you realize they didn't even take the time to understand the question before trying to kick it off the site.

I'm beginning to think the attitude of "they're all stupid questions" might actually be a key part of what is causing this problem.

EDIT: I thought I'd clarify: the answer "because crap" doesn't answer the OP's question. I never anywhere said there wasn't a lot of crap. Instead, I tried to redirect back to the OP's original question of why is there negativity towards good questions?

My suggestion was that perhaps answerers are so used to looking through the vast amounts of crap, that they gain a general negative attitude that permeates some of their answers or attitude toward other questions. As a result, they are much more eager to downvote and close as a general attitude.

This is relevant: Rubber Duck Problem Solving. –  Cupcake Apr 23 at 22:57
In discussions on the more-subjective SE sites, and especially on Metas, downvotes are often used to say "I disagree" in addition to "your post is poor". Welcome to Meta. –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 23:15
You're not wrong that a negative attitude about a preponderance of crappy posts colors how one views even good posts, but it's questionable which, attitude or crap, is the cart and which the horse. –  Josh Caswell Apr 23 at 23:17
What good questions that are being undeservedly closed are you referring to? Show me 100 questions that you feel are being closed unfairly, and I'll show you 90 to 95 questions that really should be closed. For the rest, there's resurrection. –  Robert Harvey Apr 23 at 23:19
@dallin questions are hard to ask by design. Stack Overflow forces you to do your best to do your own research and to try to solve your own problem first. I've actually been in situations where I'm in the middle of writing a question, and by the time I'm done, the process of writing the question has already helped me to find my own answer, so that I never even needed to post a question in the first place. –  Cupcake Apr 23 at 23:56
I think question downvotes are being used to mark question as either uninteresting or offensive to the principles of the downvoter. And that's not appropriate use of a downvote. If someone else upvoted, who are you to judge? Leave it be. If someone says, "hey, I know you shouldn't do this, but i'd like to know how..." that doesn't mean you downvote it because you think it shouldn't be asked. –  stevesliva Apr 29 at 17:44

I'm a newbie myself and I've asked some stupid questions myself. I haven't been on SO for long enough to see this trend, however, I write this because I think my own experience may help explain this trend a bit.

Programming is becoming more and more mainstream and so is Stack Overflow. When I opened one of my very first programming books, which was completely for newbies, I read that Stack Overflow was the main Q&A-site for programming (which is true) and that I could go there and ask questions. So I did. The problem then is: being an absolute newbie, I often didn't even really know what I actually was asking about. There was just this problem in my code and I asked here for a solution. I couldn't really do research because I didn't know what to research about.

I think that today many many more absolute newbies who don´t really have an understanding of some of the concepts in programming ask questions on Stack Overflow than a while ago. That, as I tried to explain above, leads inevitably to questions that appear stupid to experienced programmers who know what search term to use for this and see the question as a duplicate. That, very understandably, annoys those experts who spend their time on Stack Overflow.

I don´t know how to improve it, I see it as sort of an natural side-effect of Stack Overflow, and programming in generally, becoming so popular.

Not knowing some concepts isn't, I think, a problem. I certainly didn't when I started out here. The lack of knowledge on how to start solving a problem on your own is a massive problem, yes. –  Ben Apr 24 at 18:25
Users incapable of performing cursory research into a given problem are simply outside of the site's target audience. The site is for professional and enthusiast programmers, not causal hobbyists. A minimal level of understanding of the field and the topic surrounding the problem is required to ask an appropriate question. Someone not capable of forming such an acceptable question is someone who needs something that this site simply wasn't designed to provide, namely, a teacher, rather than an expert to answer your question. There are places to get that, SO just isn't one of them. –  Servy Apr 24 at 18:30
Totally agree with @Servy. While I sympathize with total beginners and appreciate that there may be a period of time during which they are not yet capable of asking proper questions, the ability to ask proper questions seems to be a pretty self-evident prerequisite of participating in a Q&A site. There's no shame in someone not having that ability yet, but until they do, it may be better to just read questions rather than to ask them. Lurking for a while before posting used to be standard advice for online communities, and is probably still good. –  Paul Griffiths Apr 24 at 19:51

I don't think that stack overflow is more negative of late, I think that it has always been negative. It might just be that my personal experience of SO has been bad but I think that a lot of users have similar experiences and eventually take on a 'don't care' attitude, use SO as a last resort, and simply don't want to contribute to a 'community' with such a negative air.

Gaming the System

It feels like many high rep SO users are gaming the reputation system to one extent or another. It's not bad on SO but it gets quite obvious on other sites. I'm not going to name names but I'm sure everyone has seen an instance or two and to occasional and low rep users it looks like the system is less about Q&A and more about rep gaming. Hiding rep from each other would alleviate this a lot.


There's an awful lot of moaning about how dreadful most users are, including this thread. None of it helps and it actively discourages many people. While new and low rep users are allowed to participate many of them are driven off because they think that their contributions will be dismissed and destroyed.


Every single downvote is a hurtful action. When you have plenty of rep it's a pinprick but when you have a little it's much worse. Users also use downvotes as petty revenge - someone made a snide comment? Downvote them on another question! Removing downvoting entirely would stop the negativity dead.


Most users don't upvote nearly enough and for the right reasons, especially when new and low rep users ask questions. If a question is good enough to answer why isn't it worth an upvote? SO shouldn't be a popularity contest but it almost always is. A maximum rep cap on questions and answers would really help.

High Rep Privilege

It feels as if many high rep users both act as if they are infallible and are treated as unable to get something wrong. Like a well paid movie star they should only be as good as their latest effort. Rep is not right.

I realise that to anyone on meta this list is going to be highly unpopular and downvoted into oblivion but the view from the bottom is not pretty. SO users appear obsessed with reputation, any suggestions that might entail the slightest curtailment or reduction (gasp!) of rep are roundly rejected. Until the community can put aside it's obsession the system cannot be changed.

You say wrong things about the site and fans are going to downvote obviously, no one accepts the truth that rules are super vague –  Mr. Alien Apr 23 at 16:13
I agree with the opening paragraph of this, and parts of the rest. I think you're missing the purpose of rep privilege though: it's important that folks with influence over the direction of the site have a vested interest in not screwing that up - rep is a proxy for that. –  Shog9 Apr 23 at 21:08
+0 I totally agree with the gaming, the moaning and some parts of the high rep priviliges, but I disagree heavily about the downvoting. I don't see why a downvoting is a hurtful action - after all you are only losing virtual points for some system which do have no real value. Removing downvotes would ruin SO imho, as low-quality content could not filtered out that easily. –  dirkk Apr 24 at 9:37
It feels as if many high rep users both act as if they are infallible yes; but so do many lower-rep users, and (gasp!) even people who don't have a SO account at all. While I support a per-question rep cap, reducing a user's reputation isn't going to change their abrasive conduct one bit. Rep points are meaningless, and after you reach 20k, they don't buy you any actual additional influence. So why obsess over them? And I guarantee you that downvotes are more painful to most high-rep users - most of them take great care to write good content, and have a reputation to protect (pun intended) –  Pekka 웃 Apr 24 at 20:05
@Clara downvotes are a vital element in the site's quality control. They support the cleanup of orphaned questions, and the question and answer ban. Without it, we would all go insane. I agree the negativity of downvoting can be a problem, but simply removing them isn't the answer. –  Pekka 웃 Apr 25 at 13:17

I think it would be helpful (for increasing quality) if the speed of Question->Comment->Comment->..Answer->Comment.. would be decreased by the process itself.

Now it is not uncommon that a question gets answered within seconds or minutes, just because it pops up somewhere. Stack Overflow users probably know this. They can get a good answer very quickly for free.

At the times of mail chess both parties had to think about their next move. The same was true with snail mail. Both parties had a time to think (days) before the next move. Some letters from that time went into the history.

It is the same with customer support (or helpdesk) service. Customer files in a ticket. Helpdesk has few hours to give first feedback, negotiate the problem and then a timeline is agreed, like - this is a low priority bug (no big damage) we will get you the fix within a month. Within that time the customer can add some more details, put some pressure, request temporary workaround, etc.

I'm new to the community. I did not ask any questions myself, and I'm used to solve problems on my own by research, etc. Just my first feelings.

Slow down. Force both parties (Question/Comment/Answer) to take breath and think instead of tweeting.

I've sometimes posted a question, hoping there might be an answer within 24hrs. When the correct answer comes back within 5 minutes it feels like I've just got a hug from a stranger while looking at a rainbow :-) –  Darren Cook Apr 24 at 8:56

This is what I have seen from this site and from my own experience. If you at least show you put in some research effort, you are less likely to be down voted to an oblivion. If you are going to post a question asking about code, make sure to post code examples of what you are referring to. Also vague questions and placing things in the wrong area will get you negative attention as well.

Now my feedback on the things mentioned above:

Research goes hand and hand with programming. I have throughout my career had to be on a project where I hadn't used a specific language before or had to integrate with 3rd party software I never had training on before or used before. I had to learn as I went with books and/or online resources and if I got stuck, kept going and trying to figure out the best solution or technique through, at times, trial and error. All this with while working extra time to not only keep the project on task but also to give myself more time for the learning curve. I think these sites tend to be used to quickly as a quick "crutch" to be used instead of doing the grunt work ourselves. I believe that is why some get down voted and causes the frustrated reactions.

For the vague questions and placing things in the wrong place. That seems to have gotten better where someone will just move the question yourself. I think a little more tolerance needs to be given for these types of questions, especially newcomers. I could see how it could get frustrating to the higher end user base (those with more reputation) because they deal with it more often. Though someone should not be drilled for other questions that aggravated them before. I have had someone mention "this was not a programming question" but was something related to programming. That was all they mentioned and I got down voted. That is not really helpful at all for anyone else who may have had a similar question I asked. A simple, this area would be better suited would work. As I mentioned earlier, I have seen this has gotten better throughout the site at least in my experience. Also, just down voting without any feedback isn't really helpful for the poster either. That speaks more of just a "I want to make this negative" without posting any constructive criticism to help the posts get better.

That is my 2 cents.


My opinion - my very humble, first-day newbie opinion - is that this progression towards negativity is pretty much the norm for an internet forum of growing popularity and functionality.

I was not among the pioneers or even the early users of SO, so I cannot speak from experience, but from my observation this community started as a smallish group of dedicated, interested, programmers who genuinely enjoyed using their knowledge to help out their peers and getting some advice in return when needed. Slowly, the small community grew and attracted more of these educated, experienced people as well as new programmers looking for help. Now, all of these people were more than likely very familiar with computers and the internet - after all, that kind of knowledge generally goes hand-in-hand with programming know-how. It wasn't very hard to keep the community high-quality, because people who didn't care about it weren't invested in it.

But then, gradually, computer use became more and more widespread, and the internet became a staple for daily living. As the popularity of computers increased, so did the computer-related jobs, and so did the educational field of computer science. Now, programming is huge, both in the job market and in education, and millions of people have some sort of stake in it.

I'm kind of feeling like I'm starting to stray from the point a bit here, so I'm going to get right to it. The problem, as I see it, is that this is The Internet we're dealing with. No longer is it just that first group of heavily invested, educated computer scientists, or even the later group of knowledge-seekers. The Internet is the land of trolls, spam, scams, hacks, and general dickheadedness, and even a focused-topic forum like SO will be affected by that to a degree.

Nowadays, who can use a computer? Pretty much anyone. And who can go to community college and take some CS courses? Pretty much anyone. Whereas the programming community was once small but invested and experienced, now it is massive, relatively inexperienced, and only invested as far as passing the class goes. (Please note that I'm not trying to put down the members of the community who are dedicated, educated, and heavily invested. I'm simply attempting to describe the more recent influx of "programmers".)

Anyways, as I stated in the beginning, this kind of thing basically happened to the entire Internet. More access led to less-educated (or just lazier) people frequenting the web, which led to overall lower-quality content. We'll call it my Theory of General Negativity. :P

And that is pretty much all I've got on that as of now. I could be entirely wrong about a lot of things here, but I did not see this in any of the previous answers, and I thought I'd put in my two cents. Thanks for reading this little spiel, and I hope to continue to be a productive part of the SO community. Ciao!


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