| Sep. 19th, 2010 @ 11:37 am I am angry |
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I am angry so I decided to vent a bit. (Please consider to refrain from commenting until you have read the last sentence, as otherwise you run the risk of making me angrier.)
The trouble is, I don’t really know why I’m angry. All I know is that it has something to do with StackOverflow and the fact that everyone there is stupid beyond description.
And I’m not talking about the people who post beginner’s questions. I don’t have a problem with that. Some people enjoy helping beginners. I also don’t have a problem with questions that are badly phrased — some people just don’t have the writing skills necessary to communicate a problem. I’m not even sure I have the writing skills necessary to phrase my answers clearly, given how often I am not understood.
I also don’t have that much of a problem with people posting answers that are plainly wrong, nonsensical, irrelevant, or otherwise bad. I can leave a comment describing why the answer is bad, and then anyone reading the answer and the comment can make their own decision based on that.
What I do have a problem with is that people are unwilling to accept when their answer is bad. 90% of the time I leave a comment describing a flaw in the answer, the author comes back with a comment trying to handwave away their mistake. In raw amount of work, it would be easier to edit the answer and fix it, but these people are programmers, and programmers have an ego, and being told that you’re wrong hurts that ego. Fixing the answer would be a concession to being wrong, so the path of least resistance is to act as if they were right after all and I was the one that made a mistake.
But the other 10% are not without fault either. While these 10% of people are willing to edit their answer to fix mistakes, they will nonetheless not learn from this mistake. In particular, they will continue to post half-baked, wrong and incomplete answers just to be first. The system rewards this: the earlier you get in with your answer, the more upvotes you get, no matter how wrong the answer is. The good citizen who does their research first and then posts a good, correct and complete answer, loses out because all the people who have seen the question when it came in have given their upvote to the wrong answer and moved on (and will never find out that the answer was wrong).
There are some very few good souls on StackOverflow who sometimes answer really difficult questions, and answer them well. I asked a question about type inference as described in the C# language specification, and I knew full well that the only people who could answer that question are people who worked on or with that specification, i.e. people who worked in the Microsoft C# language design team or in the Mono C# community. Of those people, the only one I know to be on StackOverflow is Eric Lippert. And he did find and answer the question.
After the success of that question, I didn’t think much of it to ask another question about the C# language specification, this time about implicit conversions. Unfortunately, Eric Lippert has not yet answered the question, most likely because he didn’t see it — and now it is buried deep in the list of questions, so he will probably never see it. What I got instead was three nonsensical answers from people who clearly haven’t read the specification and/or don’t understand the most basic principles of it — and two of those answers even got an upvote. This makes me angry.
It goes deeper, though. The community at large does not recognise any of these behaviours as a problem. It is pretty obvious to me why: nobody is in it to help anyone (despite overtly claiming so). The people who answer questions do so because it earns them these meaningless reputation points, so they obviously prefer a system that can earn them heaps of those points by giving heaps of amateur answers. The people who make the system (Jeff especially) are in it for making money from ad revenue, and it clearly works. He’s probably making a good fortune from this, and he probably genuinely believes that he’s “making the world a better place” as he so enthusiastically proclaims in his propaganda.
It is not hard to see that StackOverflow does not make the world a better place at all. 99.99% of the questions are completely useless to anyone but the asker (this includes my two questions that I linked to) and dilute any search engine results that would otherwise bring up something useful. The remaining questions are either questions that are too hard for rep-addicted junkies to answer properly, so you end up with a thread full of wrong answers (or, in the best case, no answer at all); or questions that are easy enough to answer, so the answer was already available on the net before StackOverflow. The only questions I’ve seen that could be genuinely useful to someone who found it by googling are questions that have been answered by the asker himself (this includes a question I asked a long time ago about MissingManifestResourceException, which is now the most often viewed, probably because it is a very googlable term indeed). If I had asked the same question somewhere in a forum, I would have posted the same answer there and it would have been just as googlable. (By the way, if you paid attention, you will notice that my answer to that question is a bad one. It covers only my problem, but other answers posted there since have indicated that the same exception can occur in other circumstances. There is no incentive for anyone to consolidate several answers into a single, complete answer, so the thread will remain as fragmented as any forum post would have been.)
The software is full of bugs, too. And Jeff doesn’t care about them. Why would he? It makes him money, that’s probably all that counts. He turns the act of declining bugreports for no reason into a new artform. He is a huge hypocrite, too: he blogs about how the distinction between bug and feature request is useless and is often used “as a wedge against users”, but then he designs meta to have the same distinction, and he goes on to do the same thing with it that he criticised in that entry, except he’s even worse. He redefines “bug” to mean “high-priority problem that affects regular users” (why specifically the minority of regular users? Probably only he understands), insists that everything else should be called a “feature request”, and then assails the users who post bugs as bugs. These people are “strident”, and posting a bug as a bug is “like marking all your outgoing mail as important, a.k.a. crying wolf”. He’s nuts.
I won’t go much more into this because nobody will find this entry interesting to read anyway, but it did help me let off some steam. If you want to help me feel better, try to resist the temptation of arguing any point I made, but instead consider stroking my ego and telling me that I’m right on all counts. :) |
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