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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow being ruined by its mods?
53 points by genwin on July 15, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 70 comments
See http://i.imgur.com/cGtm5.png. I'm not the question's author; I recently searched for this question, specifically pros/cons. Seems nowadays that about 5% of the questions on SO I look up and are perfectly legitimate to me are found to be locked, with a warning to others to knock it off. This is up from ~0% when I started using the site. Every forum I've loved eventually gets lock-happy mods. What does HN think? Am I the unreasonable one? I don't see how this question is unworthy according to the FAQ that SO refers to.



StackOverflow seems to think that these types of questions cause the community to sink to a lower level of discourse. I'd be inclined to disagree, except that the quality of responses their remains the highest I've seen on the internet. So, they appear to know what they are doing.

Quora is happy to host this type of question. Quora responses aren't usually as well-informed as SO responses... but I don't find that a compelling argument for SO to allow these questions.


Thanks. To me it's simply a matter of whether the question is on-topic for programming. If so, don't lock it for being off-topic. It seems so simple, especially when the question gets 400+ net votes and 50+ responses. They should let their users decide, with their votes, whether a question is off-topic.

SO is good, but it could be much better without so many locked on-topic questions. I don't want to ask a question there, even if it's clearly not a duplicate, with lock-happy mods there. I don't like having my time wasted.


I could be wrong, but I don't think it was closed for off-topic (non-programming). I would guess it was locked for "not having an answer."

They say you should be soliciting answers rather than opinions... and, for better or for worse, that is probably why this was locked.


Clearly for worse, considering that the lock reason is (in boldface): "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site".

A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) is not too subjective in my book. It's a typical programmer question.


The goal of SO is to have questions with ONE correct answer, and to have that answer there.

Any question - such as this one - where the answer is "it depends" better be a work of art, or have an answer that explores all the considerations in exquisite detail, or it's going to get closed. Because there's no "one right answer" to this question.

It's "on topic", but not a good question.


If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor.

That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".


The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/


It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss.

But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)


Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.


I call Betteridge's Law on this. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines ]

Stack Overflow has a fairly specific rubric for judging questions, and a central part of it is the requirement that they have a single verifiably correct answer. The example question does not, and it runs afoul of the guidelines in multiple other ways. The example question is something for a conventional discussion board or mailing list - it's not a good Stack Overflow question.


In my experience there's rarely a single verifiable correct answer for a programming question that one can't easily find the answer to without asking (outside of SO).

Also, whereas you're like the fourth person here to say the questions must have a single answer, that requirement is not called out in the SO guidelines at http://stackoverflow.com/faq. The closest I see there is "You should only ask practical, answerable questions". A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) meets that criterion in my book.


If you really care enough about this to understand the background, check out the old Stackoverflow podcasts: https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/?W4

(They have decent transcripts there)

Jeff & Joel talk about the concept of what makes a good question a few times -- the way they got to there is interesting and worth listening too. Actually, the whole series of podcasts is an interesting view into the thoughts of founders starting a company.


I think they made the right call on this example -- the whole point of SO is to get specific answers to specific questions. This question is vague and without the context that a reasonable person would need to give a specific answer.

There are plenty of examples of good questions being closed because they are perceived as generating too much discussion (esp. on the "programmers" se site). IMO, you've given us an example of SO moderation working.


Please elaborate. If I want to know the pros/cons of storing images in a database, vs. (say) storing only the links to images in the database, what more specific question should I look for? How is that question too general or vague? Apparently at least 400 people thought it was reasonable, than thought it was unreasonable. 50+ people thought it was reasonable enough to respond to.


That's like asking "What is the best way to drink milk"?

In the case of milk, circumstances matter. Is the person drinking the milk an infant? Lactose intolerant? Travelling? Going on a 1-week camping expedition? On a diet? Diebetic?

The details are key to the question. If you answered the question "In a glass with chocolate chip cookies on the side", the parent of an infant following that advice would have a baby vomiting everywhere because they cannot digest milk protein.

The database question is similar. Are you storing favicons or 10MB RAW files? Is the database an archive with low traffic or the next Flickr? What database platform are you using? What resources are available to the questioner?


It doesn't have a specific verifiable answer. It's an invitation to discussion.


That seems to be the consensus here. I disagree with it. A clear invitation to discussion would be "What would you do?" not "What are the pros/cons?". There are plenty of valuable programming questions I can think of that can possibly devolve to some level of discussion. Banning all such questions greatly degrades the site and makes me not want to ask any questions there. If I ask "What is the function parameter in this particular language that I use to do this particular thing?" there could still be differing opinions and so the question could be locked.


Here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/105191/what-a...


Thanks. There seems to be plenty of overlap between that site's purpose and SO's purpose as described here: http://stackoverflow.com/faq


To the vast majority of the people using StackOverflow, it is a site for getting information about programming. The mods and superusers may know that it is a site for getting specific 1-to-1 answers to questions, but I'll guarantee that the average user browsing the site does not know that. You have to click to the FAQs to find that out, and many people will not do that. Even if you go to the About page, you see this: "Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions..." No mention of the types of questions that are acceptable.

The above plus SO's popularity (and prominence in search engine results) are the very reasons I find the moderation a bit over the top. IMO, it should be up to the community, not a handful of mods to decide which questions are valuable and appropriate. Some questions, while they don't have a specific answer, are extremely valuable to gather opinions, particularly for those who don't have as much experience in a given subject.

So yes, I find the moderation disturbing and over-zealous, but will continue to put up with it since it is the best resource for finding quick answers to questions.


It's mentioned the first time you post a question. It's also mentioned every time a subjective question is locked by a moderator. Heck, they even have some sort of real time NLP that detects and warns you if you try using a subjective title.


The mods are elected by the community, though.


This is an old topic that was discussed in many different questions on meta.stackoverflow.com. All questions such as these have been given a special archive status where the question is locked, voting is removed and they are popped off the question list.

That lock-happy mod is the one of many fighting to keep these questions somewhere for people like you who push these silly conspiracy theories.

Stop it. It's annoying.


This topic isn't about the age of the SO question. It's about whether the SO mods calling such questions invalid and locking them is ruining SO. The SO mod says it's locked because it's not a good, on-topic question. I don't see how the mod fights to keep the question somewhere, by locking it and calling it an off-topic question.


1. It's not a valid question for Stack Overflow under the current scope. The question was made in 2008. Of course it's a valid question, "Is the sky blue?" is a valid question as well. Doesn't mean it's within scope for Stack Overflow (see more below)

2. The mod took action but all mods took chances putting historical locks on question. There were many questions to clean up. So the mod didn't say squat, it was action by the mod which displayed a message by the system. Get it right.

3. Placing a question with a historical lock instead of closing and deleting is fighting to keep it in the system as much that is hard for you to believe seeing your extreme bias to mods of which you don't really what they do and why goes in the background. You really need to understand how this works instead of these claims. Mods see them, Stack Overflow users see them and they know it's false.

So straight to it,

_Why is it not a valid Stack Overflow question?_

Because it's not _definitively_ answerable. Keyword: definitively.

That's all there is to it. A 1-to-1 relationship with a question and acceptable (to the author) answer. Yes it's a programming question, it's a great question, it's an interesting question, it's a popular question _but_ there is no way to make an answer for it that can be acceptable without clumping it into one answer for the author. Everyone can have their opinion for the pros/cons. Stack Overflow is for definite Qs&As not discussions.

Once again if this wasn't realized this question and those like it aren't going anywhere. It's archived. Please re-read the notice and stop calling out mods, they do a lot (and by a lot, I mean enough that they should be paid for doing it) of moderation work for free. They don't need unfounded claims.

See more at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/126420/what-to-do-wi... and http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/126587/what-is-a-his...


I understand the mods there are volunteers, and appreciate that.

On your #2, it seems you're saying the mod has to call it an off-topic question even if he/she is locking it for another reason. If so, then it wouldn't be the mods' fault, it'd be the SO developers'. It's still a path to ruination.

I disagree that a valid on-topic question for SO should be limited to definitely answerable questions (in this case, where a pro or con can be proven). If that's the case they should make that clear in their FAQ; I don't think they do that. While that can be their unwritten rule if they want, it makes SO much less valuable for programming questions for me, because not all programming questions I find valuable are definitely answerable, like the one I referred to. 400+ people (on net) found that question to be valuable. I don't think a question asking about pros/cons for a programming design decision is a discussion question. A discussion question would be more like "Would you store images in the database, or just links to files?" Even someone who prefers the former could potentially list out pros/cons for both choices.


You might like some data. See: http://stackoverflow.com/annotated-posts?tab=locked&filt...

1900 locked questions, out of which just over 1700 are locked because they were merged into duplicates, or migrated to other Stack Exchange sites.

< 200 locked questions out of 3.3 million doesn't seem so bad.


That's great info. If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions. I just scrolled through all 38 pages but didn't see the question I referred to in the OP.


> If accurate I must be unlucky to hit so many locked questions.

Well, there's another possibility... A lot of those 200 locked posts were created when Stack Overflow was still very young, and are quite popular - they're locked because they turned into discussions or polls and are pretty much played out when it comes to getting anything answered, but keeping them around preserves whatever value made them popular. It's hardly surprising that you might stumble onto a few of the more popular posts regularly - there are a lot of links out there to some of them.

It's pretty safe to say that something like this - http://stackoverflow.com/q/686216/ - doesn't need more answers, and doesn't need to be repeated. But it's there, locked, in the archive for those who want to refer back to it.


It's on page 17, or if you hit the "noticed" tab, it's there on the very first page.


Okay, I see it. Maybe the extent of this issue is my imagination then.


I noticed the same and I'm not sure if there's a commentary as to why this trend has continued to increase.

Programming isn't a syntax only problem and has many steps before, and after it that are relevant in software engineering.

Maybe the mods are taking too much of a narrow programming syntax only approach. To me, that may exacerbate the issues of poor software because people are only searching for a means to the ends instead of understanding why to do things a certain way.


> Maybe the mods are taking too much of a narrow programming syntax only approach.

With the 400+ vote count for that question, and 50+ people taking the time to reply, I say yes indeed they are. It is definitely a programming question in my book, one whose answers could save me & others a lot of work/time.


Looking back at my own SO account (5000 karma earned well over a year or two ago) which I've let idle, I noticed questions that have been closed as off-topic continue to earn karma -- indicating the mods are off on the soul of the place :P


I, for one, am happy with StackOverflow's moderation.


I left stack overflow about a year ago when they banned my account for a week for spamming. I posted a similar answer to a few similar question (like 3 honest) and they banned me. I was so outraged I quit the site completely.

That being said I thought about building a site to compete, but stackoverflow basically owns the market. I have no way of collecting users like they do.


Stackoverflow took their market directly out of the hands of expertsexchange. They're a lot better than expertsexchange in every respect I can think of offhand, but they do have weaknesses, and I agree with the submitter that one of those is the moderation culture. I'm surprised more users aren't bothered by it.

The Internet is not going to run out of space. Just as with Wikipedia, "deletionism" is inevitably an attempt to fix some other problem that could better be addressed some other way. If there's a problem with duplication of questions, that's because the UI doesn't do enough to make the older questions easier to find. (Hint: let users vote on tags, and give karma to users who surf through the suite adding good tags to existing questions.)

Marginally-offtopic questions are especially harmless; if there's a problem with those, let the users police the site by downvoting. If that isn't enough, again, it's indicative of some other problem, such as the lack of some sort of gateway between different Stack Exchange sites.

Ultimately, the mere fact that a site like stackoverflow needs third-party moderation means there is room for improvement at the design level. It may seem that stackoverflow is the craigslist of Q&A sites, but I don't think so. It will be easier to dislodge than Facebook, I think.


The internet running out of space is a red herring. The concern is a dilution of focus of Stack Overflow.


The internet running out of space is a red herring. The concern is a dilution of focus of Stack Overflow.

I see you have the same bad habit I do, which is to hit 'Reply' and start typing after having read the first third of a comment.


I am often guilty of that. In this case, I actually read the whole comment. Apparently I'm not comprehending something.


I followed the red-herring comment with a couple of attempts at identifying the underlying issue and correcting it without engaging in excessive censorship.


The answers and questions were both on topic and related to the sites purpose connecting common programming problems with great programming answers.


From the faq:

Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.


If you don't like open-ended questions, software development may not be the career for you.


Maybe so. And Stack Overflow may not be the site for you either.


Just curious - what was your username? I'd like to see the answers.


russellballestrini or foxhop

You cannot delete your account on stackoverflow without writing to the administrators via email. It is a manual process for them,and they don't delete your account they just rename it and prevent you from logging in. The questions do persist. I'm pretty sure they also deleted my "spam" questions when they banned me.

edit: the stack overflow account is the only one they deleted/renamed.

Here are my related accounts:

http://superuser.com/users/28269/russellballestrini

http://serverfault.com/users/27551/russellballestrini

I was active, honest, helpful and used my real name.

on stackoverflow my username was renamed to user221014

or

https://www.google.com/#q=user221014&oq=user221014


Not trying to offend, but from the answers I see, a number of them are just not right for SO. They're either very opinionated, or not answering the question itself. The first couple of questions from new users go to the moderators' queue automatically, so they will get more attention than stuff from others... then again, that's done exactly so that new users get the feel for what's acceptable and what isn't.

If you want to try again, stick around for some time. Add justifications / context to your answers. Some of your answers were of good quality and got appreciated. I wouldn't stop because some posts got closed. It is a community site after all and the big idea is that others can rewrite most of your post and if it gets improved that way, it's better if it stays around forever.


I have not logged in since they banned me. I am not going to provide free user generated content to a website that bans active and real users for spamming.


If they keep it up you'll have a ready & sizable market.


Moderating any online community is extremely difficult. Rules are generally guidelines and not always set in stone. So, this leaves things up to the discretion of moderators. It can be quite difficult to determine if something is or is not within rules. Was this locking a mistake? Probably, but one question locked means nothing. Moderators always have to watch out for 'rules creep' where the rules are stretched just a little bit over and over again until they are virtually non-existent.

In the SO case, can the moderators be a bit strict sometimes? Sure, in my opinion. But I don't think this is indicative of any broad problem on SO.


Agreed, except I think it's probably indicative of a broad problem on SO (I'm seeing it too much, and I've seen other forums ruined by it). I think what happens is, a mod becomes overly sensitive to controversy (difference of opinion in the answers). Having only one way to end the controversy, they incorrectly declare the question to be off-topic.


This is not an example of a controversial issue.

The consensus for years has been to store a path in the DB to a file resource, and if you store images in the DB you should have a really compelling, edge-case reason to do so.


If you enjoyed this question about "Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?" posted on Nov 28 '08 at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3748/storing-images-in-db... here are some other questions you might enjoy:

Storing images on a database - Jul 1 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1071636/storing-images-on...

Save image in database? - Apr 30 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805519/save-image-in-data...

store image in database or in a system file? - Apr 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766048/store-image-in-dat...

Where should I store photos? File system or the database? - Oct 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1546485/where-should-i-st...

To Do or Not to Do: Store Images in a Database - May 2 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815626/to-do-or-not-to-do...

Store images in database or on file system - Dec 28 '10 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4550197/store-images-in-d...

Store pictures as files or in the database for a web app? - Feb 18 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/561447/store-pictures-as-...

Storing a small number of images: blob or fs? - Nov 28 '08 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/325126/storing-a-small-nu...

How to store images in your filesystem - Oct 7 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191845/how-to-store-image...

User images - database vs. filesystem storage - Feb 25 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/585224/user-images-databa...

Should I store my images in the database or folders? - Apr 3 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713243/should-i-store-my-...

Would you store binary data in database or in file system? - Mar 19 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662488/would-you-store-bi...

storing uploaded photos and documents - filesystem vs database blob - Jul 9 '09 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105429/storing-uploaded-...

I came in here prepared to write an impassioned criticism of StackOverflow's aggressive moderation, but frankly you've made me understand exactly why they do it.


If the question was locked because it's a duplicate, I understand and agree with that. But it wasn't locked for being a duplicate; it was locked for being an off-topic question. I don't see how you've addressed that.


There's a subtle problem with closing questions - basically there's a list to choose from and you can't always express exactly why you made that choice. Even when people agree on closing a question I can often see a wide spread of chosen options.

If you read into the FAQs / standards for questions, this one may not be off-topic, but is definitely low quality. Seeing the expression "is not considered a good, on-topic question", I would have to agree. If there's no specific option for "it's written in a bad way", then this would be the next natural choice. There's no initial research, no specific list of questions, silly title and a tone that would get edited pretty quickly these days.


If being a duplicate is why it is being closed, a search must have been done. Could not a link to the other offerings be given instead? Failing that, saying it is because of duplication?


That's not the reason. All the posts listed above were actually created later ('09, '10) than the one from the main thread ('08). It's just a question that doesn't match the SO guidelines. It's not really bad, but it could be phrased better. Still - locked is probably better than closed here.


Actually, take a look at the "Linked" and "Related" columns on the right side.


Also, the majority wins, so if two voted to close as a dup and three voted for off topic the. It gets closed as OT.


That's a extremely vague question which can't simply be answered on a Q&A site.

There are lots of other places where such questions can be discussed.

Stackoverflow is not the place to discuss all kinds of philosophical questions.

If you have a specific question, best with source code, then go ahead. But please don't make stackoverflow a copy of Hackernews, Reddit, comp.db.advocacy or similar.

I like Stackoverflow most when it can give real direct support for a practical problem.


2 of my favorite questions are locked:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

http://serverfault.com/questions/68883/linux-command-line-be...

Recently I've stumbled on question which I would be thrilled to continue the discussion on them had they not being set to "Locked". So yes, I really think SO is killing a healthy discussion from that perspective.

off-topic: In Hebrew there is a children song which in loose translation means: "It's not so pleasant to see a closed kindergarten"[1]. I guess this feeling applies to stack overflow discussions as well. It's not that fun to find an interesting question being locked.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnRCI8aLt_Q


Often my favorite questions get killed, like the best ways to make money on Android. I'm very interested in which ads to run, in-app payments, etc.. The mod wanted it moved to some bullshit spin off site with no traffic. ;/ The sort of cut and dry questions they do allow on the site are often just the sort of thing you can find in the documentation anyway. Not very useful. Not to mention that stupid score system encouraging people to post bullshit crappy answers even when they aren't sure.


They have no traffic because everyone wants to shove everything onto SO.

And how does the score system encourage that? You often see people with negative score for wrong answers, how is that encouraging?


Well, its mods sure, and all the rest of its users.

But no, AFAICS it's a programming technique memoizer. The important questions have mostly been answered. There will be new important questions, and they will be asked and answered. But between now and then it will mostly be black noise. The color illiteracy and aspiration. Asking how to reverse a linked list?


I mainly get upset by popular questions that get completely deleted. Someone put up an unofficial deleted question archive here though which is a big help: http://stackoverflow.hewgill.com/


Yes it is. That's the simple answer to your question. The SO community has had a different "feel" lately, and I don't like it and I think the mods are something to do with it. That's a subjective statement of course. You might love it. YMMV.


For conceptual questions like these, StackExchange has http://programmers.stackexchange.com


Thanks. Looking at both their FAQs, I see clear overlap in what's on-topic. The question in the OP seems on-topic for either site, but better for programmers.stackexchange.com.


Indeed, the FAQs are not very clear. I nowadays go to programmers for conceptual questions, e.g. about architecture. But there's overlap, and I've been referred to SO from a "programmers" question before. IMHO it would be less confusing to just merge the two and let the community vote on the answers.




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