My last post dealt with a few issues I encountered during my first 30 days of using Stack Overflow. I would now like to propose a few ways I think some of these can be smoothed over. This will be my final post on the Stack Overflow topic; I think I’ve pretty well worn it out.

Hide user scores by default

New users shouldn’t see other people’s reputation scores by default. If the primary goal of scores is to identify the most “helpful” users in the community, use a color-coded or sliding scale graphic instead. Perhaps low-scoring users are on the “cool” end of the spectrum, while high-scoring users are on the “hot” side. Hiding scores by default seems to me to be an easy way to take away some of the competitiveness, while leaving some sort of means for determining a contributor’s “worth” to the community.

Implement a back-off for power-users

The more “powerful” a user (i.e. the higher their score), the longer they should be locked out from answering new questions. A delay of this sort doesn’t need to be giant; a few minutes would suffice. For example, perhaps new users can answer questions immediately, an “average” user can’t answer new questions for three minutes, and power users are locked out for five minutes. This would encourage newer users to answer the newest questions, and would make it harder for power users to snatch up points for simply being the fastest on the block.

Implement a delay for accepting answers

If a back-off delay is implemented, clearly an answer acceptance delay is needed. Let’s say that answers for new questions cannot be accepted for 10 or 15 minutes after they are asked. This would give everyone a chance to form well thought out answers to the questions asked, and would help keep new users from gaming the back-off delay.

Create a better user manual

Hire a competent writer and create a better user manual. This should be self explanatory.

If you have thoughts on these suggestions, I’d enjoy hearing them.

Having used Stack Overflow for over 30 days now, I’d like to share a few of my personal gripes with the site. Those of you who are frequent Stack Overflow contributors may disagree with the views I express below; if so, feel free to leave a comment. I’m going to try my hardest to point out issues that seem particularly problematic to new users. My next post on this subject will cover a few ways I think some of these problems could be smoothed over.

Stack Overflow is a game

This is a controversial viewpoint, but one that has some merit, especially for the dedicated user base. Every Stack Exchange website has both points and achievements. Given those two incentives, many dedicated users seem to play solely to “win.” If you look at the activity reports for some of the top-scoring users, you’ll find that they spend many hours a day, every day, answering questions and leaving comments. I recently viewed one person’s profile, and saw that he had answered several questions an hour for over 8 hours in a row (he must not have a very demanding job or life)! How can new users “compete” with folks like this?

The game is, by design, not winnable

The ultimate irony is that the “game” cannot be won. There’s no end-point, no game-over screen; just a never-ending leader board. Other than seeing your name among the top contributors, and apart from gaining a small set of user privileges as your score increases, what’s the point? Why have points and achievements at all? I can understand wanting to foster constructive discussion, but won’t that naturally occur given the question and answer voting mechanisms? It seems to me that if points were left out altogether, good answers and good questions would still be easy to find, taking precedence over less useful material.

Being fast is often a requirement

This is my pet peeve with the site. Because Stack Overflow itself has so many “players,” and because they are all playing for the same points, it’s inevitable that faster players end up scoring more than slower ones. I pity the person who yearns to contribute, but whose motor impairment makes it difficult to respond in a timely manner. So too the person who may really know what they’re talking about but, because they post in haste, their answer contains a mistake, resulting in its being down-voted by trigger happy power users.

The instruction manual stinks

Like most documentation developed by engineers, the training manual is way too thin. I cannot stress this highly enough. For the first few days on the site, I was overwhelmed by all the various rules and regulations. Most of my “education” came through mistakes I made early on, some of which resulted in a punishment to my score. It doesn’t help that one must dig down into another site to find a fuller set of instructions, many of which should have been in the training manual to begin with. A set of tutorials describing how the site works is sorely needed. I’m a reasonably intelligent person, and if I’m having trouble, think about how many others are out there having the same problem.

Established users are generally rude to newbies

This is a problem that cannot be solved. People are jerks. But the points system really exacerbates the issue. I’ve seen so many negative comments towards new users trying to answer questions; especially towards those who make mistakes in their answers. I had hoped that people would be friendlier, seeing as everyone’s goal is (hopefully) to learn and grow as programmers. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. I guess I should have known better.

Now that my 30 days are over, I will be dialing back my use of the site considerably. My original intention of helping others may have been noble, but it turns out that there are already too many operators standing by. I question whether that game is really worth playing.

In my last post, I complained about my initial experience with Stack Overflow. I decided to give myself 30 days with the service, to see whether or not I warmed up to it. Now that those 30 days are over, I will be posting several of my thoughts and observations. This first post won’t be about the site itself; instead, it will cover some of the things I learned during my 30 days. A second upcoming post will cover some problems I think exist with the Stack Overflow model, and my final post will provide a few suggestions for how I think things can be improved.

Let me first say that I learned a lot simply by browsing the site. Reading existing questions and their answers was fascinating, at least for the programming topics I care about. Some of what I learned came through mistakes I made attempting to answer open questions. Other bits of information just came through searching the web for the solution to someone’s problem (something that a lot of people at Stack Overflow are apparently too lazy to do). Without further ado, here’s a list of stuff I learned, in no particular order (each item lists the corresponding language):

C (with GNU Extension), PHP (5.3+)

The true clause in a ternary compare operation can be omitted. In this case, the first operand (the test) will be returned if true. This is a bizarre shortcut, and one I would never personally use. Here’s a PHP example (note that there’s no space between the question mark and the colon; in C, a space is necessary):

$a = $b ?: $c; // No true clause (too lazy to type it, I guess)
$a = $b ? $b : $c; // The above is equivalent to this

Regular Expressions (Perl, PHP, possibly others)

The $ in a regular expression doesn’t literally match the absolute end of the string; it can also match a new-line character that is the last character in the string. Pattern modifiers are usually available to modify this behavior. This fact was a surprise to me; I’ve had it wrong all these years!

Bash

I found a terrific article that details the differences between test, [, and [[.

Firefox Extensions (XUL, JS)

You can use the addTab method in the global browser object to inject POST data to a newly opened tab.

Perl

The way I learned to open files for output in Perl (over a decade ago) is now not advised. It’s going to take a lot of effort on my part to change to the new style; old habits, and all that.

# Old way of doing it (how I learned)
open OUT, "> myfile.txt" or die "Failed to open: $!";

# The newer, recommended way (as of Perl 5.6)
open my $out, '>', "myfile.txt" or die "Failed to open: $!";

Stack Overflow has always been a better-than-average resource for finding answers to programming questions. In particular, I have found a number of helpful answers to really obscure questions on the site, many of which helped me get past a road block either at work or in my hobby programming. As such, I decided I’d join the site to see if I could help out. Never before has a website given me a worse first impression.

In an effort to keep the community as clean and orderly as possible, new users have very little rights from the get-go. On paper, this is a pretty nice idea. In practice, it makes it difficult for new users to gain any traction. I read through a number of questions today and had several comments for the original poster. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my comments, since new users cannot post comments on articles they themselves didn’t write (you have to gain “reputation” in order to gain that privilege). Posting my comment as an “answer” to the original question seemed like bad form, so I didn’t do that.

Looking elsewhere around the site, I found a few questions I felt I could answer. As soon as I went to answer said questions, someone else (in some cases, a number of other people) had jumped in and beaten me to the punch. I never had a chance to provide a helpful answer. Not only do you have to be very knowledgeable about a subject, you’ve also got to be very fast in providing said answer. I eventually did provide an answer for a question, then realized that my approach wouldn’t work. Before I could take action and modify the answer, my submission had already been modded down by several people, several of whom left snarky remarks. What a warm welcome for a new user! I subsequently deleted my answer.

I later searched the Meta Stack Overflow site, looking for advice for new users. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks that it’s very easy for new users to get dumped on. Take a look at the questions revolving around new users on the site, and note how a number of them revolve around how hard it is for new users to improve. Documentation for how best to contribute as a new user is sorely needed.

The folks who manage these websites need to examine the barrier of entry for new users. I fully understand the need for keeping spammers and trolls out, but someone needs to develop a tutorial (or better yet, a set of tutorials) for how to properly use the website. New users do occasionally need hand holding, especially with websites as complicated as Stack Overflow. I think the community as a whole would benefit, and it would certainly help people like me who have been quickly overwhelmed by what the site offers.

One minor annoyance I have always had while surfing the web, is the non-standardized order in which you consume a website’s content. Two pertinent examples spring to mind. First, are the “post navigation” links that you find on many websites. Out of the box, WordPress uses a link pointing to the left to indicate older posts (example: « Older posts), while a link to the right indicates newer posts (example: Newer posts »). This design decision no doubt stems from the humble beginning of the blog: the journal (as in the pen and paper variant). In English, we read left-to-right, top-to-bottom; and in a pen and paper journal, newer entries are always “to the right of” older ones. I’m sure this is one reason why WordPress themes come as they do. I have always taken the opposite stance, however. Digital entries on a site are not (in my mind) the same as handwritten entries in a journal. So I have always used a link pointing to the right to indicate older posts, while a link pointing the left indicates newer ones. In short, the newest content appears “first”.

My opinion changes with my second example, however. The Twitter timeline presents the newest tweets at the top of your home page. This seems like a major design flaw, since I am seemingly shoe-horned into reading tweets in reverse order. My typical modus operandi for reading Tweets is to scroll down to my last known position, and work my way back up to the top of the page. This is really bothersome to have to do. I’d love to have an option to have the newest stuff appear last, so I could consume the content as it was presented to me.

I take a similar stance in Google Reader. I used to browse items in “newest first” mode, but I stopped doing that since I would see stories in reverse order. After switching to reading items in the “oldest first” mode, I’ve been much happier; it feels much more natural to me. I’m not sure why I feel so differently about two remarkably similar items, but I do.

Which order do you prefer? Is there a “right” way to do it?

According to the WHATWG blog, future versions of the HTML specification will no longer use a version number. I can’t imagine why this is a good idea. How are web designers supposed to know how to target their sites to visitors? A “living and breathing spec” will require frequent updates from every browser vendor, so as to stay current with what’s allowed. As new features are implemented, how will developers know who’s compliant and who’s not? It seems to me that removing the version is a big step backwards. Perhaps they have ways of handling these situations?

I recently stumbled on an incredibly wonderful website; one that threatens my productivity just as much as Wikipedia does. The Vintage Ad Browser is a trip down memory lane, showcasing magazine advertisements from as far back as 1800. All kinds of categories are available to peruse: from Airlines & Aircraft, to Gender (some of which, today, are quite sexist), to Transportation. This site is one of those black holes on the internet, where you can get lost down a trail of links. I highly recommend checking it out; definitely worth bookmarking.

Earlier today, Netflix announced some interesting changes they’ve made to the site. These changes seem to speak volumes about where the company is headed. First off, the “Watch Instantly” tab is now the default view when you log in. This clearly indicates that Netflix is wholeheartedly committed to a future where media streaming is the norm. Is this the beginning of the end for DVDs?

The second change is a relocation of the friends feature; from a prominent tab up top to the very bottom of the page. This must be an indication of how many people actually use this part of the site.

All in all, these are some interesting changes that Netflix has rolled out. It’s will be interesting to see where they go from here.

How many people here use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds? I use it as my primary surfing mechanism now, and I’m curious as to how many others use it. Although it has some quirks, I’ve gotten used to it. Google Reader has made surfing the ‘net way more efficient, so much so that I often look for new sites to troll. If you do indeed use Reader, let me know if you’d like to friend me up. I share stories on the service routinely.

It is being reported that Microsoft is trying to pay News Corp. to “de-index” their search results from Google. Rupert Murdoch (billionaire tyrant) has hinted that he’d like to prevent Google from spidering the websites for the companies that News Corp. controls. Ironically enough, what he wants can be done today for free using the appropriate rules in robots.txt.

If this report is true, it sure seems like a desperate attempt to gain search engine market share by Microsoft. What might really happen if this deal goes through? I’ve got to believe that viewership at the various sites would drop considerably. “The masses” know how to use Google to find stuff. If the stuff they’re looking for disappears, will they be willing (or knowledgeable enough) to use Bing to find it? I’m not sure that’s the case. Should this scenario play out, I can see things going one of two ways: either Microsoft wins and gains market share, or both Microsoft and News Corp. lose big time.

Gizmodo has a good take on this situation, claiming simply that, in the end, we’ll all lose. This will definitely be an interesting thing to watch in the coming months.