In the linked post, the difference between 1 & 2 emerge in most communities, it's the September that never ended, the inner circle pulling up the drawbridge at the sight of the hordes of outer circle people swarming in. Group 3 belong to group 2 and are hoping to jump to group 1 but just haven't managed it yet (and don't know what it takes).
The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was, which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or unrealistic ideal.
I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way.
My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of promotion. That there is progression.
I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit).
I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers. That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would organise themselves accordingly.
I mean cliques.
Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.
I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling.
By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups, should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work.
In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their particular set of unanswered questions.
Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope to deal with ever more niche interests.
Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.
Saying that Group 3 is a subset of Group 2 misunderstands the fundamental nature of Group 2. Help Vampires are a well understood phenomenon that predates Stack Overflow and even the web. It has to do with the fundamentally difficult nature of programming. There is a large subset of people who want to learn to program, but place a very low value on other peoples time, and see communities like SO as a free resource to the point that they expend next to no effort actually thinking and researching their problem. The worst part is when you give them an answer it does lead to critical thinking, but rather feeds their assumption that programming is about reciting the magic incantation which is easily obtained by asking a guru with a large memory of such incantations. In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one (not even themselves).
How am I supposed to research a problem if every other search result is a closed SO thread? I'm being hyperbolic but SO closed content hitting the top searches is also waste of everyone's time.
This happens quite a bit, the top result on google is a closed ("duplicate") SO thread. SO should be modifying their robots.txt to try to prevent this.
In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one
I have learned things by answering questions for people who were unable, or unwilling to do the research themselves. It's the most beneficial when its a topic I am familiar with, but have not had the need to actually try myself.
> Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.
Hiding HN usernames for 48 hours would help eliminate any HN clique. (I don't think there is a clique, but if there was this would be a simple enough fix.)
> I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail.
Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.
> Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.
Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil discussions and interesting content.
That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.
The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of communication that can exist within a community.
Conversations (forums) are another.
News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another.
Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon reviews are an example).
Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest.
I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the type of division I describe (through subreddits).
Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of scope.
Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within each area.
> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.
You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that.
And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
> you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
They are.
They are all a form of content management system for a community or group.
And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong.
Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller cliques but all with the same capabilities.
You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand (e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population).
Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the company name in my writing.
By that argument, it's impossible for the most popular website in any area which has significant network effects to be flawed, which is just ridiculous.
Maybe nobody has, but that doesn't make it a wrong observation.
As one of the answers on the OP puts it, "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." Karma SO-style doesn't solve that. I think buro9 has some really interesting ideas that might.
>Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.
Ok, its not at the same scale, because it has a narrower focus, but PerlMonks is better for Perl questions and encourages the sort of discussion that SO hates. (It probably does have as many Perl specific questions as SO though).
The styling is kind of outdated now, but the content is better. Unfortunately it is Perl specific, and I am mainly using Python these days. You would look up how to do something and come away with more knowledge of the language and reason why things are done, rather than getting just enough material to copy paste until your code works.
I wonder if a clique based karma method would work. You would be assigned to a clique based on your voting and posting history, and then see the karma attributed by that clique.
At first, it seems that the needed data is already there: karma points are associated with tags, so it should be possible to set answering, voting, modding threshold based on the questions tags, though one would have to decide which tags are valid for a given question. And then there are subtopics: if I post a question on functional programming for instance, should a more specialized developer benefit from his clojure karma to gain privileges? Should it be a ratio? And then, if I update the question to focus solely on lisp, what happens of previous actions performed on now invalid privileges?
The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was, which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or unrealistic ideal.
I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way.
My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of promotion. That there is progression.
I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit).
I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers. That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would organise themselves accordingly.
I mean cliques.
Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.
I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling.
By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups, should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work.
In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their particular set of unanswered questions.
Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope to deal with ever more niche interests.
Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.