This is the yearly stats published by staff of Stack Overflow. It seems that there has been some interest about the health of the site and its determinants. This table focuses on moderation actions, like closing questions, deleting, reviewing, editing, etc.
The highlights considering what the conversation usually is about when referring to "moderators" actions:
* There's a process that deletes posts that are old and haven't seen a single positive interaction [1]. This is the biggest responsible for deletion of post for the site. Then users, then elected moderators. In that order.
* Authors are the ones that most close questions. This is due a mechanic [2] that allows authors to accept a suggestion that their question is a duplicate. Non-authors and moderators represent a relatively small part (~15%) of all closures of questions on the site.
* There are certain actions that only elected moderators can do and no amount of coordination by users are capable of, because of their sensible nature [3], those are the special attributes of moderators. Anything else most users can accomplish them.
Is this true anymore? AFAIK, I've seen "Updated by" (rfc2119), "Obsoleted by" (rfc3501), but that might changed afterwards https://stackoverflow.com/a/39714048
Do you mean in the zinc mining and Coinstar? Pennies have been a bizarre ritual for years, wherein the government made zinc worth less than its pre-minted value, distributed them to banks nationwide, banks in turn to stores, stores using them once to give meaningless amounts of money to customers, customers in turn immediately throwing them on the ground or at best eventually dumping them into a coinstar, and coinstar returned those to banks.
Nothing of value was going on there. I'd rather pay any zinc miners and coinstar drivers who have been displaced to play video games all day while still saving all those resources, fuel, and most of all, time.
So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.
So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.
I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.
The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be.
They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.
That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:
> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.
> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.
> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)
... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.
Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.
Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you
I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.
> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.
completely agree
> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.
And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)
> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.
Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).
Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.
I undeleted it so I could give this example.
> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:
- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard.
- This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.
- This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest.
- There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos.
- The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.
> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard
This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.
Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.
OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers
The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend
If you are talking about those that left the country... yeah, obviously they are happy. They literally left and got a better life. That's called immigration. That doesn't mean that it will be fine for those that stayed.
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