I don't see how anyone could downvote this.

@Itsme2003 Because it doesn't address the question?

@Neil Butterworth Maybe, but it's adressed to the asker of the question, and , in some way it answer to it : "Be nice or don't be" should be the only one rule.

I think that most of your disappointment with Stack Overflow is because you expect it to be something that isn't its primary objective. SO isn't a discussion forum, and the primary goal of answers is not to help the asker, it's to help everyone. A majority of people who are helped by a question are anonymous visitors who find it in a web search. Think of SO (and Stack Exchange in general) as halfway between a discussion forum and Wikipedia.

“Did I deleted his question or close the subject ? No. (…) Sometimes, an outsider came with an unexpected solution that works very well. This solution exists only because we maintained the ability for other people to answer to that particular question.” You actually missed great opportunities there. That outsider with an unexpected solution ended up helping one person, and not the many other people who asked a similar question. Stack Exchange's duplicate mechanism works great in this regard. The outsider can post their answer on the parent question and help everyone who has the same problem.

@Gilles : I agree that I expect to be something it isn't, but SO founder wants to come back to its origins, and at the origin it was what I expect :) "Think of SO (and Stack Exchange in general) as halfway between a discussion forum and Wikipedia." This is exactly how I think about it, and this is exactly how the french forum worked. Because moderator used to give some link to existing content, this particular content was very well referenced by google. If some subject are not interesting at all, they will be lost in the mass of message and that's all, no need to delete them...

@Gilles : "That outsider with an unexpected solution ended up helping one person, and not the many other people who asked a similar question" No because moderators used to read every message and if a new interesting solution appear, he will speak about it in the futures messages. Usually, when something like that happened, a new topic was opened dedicated to that particular interesting solution. Most of the time, every moderator wanted to try the solution, sometimes it inspired us to make another better one, it was very exciting to participate in this forum. I loved it a lot :)

In SO, moderators encourage people to NOT give a already written piece of code... It was the opposite on our forum... We encourage the fact to give a well-formated code because I don't expect from wikipedia something like "you should make an effort" , I expect a solution.

@TomLecoz: SO does not (in my experience) discourage giving already written code. It does, however, at times discourage giving nothing but code, since the explanation is generally considered the most important part of the answer.

@TomLecoz: Also, while SO does tend to dislike posts written in very poor English, and outright reject posts if they are not written in English that can be understood, English that is merely awkward or unnatural is not treated very badly, and in fact is frequently just fixed up with edits. (I can't tell whether you perceive someone editing your posts to be unpleasant or not. Many new users do, but it is meant to simply get to the point and make the post better.)

@Nathan Tuggy : it's probably the case sometimes, but each time I tryed a ask "just the solution" because I aready worked a lot before, was tired, and need a solution ASAP , it never been possible. It always requier a lot of time from myself before I could get some help... Why ? What is the goal ? Every people I know use to ask google for an already-made answer everyday but on SO, no, it's not as easy... You need to have 10K reputation points in order to be helped quickly. It's not normal, it's not good, and it's probably one of the reason why this subject is opened

@NathanTuggy : "I can't tell whether you perceive someone editing your posts to be unpleasant or not" , it's never unpleasant when the one who edited my message add a note : "XXXXXX has edited your message because XXXXXXXXXX" If he doesn't do that, it's just a lack of respect

like the one who edited my message just now.... Here what I added at the beggining of my answer " I started the day with 11 points of reputations, I now have 3 :D Are we on a BDSM website ? I don't need a master to punish me" As expected, moderators don't like my sense of humor :)

@TomLecoz: Ah. Well, SO exists primarily to produce Google results, so sure, search for a ready-made answer, find it very quickly, you're done. Search views outnumber askers on SO something like 25 to 1 or more, so the priority is deliberately not to cater to the asker if that interferes with future searchers. Put another way, the asker, the person who has the best reason to care, is required to contribute as much as possible to making a good problem statement for others to find later, in exchange for getting answers specifically for their problem. Writing good questions is not always easy.

@NathanTuggy , as I said, I was a moderator on another forum. I answered to thousands of question and write hundreds ; I also been an active user on the forum dedicated to the "processing" language&IDE and everything happened nicely all the time. But on SO and only on SO , it's like impossible to be as the moderator wants you to be (and I don't want to be that person actually, I want to be tolerated as who I am and I don't think I am a monster...)

"Reputation is how the community thanks you" I now have a single point :) If it's not the evidence that SO is not welcoming, don't know what it is. Thank you too for figuring it out ! :)

I'm sad... If only I had 1000 reputation point, I could see how fast I get to 1 ; unfortunately, I only had 11 and I already reached the minimum... It's not even funny, i'm sad about it

@TomLecoz: "I now have a single point :) If it's not the evidence that SO is not welcoming, don't know what it is." Why should the community be thankful for your contribution thus far? We should not be thankful that a person did something. Gratitude is earned by doing something worthwhile for the site. This post has not been judged particularly worthwhile, as evidenced by the many downvotes it has attracted.

@Nicol Bolas : Maybe the people here (not all of them) could tryed to be more constructive sometimes... This subject is opened because SO is not a good place to be anymore, and it's becoming to be more and more visible. How downvote may encourage newcomer to speak here ? Please tell me.

@Nicol Bolas "Gratitude is earned by doing something worthwhile for the site" Gratitude is one thing, I didn't expect positive votes actually, but what about downvote ? Do it really deals with gratitude stuff ? I don't think so (but I may be wrong)

@Nicol Bolas , you see, that's exactly what we are speaking about. You could not vote and in my opinion you should, but no, in SO, most of moderator actively choose to downvote, and that's why it's really not a welcoming place. If you don't like something, just ignore it, don't feel forced to destroy it just because you don't like it.

Now I have a single point, I cannot even comments other post... No free-speaching ? Sounds like a dictature to me... What a wonderfull welcoming place !

@Nicol Bolas , I'm looking at your answers right now :) I can't understand how you can be so popular with only 186 answers in 7 years , and you are really impressive actually because a lot of these answers concerns how some people have too much points, how SO should downvote more, and so on... Damned, you are so helpful for the community ! What about being really helpfull ? being nice ? -as asked by the founder of the website - Its really amazing, during the full first page of your answer-list, not a single answer concerned development... Impressive...Really...

@TomLecoz: "How downvote may encourage newcomer to speak here ?" Voting is not about encouragement. Or at least, not in that way. At its core, voting is a signpost saying "this content is good" or "this content is bad". If you provided good content, we are thankful for that and give you reputation. If you provided bad content, we are not thankful, and thus take away reputation. If a question from a newcomer gets a downvote, that is because of the quality of the question, not because they are a newcomer.

"If a question from a newcomer gets a downvote, that is because of the quality of the question, not because they are a newcomer" If it was true, this post didn't exist and this one neither stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/… Sorry for you but yes, it's really time for that to change ! Be happy, it will challenge yourself !

@TomLecoz No. Absolutely not. You are misunderstanding the entire purpose of SO. Voting has absolutely nothing to do with being welcoming, and everything to do with content curation. By equating it to being welcoming, you are saying we should lower our standards. I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

@TomLecoz You're concerned about losing reputation due to down-votes. As others have pointed out, this is not a personal attack. It's vote about the content of your answer. You have a long rambling story about another site peppered with whining about SO being unwelcoming. You may have included constructive feedback for the OP, but I certainly missed it. It's more like a comment than an answer (expect that it's too long for a comment). You have 2 options: 1) Fix your answer and try to turn the negative votes around. 2) Delete your answer. (If I'm not mistaken the lost rep will be restored.)

@CraigYoung It would be, if the rep didn't come from this question itself. Ironically, nobody complains about getting upvotes, but as soon as downvotes happen, we're the bad guy. Since this is the only post he has at M.SE, deleting it will reset him to where he is right now: right at 1.

@CraigYoung : "You're concerned about losing reputation due to down-votes" No I don't, and I really don't care honestly. But the fact a downvote can lead to the disable the ability to comment, I think it's a bad thing (and I doubt you can convince someone it's a good thing ) I don't care if you don't see the point of this post. The fact is I never liked SO... Until few month ago, I thought it was just me, but no, I read dozens of article about it , even from some popular guy on SO... There is a problem ! Feel free to ignore it if you like, im not an active user anyway

When I wrote my post, it was mainly adressed to the asker. I was certain that most active user would disagree with me, and it's ok for me. I think "reputation" on SO is really a bad thing, and actually it doesn't represents the reality. Most of popular users are just very normal user but there are here from the beginning and had far more potential for being popular than newcomers. As I said, moderators from SO are very bad reputation outside of SO, that's not what "good reputation" means. Sorry.

@fbueckert : you have only 29 answers in 5 years , but you have almost 6k popular points, do you think it's fair ? It means your frequency is one answer every 2 months : look like a tourist to me. On our french forum, a moderator should have at least 1000 answers... It was not so easy to be one of them, and guess what ? They were nice and tolerant

@TomLecoz It's not about, "fairness". It's about expertise, and involvement. If you don't get involved, then nothing happens. You need to invest in the platform.

And I dispute that you need some arbitrary value to be a moderator; you need investment in the community. That's why you are elected, not imposed, on the community.

And while everyone is subject to the, "Be nice" policy, voting is irrelevant to that process.

You see bad content, you downvote it. It's the primary curator ability; ensure future readers see, and understand, that what they're reading is lacking.

@TomLecoz You're making the mistake that free speech applies to private entities; it doesn't.

It only applies to the government.

lol , human's right means it concerns humanity

So, basically, you're applying arbitrary criteria to your expectation of how things should work.

You can do that, but it won't really be much of a constructive conversation.

If you want to argue how this works in the construct of SE, we can do that.

@TomLecoz You're expecting SE to function in a certain manner, one that has no bearing on current functionality.

"Freedom of speech" is a very specific term, that applies to the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

It is not applicable to the internet, or your dealings with others, at large.

I'll check that, I'm not sure about that - I don't know -

@TomLecoz It's irrelevant.

Comments take 50 rep to comment anywhere.

Otherwise, you can comment on your posts, and any answers to your questions.

Downvotes have the ability to silence that, but it takes a rather specific set of circumstances to make that happen.

Is it? For sure. Do I care? Nope. We have standards here that I want to keep high.

standart :)

Allowing anyone to post anything in the name of being welcoming will destroy SE.

why ?

did you forget when you started ? you were a noob too, as every programmer

Because we have specific quality standards. Ones that we enforce, in an effort to keep quality high.

If we remove that enforcement, logically quality will drop.

@TomLecoz And when I started, I tried not to waste other people's time.

And when I had to ask, I tried to figure out the rules first, before just expecting free help from experts.

of what want *

what you want * - sorry -

You're equating basic curator activities to being either welcoming, or unwelcoming.

Here's the thing: those activities have nothing to do with being welcoming. They're curation activities.

I'm sorry, I didnrt understant

understand

Do you think a janitor's being unwelcoming by cleaning up someone's spilled mess in a museum or library?

If the spiller goes, "Hey, that as awesome! Why'd you remove it?", well, it's a mess. You clean it up, so visitors can properly enjoy the venue.

SO is not a museum... And in my opinion, it's not even a private place (even if there is a creator or a owner, it's the content written by the user who create the website, not the website creating the content)

That's the thing, though; that's what we're building.

A library of knowledge, for future readers.

I don't know how it works in US, but in France, every what you say is protected by author's right and couldn't be deleted without permission

@TomLecoz And to post on SE, you have to agree to the terms of service, which gives SE an unlimited right to do whatever they want with it.

Which includes deleting it.

you're right

I admit it

@TomLecoz To be honest, forums suck at this.

You have to troll through pages and pages of junk to find the one little nugget that might help you.

you're right, another time - it's annoying :) -

The whole point of SE is to take that aspect, and laser focus it. Have a problem? Find an answer.

That's it. Build that knowledge base, and help people everywhere.

Because while we might help the asker, the real goal is to help everyone else that has the same problem in the future.

Ok.. But, be honest please, don't you think it's easier on SO to get a downvote than a upvote when you are a newcomer ?

Of course it is.

Because new users don't read, and don't learn.

Everything I just told you, is in the tour.

and you think it's normal ?

New users get a lot of information put in front of them to read.

Their inability to read is their problem, not the site's.

When you join a community, it's common decency to read the rules and learn how it works.

If you can't even do that, of course you're going to have a rough time of it; you've ignored everything we did to try to help you.

and it's rude to downvote them

(sorry for the english-mistakes...)

@TomLecoz If they don't read the rules, or everything else put in front of them, then, yes, they're going to get downvotes.

They've actively ignored the help placed in front of them.

ahah

Is that rude? Nope.

yes it is,

Is it rude of them to come here and expect us to help them when they can't follow the rules? Most definitely.

I think you take yourself too seriously (it's just my opinion)

no standard of high quality, nothing like that, just "be nice"

so, no, it's not normal for being rude with newcomers, it's definitly not nice

@TomLecoz High quality has been the entire basis of SE.

From the absolute beginning.

well, then why at the beginning, the rule wans't "be an expert" ?

It should have been more clear

you can't talk for the founder

@TomLecoz This is all publicly available.

The rules aren't be an expert.

They can be distilled down to, "show effort"

Do that, and you'll do fine.

I agree, totally, but the problem - in my opinion - is that the readers of SO, even popular, almost never read fully the question , idem for the answer actually. They just answer something, probably downvote, but I never received some any help for example, and I really think how a user should write a message since I answererd to thousands of them

You should tryed to create a new fresh account, with a new nickname, just to see how it goes. I'm surprised everytime

@TomLecoz There are thousands of new questions every day. Far too many to ever see any but a small fraction of them. Readers would rather spend their time on questions that are clear, concise, and demonstrate effort. So if a question has an issue, it's not worth their time to try to fix each and every one they read.

They'll spend their time on the questions they think are salvageable or answerable.

That's the economics of scale.

If you can write a question off due to something, that means you can stop analyzing it, downvote it, and move on to another that might be more worth your time.

I don't understand why you really want to not be nice, is it so hard ?

@TomLecoz Again, this has nothing to do with being rude.

Curation is not rude.

maybe it worth to make some effort to be there, not totally sure yet but I'm doubting

Do you know what curation means?

So what does curation have to do with curing anyone?

mistake-language

Okay. But it doesn't change my point.

hmm, well , ok but no :)

We're not curating people. We're curating content.

maybe you do wrong sometime, some moderators looks very quick to downvote/answer/read/think they're right when they dont

Again, downvoting is not rude.

Everyone makes mistakes, yes.

But it doesn't change the fact that we curate content, not people, here.

Reading comprehension and answering speed are two entirely different things, and have nothing to do with this discussion.

it's not always true, there is plainty of complains about your judgement, even by popular user. Just search for it on google and you will find

Yes, because the vast majority of the internet does not understand what SE is.

when I says "your" judgement, I mean SO-popular-guys judgement

You yourself do not.

So when people complain about how SE is being mean, they include examples that show their misunderstanding.

they know *

So they're complaining based on a false premise, which means their opinion is irrelevant.

@TomLecoz Again, curation has nothing to do with being nice.

I won't repeat it again.

Content curation is enforcing standards. It's literally the point of the site.

you're right but I disagree with the idea that the only one way to cure / curate (not sure) someone is to be rude or cold or harsh.. You can cure/curate while being nice, it's not an opposite concept

I'm not saying there's only one way to do it.

ok, then why don't you try to do it

But equating keeping the site clean with being rude or harsh is a false equivalency.

We do. But make no mistake: We are still curating.

Being nice doesn't mean we're dropping the standards.

just try to be as nice as possible, that's all everyone is asking for

just do your best to be nice, that's all

As long as it doesn't interfere with curation, we will.

nice to hear

But closing an off-topic question is more important than any perceived rudeness from the asker.

it's more efficient in my opinion, in the long term I mean

We already do that.

well I'm not sure about that if the founder feel himself forced to say "hey guys, don't forget to be nice sometime"

I don't expect the perception to change, because users still won't read, still won't try, and will still complain when their obviously low quality and off-topic content gets downvoted and deleted.

The nicest way we can do that right now is just downvote, and close if applicable.

Leaving comments is apparently counter productive to getting quality questions.

when I think "they won't try", I mean "they won't even try to understand my problem"

If a user is incapable of expressing their issue, what are we supposed to do?

We can't read minds.

@TomLecoz Yeah, because we don't bump questions here.

So making trivial edits is frowned upon.

yes but it I comment something, will the subject be "upped" ?

if I comment *

Nope.

From your question, it's hard to make out what you're asking.

First, you seem confused about why a certain method is quicker than another.

Then you ask how you can make it faster yet.

Which...isn't really much a problem statement.

Then how I'm supposed to motivate people to help me (and the other people because you want to write a library for everyone, don't forget, then every question without any response should be super-important, but no, no here, why ? )

We do.

And that question doesn't really meet it.

ahah ok

why

You show a single attempt, but you don't show any effort to learn why one method is faster than the other.

You're trying to make something, but you don't understand your tools.

if I want to convert (and its the case) millionS of webgl-movie into MP4, I need to do the conversion as fast as possible

Have you read the documentation for webgl?

Have you made any other attempts to figure out why one method is faster than the other?

don't need to, I read the documentation of Three.js and they said "if you have a problem, ask stackoverflow"

@TomLecoz Bingo. There's your problem.

ahah

We're not support for any company.

there 's your problem : you don't know everything

Three.js definitely shouldn't have done that.

even the thing we don't know :)

We don't expect you to know everything.

What we do expect, however, is users to attempt to solve their own problems.

I do

And when they ask, to show us that effort.

That's why I'm almost never here

don't need to be here

Well, you are here now.

I thought, in my question, I showed the 2 known way to do it, with correct working code, but I was not happy with it and I always think it's not the correct way to do

So if you want to fit in, learning and adapting to the rules is important.

@TomLecoz That's not a problem, though.

You have two known ways to accomplish your goal.

it's not good enought for my standard of quality :)

"I don't think they're right" isn't a problem. Tell us how they don't solve your problem.

I told them

no response

message deleted

'you're welcome" :)

Told who?

Told them what?

I can't be more clear

@TomLecoz Yes, you can. Because it's hard to figure out what you're asking.

I just told you I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're asking for.

"This, but faster", to be blunt, sucks as a problem.

are you serious ?

Yes.

That's not a problem.

this is not exactly the problem actually

Okay, so that just goes to show you that it's hard to figure out what you're actually asking.

@TomLecoz Yeah, but that's not a problem statement, either.

"Why is this code faster than that code?" is a question for the developers, not SO.

But, as you said, if I edit my question, nobody will see it, and it's forbidden to write another answer to its own question... It's really like helping other people was just an option

@TomLecoz If you edit your question to clarify it, it will be bumped to the top of the page.

If you add a comment, it will not.

And don't use the answer space to bump your question; that'll just get deleted, and you'll lose your ability to ask or answer questions.

It's your opinion, because it's my question and it really need to be solved... This question of a cost (not my salary, servers...) and it's an important one

have a cost*

@TomLecoz And there's nothing wrong with that.

Oh ok, I didn't know that

It changes everything

:)

But we don't understand your constraints. You haven't given us anything to go on, except, "These two pieces of code don't work the same. Why?"

Look at the answer you got. He states what he did, and how he tested it.

And he got different results from you.

ahah I did that because of your rude attitude, I tryed to be like you : minimal

That's super useful information.

And an incredibly good hint for how you can improve your own question.

If you need it to work faster, then you need to tell us why that speed's not good enough.

Not that any of that will guarantee an answer, but editing it to make it better will increase your chances.

@TomLecoz It will. But be warned; if you make minor changes, people are really not going to like it.

Editing to clarify is awesome. Everybody loves that.

Editing to bump, nobody does.

yeah yeah, I get it, I thought it was impossible to edit a question, I mean, I thought it was either forbidden, either not readable

Editing is one of the community collaboration activities.

and that's mainly why I felt unconfortable here, it was like you have no second chance, never

Even unregistered users can submit edits.

We give everyone lots of chances.

But most new users don't try, and ignore everything.

yes, but if its unreadable (not upped), it doesn't make any sense to edit

If your question is unreadable, it'll get downvotes, close votes, and then delete votes.

on our french forum, the fact to edit the question has no impact on its position

If it's salvageable, people might edit it, if they feel they understand what's being asked.

The thing about SO is that nothing stays on the front page for longer than a couple minutes.

Ok, it's really interesting... What do you think about just saying that to the user "you can edit your question, it will be on the first position" when you delete a message, it will be much much more nice

So your best chance of getting eyes on it is making sure you make it the best it can be.

sure

Thank you

@TomLecoz Did you take the tour?

No, you didn't.

no

Take the tour

That answers much of your unfamiliarity with the site.

Actually, I discovered that page yesterday, while reading the other answer to the question. And I thought it was a problem to know it only now

Good! Then we're all happy.

Have a good day!