@fbueckert "Together"? May I ask you, how did you improve the MSO, and thus the SO, by being in a large part responsible for the current toxic clima on it?
@fbueckert Oh, well, maybe you find it pretty okay - for yourself
Please allow me to contradict.
And it the the exact opposite of the truth. You say: "What you're doing is alienating anyone who might agree with you." While the truth is, that all of the questions suggestig anything will be deeply voted down
And you will be, of course, one of the first downvoters.
@peterh: You are right: the environment on MSO is toxic to your ideas. But that's not personal. Your ideas have been tried; they do not work. It has been proven not to work. It does not scale.
@NicolBolas You can be taken seriously, fbueckert is not. You are like an athlete: and your sport is to collect SO rep. Fbueckert with his 237 rep and 5000 MSO questions downs... I find it safer if I don't label him to anything. Why are you siding with him?
@fbueckert And with your voting stats, and with your attitude, and with stalking after me since weeks, and so on. As I already said, I very rarely block people, but if the SE had a block function, you would be the first.
@fbueckert You are ignored, this is the first time I do this to somebody on the SE chat! I can't see you. It is so... wonderful! Sometime I will un-ignoire you, but not now, tomorrow I have a workday.
@NicolBolas No, I only think that he might have some different, serious problem which incites him to cause so many harm to others, as it is only possible.
@NicolBolas I don't know, why is he doing it, I don't know him. But this is what his deeds show.
@NicolBolas You are a living pearl mine on the SO.
@NicolBolas I think, this is why you see things from a different perspective.
@NicolBolas Yannis is a similarly offensive, harmful account here, I simply don't believe him. Yannis will always argument for more downvotes, lesser sites, more closed questions, harsher punishments, and so on. Just like Fbueckert. There is a little difference, that Yannis at least has provided also useful content. Thus, the first what I can't say, is that I simply don't believe it, because I can't accept Yannis to be a neutral observer
If all you're going to do is disregard the reasoned arguments that people who oppose you make, you're not going to make much headway in convincing anyone of your views.
Yannis's post is not based on opinion. It's based on the actual site; actual evidence and statistics that show that this kind of thing flat-out does not work.
@NicolBolas Ok. There are not too many people on the MSE, but they are very loud: they communication, deeds, voting stats, and arguments have all only a single focus: always to make to many harm, as it is only possible. If somebody asks, "Why I got a week suspension for that", they are surely there on the spot and explain, "You should have got at least 3 months".
@NicolBolas If somebody asks, not on the MSE but on any meta sites, "is X on-topic", then they are always there on the spot, and explain, that "no it is not ontopic". They have a very high downvote-to-upvote ratio
@NicolBolas Moment, I am still reading it
@NicolBolas My another problem with Yannis, that he is talking from the view of an authority what he doesn't have. He is not an SE insider, he wasn't and won't be ever. He is just an elected mod on some sites, and a vehement deletionist SE-wide. He can't say "we tried X and it resulted these stats"
@NicolBolas Furthermore, in the ancient times, I had an account on the Programmers SE. And I disliked it, its whole mentality, its deletionist style, its false mysticism about simple engineering.. so, I made an intentional decision that I won't have an account there.
@NicolBolas And I don't have. Yannis' statement about their experienced growth shows only 2012-2013. I am regularly check the stats of most sites, and I think our elemental group interest to have an at least linear, increasing activity stats.
I am explaining you the serious problems of this stat.
I can make a screenshot and post it. Here I have another problem, that I don't like to post bad stats, it would be a misuse of the gratefulness of the SE, that they allow us to see that. So I post now the stat of the MathSE
The Softwareengineering SE is its nearly exact opposite.
The red line is the count of the new questions, grouped by month. The blue line are the closed OR deleted questions. The yellow is count of the deleted questions.
How is it decreasing faster after an increase in the closed/deleted questions? Where is that decrease? I see the proportion of closed/deleted questions being more or less consistent across the board.
When the number of questions goes up, the number of closed/deleted go up. When the number of questions goes down, the number of closed/deleted go down.
Okay. On the SE.SE graph, what you can see, if the total count of the questions grows, also the ratio of the closed questions grows. The site has a fixed "channel capacity", if they get more question than this, they start to close
Do you see? The difference between the red and blue lines are roughly constant, and not the ratio of the red and blue lines are!
I think you're misinterpreting the data, at least from the more recent parts of the graph. For example, look at the time period right around 2016. We see a bump in the number of questions, and there's a bump in the closed/deleted. But the closed/deleted bump isn't nearly as steep as the total.
Something similar seems to be true for most of the dates on the right side of the graph.
It should also be noted that Programming.SE had a huge problem for much of its life: people asking "programming" questions rather than software engineering "whiteboard" questions. This leads to a lot more closed questions due to being off-topic.
That's also why when they changed the name to Software Engineering.SE, you see that the ratio of questions to closed/deleted drops.
And how do you explain the well-visible phenomenon: if 1600 questions arrive in a month, they close 1150... but if only 800 arrives, then they close only 350?
How is it possible, that the "community" finds always roughly 4-500 questions ontopic, it doesn't matter, from how many?
Btw, the final conclusion of Yannis' evidence is that their massive purgings and closures finally resulted a growth. I think we can accept, that this is clearly not a growing stat, it was at most stagnating even in the time as Yannis posted that "evidence".
"How is it possible, that the "community" finds always roughly 4-500 questions ontopic, it doesn't matter, from how many?" It's for the reason I said. The dramatic drop was due to people no longer asking coding questions on a site that was clearly not about coding. Which means that a flat number of questions that would have otherwise been closed were no longer being asked.
That is, once people understood what the site was for, they stopped asking so many questions that needed to be closed.
And as someone who is semi-active on the site, I can attest to the fact that you see far fewer off-topic questions there nowadays than we've ever seen before.
Ok, it is your view. My view is that the site is controlled by a closed circle of people, they have a fixed processing capacity, and if too many questions are arriving, they start to down-close-del.
So why should your view be considered more reasonable than mine?
On point 2: in your view, there is some "closed circle of people". That means a fixed number of people, who therefore have a fixed number of close votes per month. How can they close more than a fixed number of questions per month?
That is, a fixed, maximum number of questions per month.
(3) It is just group psychology, there is no need to suspect any intentional conspiracy to explain, that if you solved or tried to solve already 15 VtC problems in a day, then you maybe won't check all the needed circumstances so deeply, as you did in your first review on that day.
"Yes it makes sense." No, it doesn't. How does a group of people control a site in such a manor? How do they so consistently manage to close the same types of questions? If they were truly closing them due to "carrying capacity" rather than an actual set of objective rules, then wouldn't they be closing questions at random rather than those that violate those rules?
Yet there is no evidence of any closing at random.
Your viewpoint is founded on ignorance of the actual site, on filtering some data through your preconceived biases. Not on the actual facts on the ground.
But, honestly, I don't have too much problem with the SE.SE site. I think they are going into collective self-dissolution. They think, that their decreasing stats are actually increasing, because they purge the new users. I think so is it peaceful that I and the SE.SE are far, far away. And, honestly, if I find a quora and a SE.SE page in the google, I will still click the SE.SE first, because I still think that there has higher chance of a meaningful answer.
"because they purge the new users. I think so is it peaceful that I and the SE.SE are far, far away." How can you declare that something is happening on a site that you don't actually visit?
The evidence is that they seem to allow a fixed count of questions to exist, which is shown on the stat. But I think the content there is worthy and useful - just the community is not very welcoming
Also, it should be pointed out that Yannis's graphs are not based on questions asked, but actual visitation statistics. Those statistics would actually tell you if new users were being pushed away or not.
"The evidence is that they seem to allow a fixed count of questions to exist" No, the evidence is that the relative number of asked that aren't closed is fairly consistent. That's not the same thing.
"the own DB of the SE, I think it is more than anecdote" It measures the wrong thing. If you want to know if new users are coming or not, you have to measure that, not the number of questions being asked.
The visit stats will always grow, as the content grows. But the overwhelming majority of the community activities happen around the new questions. But really, I have no problem with the SE.SE. I think, now I could provide useful content there, they seem to have also a little workplace flavour which is very useful, and a lot of useful info about IT project management matters, which is similarly very useful.
It is hard to measure, because the few info of the deleted questions filters exactly this out.
On the SEDE, you have some info from the deleted posts, but you have no info for example, from their owners.
My overall point is this: you've provided no evidence that Yannis's statistics and analysis are incorrect. You've personally stated to having virtually no activity on the site, so your ideas about what goes on there are dubious. And therefore, you haven't proven that Yannis's point is incorrect: that broad questions don't work.
But if you see that on SE, it wouldn't be the resource that it is. It is precisely because we forbid such questions (and others) that we are the resource that you covet.
Our focus on tight, answerable questions is what makes us what we are. Mess with that at your peril.
Oh, and BTW: if you want evidence that the drop in questions on SE.SE is due to what I say, you can look here. I'll be leaving now.
So you see only the so many closed questions happened because you've so many purely programming questions, and you closed them all saying "go into the SO"?
hm
It is strong argument
I will think on it.
However, what I dislike on the SE Network, is the the generally antagonistic attitude, particularly of the meta sites, and I have little to few problems to the SE.SE
