Title: Stack Overflow: Ways out of the negativity Author: Alex Kirk Published: April 26, 2014 --- # Stack Overflow: Ways out of the negativity April 26, 2014 This is in response to the Stack Overflow Meta question: [Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/251758/578588) In my opinion the problem that Stack Overflow is currently facing is caused by a lot of new users that are characterized by [user Mysticial](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252077/578588) as "help vampires". **They care nothing for the site and just want their code fixed. They don’t research** (or very little) **and provide less than the minimum information needed.** Most of the times the questions are very basic and can be answered by an intermediate programmer in a few minutes. **In a normal forum, users would not yield any responses.** Not so on Stack Overflow: you get reputation for answering questions and therefore even theses badly researched questions get answers within under a minute. _Mystical_ calls these users "reputation whores". The problem is that "help vampires" and "reputation whores" **create a vicious circle**: they both need each other and therefore the circle continues to spin. The outcome of this situation: the site is flooded with a high number of low quality questions, **experienced programmers who are interested in learning something don’t see the forrest for the trees.** Even though questions can be voted up, they don’t stand out enough to gain momentum. ### Proposed Solutions #### a) Create a "beginners test" This would **create a higher burden** for low reputation users before they can ** ask their question**. They need to invest more time and rethink their action before they get to post something. A few ideas what that could be: * The user needs to give 3 search queries that he used either on Google or on Stack Overflow that didn’t yield results. * If they don’t include any code, they must confirm that they are asking a non- code question. See this proposal on [Stack Exchange Meta](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/228072/175377). * Specify the time that they took to research the problem (while this can be easily faked, it makes the user reconsider if they had taken enough time for the problem) #### b) Have experienced users review a question, before it goes online There would be a process where a new user asks his or her question, **but it doesn’t go online**. Higher reputation users read the question but are **unable to answer it, and give feedback if the question has enough information** or has been researched enough. Finally, the question get’s thrown into the shark tank. It would be fine to give these reviewing higher reputation users even more reputation for reviewing this: they are helping to improve the site, **this is actually what the reputation system has been designed for: to make the site interesting**, not for feeding the "help vampires". All in all it is remarkable that despite the current situation, Stack Overflow has reached the quality it has. The **reputation and badge system** has for sure been a **very big factor** in this but it is very appalling that in **order to reach a certain reputation level, you really have to feed the "help vampires"**. You can find me on Stack Overflow as [akirk](http://stackoverflow.com/users/578588/akirk). [Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/) Read this next [Fix qTranslate with WordPress 3.9](https://alex.kirk.at/2014/04/17/fix-qtranslate-with-wordpress-3-9/) ### Leave a Reply 󠀁[Cancel reply](https://alex.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-of-the-negativity/?output_format=md#respond)󠁿 Only people in [my network](https://alex.kirk.at/friends/) can comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. [Learn how your comment data is processed.](https://akismet.com/privacy/)