Hi all,
Today, as I was tooling around on stack overflow, I decided to ask
a question on meta. For those of you who don't know, stack
overflow is supposedly a q&a site. There are zillions of
answers to quite a few "how to do i do x" style questions. Folks
upvote and downvote the answers and the site is a goto for a lot
of developers. I've used it since it came online - back in the
late 2000's. I have a love hate relationship with the site. When
there's a good answer to a question that I have, I love it. When
they downvote fringe cases that I care about to the point where
they effectively become gray literature that is near on impossible
to locate - I hate it. Meta is supposedly where you go to ask
questions about the stack.
Yesterday, I asked this question:
Do you know of
any studies that have been done around downvoted content,
specifically on stack overflow or stack exchange?
By way of background - I
find any questions or answers that are on the border (+1, 0, -1)
as dubiously helpful, but when the downvotes pile up, much like
upvotes, the answers become interesting to me again as they give
me insights I might miss otherwise.
After a slew of why would you think that was interesting, there's
no value with upvotes and downvotes, and your question is unclear
responses along with, as of now, 31 downvotes net, the question
was closed for lack of clarity. My answer, which was informed by
some of the comments was:
There don't
appear to be any papers on downvoting specific to Stack
Overflow. You can find a good list of known academic papers
using Stack Exchange data in the list hosted on Stack Exchange
Meta (link). It is an attempt to keep a current list of works up
to date.
The Stack Exchange Data
Explorer (link) is an open API for doing data research, if you
want to dig into the data yourself.
Which was quickly downvoted 9 times net.
To see the entire debacle:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423080/are-there-any-serious-studies-on-the-value-of-downvoting
Anyhow, other than what I perceive to be a decidely hostile
environment for asking questions, it is still actually a useful
resource.
Wow, have times changed though on the hostility front.
So, it got me thinking...
What was it like in the very beginning of things (well, ok, maybe
not the very beginning, but around and after the advent of v6 and
when it was at or around 50 sites) for folks needing answers to
questions related to unix?
The questions... and for the love of Pete, don't downvote me
anymore today, I'm a fragile snowflake, and I might just cry...
What was the mechanism - phone, email, dropbox of questions, snail
mail, saint bernardnet, what?
What was the mood - did folks quickly tire of answering questions
and get snippy, or was it all roses?
When did those individual inquiries get too much and what change
was made to aggregate things?
I'm thinking there may have been overlap between unix users and
usenet... Also, I remember using fidonet for some of my early
question about linux, but that was 1991, many years after the rise
of unix.
Thanks,
Will