What is happening to PPCG?

Question

Hi Guys & Gals and fellow golfers.

I just want to ask a question and hopefully get some meaningful answers.

I am a relative newbie on PPCG with a rep of only around 2.5k. That suits me but I am continually seeing questions closed for newcomers as dupes and unclear and get very little chance to compete against the mathematical geniuses that make up most of this site. No disrespect intended guys.

I have made my feelings clear on a couple of discussions that have gone on about "How can we attract new members" and "Closing duplicates" in the past. I have also made it clear that I joined because it was a fun way to get away for my "real job" of writing readable code in my real life and having some banter with some fellow coders who think the same way out of work hours.

It now appears that too many members are taking PPCG far too seriously. Maybe it is me that is misunderstanding what PPCG is supposed to be about. I've only been here for a year but am seriously thinking of quitting because the fun has gone out of it.

Just a suggestion for Meta. Am I wrong? If not, then can we do anything to improve things?

Answer 1

First of all, if you see a question closed as duplicate, then assuming the close is correct, that really shouldn't prevent you participating in the site; just answer the duplicated question rather than the duplicate one. A duplicate mark should only exist if the questions are similar enough that working on one is much the same task as working on the other; they're likely to need the same techniques to solve, have a similar level of difficulty, and the like. (If you think the duplicate questions are different enough that that doesn't apply, you should let somebody know, e.g. by bringing it up in chat, or flagging the post.)

With "unclear what you're asking", the other common sort of closure, the issue here is more of a failure of everyone to get along with each other. Because people are competing for the best possible score, that means cutting every corner they can get away with, and that can sometimes lead to very bizarre interpretations of a question. (I know I've got highly annoyed with some people's interpretation of questions in the past; a question of mine I'm quite fond of had to be closed because a user was persistently trying to claim that the equivalent of fprintf(stderr, "error") was a run-time error, a definition which seemed maliciously absurd to me.) As such, if a question isn't massively precise, it puts the answerers in a really awkward spot: should they try to force their way into a loophole, or should they carefully not exploit it and let someone who's willing to cut in front of them? Writing Perl, 12 or 11 or 10 bytes and giving a different version of the program for each possible interpretation of the rules is a pain.

As for the more general question, of why the site's taken seriously, it's the same reason that many other recreational games and sports have for taking things seriously: if your opponents aren't trying hard to win, it's much less fun. (This isn't the only recreational site I'm on; another one, which has nothing to do with programming, has a rather strict rule that you must always play to win, as failure to do so would be unfair on both your opponents and team-mates.) The PPCG version of that is a bit different: it's "here's a problem, you can probably solve it, but can you do better?". The best challenges here are the ones that have almost unlimited scope for continuously improving. (Oddly, those tend not to be pure code-golf; with that, it's sometimes but not always obvious that an answer can't reasonably be improved whilst staying within its parameters for language, algorithm, unused loopholes, and the like.)

If your problem is simply that you feel you can't compete because other programmers are better than you, there are a few solutions there. For example, you can learn (or invent!) an obscure language to compete in, and thus have fewer competitors. Or perhaps you can pick a language you know well, and try to learn golfing techniques; after a while you start to be able to at least tie the best competitors on simpler problems, and then maybe win occasionally when you have an insight nobody else does.

Note that it's entirely possible to compete "privately", without posting the answer; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a problem, instantly come up with an algorithm for solving it in Jelly, then scrolled down to find that someone else had already posted the answer before I saw the question (this also happens with Brachylog too sometimes, but it's less popular so it happens less often). That's disheartening, but it's also encouraging, because it means that at least I wasn't outgolfed by anything other than the timestamp, and that my skills are probably up to scratch.

Anyway, if you find the fun is in solving the problems, rather than solving the problems with an optimized score, you're likely to have more fun elsewhere; PPCG isn't too friendly to non-serious contenders, as that's not really what the site is for (and it'd mean that people who did want to compete would have a hard time figuring out what answers they should pay attention to to compete against). If you find the fun is in optimizing the score, though, it serves its function fairly well (despite the fact that it's hosted on Stack Exchange, which is almost completely the wrong backend software to be powering the sort of frontend we'd ideally want).

Answer 2

I'd just like to express my disagreement with this post.

I love PPCG. I technically joined 6 months ago but I became active only 1 month ago. The PPCG community has welcomed me with open arms, such as in The Nineteenth Byte where I am now a regular. Everyone has been great to me. Proving that newbies can become part of the PPCG community. (On top of my being a noob here, I came from StackOverflow. If for some reason you think PPCG is not receptive to newcomers, StackOverflow is about a hundred times worse.)

I've also found lots and lots of perfectly good questions to answer. Initially I answered questions in C and BASIC, and got plenty of rep from that while none of my answers were very short, per se. Proving that if you're not super competitive you can get reputation.

More recently I've been developing my own languages - which, again, the community has been very helpful with - and have been dedicating my time to that instead. I solve challenges in my languages to help improve them. Proving that even if you're not an avid answerer there is still fun in PPCG.

However, I am/was not the perfect newbie. I asked a couple awful questions when I first joined; they were downvoted and closed as they should be. If you think people should decide to like a bad question just because a newbie posted it, well, no. I soon leaned to use the Sandbox. Bad questions are bad questions regardless of newbie-ness.

I now have questions with 30+ votes. Newbies can and should learn to ask good questions. It may not be particularly easy, but that's no reason not to try.

In regards to your statement that you have to compete against the mathematical geniuses the make up most of this site, do what I do. Don't browse the math tag. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, just saying thanks to the community here. Not all newcomers think you're too competitive or dislike competing with brilliance.

Answer 3

I'm a very, very big noob (this is my first answer to a question that didn't turn out to be a year old) so I'm not very qualified to form an opinion, but here it is:

We need to bring back underhanded*+ make more KoTH

Why? Because you can enter and understand them much better as a beginner (especially King of the hill). Whereas code-golf uses objective measurements, underhanded rewards accessibility and king of the hill can be as bodged as you like, as long as you have a good idea. Reading these questions has helped me build up my understanding: King of the hill helps me start to understand other programming languages , and underhanded answers usually contain 1 concept rather than the 'throw all skills at it' nature of code-golf which is hard to understand as a beginner. Thanks to KoTH and underhanded, I can now (sometimes) understand how one might approach a code-golf question.

To summarize

I do not think the problem is the community. In fact, I love the community; they are the nicest of any Internet site I have seen

I think it is the type of questions that is the problem. This is not a dig at code-golf...I'm saying it's hard to access at first, not that they are bad or anything.

I just wrote this then realised this question is a year old too... :(

*EDIT:After looking at some replies and doing some research I realise that there are probably significant problems with bringing back underhanded. Although it seemed like a fun idea, I realise that it was not having a positive impact on the site and the image the site was showing. I still think that having a wealth of non-golfing challenges is important, for making the site friendly and not too 'dense' and serious.

Answer 4

OK, so with 13 upvotes and a fair few comments this seems to be a question that has attracted some attention so maybe I can now clarify what I am thinking with the benefit of what you guys have said so far.

1. Many thanks to @ais523 for taking the time to submit such a well thought out and well presented answer. Most of my points are related to what was said in the above answer.
2. Duplicates - as mentioned by @numbermaniac, many duplicates are duplicates of old questions and things have probably changed since then. new languages, new users, etc. I really don't think that the response "Go and answer the original question" carries much incentive to do so. By all means identify it as a duplicate if it makes you feel good, by all means don't answer it if you don't want to but why close it? This is not a Q&A site. I often come on PPCG just to read what people have done and I can gain a lot from other peoples answers to dupes. I agree that we don't want the same questions coming up every week. Maybe a time limit could work? If the original is more than (e.g) a year old then let it run and see what happens.
3. Unclear what you are asking - I have actually been surprised by this response to some questions as they have seemed perfectly clear to me. I sometimes wonder if this is just being used as a "catch all" by people who just don't like the question for their own reasons. On previous threads I have made my opinion clear that the sandbox should be mandatory for all users below xxxx rep (to be decided) before they post live. A bit like users cannot comment until they reach a certain rep and that other privileges are gained as rep increases. The idea is not a new concept.
4. On the subject of sandbox, I have read a couple of times that people do not use it because they leave their questions there for a week and get no negative comments then have their questions closed when posted live. Maybe we could all make more effort to monitor and help in the sandbox. I admit I am as guilty as any. Although I have used the sandbox for all of my questions (and received valuable feedback) I sure don't spend enough time helping others there.
5. I guess, as I said in the original question, the site seems to have changed in the year since I joined. There have been questions on meta about e.g. "What can we do to support new members?". My answer would be not to be so aggressive and not close questions so quickly without a decent and detailed explanation why. One thing I suggested on a previous comment was a one month read-only membership requirement (or maybe only be allowed to answer questions and not ask them). I seem to remember that it was suggested that this is setting a very high barrier to membership. Which is better? Fewer member or more "duplicates" and "unclears"? I certainly feel that the attitude to new members who maybe don't have a full understanding about what the site is about has become far more aggressive in recent months.
6. Finally, this is nothing to do with not being able to compete. I am currently learning Pyth, regularly post Python answers which are never going to beat @xnor (or the other more gifted Python programmers many of whom have given me some great hints in the past) and also post using Lotus Notes Formula which is only slightly less verbose than VerboseScript (which I am writing at the moment ;-)). As I have said before I joined because it is fun. Let's keep it that way.

@Dennis. I hope this helps to clarify what you asked in your comment.