Negative engagement, ganging up, question closing, downvoting

Question

I am relatively new to Code Review, so I don't know if this Stack Exchange site suffers particularly from counter-productive interaction by negatively critical senior users but I'm certainly seeing it with the last question I asked.

I asked a question, 3 days ago, about how best to structure PHP arrays:

What's the best way to tidy up a PHP array with both indexed entries and associative entries?

Over the course of the first two days, lots of positive interaction:

• the question attracted one upvote and three answers
• two out of three of those answers received upvotes
• one of the three answers was then accepted

So far, so positive. This looks to me like a Stack Exchange site working exactly as it is supposed to.

Since then (and I stress, since I accepted one of the three answers):

• the question has been argued with
• the question has been closed
• the question has been downvoted (it now has a negative score)

It is really no wonder, is it, that Stack Exchange struggles to make new users feel welcome? This feels exactly like a bunch of clique-identifying bullies with a petty sense of ego-driven ownership ganging up to maintain the conservative norms of "their Stack Exchange site."

The question enquired as to how a PHP array with mixed-type entries ought to be structured and how it could be restructured most efficiently.

In my question, I gave my perspective on an improved structure and gave my working code on how to get to that improved structure.

Those who answered my question responded to the question intelligently and thoughtfully. At the point where I accepted one of those answers, everything was done and dusted, I thought.

And yet we have people who come along subsequently, and have nothing better to do with their time than to interact negatively and cause nothing but needless trouble. Why?

I have had to explicitly point out that in the Help Center FAQ for Code Review, users are recommended to ask about "Application of best practices and design pattern usage".

This was a - pretty elementary - question about the best practices of structuring arrays in PHP.

Perhaps when a question asking for code to be reviewed is asked, reviewed, improved, answered several times, the answers are good and one answer is good enough to be accepted, perhaps (just maybe?) that's not a textbook example of question to start picking holes in?

Perhaps, instead, those who are picking holes are doing so because it doesn't fit their partisan view of what Code Review should look like because something as elementary to them as array structure is something everyone should have learned at school ages ago, and it never crosses their mind that some (many?) users here are not from a formal programming background and are asking these sorts of questions because they consider it important to get basic building blocks right?

Answer 1

There's a gigantic disconnect here.

I would have felt better if those capable of interacting with the question positively had done so (which indeed they did, and I am very grateful to them for doing so) and those incapable of interacting with the question positively had concluded the question was not one for them.

Seems you define "positive interaction" as, basically, an answer - any answer - whether or not that's actually reviewing your code (as your own posted answer demonstrates).

I understand where you're coming from, really, I do. You have a question, you ask one, there's a way to read it in such a way that it's defensibly within the site's scope, and when two less-experienced users come looking for low-hanging fruits to score a quick upvote with, post an answer, and there, see, these users bring positive energy, these users understand!

Why don't the more experienced users then? Why are they telling you to fix your post? There can't possibly be anything wrong with it, see, it got answers!

That's part of the problem: the fact that a question can even have a single canonical answer (which when you're learning is, indeed, very helpful) on this site is a red flag, and while it's helping you in one way (you get what you came here for), it's also hurting you in the following way: these answers have effectively "frozen" your post in a bad state, as fixing the post will now very likely invalidate the answers, and answer-invalidating edits routinely get rolled back, because the last thing we want is for readers to work out which answer speaks to which particular specific revision of the original post: letting that happen quickly turns everything into an undecypherable mess, and I'm sure we can all agree that nobody wants any of that to happen.

New contributors posting their first answer here might have an understanding of the site similar to the one you came here with, and put up what you would think is a very helpful piece of advice or a snippet of code that solves your specific problem. That's great, but this isn't what Code Review means to be.

In a nutshell, a good CR post (note I avoid the term "question") presents a piece of code with as much context as possible, walks reviewers through it, maybe it raises questions about the design, the algorithm, the performance, security, or any other aspect of it - and reviewers are free to post "answers" that cover any/all aspects of the code, whether or not the concern is expressed in the question - and that's how you could get a reviewer pointing out a bug, an edge case, a performance issue, a language opportunity, or anything else, that you didn't even know about when you posted the question: it's precisely what makes CR such an amazing learning resource.

The counterpart of this, is that you can't "narrow down" a piece of code to one specific concern, strip it of its context, make the identifier names meaningless or otherwise irrelevant, and then ask about that one concept, showing a code snippet that merely serves illustrative purposes, that isn't really the actual subject matter of the post: to be clear, this is what your post reads like, and why it was closed.

Site regulars aren't here to argue; they aren't here to judge your skills (or lack thereof, if applicable); all they want to do is review working code, and in order to do that and make it easier for everyone else that wants to be reviewing code, the SE system gives us downvotes as a tool: at -4 net score, a question no longer shows up on the site's home page, which leaves room for one more post that is on-topic (I see no reason to downvote anything beyond -4, and at -4 all you need is +1 to counter all the deducted reputation points, so this isn't about rep scores either). It's not about policing people, nor about picking holes in answered questions. Close votes are another tool the SE system gives its more experienced users, those that are (usually) deemed more familiar with the site's scope, and trusted to vote accordingly. Not one single (non-moderator) user's opinion can get a question closed: others need to agree, too. Posts that get put "on hold" can't be answered by less-experienced users, and that is a good thing, because it prevents the "stuck between a rock and a hard place" situation your post is currently in... when it happens swiftly enough.

The regulars here were just trying to make sure your next post was well-received, because objectively speaking, that one wasn't, and everyone here wants you to get the best out of this site.

Letting it slide on the basis that "oh well, it's answered" wouldn't have been helpful either, because you wouldn't have come here to enquire about what was wrong with the post, and then the next post might not have been as lucky.

Additional resources:

• How to get the best value out of CR: Asking Questions
• Checklist for how to write a good CR question
• What topics can I ask about here?
• What types of questions should I avoid asking here?

Answer 2

If I may add to a subject that looks closed-ish, there is one thing that might help you understand the nature of what happened.

Under one of the two answers you have on your post, you left this comment (emphasis mine) :

My apologies, I didn't make it sufficiently clear which part of my question was the Code to Review. I have edited the question to indicate it much more clearly. To restate my two questions: 1) Is a hybrid associative / indexed array a bad idea; and 2) what is the best approach to transform the former into a "non-mixed" associative (or even an indexed) array? – Rounin Feb 27 at 23:38

What happened here is that someone took time to post a review to your code and lost their time because there wasn't enough context in the post to understand what was the object of the review. It isn't so bad now because it's a small answer, but imagine a scenario where a user takes 30-45 minutes to write a deep review of a post, only to be told "you didn't review the right thing because I wasn't clear".

People who downvoted/VTCd the post didn't do it out of spite and certainly not because they knew the answer to your problem. The post was closed because there wasn't enough context for people to give a good review.

This happens often and the objective of closing the question is to give you time to add context on your post so that people taking time to write answers to help you out don't lose their time doing it.

Most of the time, closing a post is an invitation to fix it so it fits the scope of the site. You may not agree with the fact that the site needs a scope, but if this scope wasn't there, the number of posts not asking for review or posting a piece of code without context would be too high.

What you should need to take out of this is that a closed post isn't a dead post or a bad one, especially when the OP takes time to try and fix things.