I don’t think I understand that. Why would someone pay to generate noise on cplusplus.com? Or SO?

You buy ads from me and pay based off # of views.
So I pay a guy a very tiny bit to throw some bogus topics on my site to make people look. They look, you pay me more. I get an extra 90 cents, the guy with the post get a dime, and you are out a buck :)

I don't get web advertising at all. The whole thing seems to operate like the above ... ponzi schemes and laundering and general thievery from the dumb executive that bought the ad space to place content no one looks at. I mean, am I exceptional here in that 1) if I want it, I will do a search for it, and look at the real sites (not ads) of the thing I wanted and 2) if the ads are noisy (play sounds), flashy (play videos) or in the way (have to click to get them to go away) I blacklist that company. I thought everyone did that. Who is like "ooo, would you look at that, I NEED that" ... right now I have a picture of a sandwich from a place I don't care much about one way or the other. I only noticed it because I forced myself to look due to the topic at hand. At least its not a video of a guy eating it as if he were a viking making gross noises (does THAT really SELL food??) like the ones on tv.

The "they are not real people" theory is loony. Sorry, I'm just being honest. Yes, there are spambots that post, and sometimes bait people into replies, but those are a completely different pattern than the users being described in this thread (like the [edit: removed word here] https://cplusplus.com/user/abdulcc090/)

There have been maybe two or three genuinely deranged users that have posted in the past, but again that still doesn't compare with users like the one I linked above; those are real people.

Duthomhas wrote:
Why would someone pay to generate noise on cplusplus.com? Or SO?

It's about traffic, no one wants to own a site which has 1 topic per day. This sort becomes self defeating: not many posts; so no one looks -> not many posts. As jonnin says it's all tied the advertising revenue as well.

SO is rather different, their site is heavily moderated, they don't want mindless repetition of the same subjects (like thousands of questions about tic tac toe, or many other subjects over & over again). They also don't put up with abusive posts of any kind. As we all know it's rather difficult to ask questions on SO, perhaps unless one is asking about the latest c++ standard, because all the other questions have already been answered.

Another thing to do is compare the amount of less than desirable things we see on this site compared to SO. One thing I see here is the effort to find c++ oddities in the language (like the accidental "operator" x--> 0), or other crazy things like code lines that start with semicolons - anything at all to attract comment.

There also seems to be a concerted effort to find really bad code and post a question around it.

Ganado wrote:
The "they are not real people" theory is loony. Sorry, I'm just being honest.

No worries, everyone can have an opinion - it's all good.



However, remember not to believe everything one reads on the internet. Some users here may have posted enough backstory so as to become "believable". It's possible that these members are being "run" by one person. Basically I am saying that a lot of clever psychology of various kinds may be implemented here, enough to make it believable.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a DB being kept on the real users, to keep stats on what topics they answer: to keep posting topics with those subjects

As I mentioned earlier, me being the devils advocate and biting the hand feeds: some (not all) users have multiple accounts that always post very good code, explain things very well in a detailed expert fashion. The ulterior motive is to provide a sense of there being regular expert members on this forum, which gives other members a reason to visit the site. There may well be some member who are real people and do give expert advice, and are here independently, posting from a will to help people. Actually for me the expert members (real or not) is the main reason I am still here after all these years. I am not going to name names, and I sincerely hope that the experts here are real people.

So you may say that a user is a real person, how do you know?

What if I was to propose that 70% of the posts here are not real? It's telling that there is no moderation here, perhaps because it would destroy the business model?

I am sorry if people find all this hard to digest, but IMO one should always have the right to express critical thinking.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.

Kind of makes me feel stupid.
And it makes me not want to bother any more.

Whether there are traffic bots or not I will still help others.

When it becomes obvious the user in particular shows they are a bot then and only then will I wander off to another thread.

We really haven't hit peak stupid yet:

http://rosenke.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/7/9/5079039/english_-_9_-_handouts_-_the_marching_morons.pdf

Basically I am saying that a lot of clever psychology of various kinds may be implemented here, enough to make it believable. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a DB being kept on the real users, to keep stats on what topics they answer: to keep posting topics with those subjects

Are you coming out as the mastermind!?

Possible != Probable

Everything you said could be happening, but there's no way there's enough money involved to incentivize it.

There's also the fact that this is a fairly easy website to find - searching up anything C++ related will surely bring you here like it brought me here. That alone generates traffic and a small percentage of those people end up posting in the forum.

Understand that this website very likely gets most of its traffic from the C++ section and not the forum section. The few pennies extra from generating some more forum traffic would not even be worth the time invested to do so.

Duthomhas wrote:
And it makes me not want to bother any more.

I would look at it this way: if this site was moderated, and there were experts to answer questions, people would come here.
This site would be poorer if those with lots of knowledge left.

zapshe wrote:
Are you coming out as the mastermind!?

I am definitely not an expert, so that isn't feasible. Nor would I have the time. Nor would I be involved with anything deceptive.

Possible != Probable

True, I have no way of proving anything I said, it's empirical evidence.

Everything you said could be happening, but there's no way there's enough money involved to incentivize it.

This site is worth a considerable amount of money; it wouldn't be worth much if there was orders of magnitude less traffic.

Understand that this website very likely gets most of its traffic from the C++ section and not the forum section.

Really? It is out of date: only C++14. So that would mean beginners, but some of the members who are oxygen thieves which post here never looked at the reference.

Really? It is out of date: only C++14. So that would mean beginners, but some of the members who are oxygen thieves which post here never looked at the reference

I've seen people I know from my CS classes on this website solely because they were googling how to use some C++ thing. Most of them don't even realize there's a forum section to ask questions.

I've been on this site plenty of times before I even considered checking out the forum. Most "actual" C++ questions will bring up SO and other forums first.

I find that Googling C++ stuff brings up cplusplus.com as often as SO.

Duthomhas

One more thing I should have said earlier:

There are real users on this site: if you write a great explanation, or post some splendid code, and people learn from it, then that is awesome. In a nutshell that is ideally what a forum is supposed to be about. So your time is not wasted. The main reason I still persevere with this forum, is to learn from those who have knowledge.

What I am unhappy about is the sheer volume of really crappy questions, and the deception in what I am guessing is the ulterior motive.

I think I feel the same way. The age of this forum and the lack of attention it has had shows poorly, alas. I don’t think twicker is paying people to spam his forum, but I could be wrong. It would be really sad if that were true. But I think zapshe’s reasoning there is correct.

It does leave the question, though: why all the stupid?

I think it is because people are dumb, and these days the power to be dumb is more available to the unwashed hoi polloi, for whom being able to do this stuff is no longer an earned or deserved privilege. That is, the barriers to entry in our (programmer’s) world have been so diluted that we are now being overrun by those who don’t care to understand it: they smash about like a bunch of elephants slopping about in the bath (or bulls in the china shop).

The main problem I see is that programming has always appealed to organized minds. But most people’s thinking doesn’t work in such an orderly fashion. It is as Babbage reported on his experiences in the mid-1800’s:

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

And so we find ourselves inundated with people who lack all grace formerly known as “netiquette”.

But, I swear, people are getting dumber about it at a shocking rate...

Furry Guy wrote:
We really haven't hit peak stupid yet: http://rosenke.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/7/9/5079039/english_-_9_-_handouts_-_the_marching_morons.pdf

Wow...

Where did you find this? It sounds like a bad remake of George Orwell's 1984. Too many spelling errors in it to make reading it actually enjoyable.

Where did you find this?

'net search is your friend...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+marching+morons+pdf&t=ffsb&ia=web

And a little hint, the "spelling errors" are intentional. This is a dumbed down future after all.

Project Gutenberg's version is "better" formatted, though the HTML is a bit screwy. The Kindle (with pictures) is a very good rendition.

Ah. I thought it was from an obscure forum for old guys like us.

Aside, I use Duck Duck Go as well– Google just doesn't seem to be as, well, reliable as it used to be.

[Edit] April 1951?? Wow, that's just a couple years after 1984 was published...

The Marching Morons is a different theme than 1984. Totally different stories.

One is about the consequences of a future full of idiots with a few intelligent people left to run and maintain everything.

The other is about a Socialist Dystopia.

I have a more and more difficult time scanning through the titles of questions like:

    “Why can't absolute value be less than zero?”

and

    “if deleting top pointer deletes all pointers”

and the like.

Are people in gosh-darnit university courses so lost that they can actually have to ask such questions? As Babbage said — I really cannot fathom what kind of confused thinking must be going on to be able to ask such questions. There is a serious, fundamental failure somewhere deep, deep down to not have the very most basic understanding of your subject material and have gotten far enough to not know the absurd non-sequitur in the very premise.

Are people just too feeping lazy to actually learn?
Or are they just, truly, stupider?

Or is it, as I earlier postulated, that the barriers against dumb people are lower and so we see more of it?

Colleges are accepting dumber people - so they end up having dumb questions.

Some of these people had terrible high school GPAs and they decide to major in something like CS hoping they'll somehow manage. If they're asking dumb questions, they're most likely in the weeder classes and won't progress.

I hear in the state of Oregon they recently eliminated the end-of-school cognitive abilities test. So now it doesn't matter if you can't read, write, or do 'rithmetic, you can still graduate. It had something to do with "people not doing as well because of the Covid" or something like that.

So, to answer your question Duthomhas,

Or is it, as I earlier postulated, that the barriers against dumb people are lower and so we see more of it?

It's the barriers. They're just lowering the standards. Pretty soon, we'll have a whole lot of morons running the world.

Stuff like this scares the crap out of me...because think about it. These people will soon be getting their hands onto all sorts of things– politics, traffic control, teaching, random IT jobs, Amazon packagers, Uber drivers, the list goes on and on.

Makes me want to just hole up somewhere in the mountains and live my life out drinking coffee and hunting moose.