I’ve never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it’s already at the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have been asked and answered.
SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.
On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.
I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.
It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users.
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
It's very good for C++, and pretty good for CUDA thanks to two very diligent and committed individuals. Also for bash. But - I don't agree about JS, or at least - not JS everywhere. If you're doing, say, Thunderbird extension development, you probably won't get far.
But - it may be difficult to know in advance whether SO is good for a given language.
> and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
Tangentially, every time I google/ddg a problem, it's almost never taking me to good blog posts addressing the substance of my issues. I usually find those after two or three clicks, like e.g. an article mentioning a blog post.
And it's sad because there's a myriad excellent blog posts out there, somehow unreachable at least without 10 minutes of browsing the search results pages.
What's wrong with Medium? I find lots of good tutorials there. It helps me with going from 0 understanding of a framework to having some boilerplate I can build on.
The content is good. From a user side you have to log in to view content. From a content creator side, why would you want your post to be under the control of Medium instead of your own domain?
Isn’t that the same thing? Lisp hasn’t been on the hype cycle since SO was launched. Personally, yet another reason not to focus on less popular technologies.
As far as MacOS, I’ve heard too many horror stories about developing on Apple platforms from people like Marco Arment and other well known developers caused by Apple’s poor documentation, I’ve also avoided it even though I am rabid consumer of Apple products.
I always try to find something on a dedicated forum first, then SO, then whatever DDG suggest. Reddit is a last resort, because I suck at reddit. Every time I post something there will be ignorant people who don’t even bother educating themselves, take their “best” shot at you. On more opinionated subs like political subs, those ignorants are well represented on both sides. On the niche tech subs, I also feel like you have to agree with the ongoing mentality of the Sub’s running “cultist” majority.
I’ve never experienced that much politics on the none political subs. I went over to r/90DayFiance out of curiosity just to see how political a sub about foreigners coming to the US to get married would be. I was pleasantly surprised.
> I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
I agree. I've tried alternatives to Matlab for technical computing at work. So far I have not found anything to match both the quality of the product and the fast technical support I can get from the Mathworks through our support contract.
I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also had to manage phones in their environment.
There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.
I was the top-rated user on Server Fault from 2009 to 2014. I participated less and less in 2013, and eventually stopped nearly "cold turkey".
The tenor of the questions changed in the last couple years I participated. Early questions were more of the the "I'm having this strange thing-- here's what I've tried already"-type. These were a lot of fun to research and answer. They ended up sending me down rabbit-holes that helped in my work later on. (There were also "explain xxx concept" questions, which were tremendous fun to write for but there are only so many of those that can be asked.)
I was never one to "vote to close" because something wasn't "sysadmin-related". That's likely because I've been asked by Customers to "sysadmin" virtually anything electronic. A number of my answers ended up migrated over to "Super User" as a result. The migration of questions to other sites didn't bother me, because that wasn't killing the question out-right. The "community" closing legitimate questions, however, made me sad.
I did "vote to close" on questions more of the "Can I get some free labor" vs. "I'm having a problem, here's what I tried". The former seemed a lot more common towards the end of my participation. I never saw closing these questions as lacking in compassion. Often there were plenty of existing questions the posters could've used as reference. It was clearly easier for them to ask another question rather than research.
I hold myself to am unreasonably high standard w/ respect to researching before asking anybody a question (at least, anybody who I'm not paying for it). I tried to relax that standard when it came to answering Server Fault questions, but there was still a lower limit. It was hard for me to be "compassionate" in the face of such apparent laziness and disrespect for the donated time of others, particularly when there were so many good resources right at the poster's fingertips.
I'm in the top 2% on ServerFault to this day. I remember interacting with you on numerous questions. I'm GregD on the Stack sites.
I totally understand the limits that had to be set on the low bar for quality content. In those early days though, it seemed to me that when people asked questions about managing mobile phones for instance, because it was only newly related to being a sys admin, they'd get closed as not related.
Granted, in those early days, there weren't as many process "rules" in place to guide users to ask better questions and perhaps that's still so. However, a quick perusal of the site indicate this has gotten better and more friendly towards new people.
> I never saw closing these questions as lacking in compassion. Often there were plenty of existing questions the posters could've used as reference. It was clearly easier for them to ask another question rather than research.
People like you are why Server Fault sucks. I once asked a simple question about logging in microseconds instead of milliseconds. I received a bunch of condescending responses to RTFM and that I should "hire a developer" to figure it out. Site admins closed the question as being "low effort" or something equally stupid.
I'm a developer with over 20 years experience. I read the whole manual and the product clearly only documented milliseconds. I have thousands of karma points on the main site, but because I never used Server Fault everyone treated me like a newb who's first reaction was running to Server Fault.
Server Fault is filled with arrogant admins who would rather be assholes than help.
I think the main problem is actually the reputation system. People like you get MAD because someone asks a question you can't answer in 5 minutes because then you can't get your karma points so easily. You get MAD because someone else might earn a bunch of karma from "easy" questions you don't want to bother answering.
I've been a Usenet user since 1987 and am reasonably aware of how to write questions to technical groups. My last two or three Stack posts regarding "I want to do x, I've tried a-e" were summarily closed with no responses to appeals even though there may have been useful although not conclusive suggestions. The claim was that the questions asked for product recommendations, even when I wrote "Not looking for product recommendations" in the posts. That's when I deleted my account. "Lack of compassion" is very accurate. I think the gatekeepers have gotten carried away.
I remember trying to figure out how to run YARN jobs in discrete cgroups with memory limits. It took us at least three working days to compile all the options and eventually discover that Cloudera didn't have new enough software versions, so we couldn't do it. I decided to write what I'd learned in Q&A format on SF (or maybe another SO site) so that in the future someone might benefit. Expensive knowledge, freely given. Promptly closed.
I’ve done this a few times on SO: ask a well posed question, wait a few days, then answer it (perhaps with some fluff talk about the journey).
If you do not follow the Q & A format correctly, your “question” should be closed.
More regularly I have answered my own question because the Q was hard and got zero answers, then I eventually discover a solution so I wrote an answer.
> There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users.
Well put. This is what I've experienced with most of the stackoverflow communities. It WAS definitely better previously.
But I'm experiencing some trouble asking questions in certain tags where moderators are easily closing down or downvoting the question. Even I saw the person who answered my question replied in the thread that he/she doesn't understand why is it getting downvoted. People just don't stay on point. Neither do they refrain from their cocksure way of replying.
What the author says about the scope of the question is not there with answers or comments.
Sometimes I'll leave a comment saying I don't understand why something is getting votes, but it's not because I want to commiserate with the question asker - it's because I hope to get the people who are piling on to stop for a second and ask themselves if they're doing the right thing. It probably doesn't help but I hate standing by and watching injustice being served.
That is one of my major pet peeves with SO. Moderators assuming you are asking a question for a school assignment. Most of the time I have to make my question sound like as general as possible with fake variables, so as not to expose proprietary information. So they may look like school assignment to the ignorant.
My favorite has always been me working on problems that have no practical application, but I'm working on them to gain understanding of how or why something works the way it does, only to get several "don't do that" replies
There are a ton of people asking questions who genuinely don't know why what they're asking to do is a bad idea. If you assume that they just weren't aware of the better way, you'll be right about 99% of the time. It's not a reflection on you, it's a reflection of the cluelessness of the general population. If you really just want to know about the internal workings of something, perhaps stating so up front would get some sympathy - but no guarantees.
> Moderators assuming you are asking a question for a school assignment
It's pretty obvious when that's the case. Ironically, using SO for work assignments is OK, but that's probably because the questions are more interesting, esoteric, or have longer term value than a question about while loops.
>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this.
SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.
While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.
I'd also like to see the ability to re-ask questions after a few years without them being dismissed as duplicates.
There have been a few questions where the answers no longer worked due to being obsolete, and I had to figure out the new solution myself. And in some cases, the answer never worked properly but was accepted as the best known at the time, and I had one that worked. But there was no point posting, because the accepted answer from X years ago dominated, and it was unlikely that a contribution from little me would be noticed.
In fact that's why I never ended up joining SO despite being a heavy user - on each of the occasions I felt I could make a useful contribution, it happened to be a question that was old and "settled", and I felt it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea.
One big issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation getting smaller.
Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.
The thing I wish for most would be some mandatory versioning on the question and answer. If you are looking for a solution to Android 4.4, answers that are specific to 6.0 are worthless. I know it won't be 100% accurate but if people put in their best guess it could really help with filtering. I know they can put it in the title but you get mistyped and different names for things and I'd rather the tool make it mandatory but also quick and easy to just pick with just a few clicks.
An answer will already decay naturally if it goes out of date as people will downvote it for being wrong. There are plenty of relevent 10yr old questions and answers. Decaying old answers will just make good info harder to find.
imo they should get rid of the gamification. change the upvote to a "thanks" button and don't so the totals
A decay function on reputation might help, but I think the real issue is treating reputation as a precise indicator of user quality. But is a user with 40k rep really meaningfully better than a user with 35k rep?
An idea that I had was to hide reputation entirely from users and move to a flair system based on fuzzy metrics[1]. If the signal isn't precise, find ways to reflect that when displaying it.
[1] I imagine this as a system independent from badges, which are permanent and triggered by certain milestones/events.
I am more of thee type that creates a new account for answers/question from time to time, because I think the rep system is ridiculous as it is and I simply forget my login details. Neither do I know any names on SO, nor do I even look at the rep someone has that answered a question. Not being able to comment to get specifications to questions is bothersome, but at least the barrier is low.
This happens anyway, because the number of points in circulation increases. 10 years ago, having 20K points on StackOverflow was both more rare and meaningful than today.
If an answer is no longer relevant, it will, stop being upvoted, possibly even downvoted. So it’s score will become lower relative to newer, more correct answers. At least that’s the theory. The problem is the discouragement of asking new questions, the pointlessness of a new answer on a 10 year old question with 1,000 upvotes, search engines sending people to out of date answers, and that the upvotes don’t account for knowledge and experience. I have no idea how to solve those problems.
I think you misunderstood GP. My take on their point is that when a question from 10 years ago about a C#/SQL issue has a top answer with 300 points about using a library that’s 12 years old, but a better answer with Linq from this year only has 4 points, people are probably going to either go with the 300 point legacy answer. A decaying function can implement relevancy.
No, that was perfectly clear. That's why I said people should not use reputation or upvotes to judge anything in the first place including how good an answer is. They should read all the answers (including the more recent ones) and if needed do further research to find out which one is more updated or relevant at present. I do it all the time particularly for questions on things like git and even programming languages like python which have lot of better way of doing things in last 2-3 years than say 10-15 years ago.
In addition to being offensive (which, mind you, goes against HN's guidelines), you're literally agreeing that the current way scoring works is bad for finding up-to-date answers (of course "relevance" is more vague). I'd say any solution that makes it easier to automatically push better (in this specific case, updated) answers to the top is a win, especially for such a widely used system.
> you're literally agreeing that the current way scoring works is bad for finding up-to-date answers
No you're "literally" misinterpreting what I said. I said there should not be any scoring system at all and people should select an answer based on its own merit, usefulness and how recent they are as per their own judgment instead of relying on other people. In fact this should be true for anywhere on internet including this site.
SO has a rep system. I offered an idea that I think would make that system more effective. On the other hand, if you think the concept is misguided, don't give a flying f* about it, and think it should be eliminated, you're welcome to suggest that to the people who run the site.
How would it change the UX (or UI) at all? Question and comment "scores" constantly change as they get upvoted (and occasionally downvoted). This would just be another factor in determining the present score.
As far as "theory" questions, such a designation could simply be another moderator privilege -- high-rep individuals would have the ability to vote to prevent a question from decaying. Perhaps an additional requirement would be that the question must have been transferred to Community Wiki.
You haven't explained why "this would be terrible UX", and it would be fairly trivial to add a special "theory" tag or something more general (maybe restricted to high-rep users or mods) to avoid the problem of unwanted decay.
> Because it seems obvious that watching one's hard-earned score shrink would be a bad experience.
But it's a Q&A site, not a point-gathering exercise. Leave the displayed score of the answers/questions but decay the benefit the author gains from it.
Indeed, but if you've put in a lot of work asking/answering good questions and they reward you with standing then it sucks to suddenly start losing that. There is already a certain level of inflation in that those who are continuously active will keep raising the bar. I am rather proud of my contributions and score on SO and don't want to see that go away
One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or SO.
Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling.
Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.
So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge.
[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
Shameless plug. I did some analysis on closed and deleted questions on StackOverflow posted between 2008-2014 [0, 1]. The key findings from the analysis were as follows
* Closed questions due to the reason "subjective" are very popular amongst the subscribers but not in line with Stackoverflow rules
* Closed questions with reasons "duplicates" and "off topic" are the prime question areas for reputation gaming
* Deleted questions are very low in quality and are pretty much unrevivable with interference, unlike closed questions. Pyramidal structure of decreasing quality - Normal -> Closed -> Deleted
* If your question is accidentally deleted, such ones are revived quickly
Some side notes
* Deleted questions are clearly against guidelines and the style of writing is enough to give away these questions are just poor even without the actual content.
* Most closed questions are relatively good in content quality but against site guidelines (off topic, subjective etc.)
Personally, I see more often than not that people are just annoyed they can't ask their question on Stackoverflow rather than accepting that SO isn't the right place to ask their question. In addition, I also see answers/comments very hostile and don't lead to constructive feedback. A typical example of this behavior is Person P asks Question Q. An expert E makes a comment "Why are you doing this? You shouldn't do this - this is not the right away". Such a comment is not helpful because it passes a judgment on the approach of the question rather than answering it even if the question approach was not correct.
These were literally the first 3 questions on my review queue:
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615 - A question by an absolute beginner, trying to do something that they have no clue how to start with. Already closed.
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242 - A question about parsing a JSON response with jQuery. Two votes to close. The asker clearly does not know the word "parse".
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318 - Someone trying to figure out an error message they're getting with kubernetes. This is exactly the kind of thing you get at the top of your google results when you hit the same error, and with one more vote to close, it will be forever locked with no useful information. Some asshole even downvoted the one answer that is there without adding any comments.
None of these questions are good, but they could be made better, and they all represent people with real problems that deserve help. Getting mad at people for "being lazy" (because if I, the expert, could easily find the answer to this, then why didn't you?!), is not productive.
Here's what I don't understand about all these SO deletionists: how is closing the question helpful in any way? If you don't find the question answerable, then don't answer it! But why block other people from trying to help? It's not like you're somehow "teaching" these people how to ask by blocking them. The user from question 59344615 (which got closed) did not post another question with better details. They just left the site, one more developer that doesn't have anywhere they can ask newbie questions. It sucks.
First one was aptly closed IMHO, much too vague. SO is not the right tool for absolute beginners to seek guidance when they have no idea what they're doing: the format asks for a reasonably specific answerable question. Would be nice if upon closing the asker was given pointers to beginner-friendly resources, though.
The other two are better, and (aptly) not closed. Of course you'll get inappropriate votes to close, but I hope they are correctly offset by other votes the (hopefully vast) majority of the time.
Now about this:
> how is closing the question helpful in any way?
I suppose it's to stay focused. When googling I quite often get useful SO results (& upvote those), and I'm happy not having to sift through tons of useless questions.
To do so, I would have to start keeping a log of each time I go through google to a SO answer that is being unfairly closed/downvoted/whatever.
For Wikipedia, you never actually see what goes on without going to the discussion page, which I've never looked at except when someone pointed me there (once again, I've not kept a journal of such excursions, and can therefore not answer your challenge). I have, however, seen enough to never ever try editing a page for any reason.
> Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.
This feels more like an invitation to start some drama and nitpick pointlessly over an example than to actually reasonably discuss any issues. Like other commenters have mentioned: reasonable people do not keep lists of examples like this, just like reasonable people don't keep "burn books" of every time they've felt slighted.
> How do we "reasonably discuss any issues" unless someone presents examples of the "issues"?
How most people discuss things: by relating their experiences and impressions, and listening to those of others with an open mind.
Here's mine: it can be very obnoxious to extract a good answer out of the SO community for a challenging question. Often all you get are answers to different easier questions or a useless "don't do that." It takes a lot of annoying policing and preemptive anticipations of SO's typical bad answers to keep things on track. I've also personally come across many closed questions that were helpful and exactly what I wanted. I've also found myself having to pre-emptively address the closers because they're too trigger happy.
What I've just said is true, but the few examples I have would link you to my SO account, and honestly, you don't seem like the kind of person who I'd feel comfortable sharing that with.
> I suspect most of these "issues" don't exist.
I suspect you have a perspective that makes you blind to them. I would suggest listening more and holding off on the aggressive challenges rather than opening with them.
> The lack of such delinquent SO examples here is telling.
It only tells that people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
> 1) by relating experiences and impressions, 2) and listening to those of others with an open mind
1) may not be correct (plus my own impression that SO isn't terrible doesn't count?) and 2) I've a perfectly open mind, that's why I asked the question. I asked for evidence. That's a reasonable request.
> it can be very obnoxious to ... to keep things on track
I've experienced some of that, in a minor form. That people are having trouble showing much evidence is what I keep coming back to. It may be that you're asking higher level questions than I am.
> What I've just said is true...
That's useless to me or to this argument. I want evidence.
> few examples I have would link you to my SO account
well, OK, I can sympathise with that - to an extent.
> people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
Garbage. What 'precise hoops'? I asked that those hard done by post some personal evidence, which is easily found (if it exists).
> (plus my own impression that SO isn't terrible doesn't count?)
It does, but you didn't just contribute it to the discussion. You've been outright declaring your interlocutor's impressions to be wrong and making demands of them in a way that discourages me from wanting to listen to you.
>> people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
> Garbage. What 'precise hoops'? I asked that those hard done by post some personal evidence, which is easily found (if it exists).
It's not garbage. You just outlined your hoops again. I'm not jumping through them--for reasons you can sympathize with, and I'm sure there are others like me.
And honestly, I just don't like your attitude, which is actually not a very helpful one. I can see why you're so defensive of SO and Wikipedia.
> > people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
>
> Garbage. What 'precise hoops'?
Might be worth asking yourself whether "Garbage" is a worthwhile contribution to the discussion here. In this thread you stress that you have "a perfectly open mind" and yet when people disagree you seem to take it extremely personally.
'garbage' because those claimed hoops were never listed, strangely enough. Even when I asked for them.
> you stress that you have "a perfectly open mind" and yet when people disagree you seem to take it extremely personally
I do not take it personally. I asked for evidence. Very little was forthcoming. I've an open mind to opinions backed up by evidence. Opinion without some basis is useless or worse. QV. anti-vaxxers, chem-trailers etc. Or do you support these people's views just because they opine so? Please answer this point specifically.
I'm not supporting their views at all. You said someone's comment was garbage, I asked whether that was a constructive contribution and you assume from that that I'm taking sides here, which is an example of what I'm calling "taking it personally".
Civil and open dialogue on HN is important. We can disagree about things without using dismissive language of that kind.
there is nothing more frustrating than googling something, and having the first result be your exact question marked as a dupe where the pretendedly "duped-from" question is off enough that it is useless for your actual problem;
Not that odd. I'm not annoyed enough to keep a log of "I was frustrated by SO again today" just for the opportunity to win an internet argument about SO a few weeks later.
I asked "if you say it's happened to you..." therefore you don't need a log. Just log in to SO and bingo all your Q's with their A's are available. It's not difficult.
How is me having an issue with SO overall, any different then someone not have any issues with SO overall? One requires hard evidence and one does not?
I've never had a question closed, but I have had to deal with condescending responses. If I've gotten too much shit on a question, I usually delete it after I've gotten the information I need, rendering the evidence unavailable (even to myself as the poster after a window of time).
Stack Overflow curates its public-facing content, and so do I, when using real-name accounts. Given a choice between being seen taking shit from someone, investing time in arguing with that person, or just erasing the exchange altogether, the third option is sometimes the most expedient. I don't do it often.
Ideally people would just be polite, and questions could just be answered by anyone who cared to answer them, with low-scoring exchanges de-emphasized instead of being shut down.
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information.
I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....
They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway.
What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do.
Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
I understand your sentiment (good tip about GH issues as well), but I found SO to be useful at times.
I agree with the culture, which is why I always state:
1. How my question is different from related questions.
2. How I searched on Google and what I tried.
3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly".
My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated.
It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
Yeah, I actually find the sister sites more helpful. The main problem is that there are far too many people on that site with their own opinions about how things should be done. There's less traffic on the sister sites like unix and linux, superuser, vi, emacs etc. They should break up the main site for different programming languages and platforms like git as well.
SO questions and answers do sometimes seem ossified now, the ever-shifting flood plain of restrictions and gatekeeper culture having muted and chilled what used to be a more dynamic forum. I increasingly find more valuable and timely information poking around in the relevant subreddits.
New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything.
This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone.
Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested in.
Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn more money.
Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.
The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.
Yes, that's why I thought OP's idea of explicitly separating the derived "better" questions interesting, instead of allowing anyone to edit the original question and steer the discussion in a different direction. This is an interesting format that leaves room for multiple directions to explore… which SO does not want to do as they insist so much on focus.
Sometimes the asker is missing a concept, and it's not always impossible to comment about it and rephrase the question to make it answerable & more useful to keep for posterity. It's far from the majority of questions, but not awfully rare either. Some of those are worth salvaging.
If you understand enough of the question to rephrase it, you probably understand it well enough to answer it too. Adding a middle step just gets in the way. I've answered questions like that, and it's gratifying when it turns out your understanding was correct.
I upvoted because I find the idea of an explicit third stage interesting. But SO does offer the ability for experts to edit questions already, in order to keep the simple Q&A format with two stages, so it's "by design". I'm not arguing which design is better... I'd actually like to see your idea implemented :)
Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort, unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject, who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.
There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question.
Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.
True. If they can discern a newbie question from a idle do-my-homework for me question, people tend to be very good. I grant there are some exceptions, but few (though irritating).
"Dumb" questions are fine, but they're completely different than lazy questions, which are often misidentified as dumb questions.
A dumb question might be something like "I can't log into my server with `ssh server.com`. It keeps rejecting my password when it asks for `user@server.com's password`. What's going on?" The user might not know to explicitly add `admin@` on the command line.
A lazy question is "My server that I bought doesn't let me log in!" Come on, you need to address 1) what result you expect, 2) the exact steps you take, 3) the result you obtain instead, and 4) any other details a non-omniscient being might need to answer your question.
The first one is not really a dumb question. They may have setup their .ssh/config so that the user is automatically taken from that file and password being rejected may simply be due to some other reasons (such as disabling password based login at the server). This is why people should not assume something or make a judgment.
The second question is more because of a misunderstanding about the particular platform. These type of lead-in questions are common in tech support and even many forums where they expect someone will get back to them with more specific questions (they may not have an idea what sort of information will be relevant). A simple comment clarifying this will not only prevent confusion due to arbitrarily closing the question but will help them make a better question.
The second question could be coming from someone that simply doesn't have enough context to lead off with that information.
Like maybe they don't realize there are different ways of interacting with servers. I wouldn't expend a great deal of effort helping someone asking a question like that, but I hope I wouldn't make a bunch of a priori assumptions about why they were asking that question instead of another one.
The second question simply fails to describe what actions the user is taking. In this case, it's not a matter of not knowing about methods of interacting with servers. It's a matter of leaving out steps, such as typing `ssh`, due to lack of their effort.
If I asked a question about something I have no idea about, such as training a sheepdog, I'd still be able to put forth effort into describing the steps I take to someone, so they know what I tried to do. The question "The dog isn't learning this command!" isn't bad because of my lack of sheepdog knowledge, it's bad because it omits tons of important information about my situation. Therefore it's a lazy question.
If there are only dumb people, and no dumb questions, the implication is that dumb people either ask smart questions or no questions at all. I don't believe the latter is actually the case, and the former seems contradictory. Thus I conclude that when dumb people ask questions those questions will tend towards being dumb, hence: How is babby formed?
I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors.
If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
“Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s not the right forum.
I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.
Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.
I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
Good luck attracting experts to your site... without incentive for experts to participate it will likely just be the blind leading the blind (i.e. newbies helping newbies - which could possibly be a good thing!).
A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be prepared to answer the following -
1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?
2. Tell me what all you have tried.
3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.
It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.
I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so.
I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.
I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.
But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.
So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions. This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).
I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community helps in stating the questions correctly.
The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection.
One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by multiple mods.
Stack Overflow's content is good because:
1. The site design is high-quality.
2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.
The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.
My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately; always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site is harsh.
If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote.
That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(
Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.
I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.
This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.
Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence.
Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score.
That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.
As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.
I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice.
I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.
: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked
> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing...
I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution.
So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.
80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry, but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers per year though.
Sure it is. Asking a question has several dimensions along which to afford skill. General social skills aside, question-asking specifically has the extra challenge of "get someone to give me the information I need", and some people are demonstrably much more effective at this than others.
I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an answer that is useful to you.
I agree that a statement in this generality is non-sense. (If it were a skill, how would you acquire it without asking a question.) What is meant here (probably) is sth. like "asking a good question" is a skill -- where "good" could be defined in any number of ways. In this context, it's probably synonymous to "getting the reply you're actually after without someone closing your question, or marking it as a dupe". That probably is a skill.
However, SO would be a more useful place, especially but not only for newcomers, if that skill wasn't required. If anyone could ask anything, and as long as there's someone willing to answer, it doesn't matter whether the question could be deemed "skillful" by any measure.
There are a number of reasons why SO isn't that place, and I can see why these reasons exist. It's a fun thought experiment to think about whether SO would have made it to the place it is today if it had started out already with the same draconic rules and views on how questions should be written as are in place today.
Let's consider the question you have just asked here. As the article you are responding to has presented several arguments for the proposition that it is a skill, a good follow-up question would challenge one or more of the claims or inferences made in that article, or raise a point that seems to have been overlooked. A question that ignores everything that has already been said on the issue is not likely to elicit anything new.
SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.
On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.
I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.