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It's a negative dynamic that starts from the popular, "low-hanging fruit" kinds of questions like "how do you subtract 2 dates in framework X". Such a question would gain many points both to the OP and the answerers. The best answer to a question like that is short, unambiguous and concise. Consequently, you have high-reputation users skilled in answering popular questions. Then the popular questions are mostly over and people start asking questions about a particular problem hidden in their piece of code, and high-rep users sneer at it because they see it as "not researched".


view as:

high-rep users sneer at it

That sneering and the general idea that some questions are worthy and others not is one of the most offputting things about SE, followed by duplicative and unhelpful me-too answers that are very obvious reputation farming. When I took up programming again after a long hiatus I found SE very helpful at first but got sick of it within a matter of months because the meta game/* is horrible.

* the social dynamics in a community driven website that are wholly orthogonal to and often end up subverting the site's stated purpose by leveraging the stated ethos and decision infrastructure in pursuit of selfish ends. Other examples include Wikipedia edit wars or abusive forms of legalism and political brinksmanship.


Yeah this always turned me off of contributing in earnest to SE. The purpose is supposed to be a general purpose site with an answer to _all_ questions, but in practice it's just a site with answers to questions an expert might have. Almost everything below that level of technicality gets culled.

The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"


Not necessarily "not researched", rather "too localized". SE is not a place to ask to solve your specific problem, which will only litter the website because it will never help anyone else. Debugging and solving logical errors is one subset of that. Once the problem is about some kind of misunderstanding how some interface works, it can help others who will have a similar problem. And of course a high-level design problem is also a good question.

Maybe there needs to be a separate "bunny slope" SO site, and such questions just get bounced over there where they are topical. Though I don't know who that could write good answers would spend time doing so. The people for whom those are still interesting questions are not the ones everyone else should get advice from.

Yea I typically just point to a non SE forum in such too localized cases.

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