Good point, that's why we added analytics where we cluster the most common questions and show you the most common unanswered questions, so you can improve your help pages. There's also a (albeit rudimentary) human handover when the question can't be answered.
Most questions don't get answers. The problem is not users giving excellent, well thought out answers so quickly a new user cannot find something to answer. There are 3M questions without any answer. There are lots of opportunities to provide answers. Most people, however dontnknownhow to write a good question... or for that matter, a good answer.
Look at the newest questions, or triage, or help and improvement queues. There are many more questions than there are answers.
One may like helping the people generally, but real-time monitoring of unanswered questions for posting the FIRST answers.... that's something different.
I'm not so sure about that. SO users are quick to answer simple/easy problems but those are never the ones I need help with. Ask a question that requires a lot of expertise and some effort to answer, and it's nothing but crickets chirping, whereas if I'm lucky enough that someone already had my problem on EX, it is usually answered fully, even if it took 3 people multiple tries and a lot of effort to get there.
Not to say that I'd ever pay for EX, but it obviously has its uses...
The biggest advantage is not in finding the answer. It's in being able to ask questions about that answer and getting immediate and pretty accurate responses.
I've found this to be a big plus in my experience. Additionally, if you're question has not been answered, you at least have the benefit of widespread familiarity with the text you are using. This means friendly internet folk will have less mental overhead due to notation, etc., and less of a barrier to answering your question if you ask.
I find that most questions have been answered already. Unless one is doing cutting edge research, somebody has almost always had the same problem I'm having before, and written about it, and some guru has written a five page response on SO that breaks it down in detail and I don't have to ask...
I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.
I have actually found questions with no answer that I eventually found the answer for myself (either from another site, trial and error, luck, or frightening insight). I have zero ability to add an answer for these tough problems.
The easy questions get answered quickly because it's a game. I don't play that game, I work for a living. I have the knowledge to contribute the long tail value of SO if I was able but I am not. I'm not sure there's a solution but that's the gripe I have.
One metric I would have liked to see was whether people were more or less able to find _good_ answers to questions. A lot of times my questions are answered with "you shouldn't do that" and usually, I know that it is bad, but turn to SO for tricky stuff. I can't change things like the build process or build scripts easily at work for example, I want to know how to adapt to it instead of getting told me how wrong I am.
I mostly code in C/C++ and the number of meaningful answers to my questions has declined over the years. Maybe I don't ask stuff as trivial as I used to but I just can't accept as many answers as I used to, despite community's pressure to "work on my acceptance rate". I end up accepting the answer that helped me the most, even if it was very little help.
My main issue, with the main Stack Overflow site (rather than some of the other stack sites), is that I don't get answers to my questions, possibly because no-one knows the answer. If they did, then it's probably been asked before, and since I always look first, I've found the answer to the question that was asked, and so don't eve pose the question, though I might contribute to the answer I found in some way.
Same experience here. Quick, one or two line answers to simple, common questions seem to do the best.
Although, those questions that I've poured the most time into and really tried to answer thoroughly are my favorites. Especially if it's something I had to do a bunch of research and/or testing to confirm. The lack of feedback is supplanted by the quenching of the thirst to learn something new. In fact, this quenching is my favorite part of the SE sites.
I advocate for "was this page helpful?" being the standard question across docs sites because ultimately it does reflect the purpose of documentation (to be helpful in one way or another, which usually means helping you complete a task or understand a concept) and because using the same question on all sites enables us to benchmark and compare. I once ran an A/B test on the same page where 50% were prompted "was this page helpful?" and the other 50% were prompted "was this page useful?" and the results were different to a statistically significant degree which suggests that even minor rephrasings skew the results, so we need to all use the same terminology.
> its a request for feedback I don't know helps me or not
Yes I'm aware that readers aren't incentivized to respond which explains why it's rare to get higher than 5% response rate. This situation is a microcosm for documentation's overall problem: we can't find incentives for people to voluntarily and consistently confirm the value we provide and we don't have any other means to prove the causality.
You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.
I wish that StackOverflow rewarded unanswered questions. Most of my questions are open-ended without satisfactory answers because they hint at oversights or weaknesses in methodologies. I've had people comment that they refuse to answer my new questions because my answer selection rate is so low.
I often go to wolframalpha if I want an answer to something fast and easy. Half the time I don't express the right question or the results go somewhere else. In those times, I need to write some code. Still, it is nice when the answer pops up.
I'd say I almost always get 70%+ of the benefit just by having an answer. And there's other techniques that help, eg checking one problem against other problems, getting a bound on your error, asking on forums/mailing lists, etc.
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