> People will constantly be rewriting or deleting your questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining about something silly like the formatting.
I will mercilessly soft-rewrite and spelling/formatting correct every question and answer into oblivion if I can be bothered, and find the issue annoying enough.
I treat SO like a Wikipedia of sorts, so presentation is important. Each topic will inevitably be read by a thousand other people in the future, so I might as well leave it looking presentable. It's a commons thing. "Don't leave trash behind and clean up if others didn't", basically.
> all questions should follow a very specific format
The format is good enough, but I really dislike the idea of enforcing it for every question. As a top comment suggested, some of the most interesting questions in SO are sort of open-ended. Most of my questions and answers there (~3.5k reputation) violate your format.
> Maybe someone with excellent writing skills and having demonstrated reading all the documentation and FAQs is still asking for help in a respectful and intelligent way, and so maybe you engage.
You mean it gets tiring to find the entertaining messages instead of the random trash? Because it doesn't matter how much effort the sender has put, or how intelligent his request/question/contribution/comment is. If I'm not in the mood, I will ignore it. I'm doing it for the fun, not to provide free support, so I will only read stuff that is fun to me. Obviously being an intelligent question is likely to add points, but it's not always the case.
It's not like this is race to see who is the least Torvalds-like of the bunch. It's 100% OK to just ignore everything. The people who complain "I had to moderate comments while my mother was in the hospital!" look like they have an addiction, or a runaway hobby.
I even have an online board for this sort of requests and generally I just read the subject lines. Fortunately for them, once your software is popular enough, a lot of people seem to like to reply to other people's questions, for some reason.
> If you don't understand the answer, leave a comment asking for clarification.
In SO this will get shot down and clarifications will get edited away. It's brutal there and not helpful. I firmly believe the benefit (since it is a QA site, or is it a lets re-write the manual site?) outweighs the detriment.
> Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions.
Honestly a lot of the people that answer and moderate questions there are unfriendly, the snark is high, it might be good to get a new batch of answerers in there and have the old move on. Obviously my opinion.
> SO needs to refocus on user stories and pain points.
It did, massively, but ended up alienating a lot of loyal, hard working volunteers in the process, because actually a lot of first time interactions were good and patient, and only a few weren't, and SO talked as though they were all bad. And even then, they were mostly just brusque based on culture rather than actually bad.
If you read some of the beginner questions that had no effort put into them, requiring a long patient conversation to tease out the detail, partway through which half the time the beginner would lose patience, say something rude and leave, and then post about toxicity on Reddit, you might also sympathise slightly more with mods and regulars who've dealt patiently with this sort of thing hundreds of times.
Tl;dr: You can't be both a repository of useful, searchable reference content and a human-powered ChatGPT interface for beginners.
> They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get.
Yeah see this is the problem. Fuck that man. The vast majority of people who want to ask questions are very new. They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question. They could search for it. SO is full of elitist pricks who are very rude to people who are trying to ask a question and don’t know how and are feeling frustrated. It’s a beginner hostile environment. And that’s not intuitive. Because you DO end up hitting stack overflow for a lot of basic questions from 10 years ago, and that’s nice, but it is bad for people who lack the expertise to navigate that historical index.
Discord is not indexed, but it’s largely full of people who are willing to help newbies construct their question and then answer it. It’s night and day a better experience. Same for chat gpt.
I have spent a fair amount of time on the unreal engine discord helping what I assume are kids who have never done any programming before realize that their questions make no sense and that they don’t know what a variable is. They are extremely thankful.
SO just makes people feel bad for not being experts on the topic for which they are seeking help to learn.
StackOverflow has a real problem with attracting strict rule followers who love over-moderating. I expect Wikipedia suffers from a similar issue but it's not such an interactive site so most people aren't exposed to it.
> Where’s all that anger even coming from?
StackOverflow can be an extremely frustrating experience due to people who probably think they are helping casually closing questions.
> Finally, I have never closed a dupe in all my puff, and I’m thoroughly unimpressed by those that do.
Good! I wish there were more people like you! I'm still waiting for the day when somebody starts a friendly competitor to StackOverflow that doesn't support closing questions, gives authors actual control over what they write (can you imagine if other people could edit your comments here?) and does away with mods. One day...
> Ultimately, SO is suffering from issues of scale without the corresponding tooling to enable people who are trying to answer to find interesting questions more easily.
Yes, that seems like a reasonable take.
I suppose in my imagined ideal reality, people simply don't answer questions that are not asked well, or that don't interest them for any other reason, rather than actively body-slamming those questions.
If this results in a glut of low-effort questions, then the site suffers. As a result, the site has an incentive to provide better tools.
Right now, volunteers heroically stem the flood of poor questions by burning themselves out and sometimes getting bitter. The site still suffers, but in a different, more pernicious way.
I looked at a triage queue question just now, and it was indeed poorly-written. I selected "Needs author edit", and clicked "Submit". Then, I got a pop-up asking "Why should this question be closed?" and I was confused. I don't want to close the question. I don't want to send that signal to the question writer. I want them to improve their question, that's all. I canceled the interaction. So again: agreed about bad tools. Personally, I choose not to use them.
> I’ve also found the forum a bit hostile because I ask stupid questions since I don’t know how to ask in the right way with the right words.
Oh, yes, so much this. I dislike the forums, and certainly wouldn't ask any questions on them. When I use them, it's to browse through and hope someone else has already asked the question and received a useful answer.
> What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks...
If people really thought of those questions as time sinks, they wouldn't bother responding. The aggravated forum response smacks more of a perverted delight in bullying the novice.
And I understand the impulse. You've just answered the same question three times, and get it again? What gives!? Someone should smack these people!
But if people are asking the same questions over and over, it's time to take another look at your search/FAQ/layout. If people are hostile to other people on your forum, it shouldn't be dismissed as "they just love challenging questions." It's time to fix your buggy culture.
Someone should write a companion piece working on the other end. How to Answer (Stupid) Questions the Smart Way:
1. If hate customer service, let someone else handle it.
> Questions are supposed to be somewhat open-ended prompts that inspire experts to write detailed and informative responses.
> open ended
I recently tried asking a question like that. Easy but effective optimization techniques for programming languages. Hell I included an answer myself and was going to add more. The result wasn't pretty. While I was typing up a second answer, the question was downvoted, closed, someone welcomed me to the site and then deleted the comment, the answer I included with the post was downvoted not for being wrong but for "enabling" a bad question, I got told to get out and go blog about it instead and then a few days later the entire thing was deleted like worthless spam.
> Attempt to answer the question, or don’t comment at all.
Don’t tell them to RTFM, Google it,
No, just no. There is no point to any of all this search technology and this accumulated knowledge if no one uses it.
Someone asking a question that is answered in the documentation or has been asked and answered over and over should be pointed at those sources. One of the most important skills anyone is going to learn in a technical position is finding answers to questions you have that have already been answered. The next important skill they have to learn is doing a little bit of your own research in understanding your problem.
This goes especially for places like StackOverflow which is not a discussion forum. It's value is diminished by asking and answering the same questions over and over.
EDIT: I'll mention the last part of the statement I quoted too, it's unfortunate the lumped the second half of the statement with the first.
> correct their grammar, or give your opinions about their choice of technology
Correcting grammar is not helpful in any way in this context. If you can't understand what they're getting at, ask for clarification. Nitpicking grammar is just being a dick.
Opinions about what they're using may have one very narrow use, if what they're using to do what they're trying to do is just so very wrong. And we're talking 'I'm trying to create a pure HTML page to run this Nuclear reactor' levels of wrong. Most of the time, you do need to keep it to yourself. Especially on sites like StackOverflow, which is not a discussion board.
> moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.
Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.
I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.
Then I find another question on how to do X, and the mods close it as a duplicate of that earlier question. Even when the questioner specifically notes in their question that it is not a duplicate of that earlier question because they really need to do X the idiot moderators close it.
> That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need.
1) Answers on questions aren't just meant to serve you, they're meant to serve people that find the question later. It's incredibly important to note when there's a better way altogether to approach a problem.
2) Askers on SO often exhibit the XY problem. Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; it's ignoring (often) good advice that other people are donating their time to give you.
Honestly, your entire interaction on that question is a prime example of why so many moderators go to the other extreme and become trigger happy. Because anybody would get burnt out dealing day in, day out with people having the same sense of entitlement that you have.
> SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit.
Questions are only closed if nobody can understand them, not because of grammar. So this little girl wouldn't have gotten her question answered regardless of whether the question was closed, simply because it wasn't clear.
If grammar is lacking but it's understandable, people will either leave it be or edit it to upgrade the English. At least, that is my experience on the IT Security StackExchange site (the only one I'm really active at).
> if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model.
Hmm. It's probably my fault and not yours, but this clarified little for me. At least, it doesn't make me feel confident that if I have a question, I'd be able to tell if it's one that would get a reasonable response on SO.
Perhaps So would be better served if they separated out the "Q&A" from whatever entries they feel are worth being preserved, rather than combining the two.
Doing that might make interacting with SO less unpleasant or more helpful, and then the particular ones that fit SO's model can be copied to a separate reference section.
What I do know is that SO as it is puts an awful lot of people off, including experienced devs who might otherwise be willing to help answer questions.
I will mercilessly soft-rewrite and spelling/formatting correct every question and answer into oblivion if I can be bothered, and find the issue annoying enough.
I treat SO like a Wikipedia of sorts, so presentation is important. Each topic will inevitably be read by a thousand other people in the future, so I might as well leave it looking presentable. It's a commons thing. "Don't leave trash behind and clean up if others didn't", basically.
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