The surest way to get massively downvoted here is to complain about downvoted, though. People seem to relish in it.

No, in that case, one replies: and begins a discussion.

As usual, I stand by my comments, as they are my lived life experience. And, I believe they are quite accurate, and otherwise a thoughtful answer to the OPs question.

Nobody asked, for example WHY was I writing assembly language for 4 years; but I'll tell anyway: I wrote a compiler for a Python-like language called "Simpletran". It pre-dates Python by several decades, but many of the original ideas in the early Pythons are there.

My best theory is that it's the Reddit "I don't need to understand how stuff works to be a programmer" crowd.

This has been my experience too. For someone like me who's a non-professional programming hobbyist, SO has been one of the most toxic and unhelpful communities. My only helpful experiences there are with the people who also happen to have their real names for their user ids.

I've had questions downvoted because I omitted something that "should have been there", downvoted because I included some things that "should not have been there", downvoted because I "asked for a suggestion" (eg: which type of DB is better for this kind of data?), or because I asked for something "that has been asked elsewhere", even though the two questions might have different tech stacks and use cases altogether.

I recommend most beginner programmers to go to reddit instead, where there's a less barrier to entry and visibility for questions. People are happy to answer you in Reddit for some karma, while on SO, the people who answer correctly have to subtly beg the questioner to mark the answer as correct.

To be fair, the same happens when discussing OSes, languages, and frameworks.

Ah. Maybe it's because I explained stuff that's basically newtypes using language that might make it seem they're different? Ugh. HN comments always make me so neurotic. But the content is usually more interesting than dev.to. I just wish they'd get rid of the downvote feature.

There is a downvote button.

"well why don't you learn to code and make it yourself" is the gut response to it...

Judging from your other comments, you can be fascinating and insightful, and I have much to learn from you especially in the field of programming. And yet your comment history is peppered with comments in a similar tone and attitude.

I can't tell if you're just tone-deaf or doing this on purpose, but I find it highly unpleasant. Plus, you're not following the guidelines:

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything.

“How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of stuff.

You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you must have an Internet connection to program.

I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing.

The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a Thank You. out of it.

The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever since.

That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of Oh, you're not violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided you're banned just because.; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous messages by any other means.

So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to avoid the garbage standard to start with.

I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks similarly.