But it is also annoying to try and give back to the community and find newbies who are at times extremely rude and ask "do you haz teh codez" questions.

That's why this issue is so difficult to tackle. As an answerer, I downvote questions that are not well formed because I do not want other answerers to lose their time looking at that question.

I personally believe SO lacks "triage" for incoming questions. Not every c# answerer should read every c# question. A new question may be marked as "for triage" (maybe this step could be skipped for users with some reputation), then reviewed as such by some community members. Badly formed questions would go into a bin for helping the user differently than a normal question. other questions could be sent directly to super user, code review or computer science or what not...

I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming resource (as in "archive") where people with a problem should find a solution - not by asking but through googling. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of general value, not an individual answer to just one person.

But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on.

In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic reasons. Way to go.

I used to be a daily visitor to SO and was active in the early days when Jeff and Joel were active and I felt part of the community. After recently seeing moderators rampantly closing questions as if to say 'I consider your question unproductive or unintelligent by my standards', I rarely visit.

Apparently Code Golf is considered a valid question while questions lacking extreme detail that may help people are not.....

The SE community works very hard to keep things on topic. The questions that come up on Hacker News are very interesting, but often times fit the definitions of being off-topic or not constructive. I don't think their closure has had any effect on the frequency of those really interesting off-topic questions.

Also, imagine if SE allowed these types of questions. The community would be overrun by flame wars and turn more into a discussion board, not a place to get answers.

On the other hand, I don't think closing questions has a strong enough effect to discourage people from asking off-topic or otherwise poor questions (see the Programmers.SE board for an example). It's been going through Eternal September for a couple of years now. (I'm not going to give an example of, what is in my opinion, the best moderated SE board since I don't want it to get any exposure and suffer the same fate)

So in closing, there's rhyme and reason to SE closing questions, and I don't think it hurts the site.

Consider this recent question: "Should I start edx cs50 course before any other JavaScript course, or in the middle, or after?"

This person _should_ get downvoted and told that this is not an appropriate question. Hopefully they come around after a while and learn what kinds of questions are helpful for the _community_ at large. Does it suck that they feel unwelcome? Yes. But that doesn't mean users should be forced to "be nice" just because of it.

The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard questions instead of answering them.

E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal strength for the connected network.

10 minutes later it got a vote to close “migrate to superuser”. I immediately updated the question explaining that I only interested in C API. An hour later it got closed as offtopic. I flagged to mod, nothing happened. It gathered a few votes to reopen but not enough to reopen. And now it’s just deleted by “Community” saying “RemoveAbandonedClosed”.

I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

SO wants curation and objective answers to objective questions. Vague or poorly-scoped questions? Toss em in the bin. Questions about "best way" "best library" or "best tool for"? Subjective or not-software -- in the bin.

As a question-answerer, a frustrating question would be one that tries to articulate a bug/problem but never cites any code, compiler error or runtime error. When posed by anyone who is not already an expert these questions very often cannot be addressed without a roundtrip involving "ok, please share the code so we can reproduce the problem".

No joke -- that tip about the MCVE or SSCCE was super valuable. Unfortunately I'd bet that just the act of making this example would probably yield an answer to the person's question most of the time, without even needing SO. Novice question-askers lacked the expertise/experience to know to do this or just the patience required. I'm not faulting them, I remember what it was like to be a novice. It's a reasonable expectation to turn to a mentor and show them the code and ask them what you're doing wrong.

> Hope this paper helps me out!

> > Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style.

This matches my experience. But I'd love to hear how the results might change if they filtered on low reputation question askers.

When HN bashes SO, I feel conflicted. I totally understand why so many folks are disappointed. But I also think that it's good for what it wants to be.

So many of the low-effort questions and answers belong in forums or IRC channels, or just ask your colleague, FFS. Or, you know, read official documentation? Get an understanding of the subject before you start making posts and just wait around for an answer. But I guess people could actually learn something, then.

Learning is not what many developers seem to use SO for, they just want a quick fix. Something to copy-paste. It leaves them with no understanding and increases the shittyness of code everywhere.

We need a higher bar for programming. If you can't get your work done without SO, you should be fired.

If I have a problem that I can't reproduce but is related to programming, and there's a chance that someone else has also had a similar problem and found the solution, SO does not offer a way for me to connect with that person.

On the other hand, if an unreproducible problem is posted and allowed, and multiple answers are given, there's a good chance one of those will point the OP in the right direction, and in turn, someone else that faces that same issue. There should be nothing wrong with this type of interaction. If someone feels it's a waste of their time, by all means, move on.

I know this has been argued ad nauseam, both here and on meta, and is likely something that will never change, but that's not the point of my post here. I just think it's worth defending the stance that the SO community is too quick to close programming related topics that may not be completely black and white.

By the way, programmers.stackexchange.com also suffers from this same fate, and I don't think this question would have received a much different response there, even though it's supposed to allow more open-ended questions.

However, I have been discouraged from using the site in recent years due to too many disagreements over closing and downvoting questions when actually just getting a little bit more clarification from the person asking the question would have helped a lot more.

I've answered over 1,000 questions, ranging from very simple beginner level to some things that took a good deal of research or debugging to answer. I've seen my fair share of poor questions. If a question is completely off topic, then sure, I click the "close" button immediately.

However, if it's on topic, and about some identifiable issue, but not specific enough, too poorly worded, or doesn't include a code sample, or the like, then I post a comment requesting clarification, and listing how they can improve their question. In some cases, they actually work with me, improve the question, and then I or someone else can answer it. In some cases, they just ignore my comments or continue with requests to just give them the code or the like, in which at that point I find it worth a downvote or close vote.

But a lot of the times, I've seen perfectly good questions that were just a little confusingly worded, however I was able to tease out what they were getting at, I've done some research to find the answer, and come back, only to find the questions closed. Now I have an answer for the question, but can't actually post it. If I vote to reopen, sometimes even after editing it to clarify or getting the OP to edit it, it will generally languish with one or two reopen votes. Sometimes I'll then post on meta to complain about this behavior; people being way to quick to close. This will frequently lead to enough people clicking through to reopen it, but also a torrent of complaints about how the question really is bad and how we shouldn't let this kind of stuff on the site because it's destroying the community.

The thing is, bad questions don't destroy the community. If they're bad questions, they'll generally fall off the front page and get forgotten about. They don't really cause much in the way of problems; they're just a few extra bits. But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they're doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners.

I think that Stack Overflow is a very different thing than MathOverflow. Professional programmers sometimes run into thing that they need to do that they are complete beginners at; you may have years of experience writing Java, but then you wind up needing to integrate with and write a plugin for something written in Ruby, and you really have very little experience with it and so don't know where to look. Due to the huge numbers of different languages, APIs, platforms, and so on, rapid pace of change, and shortage of qualified people with the exact relevant experience, almost everyone is a beginner at something they are doing at some point in their career.

Furthermore, some people just don't know how to ask good questions online. It's a skill that takes some time to learn. If you're asking a question to someone in person, they may already have more context about what you're doing, or will be able to more easily ask you questions to clarify and sit down with you to work through it, while asking good questions online can involve a certain amount of preparation in advance to narrow the issue down to a self contained, reproducible test case, to phrase the question appropriately, and so on.

So while I agree that complete junk should be closed and delete, and people who just post "plz gimmeh teh codez" should be discouraged, I am really frustrated by the way people extend that to things that are just beginner questions, poorly worded questions from people who aren't good at asking questions online or aren't good at English, or the like.

That, and the fact that the SO/Programmers distinction is rather confusing and unnecessary in my opinion.

Why not? A lot of people need help, why not just politely point them in the right direction. Or if you feel that that is beneath you just ignore them.

If someone asks a question like "Which is the best tool for solving problem x" they question is closed with a note saying that is has been closed because it will only attract opinion based answers. Well that is exactly what the question was asking for, an opinion from someone who might know better than the person asking the question.

I would much rather have the supercilious answers removed. I have in mind the ones that instead of answering the question simply tell you that you shouldn't approach the problem that way at all even when the person asking has made it clear that they have no choice in that (corporate choice of platform, IDE, DB, etc., for instance).

Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.

You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4]

I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.

Which I suppose is something.

[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction

[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code

[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid"

[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking

There are plenty of examples of good questions being closed because they are perceived as generating too much discussion (esp. on the "programmers" se site). IMO, you've given us an example of SO moderation working.

As for the stats, is it really that suprising that newcomers ask more questions? I'd imagine those who have been programming for some time are more confident in their ability to research answers, check the usual resources (e.g. MDSN), read and understand open source code, and then use SO as a form of last resort.

The community itself it seems has become hostile, and therefore I personally don't want to post questions just to be berated for not knowing the answer.

I also think SO is so focused on the simpler questions. This is my code, it isn't working, can you help me fix it. I once asked a question which was more of an architecture problem, no clear answer, but I thought "maybe" it could get some discussion going which would lead to the answer. Nope, SO isn't interested in getting into the larger questions which could help you learn and progress. Keep it to simple errors or maybe help find the right algorithm.

The usefulness decreases over time as we become better developers if SO can't lead us to asking larger questions.