7 ms·

You see people ask basic questions on SO. And people will downvote them to oblivion.

PeCaN 11y ago
Because they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them at all and generally it's fairly clear the asker hasn't even checked if the question is asked before. All the basic questions have pretty much been answered quite thoroughly already. Any beginner is extremely unlikely to ask something that someone else hasn't already thought of.
- smithkl42 11y ago
  But beginners often don't know what to ask or how, or even what to Google for. You need a year in the field just to pick up the right terms to type into a search engine to point you in the right direction.
  - PeCaN 11y ago
    I'd debate that a bit. Personally I hardly had to ask any questions when I was a beginner, and I'm not even particularly good with Google. Relevant vocabulary can be picked up from tutorials quite quickly. Though Google does seem a little worse at programming queries now than it was circa 2009. :/
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      I support your position 100%. There was no Google when I had questions. I cut my teeth on pointers in C with nothing but the K&R book. That people can't be bothered to put some effort into that miraculous white textbox doesn't make me feel any pity for them. Google is good enough just literally typing what you're saying with your mouth into the search bar. The other thing here I feel pretty strongly about is that programming has a barrier to entry, and that barrier to entry will not go away until robots are writing software. In twenty years of programming, I have met people that cannot think in that way, try as they might. At some point, people will hit a test of wherewithal. Their ability to reason and think logically about pure abstractions will be put to the test. Whether they fail the test in their first semester, their first SO question, or their first time trying to Google something, trying to do something about it is just shifting the time when that happens. There's a reason programmers have the salaries we do.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    Sometimes that's true. But often it's enough to google the actual error message which is returned to you and people still don't do that. I don't think that's a case of beginner not knowing what to google for. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22NoneType+object+has+no+attribute%22 https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22NoneType+object+has+no... - ~900 cases of people spending time to upload their code to SO and waiting for answers with explanations, rather than trying to understand what the error means. (or even reading the first link that comes up in "Questions that may already have your answer")
    - crispyambulance 11y ago
      It is never OK to be mean to someone asking a question. But more importantly, it is clear that too many questions have "enough" effort put into them that they don't deserve a withering response. As for copy-pasting error-messages into google, the results may not apply, in the asker's mind, to what they are doing. The results might have information which is too technical to understand. If the error comes from a turgid framework, it might very well provide no useful clue at all because its just detritus from leaky framework abstractions.
      - smithkl42 11y ago
        "detritus from leaky framework abstractions" - good line.
    - smithkl42 11y ago
      Here's an example of me screwing up a pretty basic question on SO: I was new to Angular, and didn't even think to follow the really obvious URL that they included in the error message. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19671962/uncaught-error-injectorunpr-with-angular-after-deployment http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19671962/uncaught-error-i... Luckily, I was met with a kind and thoughtful answer, and it turns out that I'm probably not the only one with the problem: the question has had some 42K views. But I've been coding for 20+ years, and I still screwed up my question. Yes, even on a Q&A site, folks should research before posting. But some grace to beginners who don't even know the proper etiquette would go a long ways.
- jotux 11y ago
  >they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them Or they're new to programming and lack the vocabulary to research what they're interested in or phrase a question well.
- inopinatus 11y ago
  This isn't true or fair to beginners. Some people would call me an expert in my field. Beginners are perfectly capable of throwing me a hypothetical that neither I nor any of my peers had previously considered. Perhaps you are confusing beginner with idiot? They are not the same thing. Seymour Cray once said he liked to hire inexperienced engineers, because they don't know what's supposed to be impossible.
bunkat 11y ago
This is why I don't bother with SO anymore. I once spent a good 45 minutes carefully explaining how something worked to somebody that was obviously a beginner. When I went to submit the answer, I was informed that I couldn't because a moderator had closed the question. When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed. I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.
- smithkl42 11y ago
  This is a real problem with SO. SO is still the best place to go to find answers, but they do quite a bit - though not nearly as much as Wikipedia - to frighten off beginners. Arbitrarily closing perfectly fine, sometimes even great questions, is only the half of it.
  - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
    Bill_The_Lizard does this so much I actually remember his name. I assumed it was just because he only had time to make snap decisions since he handling so much content. Now it sounds like this is a conscious decision to push beginners out.
    - kagamine 11y ago
      It's also the manner in which it is done. About 5 years ago I asked a (dumb) question, I had no idea how to ask the "right" question and was closed down and told "this isn't your personal code writing service". I had phrased the question as can you give advice on how to proceed, I wasn't asking for code samples. Yes, SO wants you to post code, but if you have no idea where to start, some advice could go a long way. Being snarked at was unnecessary and it was 3 years before I posted there again.
wyldfire 11y ago
SO needs help turning this impression around. I upvote any question that's halfway comprehensible. I nearly always comment in order to help resolve the ambiguity in the question. It works out best when the asker engages SO in the comments section.
crispyambulance 11y ago
There's so many assholes on SO, but there are also people who are incredible at explaining stuff. Unfortunately the assholes are far more promiscuous with downvotes, closing and toxic-responses than the good people are with _any_ response. To make it worse assholes see it as their duty to "police" SO to maintain the quality of the forum and will be laughably smug about justifying their actions. The sad thing is it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the person with the most high score, Jon Skeet, is remarkably gentle and kind in all his interactions. It is a pity more folks don't see him as a role model to emulate.
- ChrisDutrow 11y ago
  I participate in a circle of people who e-mail new questions that we ask (and answers). If we think the question needs work, we make suggestions. If we like the question, we up-vote it. The extra up-votes help with other people taking the question seriously and it actually getting good answers. If you or anyone else wants to be included, shoot me an e-mail (its in my profile)
  - crispyambulance 11y ago
    That's a really cool idea... To be sure I understand, are you saying you're in a group that preps questions for SO and then buttress them against spurious closures/downvotes?
    - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
      If we think it is a good question, we upvote it. I believe this conforms to the rules :) Definitely email if you are interested. And to everyone else reading this: its an open invitation, we'd love to meet some more hackers!
- Latty 11y ago
  I don't think this problem is as big as people make out. There definitely are the asshole types (unfortunately, a lot fo them are the helpful people after they got burnt out trying to feed the help vampires). There is a middle ground. There is a need to get rid of low quality content or content that doesn't fit on SO - if you remember the time before SO, you remember the experience of wading through the piles of rubbish and nothing that was forums and resources for programmers of the past. The reason SO is different to those and better is because they know what type of content works on the site, and they intentionally limit the site. The right answer is to try and help those people who post the wrong stuff in a nice way (point them at the right places, explain the issue), move on quickly, and answer good questions.
viraptor 11y ago
It depends what you mean by "basic questions". There are basic questions which are about general issues. There are also basic questions which are super-specific to one issue of a trivial program and can be solved by literally searching for the error message. [going to SO to grab the one on the front page right now] - 5th question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-install-jira https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-... - google: pip install "Operation not permitted" - first link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-sudo-pip-install-oserror-errno-1-operation-not-permitted https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-... - second link: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-pip-after-the-el-capitan-max-os-x-upgrade https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-... (downvoted, marked to close as dupe) Yes. People get downvoted into oblivion by asking questions which they (demonstrably) did not spend a moment researching. The front page of SO contains a steady stream of them anyway. The downvote arrow means (tooltip): "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". But! If someone actually posted something that's not googlable and that they actually tried to understand, they do get good answers in my experience. If a good question in closed, you can always report it for review. I'm not saying it never happens - but I helped to reopen a few.

PeCaN 11y ago

Because they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them at all and generally it's fairly clear the asker hasn't even checked if the question is asked before. All the basic questions have pretty much been answered quite thoroughly already. Any beginner is extremely unlikely to ask something that someone else hasn't already thought of.

smithkl42 11y ago
But beginners often don't know what to ask or how, or even what to Google for. You need a year in the field just to pick up the right terms to type into a search engine to point you in the right direction.
- PeCaN 11y ago
  I'd debate that a bit. Personally I hardly had to ask any questions when I was a beginner, and I'm not even particularly good with Google. Relevant vocabulary can be picked up from tutorials quite quickly. Though Google does seem a little worse at programming queries now than it was circa 2009. :/
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    I support your position 100%. There was no Google when I had questions. I cut my teeth on pointers in C with nothing but the K&R book. That people can't be bothered to put some effort into that miraculous white textbox doesn't make me feel any pity for them. Google is good enough just literally typing what you're saying with your mouth into the search bar. The other thing here I feel pretty strongly about is that programming has a barrier to entry, and that barrier to entry will not go away until robots are writing software. In twenty years of programming, I have met people that cannot think in that way, try as they might. At some point, people will hit a test of wherewithal. Their ability to reason and think logically about pure abstractions will be put to the test. Whether they fail the test in their first semester, their first SO question, or their first time trying to Google something, trying to do something about it is just shifting the time when that happens. There's a reason programmers have the salaries we do.
- viraptor 11y ago
  Sometimes that's true. But often it's enough to google the actual error message which is returned to you and people still don't do that. I don't think that's a case of beginner not knowing what to google for. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22NoneType+object+has+no+attribute%22 https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22NoneType+object+has+no... - ~900 cases of people spending time to upload their code to SO and waiting for answers with explanations, rather than trying to understand what the error means. (or even reading the first link that comes up in "Questions that may already have your answer")
  - crispyambulance 11y ago
    It is never OK to be mean to someone asking a question. But more importantly, it is clear that too many questions have "enough" effort put into them that they don't deserve a withering response. As for copy-pasting error-messages into google, the results may not apply, in the asker's mind, to what they are doing. The results might have information which is too technical to understand. If the error comes from a turgid framework, it might very well provide no useful clue at all because its just detritus from leaky framework abstractions.
    - smithkl42 11y ago
      "detritus from leaky framework abstractions" - good line.
  - smithkl42 11y ago
    Here's an example of me screwing up a pretty basic question on SO: I was new to Angular, and didn't even think to follow the really obvious URL that they included in the error message. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19671962/uncaught-error-injectorunpr-with-angular-after-deployment http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19671962/uncaught-error-i... Luckily, I was met with a kind and thoughtful answer, and it turns out that I'm probably not the only one with the problem: the question has had some 42K views. But I've been coding for 20+ years, and I still screwed up my question. Yes, even on a Q&A site, folks should research before posting. But some grace to beginners who don't even know the proper etiquette would go a long ways.
jotux 11y ago
>they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them Or they're new to programming and lack the vocabulary to research what they're interested in or phrase a question well.
inopinatus 11y ago
This isn't true or fair to beginners. Some people would call me an expert in my field. Beginners are perfectly capable of throwing me a hypothetical that neither I nor any of my peers had previously considered. Perhaps you are confusing beginner with idiot? They are not the same thing. Seymour Cray once said he liked to hire inexperienced engineers, because they don't know what's supposed to be impossible.

bunkat 11y ago

This is why I don't bother with SO anymore. I once spent a good 45 minutes carefully explaining how something worked to somebody that was obviously a beginner. When I went to submit the answer, I was informed that I couldn't because a moderator had closed the question. When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed. I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.

smithkl42 11y ago
This is a real problem with SO. SO is still the best place to go to find answers, but they do quite a bit - though not nearly as much as Wikipedia - to frighten off beginners. Arbitrarily closing perfectly fine, sometimes even great questions, is only the half of it.
- ChrisDutrow 11y ago
  Bill_The_Lizard does this so much I actually remember his name. I assumed it was just because he only had time to make snap decisions since he handling so much content. Now it sounds like this is a conscious decision to push beginners out.
  - kagamine 11y ago
    It's also the manner in which it is done. About 5 years ago I asked a (dumb) question, I had no idea how to ask the "right" question and was closed down and told "this isn't your personal code writing service". I had phrased the question as can you give advice on how to proceed, I wasn't asking for code samples. Yes, SO wants you to post code, but if you have no idea where to start, some advice could go a long way. Being snarked at was unnecessary and it was 3 years before I posted there again.

wyldfire 11y ago

SO needs help turning this impression around. I upvote any question that's halfway comprehensible. I nearly always comment in order to help resolve the ambiguity in the question. It works out best when the asker engages SO in the comments section.

crispyambulance 11y ago

There's so many assholes on SO, but there are also people who are incredible at explaining stuff. Unfortunately the assholes are far more promiscuous with downvotes, closing and toxic-responses than the good people are with _any_ response. To make it worse assholes see it as their duty to "police" SO to maintain the quality of the forum and will be laughably smug about justifying their actions. The sad thing is it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the person with the most high score, Jon Skeet, is remarkably gentle and kind in all his interactions. It is a pity more folks don't see him as a role model to emulate.

ChrisDutrow 11y ago
I participate in a circle of people who e-mail new questions that we ask (and answers). If we think the question needs work, we make suggestions. If we like the question, we up-vote it. The extra up-votes help with other people taking the question seriously and it actually getting good answers. If you or anyone else wants to be included, shoot me an e-mail (its in my profile)
- crispyambulance 11y ago
  That's a really cool idea... To be sure I understand, are you saying you're in a group that preps questions for SO and then buttress them against spurious closures/downvotes?
  - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
    If we think it is a good question, we upvote it. I believe this conforms to the rules :) Definitely email if you are interested. And to everyone else reading this: its an open invitation, we'd love to meet some more hackers!
Latty 11y ago
I don't think this problem is as big as people make out. There definitely are the asshole types (unfortunately, a lot fo them are the helpful people after they got burnt out trying to feed the help vampires). There is a middle ground. There is a need to get rid of low quality content or content that doesn't fit on SO - if you remember the time before SO, you remember the experience of wading through the piles of rubbish and nothing that was forums and resources for programmers of the past. The reason SO is different to those and better is because they know what type of content works on the site, and they intentionally limit the site. The right answer is to try and help those people who post the wrong stuff in a nice way (point them at the right places, explain the issue), move on quickly, and answer good questions.

viraptor 11y ago

It depends what you mean by "basic questions". There are basic questions which are about general issues. There are also basic questions which are super-specific to one issue of a trivial program and can be solved by literally searching for the error message. [going to SO to grab the one on the front page right now] - 5th question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-install-jira https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-... - google: pip install "Operation not permitted" - first link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-sudo-pip-install-oserror-errno-1-operation-not-permitted https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-... - second link: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-pip-after-the-el-capitan-max-os-x-upgrade https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-... (downvoted, marked to close as dupe) Yes. People get downvoted into oblivion by asking questions which they (demonstrably) did not spend a moment researching. The front page of SO contains a steady stream of them anyway. The downvote arrow means (tooltip): "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". But! If someone actually posted something that's not googlable and that they actually tried to understand, they do get good answers in my experience. If a good question in closed, you can always report it for review. I'm not saying it never happens - but I helped to reopen a few.