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Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

108 points by exolymph 10y ago

msftie 10y ago
Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
- grawlinson 10y ago
  I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off comments with your Facebook account. The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or people with "correct" opinions. Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively moderate them beyond ground level.)
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    At this point I would rather go to reddit (reddit!!) with technical questions instead of stack overflow.
- toyg 10y ago
  I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.
  - tajen 10y ago
    Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays.
    - danbruc 10y ago
      Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again. [1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com http://codereview.stackexchange.com
    - ricree 10y ago
      This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.
      - Shog9 10y ago
        You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers. Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.
  - Latty 10y ago
    If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date. StackOverflow is a good resource precisely because it's curated and maintained, including rejecting content that doesn't work on the site. Just like Wikipedia doesn't allow you to have your own page listing your opinions.
- danbruc 10y ago
  This kind of cuts both ways. I stopped answering Stack Overflow questions because now there is such a huge amount of trivial questions that are easily answered reading manuals or tutorials that it became hard to find interesting questions to answer. There are certainly other factors at play like me getting more experienced and therefore what I consider interesting shifted, Stack Overflow already has answers to a huge amount of questions and so on. But I am pretty sure that the kind of questions asked objectively shifted quite a bit towards trivial questions. Now it depends on what you think about what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. I personally think Stack Overflow should be focused on providing information that not already exists, I don't think it should try to replicate or link to every manual and tutorial out there. This stuff already exists and is hopefully actively maintained by the language and library developers, so what is the point of duplicating it? I think Stack Overflow should not be about teaching people how to code but help them to solve hard problems. What constitutes a hard problem of course heavily depends on one's experience and abilities so the line is kind of arbitrary but I would say that if it is in a beginners tutorial or the manual, then it is not a hard problem. I certainly unterstand the desire to get problems solved within minutes but I also think that is not really a good thing. No matter how good and experienced a developer you are, you will come across problems that take hours and days to solve again and again. Reading ten pages of a manual should really not be considered an annoyance but a valuable skill. Very often you will already have a rough idea of how you want to solve your problem and just look for some very specific information, but if you take the time to read about it you will often find that your initial solution is actually not that great and there is a different preferred way to do it. So if there is one advice I would give to beginners than it definitely is »Read the fucking manual!« and probably read it twice.
tomb_ 10y ago
>Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. No. There's a lot, A LOT of resources online for beginners. let the nerds run SO, it's perfect as it is for people who know what they are doing.
- kylehotchkiss 10y ago
  Maybe SO could better integrate this type of thing with results. Example: "Your question is simple but I know this great starter guide or Book on Amazon that can help you find your way".
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    Yet SO is filled with people asking "how to homework" or want something they can copy/paste into their program. I've seriously seen an OP ask why the answer's code didn't work because it used variable names not present in the OP's code. Yet there was no way to know what the original variables were called because the OP didn't provide any code.
PythonicAlpha 10y ago
Part of the problem IMHO is, that SO tries to be two things at once. It says, it shall be a help portal for programmers, but at the same time they want to be something like Wikipedia for programmers. Both things do not fit well together. When you want to help others, you must allow any question that is earnest. When you want to be an encyclopedia, you have to filter questions very harshly. Sadly, together with this, the self-moderation feature of SO attract people that are more interested in enforcing rules, instead of helping people.
mkoryak 10y ago
Back in 2009 and 2010 I used to participate heavily on SO. I asked and answered questions and it was a great resource for me. At some point I stopped needing it, my questions became too specific and I got tired of answering the same questions. At that point I had about 20k karma points. I've recently needed to ask a few answerable questions so I went back. All my questions were closed or down voted and people reduced me for asking such bad questions with 25k karma. SO is now useless unless your question fits exactly into some mold they require, ie questions someone with 2-3 years experience might ask.
baking 10y ago
Lesson learned is that if Google returns a result that doesn't appear to match your request, then ctrl-f is your friend. This applies in many areas besides programming.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Google really tried to unlearn this a couple of years ago. Back when any question you would ask would have at least 20000 answers it seemed only the pages never contained the text, they only where in the index because of some link with that text.
fabian2k 10y ago
This looks like a problem that would be solved by splitting that Python manual page. All the information is there, it's just that the whole page is rather long and it's possible to miss that it is in there.
- toyg 10y ago
  Yeah, this is really a Python Doc fail, rather than SO fail.
- niftich 10y ago
  Good point. The Python manual pages are actually rather long-winded, and try to intersperse narration with sporadic usage examples. It's too long-form to be a reference, and too context-free to be a tutorial. I'm not surprised Python questions are so frequent.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
When I was getting started I occasionally got some angry responses on SO. In the end it was good for me. People were willing to point me in the right direction but when you don't even know the fundamentals they're just wasting their time and doing the work for you. If you take the time to learn the fundamentals, any basic question you have already has an answer on SO and you will be able to use it.
mlvljr 10y ago
Nice place to pick up an online fight though (when you're up to it) :)
johntherip 10y ago
Well, while I agree that SO might have become a somewhat elitist plateform, maybe partly because a lot of professional developers are using their SO account to enforce their curriculum, it is not either supposed to be a kind of nursery for "wanna be" developers that happen to have a quick look on programming languages, and think SO is a forum where any question can be asked. Sorry to say that, but I'm neither surprised nor offended by the closing of that post.
niftich 10y ago
Just as the article observes, it's really ironic that many, many google searches for "how to do X in language Y" lead to questions on SO that are marked as [closed], 'not a good question', etc. Often, the accepted answer is a variation of RTFM, but sometimes with an inline code example. Also ironic is when the question asks for help in choosing between frameworks or libraries of comparable functionality and it gets marked as [closed] 'opinion-based'. What's a good question then? I understand that SO wants/wanted to discourage becoming just a copy-pastable repository of code snippets for common patterns, and that they also don't want to be full of thinly-veiled marketing posts about why framework X is better than its competitors. But then what content DO they want? (Rhetorical, but in-depth questions about API usage are probably the best ones to ask.) I treat SO as read-only, and that makes it a valuable resource for me.
- edem 10y ago
  > What's a good question then? Read the FAQ and you will know.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    I find that my definition of for instance "primarily opinion based" or "not constructive" differ by a wide margin from some people at SO. So no, just reading the rules might not help everyone I'm afraid. This is more like case law than physics I'm afraid.
  - jedberg 10y ago
    With respect, I have to vehemently disagree. I've been using the site since the beta, have thousands of karma and twenty+ years of experience, and yet I can't ask or answer a question anymore. When I answer a question, it gets downvoted and then an inaccurate answer gets accepted and upvoted. When I ask a question, it gets marked as a duplicate, and then they link to the question it's a duplicate of, which is a question I found in my own research that was exactly the opposite of the question I had. That community has become completely toxic and I can't participate it in anymore.
    - 10y ago
mehrdada 10y ago
I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like this with a grain of salt these days. End of the day, I think it is important to keep in mind what Stack Overflow is not: it's not Khan Academy. It's not college classes. It's not your IRC buddy. It's more like Wikipedia (but not quite exactly that) than those things. Some choices should be made to keep the content quality high.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Problem is as have been pointed out again and again: there are so many amazingly useful questions closed as "not constructive". All while IIRC quiz-type "trivia" questions seems be more OK.
- jrumbut 10y ago
  What I think the experienced users are missing is that newbie questions are an opportunity to let a newbie answerer learn to teach. When I decided I wanted to start helping out on SO I found it almost impossible for months because the easy questions were instantly shut down with a frustrated response from an elder statesman user. It's like when there's one guy who has maintained a system for years and won't let anyone else touch it but also complains about having no time for other projects. Eventually he has to let someone new take over parts of it, even if it means that at first it takes a little longer and it's not done quite the way he would.
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    I'm a 2k user and I've never asked a question. I find that the greatest benefit to my learning has been trying to answer someone else's question. That being said, I'd say on average there are 2 "async loop" questions on the "newest javascript questions", both of which tend to get an answer by a newbie and still get marked as a dupe. Just because it gets closed, doesn't mean you can't work on answering it. The research will benefit you whether or not you get the validation from answering it. However, I do understand that it's hard to know if it's the right answer without the feedback of an upvote or two.
maxlybbert 10y ago
The StackOverflow question given as an example is a terrible question. Odds are that neither the person asking the question or the person who wrote this blog post realize how big the subject is, but since the question just says "tell me everything and I'll figure out if it's relevant," there really is no good way to answer, other than a link to the doc page and a little prodding along the lines of "what are you actually trying to do?"
edem 10y ago
The problem is that most users are not reading the FAQ and they don't use Google nor the search function on SO itself. This leads to the frustration of the experiences users who see a lot of malformed/unanswerable/duplicate questions. I see this every day. I usually don't comment and just vote on "close" silently but there are some users who are openly communicate their frustration and honestly they have a reason. I think that SO should come up with some NLP solution which filters out those questions and informs the offending users that their question is problematic. I have asked a LOT of questions on SO (136) and if I follow the guidelines I ALWAYS get quality responses. The problem IMHO is the lazy newbies who don't bother to read the guidelines / FAQ.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
I do generally agree that Stack Overflow as a community is too enthusiastic about closing down some questions. It's always particularly frustrating to Google for some weird error message and find a Stack Overflow discussion which has been killed off because the question was inappropriate :) But, that said… I'm not sure this is a particularly convincing example of this phenomenon. This is an example of something which can easily be found by reading the documentation, and I'm not convinced that Stack Overflow is the correct place to ask for other people to do your research for you! In individual cases I don't doubt that it's fine, but I imagine it gets frustrating to deal with repeated questions of this character, especially when we now have the benefit of such easily-accessible online documentation. There is a balance to be struck, I guess. No reason to be rude even when silly questions are being asked.
- jrumbut 10y ago
  I think the point the author is making is that what can be easily found in a language's docs is subject to the same learning curve as what can be easily done with the language. Skill in docs reading comes with skill in the practice and understanding the concepts of a technology. Someone can make an honest and unsuccessful search for something that is blindingly obvious to another. If new users have difficulty using the documentation, that is sufficient proof that the documentation doesn't adequately serve new users (besides new users who magically know how to learn like experienced users) and that's where Q&A communities come in. The rules say you have to do research and you have to show what you've tried to do. It doesn't specify a standard skill level you need to meet.
  - amag 10y ago
    The problem of writing documentation is that it's not possible to write it to suite every person. While most documentation certainly can be improved upon it's always the matter of where to best spend my time. Developing a feature or document an old feature in yet another way to serve people with a different mindset than my own. With the risk of sounding a bit of "it's programming it's meant to be hard", I feel the author is a bit spoiled. It's not as if the information wasn't there, she just needed ctrl-f "%r". This is also something you need to learn when learning how to program. In fact I would say that looking up information online is a fundamental programming skill (it didn't use to be, back in the days it was finding stuff in books, but we're mostly past that now, ctrl-f is so much nicer). So she just learned a very valuable lesson, I'd say.
Veedrac 10y ago
> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it." Stack Overflow's biggest problem is that frequent contributors are getting fed up with the torrent of newbie questions from people who haven't programmed for a month. Imagine joining Math Overflow because you're an enthusiast mathematician... only 19 of every 20 questions are about how to multiply two digit numbers. Imagine joining a DIY group after years of practice only to find that you spend most of your time building cubes out of playdough and sticks. Have you tried reading the new queue on Stack Overflow? What does this[1] even mean? (I'm actually kind'a shocked about how good it's looking right now; only about half of the questions are utterly irredeemable.) People from the outside don't see this. There are filters in place and people who care to make them work. So all you see is the hostility and none of the reason. But please believe me when I say that it's not just us being cronies. We really do care about the site, and we just don't want to lose it. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-disable-tridion-cme-ribbon-based-on-any-metadata-field-value-chang http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-di...
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    If they would search for the answer to their question, they would get it right now instead of waiting for someone to come in and answer the same question yet again. If you are starting out with something new, someone has already had the same problem you are. Your question has already been asked and answered.
droope 10y ago
Welcome to the programming community! People are generally kind and willing to help, but there is one caveat: there is frequently little patience for questions which you could have resolved yourself. With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a way that it reflects that you've "done your research."
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Problem is when you are stumped with some small detail you have missed. I must admit I have come to the point were I unconsciously just don't ask questions on SO and instead try another hour on my own instead of even trying to ask.
  - Tyr42 10y ago
    I find that half the time I start typing up a question for SO I answer it myself. I'll imagine someone trying to answer it, but asking if I checked site Y on the topic first, so I'll make sure to add "Site Y only says <blah>" to my question. Only once I have added proof that it's not a trivial mistake on my part would I actually post the question, but sometimes I find out what was causing the problem in the first place. Or maybe I'll be trying to reduce the problem to a minimal C file and the invocation of gcc that causes the error. And in doing so I'll realize what's wrong. So I don't think it's a bad thing to get people to go over the question a few times before asking, and try and make it as easy as possible to answer the question.
  - yoo1I 10y ago
    I find that in preparing a question that is specific and answerable, includes everything needed to resolve it and anticipates criticism about not having done enough research myself, I'm usually able to answer the question I had myself, and even find stupid typos or or other silly little details. In the cases that this process doesn't lead me to an answer, oftentimes I discover that either my question is too broad to be answerable, or that I am missing general education in the area and my actual question is somewhere further down. So really the impatience and hostility towards bad questions, is a tool I use to aid me in finding answers myself. That all sounds a little smug, but when I am stuck even after this process and actually post my research on SO or IRC or to a mailing list, too many times I get one-line answers about the tiny thing I was missing... but at least then nobody thought I was just being lazy.
laddng 10y ago
I have found that as a beginner programmer, one thing that is really important is to have patience and persistence. I have observed other beginners who want to rush to become a good programmer in X language and basically throw every question into Stack Overflow. Slow down, learn how to read technical manuals, and in the long run you'll thank yourself as you go on to learn more complex languages by reading technical documentation with patience and persistence. Build that foundation of how to learn and things will pay off in the long run.
keithnz 10y ago
SO is a bit of a culture shock from other places. Its not a forum, it's a little bit wikipedia ish. Having your question closed is not a hostile act, it's part of creating crowd sourced editing of content. Sometimes questions that could be good get closed, sometimes questions that are bad don't get closed ( at least for several years ). While you may wish it to be a little more friendly, its main goal is to provide high quality content especially for professional developers, and the thing is, it is very successful at doing that, so be careful to understand how it gets a lot of high quality content because a lot of other sites tried and failed to do the same thing. Be very careful to fit into the culture of SO, if you want to chat about problems, find a forum, go on gitter, or some other space. On SO, best thing you can do is edit the original question if its badly done and you care about the question. Make it better.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
callumlocke 10y ago
The other StackExchange sites are just as bad. I once had a physics question (I'm not a scientist, I was just curious) and I asked it on the Physics SE site. The result was a torrent of intelligent, articulate people telling me my question was stupid and that I should not have asked it. Imagine if a curious schoolkid had that experience, they could be put off physics for life. StackOverflow etc. can be useful at times, but it has a pedantic and hostile culture that is anathema to learning.
- gutnor 10y ago
  Well, that's ok, that's not the place to ask the question. Or is it ? How do you find a better place ? Probably use google and find yourself back on SO / Whatever SE again. That's the biggest problem. The #1 source of information does not accept dumb questions. And anyway, what is a dumb question ? Lots of question on SO are pretty dumb. Useful, because they save you 1 hour parsing the doc/spec, but dumb because well that's literally a chapter in the manual. Ask OP question on Swift 2 years ago and it was ok (despite the doc being readily available too), ask it today it is dumb, ask it on java, dumb again. That would be like going on wikipedia and you would only find information about Game of Throne Season 4, 5 and 6, but the pages on Season 1, 2 and 3 have been closed because a real Game of Throne enthousiast shouldn't need that information. I sort of see SO goals. Curated set of responses, move with the technology, etc. But the human side of the site is still firmly and proudly stuck in the worst of the 90's.
philwebster 10y ago
Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place for the answer. I deleted the first answer, tried re-posting on the second question and wasn't allowed. After that, I gave up.
- gbrayut 10y ago
  Sounds like you ran into one of the spam prevention mechanisms. I've done the same thing before, and usually as long as you do some editing and don't just copy/paste the answer it should let it thru. Or sometimes I leave a comment with a link to the other answer so people can find it. Sorry you had a bad experience with the site. I hope you try contributing again in the future if you get a chance.
sklivvz1971 10y ago
Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions. Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to build a library that will last for years longer than solving the problem for a single person. Another thing that people don't get is that Stack Overflow is basically a school. When programmers say their profession is a life-long learning exercise... they do it mainly on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. We can only ask them to be nice, but you can't expect everyone to be exactly how you expect. It just won't happen. While we do moderate rudeness, it can only be a post-hoc exercise where users help us identify such behavior. EDIT: I removed a paragraph that was very misleading and added a clearer one. Sorry about that.
- jrumbut 10y ago
  I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks?
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol An excellent question, which leads us to the heart of the matter ...
    - jrumbut 10y ago
      I also wonder if there is any connection between the low value put on being polite and welcoming and the struggles to create bring more diversity to our community. StackOverflow is where professional development happens, and so there is some responsibility on them to make sure that development is healthy.
phantom_oracle 10y ago
The filter goes both ways. Some may feel discouraged when SO closes/downvotes you to the coldest pits of "I'm a newb and don't know anything", but imagine a situation far, far worse: Imagine searching for this exact question and getting 36 SO questions all asking the same basic thing, just tweaked ever-so slightly. It sucks to have mods putting in some effort with strict-filter rules, but without their filtering, the 'noise' ratio would be horrendous and would render the generally useful SO into oblivion.
current_call 10y ago
But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people to ~learn how to code~, then you’re doing it right. I have all the community I want, thanks. If you think I'm being self centered, you have it backwards. I don't care what you do, but you think a community you aren't part of should cater to you.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Problem is a number of us were parts of the community and now treat it mostly as read only.
  - current_call 10y ago
    You mean like what happened to Wikipedia?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rajadigopula 10y ago
I am on SO and I once tried to help someone in similar situation. I could easily say search on google, but instead I helped them. Guess what - the converstion below my answer ended up me answering more fundemental questions from the same OP which are far worse than the actual asked question. Some of the follow up qustions, if I give them to the author of the above blog, might ask me to google them!
Animats 10y ago
This is really a complaint about the Python docs. The poster is using a book that makes you look for info that ought to be in the book in a convenient table. If you search for "Python formatting", you get to [1] which doesn't list the "%r" format effector. Neither does [2], which is the same document for Python 3.6. See, on that page, "Form specification mini-language": format_spec ::= [[fill]align][sign][#][0][width][,][.precision][type] fill ::= <any character> align ::= "<" | ">" | "=" | "^" sign ::= "+" | "-" | " " width ::= integer precision ::= integer type ::= "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "E" | "f" | "F" | "g" | "G" | "n" | "o" | "s" | "x" | "X" | "%" Not seeing an "r" in there. There's an example further down on the page which uses "%r", but the syntax description and tables do not mention it. Stack Overflow isn't the one to blame here. [1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html [2] https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec
- exolymph 10y ago
  My point was more about the attitude toward beginners than the actual accessibility of the information, but you're right that Python's docs could be more user-friendly.
lloyd-christmas 10y ago
SO for true beginners is like asking questions about 16th century French literature when the only french you know is "Je m'appelle Lloyd. Ou est la bibliotheque?". The problem is that beginners don't have the ability to actually know what they are searching for. Trying to ask "how do I do string interpolation in javascript?" means you have to know what string interpolation is in the first place. You're much more likely to get the title "var in text... HALP?!?" filled with details of an XY problem. While I sympathize with it, I'm not going to answer the Nx10th question about async loops. I remember those days, so I try to make it a policy to leave a comment whenever I flag those types of questions. However, trying to make SO "beginner friendly" is doing a disservice to the people who actually use it everyday as well as that person who finally figures out the terminology for what they were looking for in the first place. I can never remember `git rm -r --cached .` any time I change my .gitignore, but finding that is super easy only because "what is git" doesn't float to the top above it. I'm definitely not encouraging being an asshole, but it's a simple case of using the right tool for the job. SO isn't that tool when you're at that stage.
- exolymph 10y ago
  It would be massively helpful if SO provided this context for people who arrive from Google searching, which it doesn't.
british_india 10y ago
Stack Overflow is full of snotty moderators just waiting to pounce on anybody who violates what they see as the rules. Asshole moderators all over Stack Overflow.
brudgers 10y ago
StackOverflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood disagreed over whether a question can be too basic. Spolsky authored the famous "How do I move the turtle in Logo" question [1]. Atwood's view won out providing asshats plausible deniability for asshattery toward novices and students. On the other hand, some languages are better than others. Ask a question, even a homework question, about Racket and odds are that someone deep into extending it will answer. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
mmgutz 10y ago
Many of the approved answers on SO are outdated and in some cases just outright incorrect in their approach. You can't just read the selected answer anymore, you also have to read hidden comments that may point to the correct answer. SO needs a feature where the community can select a better answer.
- brudgers 10y ago
  It has that feature...well kind of. Anyone can edit any question and any answer. Until a certain level of internet points those edits get reviewed by someone with enough points to be trusted. After a certain level of internet points a person is trusted to edit questions without review. Anyone can fix what is broken or at least do the bulk of the work.
King-Aaron 10y ago
I feel most people who complain about Stack Overflow, are people who rock up without attempting to solve a problem themselves, and then get angry when you tell them to come back with an example of what they've tried. That or they get upset at being told that their question about "how to I make this div tag blue" etc could be answered with three seconds of google searching. There is a vast number of legitimate, interesting questions that get answered all the time. But this leads the rest of the herd to believe SO is a free homework completion service, then take to their blogs when they get told to fuck off.
doug1001 10y ago
so my rep on SO is about 41K with an average rep per answer a little shy of 100 and about every third answer is the accepted answer. My numbers on Cross Validated (the SO for "data scientists") are significantly better. but i've given up trying to ask a question on any of the SO Sites. As far as i can tell, most questions on SO et al are closed for violating one of two boundary conditions. At one end: don't ask a question whose answer is subjective. And at the other end: don't ask a question that can be answered directly from the docs (or google). when you look over a few dozen or more questions closed on these grounds, it's clear to me that this window--the space between these two boundaries that represents an acceptable question is very very small. It's so small that the last couple of questions i've posted i've missed--aimed either too high or too low.

108 points by exolymph 10y ago

msftie 10y ago

Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.

grawlinson 10y ago
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- reitanqild 10y ago
  It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off comments with your Facebook account. The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or people with "correct" opinions. Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively moderate them beyond ground level.)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  At this point I would rather go to reddit (reddit!!) with technical questions instead of stack overflow.
toyg 10y ago
I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.
- tajen 10y ago
  Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again. [1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com http://codereview.stackexchange.com
  - ricree 10y ago
    This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.
    - Shog9 10y ago
      You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers. Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.
- Latty 10y ago
  If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date. StackOverflow is a good resource precisely because it's curated and maintained, including rejecting content that doesn't work on the site. Just like Wikipedia doesn't allow you to have your own page listing your opinions.
danbruc 10y ago
This kind of cuts both ways. I stopped answering Stack Overflow questions because now there is such a huge amount of trivial questions that are easily answered reading manuals or tutorials that it became hard to find interesting questions to answer. There are certainly other factors at play like me getting more experienced and therefore what I consider interesting shifted, Stack Overflow already has answers to a huge amount of questions and so on. But I am pretty sure that the kind of questions asked objectively shifted quite a bit towards trivial questions. Now it depends on what you think about what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. I personally think Stack Overflow should be focused on providing information that not already exists, I don't think it should try to replicate or link to every manual and tutorial out there. This stuff already exists and is hopefully actively maintained by the language and library developers, so what is the point of duplicating it? I think Stack Overflow should not be about teaching people how to code but help them to solve hard problems. What constitutes a hard problem of course heavily depends on one's experience and abilities so the line is kind of arbitrary but I would say that if it is in a beginners tutorial or the manual, then it is not a hard problem. I certainly unterstand the desire to get problems solved within minutes but I also think that is not really a good thing. No matter how good and experienced a developer you are, you will come across problems that take hours and days to solve again and again. Reading ten pages of a manual should really not be considered an annoyance but a valuable skill. Very often you will already have a rough idea of how you want to solve your problem and just look for some very specific information, but if you take the time to read about it you will often find that your initial solution is actually not that great and there is a different preferred way to do it. So if there is one advice I would give to beginners than it definitely is »Read the fucking manual!« and probably read it twice.

tomb_ 10y ago

>Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. No. There's a lot, A LOT of resources online for beginners. let the nerds run SO, it's perfect as it is for people who know what they are doing.

kylehotchkiss 10y ago
Maybe SO could better integrate this type of thing with results. Example: "Your question is simple but I know this great starter guide or Book on Amazon that can help you find your way".
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Yet SO is filled with people asking "how to homework" or want something they can copy/paste into their program. I've seriously seen an OP ask why the answer's code didn't work because it used variable names not present in the OP's code. Yet there was no way to know what the original variables were called because the OP didn't provide any code.

PythonicAlpha 10y ago

Part of the problem IMHO is, that SO tries to be two things at once. It says, it shall be a help portal for programmers, but at the same time they want to be something like Wikipedia for programmers. Both things do not fit well together. When you want to help others, you must allow any question that is earnest. When you want to be an encyclopedia, you have to filter questions very harshly. Sadly, together with this, the self-moderation feature of SO attract people that are more interested in enforcing rules, instead of helping people.

mkoryak 10y ago

Back in 2009 and 2010 I used to participate heavily on SO. I asked and answered questions and it was a great resource for me. At some point I stopped needing it, my questions became too specific and I got tired of answering the same questions. At that point I had about 20k karma points. I've recently needed to ask a few answerable questions so I went back. All my questions were closed or down voted and people reduced me for asking such bad questions with 25k karma. SO is now useless unless your question fits exactly into some mold they require, ie questions someone with 2-3 years experience might ask.

baking 10y ago

Lesson learned is that if Google returns a result that doesn't appear to match your request, then ctrl-f is your friend. This applies in many areas besides programming.

reitanqild 10y ago
Google really tried to unlearn this a couple of years ago. Back when any question you would ask would have at least 20000 answers it seemed only the pages never contained the text, they only where in the index because of some link with that text.

fabian2k 10y ago

This looks like a problem that would be solved by splitting that Python manual page. All the information is there, it's just that the whole page is rather long and it's possible to miss that it is in there.

toyg 10y ago
Yeah, this is really a Python Doc fail, rather than SO fail.
niftich 10y ago
Good point. The Python manual pages are actually rather long-winded, and try to intersperse narration with sporadic usage examples. It's too long-form to be a reference, and too context-free to be a tutorial. I'm not surprised Python questions are so frequent.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

When I was getting started I occasionally got some angry responses on SO. In the end it was good for me. People were willing to point me in the right direction but when you don't even know the fundamentals they're just wasting their time and doing the work for you. If you take the time to learn the fundamentals, any basic question you have already has an answer on SO and you will be able to use it.

mlvljr 10y ago

Nice place to pick up an online fight though (when you're up to it) :)

johntherip 10y ago

Well, while I agree that SO might have become a somewhat elitist plateform, maybe partly because a lot of professional developers are using their SO account to enforce their curriculum, it is not either supposed to be a kind of nursery for "wanna be" developers that happen to have a quick look on programming languages, and think SO is a forum where any question can be asked. Sorry to say that, but I'm neither surprised nor offended by the closing of that post.

niftich 10y ago

Just as the article observes, it's really ironic that many, many google searches for "how to do X in language Y" lead to questions on SO that are marked as [closed], 'not a good question', etc. Often, the accepted answer is a variation of RTFM, but sometimes with an inline code example. Also ironic is when the question asks for help in choosing between frameworks or libraries of comparable functionality and it gets marked as [closed] 'opinion-based'. What's a good question then? I understand that SO wants/wanted to discourage becoming just a copy-pastable repository of code snippets for common patterns, and that they also don't want to be full of thinly-veiled marketing posts about why framework X is better than its competitors. But then what content DO they want? (Rhetorical, but in-depth questions about API usage are probably the best ones to ask.) I treat SO as read-only, and that makes it a valuable resource for me.

edem 10y ago
> What's a good question then? Read the FAQ and you will know.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  I find that my definition of for instance "primarily opinion based" or "not constructive" differ by a wide margin from some people at SO. So no, just reading the rules might not help everyone I'm afraid. This is more like case law than physics I'm afraid.
- jedberg 10y ago
  With respect, I have to vehemently disagree. I've been using the site since the beta, have thousands of karma and twenty+ years of experience, and yet I can't ask or answer a question anymore. When I answer a question, it gets downvoted and then an inaccurate answer gets accepted and upvoted. When I ask a question, it gets marked as a duplicate, and then they link to the question it's a duplicate of, which is a question I found in my own research that was exactly the opposite of the question I had. That community has become completely toxic and I can't participate it in anymore.
  - 10y ago

mehrdada 10y ago

I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like this with a grain of salt these days. End of the day, I think it is important to keep in mind what Stack Overflow is not: it's not Khan Academy. It's not college classes. It's not your IRC buddy. It's more like Wikipedia (but not quite exactly that) than those things. Some choices should be made to keep the content quality high.

reitanqild 10y ago
Problem is as have been pointed out again and again: there are so many amazingly useful questions closed as "not constructive". All while IIRC quiz-type "trivia" questions seems be more OK.
jrumbut 10y ago
What I think the experienced users are missing is that newbie questions are an opportunity to let a newbie answerer learn to teach. When I decided I wanted to start helping out on SO I found it almost impossible for months because the easy questions were instantly shut down with a frustrated response from an elder statesman user. It's like when there's one guy who has maintained a system for years and won't let anyone else touch it but also complains about having no time for other projects. Eventually he has to let someone new take over parts of it, even if it means that at first it takes a little longer and it's not done quite the way he would.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  I'm a 2k user and I've never asked a question. I find that the greatest benefit to my learning has been trying to answer someone else's question. That being said, I'd say on average there are 2 "async loop" questions on the "newest javascript questions", both of which tend to get an answer by a newbie and still get marked as a dupe. Just because it gets closed, doesn't mean you can't work on answering it. The research will benefit you whether or not you get the validation from answering it. However, I do understand that it's hard to know if it's the right answer without the feedback of an upvote or two.

maxlybbert 10y ago

The StackOverflow question given as an example is a terrible question. Odds are that neither the person asking the question or the person who wrote this blog post realize how big the subject is, but since the question just says "tell me everything and I'll figure out if it's relevant," there really is no good way to answer, other than a link to the doc page and a little prodding along the lines of "what are you actually trying to do?"

edem 10y ago

The problem is that most users are not reading the FAQ and they don't use Google nor the search function on SO itself. This leads to the frustration of the experiences users who see a lot of malformed/unanswerable/duplicate questions. I see this every day. I usually don't comment and just vote on "close" silently but there are some users who are openly communicate their frustration and honestly they have a reason. I think that SO should come up with some NLP solution which filters out those questions and informs the offending users that their question is problematic. I have asked a LOT of questions on SO (136) and if I follow the guidelines I ALWAYS get quality responses. The problem IMHO is the lazy newbies who don't bother to read the guidelines / FAQ.

matthewmacleod 10y ago

I do generally agree that Stack Overflow as a community is too enthusiastic about closing down some questions. It's always particularly frustrating to Google for some weird error message and find a Stack Overflow discussion which has been killed off because the question was inappropriate :) But, that said… I'm not sure this is a particularly convincing example of this phenomenon. This is an example of something which can easily be found by reading the documentation, and I'm not convinced that Stack Overflow is the correct place to ask for other people to do your research for you! In individual cases I don't doubt that it's fine, but I imagine it gets frustrating to deal with repeated questions of this character, especially when we now have the benefit of such easily-accessible online documentation. There is a balance to be struck, I guess. No reason to be rude even when silly questions are being asked.

jrumbut 10y ago
I think the point the author is making is that what can be easily found in a language's docs is subject to the same learning curve as what can be easily done with the language. Skill in docs reading comes with skill in the practice and understanding the concepts of a technology. Someone can make an honest and unsuccessful search for something that is blindingly obvious to another. If new users have difficulty using the documentation, that is sufficient proof that the documentation doesn't adequately serve new users (besides new users who magically know how to learn like experienced users) and that's where Q&A communities come in. The rules say you have to do research and you have to show what you've tried to do. It doesn't specify a standard skill level you need to meet.
- amag 10y ago
  The problem of writing documentation is that it's not possible to write it to suite every person. While most documentation certainly can be improved upon it's always the matter of where to best spend my time. Developing a feature or document an old feature in yet another way to serve people with a different mindset than my own. With the risk of sounding a bit of "it's programming it's meant to be hard", I feel the author is a bit spoiled. It's not as if the information wasn't there, she just needed ctrl-f "%r". This is also something you need to learn when learning how to program. In fact I would say that looking up information online is a fundamental programming skill (it didn't use to be, back in the days it was finding stuff in books, but we're mostly past that now, ctrl-f is so much nicer). So she just learned a very valuable lesson, I'd say.

Veedrac 10y ago

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it." Stack Overflow's biggest problem is that frequent contributors are getting fed up with the torrent of newbie questions from people who haven't programmed for a month. Imagine joining Math Overflow because you're an enthusiast mathematician... only 19 of every 20 questions are about how to multiply two digit numbers. Imagine joining a DIY group after years of practice only to find that you spend most of your time building cubes out of playdough and sticks. Have you tried reading the new queue on Stack Overflow? What does this[1] even mean? (I'm actually kind'a shocked about how good it's looking right now; only about half of the questions are utterly irredeemable.) People from the outside don't see this. There are filters in place and people who care to make them work. So all you see is the hostility and none of the reason. But please believe me when I say that it's not just us being cronies. We really do care about the site, and we just don't want to lose it. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-disable-tridion-cme-ribbon-based-on-any-metadata-field-value-chang http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-di...

reitanqild 10y ago
Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.
- mhurron 10y ago
  If they would search for the answer to their question, they would get it right now instead of waiting for someone to come in and answer the same question yet again. If you are starting out with something new, someone has already had the same problem you are. Your question has already been asked and answered.

droope 10y ago

Welcome to the programming community! People are generally kind and willing to help, but there is one caveat: there is frequently little patience for questions which you could have resolved yourself. With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a way that it reflects that you've "done your research."

reitanqild 10y ago
Problem is when you are stumped with some small detail you have missed. I must admit I have come to the point were I unconsciously just don't ask questions on SO and instead try another hour on my own instead of even trying to ask.
- Tyr42 10y ago
  I find that half the time I start typing up a question for SO I answer it myself. I'll imagine someone trying to answer it, but asking if I checked site Y on the topic first, so I'll make sure to add "Site Y only says <blah>" to my question. Only once I have added proof that it's not a trivial mistake on my part would I actually post the question, but sometimes I find out what was causing the problem in the first place. Or maybe I'll be trying to reduce the problem to a minimal C file and the invocation of gcc that causes the error. And in doing so I'll realize what's wrong. So I don't think it's a bad thing to get people to go over the question a few times before asking, and try and make it as easy as possible to answer the question.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  I find that in preparing a question that is specific and answerable, includes everything needed to resolve it and anticipates criticism about not having done enough research myself, I'm usually able to answer the question I had myself, and even find stupid typos or or other silly little details. In the cases that this process doesn't lead me to an answer, oftentimes I discover that either my question is too broad to be answerable, or that I am missing general education in the area and my actual question is somewhere further down. So really the impatience and hostility towards bad questions, is a tool I use to aid me in finding answers myself. That all sounds a little smug, but when I am stuck even after this process and actually post my research on SO or IRC or to a mailing list, too many times I get one-line answers about the tiny thing I was missing... but at least then nobody thought I was just being lazy.

laddng 10y ago

I have found that as a beginner programmer, one thing that is really important is to have patience and persistence. I have observed other beginners who want to rush to become a good programmer in X language and basically throw every question into Stack Overflow. Slow down, learn how to read technical manuals, and in the long run you'll thank yourself as you go on to learn more complex languages by reading technical documentation with patience and persistence. Build that foundation of how to learn and things will pay off in the long run.

keithnz 10y ago

SO is a bit of a culture shock from other places. Its not a forum, it's a little bit wikipedia ish. Having your question closed is not a hostile act, it's part of creating crowd sourced editing of content. Sometimes questions that could be good get closed, sometimes questions that are bad don't get closed ( at least for several years ). While you may wish it to be a little more friendly, its main goal is to provide high quality content especially for professional developers, and the thing is, it is very successful at doing that, so be careful to understand how it gets a lot of high quality content because a lot of other sites tried and failed to do the same thing. Be very careful to fit into the culture of SO, if you want to chat about problems, find a forum, go on gitter, or some other space. On SO, best thing you can do is edit the original question if its badly done and you care about the question. Make it better.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

callumlocke 10y ago

The other StackExchange sites are just as bad. I once had a physics question (I'm not a scientist, I was just curious) and I asked it on the Physics SE site. The result was a torrent of intelligent, articulate people telling me my question was stupid and that I should not have asked it. Imagine if a curious schoolkid had that experience, they could be put off physics for life. StackOverflow etc. can be useful at times, but it has a pedantic and hostile culture that is anathema to learning.

gutnor 10y ago
Well, that's ok, that's not the place to ask the question. Or is it ? How do you find a better place ? Probably use google and find yourself back on SO / Whatever SE again. That's the biggest problem. The #1 source of information does not accept dumb questions. And anyway, what is a dumb question ? Lots of question on SO are pretty dumb. Useful, because they save you 1 hour parsing the doc/spec, but dumb because well that's literally a chapter in the manual. Ask OP question on Swift 2 years ago and it was ok (despite the doc being readily available too), ask it today it is dumb, ask it on java, dumb again. That would be like going on wikipedia and you would only find information about Game of Throne Season 4, 5 and 6, but the pages on Season 1, 2 and 3 have been closed because a real Game of Throne enthousiast shouldn't need that information. I sort of see SO goals. Curated set of responses, move with the technology, etc. But the human side of the site is still firmly and proudly stuck in the worst of the 90's.

philwebster 10y ago

Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place for the answer. I deleted the first answer, tried re-posting on the second question and wasn't allowed. After that, I gave up.

gbrayut 10y ago
Sounds like you ran into one of the spam prevention mechanisms. I've done the same thing before, and usually as long as you do some editing and don't just copy/paste the answer it should let it thru. Or sometimes I leave a comment with a link to the other answer so people can find it. Sorry you had a bad experience with the site. I hope you try contributing again in the future if you get a chance.

sklivvz1971 10y ago

Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions. Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to build a library that will last for years longer than solving the problem for a single person. Another thing that people don't get is that Stack Overflow is basically a school. When programmers say their profession is a life-long learning exercise... they do it mainly on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. We can only ask them to be nice, but you can't expect everyone to be exactly how you expect. It just won't happen. While we do moderate rudeness, it can only be a post-hoc exercise where users help us identify such behavior. EDIT: I removed a paragraph that was very misleading and added a clearer one. Sorry about that.

jrumbut 10y ago
I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks?
- hackuser 10y ago
  > I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol An excellent question, which leads us to the heart of the matter ...
  - jrumbut 10y ago
    I also wonder if there is any connection between the low value put on being polite and welcoming and the struggles to create bring more diversity to our community. StackOverflow is where professional development happens, and so there is some responsibility on them to make sure that development is healthy.

phantom_oracle 10y ago

The filter goes both ways. Some may feel discouraged when SO closes/downvotes you to the coldest pits of "I'm a newb and don't know anything", but imagine a situation far, far worse: Imagine searching for this exact question and getting 36 SO questions all asking the same basic thing, just tweaked ever-so slightly. It sucks to have mods putting in some effort with strict-filter rules, but without their filtering, the 'noise' ratio would be horrendous and would render the generally useful SO into oblivion.

current_call 10y ago

But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people to ~learn how to code~, then you’re doing it right. I have all the community I want, thanks. If you think I'm being self centered, you have it backwards. I don't care what you do, but you think a community you aren't part of should cater to you.

reitanqild 10y ago
Problem is a number of us were parts of the community and now treat it mostly as read only.
- current_call 10y ago
  You mean like what happened to Wikipedia?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rajadigopula 10y ago

I am on SO and I once tried to help someone in similar situation. I could easily say search on google, but instead I helped them. Guess what - the converstion below my answer ended up me answering more fundemental questions from the same OP which are far worse than the actual asked question. Some of the follow up qustions, if I give them to the author of the above blog, might ask me to google them!

Animats 10y ago

This is really a complaint about the Python docs. The poster is using a book that makes you look for info that ought to be in the book in a convenient table. If you search for "Python formatting", you get to [1] which doesn't list the "%r" format effector. Neither does [2], which is the same document for Python 3.6. See, on that page, "Form specification mini-language": format_spec ::= [[fill]align][sign][#][0][width][,][.precision][type] fill ::= <any character> align ::= "<" | ">" | "=" | "^" sign ::= "+" | "-" | " " width ::= integer precision ::= integer type ::= "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "E" | "f" | "F" | "g" | "G" | "n" | "o" | "s" | "x" | "X" | "%" Not seeing an "r" in there. There's an example further down on the page which uses "%r", but the syntax description and tables do not mention it. Stack Overflow isn't the one to blame here. [1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html [2] https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec

exolymph 10y ago
My point was more about the attitude toward beginners than the actual accessibility of the information, but you're right that Python's docs could be more user-friendly.

lloyd-christmas 10y ago

SO for true beginners is like asking questions about 16th century French literature when the only french you know is "Je m'appelle Lloyd. Ou est la bibliotheque?". The problem is that beginners don't have the ability to actually know what they are searching for. Trying to ask "how do I do string interpolation in javascript?" means you have to know what string interpolation is in the first place. You're much more likely to get the title "var in text... HALP?!?" filled with details of an XY problem. While I sympathize with it, I'm not going to answer the Nx10th question about async loops. I remember those days, so I try to make it a policy to leave a comment whenever I flag those types of questions. However, trying to make SO "beginner friendly" is doing a disservice to the people who actually use it everyday as well as that person who finally figures out the terminology for what they were looking for in the first place. I can never remember `git rm -r --cached .` any time I change my .gitignore, but finding that is super easy only because "what is git" doesn't float to the top above it. I'm definitely not encouraging being an asshole, but it's a simple case of using the right tool for the job. SO isn't that tool when you're at that stage.

exolymph 10y ago
It would be massively helpful if SO provided this context for people who arrive from Google searching, which it doesn't.

british_india 10y ago

Stack Overflow is full of snotty moderators just waiting to pounce on anybody who violates what they see as the rules. Asshole moderators all over Stack Overflow.

brudgers 10y ago

StackOverflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood disagreed over whether a question can be too basic. Spolsky authored the famous "How do I move the turtle in Logo" question [1]. Atwood's view won out providing asshats plausible deniability for asshattery toward novices and students. On the other hand, some languages are better than others. Ask a question, even a homework question, about Racket and odds are that someone deep into extending it will answer. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

mmgutz 10y ago

Many of the approved answers on SO are outdated and in some cases just outright incorrect in their approach. You can't just read the selected answer anymore, you also have to read hidden comments that may point to the correct answer. SO needs a feature where the community can select a better answer.

brudgers 10y ago
It has that feature...well kind of. Anyone can edit any question and any answer. Until a certain level of internet points those edits get reviewed by someone with enough points to be trusted. After a certain level of internet points a person is trusted to edit questions without review. Anyone can fix what is broken or at least do the bulk of the work.

King-Aaron 10y ago

I feel most people who complain about Stack Overflow, are people who rock up without attempting to solve a problem themselves, and then get angry when you tell them to come back with an example of what they've tried. That or they get upset at being told that their question about "how to I make this div tag blue" etc could be answered with three seconds of google searching. There is a vast number of legitimate, interesting questions that get answered all the time. But this leads the rest of the herd to believe SO is a free homework completion service, then take to their blogs when they get told to fuck off.

doug1001 10y ago

so my rep on SO is about 41K with an average rep per answer a little shy of 100 and about every third answer is the accepted answer. My numbers on Cross Validated (the SO for "data scientists") are significantly better. but i've given up trying to ask a question on any of the SO Sites. As far as i can tell, most questions on SO et al are closed for violating one of two boundary conditions. At one end: don't ask a question whose answer is subjective. And at the other end: don't ask a question that can be answered directly from the docs (or google). when you look over a few dozen or more questions closed on these grounds, it's clear to me that this window--the space between these two boundaries that represents an acceptable question is very very small. It's so small that the last couple of questions i've posted i've missed--aimed either too high or too low.