3 ms·
I don't disagree with the gist of your argument: the quality of Stack Overflow would greatly diminish if people (newbies or otherwise) were allowed to ask quest
by catnaroek 10y ago
I don't disagree with the gist of your argument: the quality of Stack Overflow would greatly diminish if people (newbies or otherwise) were allowed to ask questions whose answers are in the manual. But there are better ways to correct undesired behavior. For starters:
(0) Don't downvote newbies to oblivion. That's just being a bully. (IMO, downvotes should be reserved for bad answers.)
(1) When contributing an answer, provide an option to flag the answer as “taken straight from the manual”. I'll call such answers “RTFM answers” for short.
(2) When a user receives their first RTFM answer, just tell them in a gentle way that they're expected to do their research, and perhaps provide useful links, depending on the tags associated to their question.
(3) Only if a user consistently asks questions with RTFM answers, punish their behavior in some way: reputation loss, decreased question visibility, etc.
I've asked my fair share of dumb questions and even posted dumb answers, and the community has treated me relatively kindly. (I have ~7k reputation as of now.) I wish others could be treated the same way.
- Veedrac 10y agoFor the most part, downvotes on poor questions don't cascade a ton. Questions that go lower generally deserve it. Of those questions about a day old with score <= 0, only ~30% are less than 0. Of those <= -1, only ~30% are < -1 and only ~10% are < -2. Your RTFM tag doesn't seem to add very much over a moderate count of downvotes. I believe the rest of what you've said applies when downvotes happen.