I've been writing my own blog post about my experience as an "answerer" on StackOverflow for the past year (first time I've spent significant time on the websit

I've been writing my own blog post about my experience as an "answerer" on StackOverflow for the past year (first time I've spent significant time on the website). This puts to words a lot of the problem feelings I had that I couldn't quite explain. What I find interesting is his point on diagnostics: > In my case, I have often have a sub-goal of “try to help improve the diagnostic skill of software engineers so that they’re in a better position to solve their own problems.” There was a recent discussion on Meta that went over whether or not basic debugging was a required skill. [1] My reading of the general consensus was that StackOverflow isn't a place for such users. Anyone who cannot debug or do basic diagnostics before posting doesn't appear welcome. However, there have been efforts of trying implement mentoring to help do exactly what Jon Skeet is doing. [2] This all leaves me wondering what the true purpose of StackOverflow is now. One last problem that I didn't see mentioned that I think is compounding the issue of "askers" looking for quick answers is the trend for larger open source projects to tell users to submit all questions to StackOverflow instead of on the issue tracker. So projects with significant churn and poor documentation end up flooding StackOverflow with extremely low quality questions. StackOverflow was never meant to be used this way. [3][4] However, they haven't done anything to curb this behavior and it's starting to become the norm. I feel that this issue will make the "improve the diagnostic skill" approach to answering impossible in the future. [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-support-users-who-do-not-understand-how-to-debug-their-code https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-suppo... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring [3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-use-stack-overflow-as-the-support-forum-for-a-product-or-project https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-... [4] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-overflow-as-the-official-support-site-of-an-open-source-project https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-ove...