4 ms·

Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there i

Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth their time. You may say, well, leave it up to folks to what they want to answer. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. Even worse, lot of people go after trivial stuff just to get more points. Even more worse people who ask bad questions get encouraged to keep doing same things. You can see where this is going. In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.

viraptor 8y ago
> Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice. I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
- tedmiston 8y ago
  > I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions. https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes

viraptor 8y ago

> Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice. I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.

tedmiston 8y ago
> I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions. https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes