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I was pretty into SO back in '13, contributing and asking questions. I recently posted a question. Here's how it went. Posted question, gave some urls to doc

I was pretty into SO back in '13, contributing and asking questions. I recently posted a question. Here's how it went. Posted question, gave some urls to documentation, wrote up code example and asked for help on a specific point. Downvoted and commented that it wasn't what the rules specified. Although I didn't find anything wrong with my post compared to said rules, but adjusted the post. Downvoted again. Adjusted again and still more downvotes and no helpful comments. At this point I just deleted the question and sought help elsewhere. ------ Whereas before you would get your question edited if it wasn't within the guidelines or perhaps people would not downvote but comment on how you could be more specific. Instead it was as if I had to "do the work" for them to understand what was being asked or do as much as I could so it wasn't taxing for them. The help I got elsewhere was actually from reddit. Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. Being a solo developer and not having more than 1 pair of eyes can sometimes get you in the weeds. Now I just use SO for reading and getting hints on what I'm working on myself. It's good in that respect. It's just a shame it's gotten so toxic. I know from reading other forums when someone mentions SO, it's just not the same anymore. I genuinely feel bad for new comers.

sampo 8y ago
Your question was about one of the big languages or frameworks, probably? SO can still be nice in its smaller corners, outside of the busiest mainstream topics.
umvi 8y ago
> Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. The solution may have been trivial - maybe even a single character fix, but this smells like you posted a wall of code and wanted someone to go through it with a comb for you. You likely got downvoted because you didn't provide a minimal verifiable example and instead posted way more code than was necessary to produce the bug. If you post anything more than a few lines of code, you are probably providing TMI and need to spend more effort distilling down the problem. 9 out of 10 times, you'll find the root of the problem yourself during this distillation process, especially if the problem is trivial. Then again, this is wild speculation, but I see this a lot when I am helping newbies.
- chefandy 8y ago
  The problem with being a beginner is that you probably don't know what those few lines are that make the most difference. Mods haughtily saying "You're doing it wrong; come back when you can do it right; here's a wall of meta-documentation that only tells you why your post sucks and doesn't help you figure out what part of your code matters" doesn't help anybody. If the bar to getting your question answered is to figure out on their own with no actual guidance how to ask the question perfectly, then you've already eliminated the 1/2 of developers out there who need the most help. I'll never understand the mentality of people who put themselves in a position of answering questions, but are genuinely perturbed by the prospect of helping people with basic/misguided/imperfectly conceived questions. If they're the kind of person who could just read the documentation and solve all but the most complex of their own problems, congratulations. They should feel free to set that as the bar for anybody you hire or collaborate with. Or even set it as the bar for questions that they answer, but don't penalize people who are coming to a Q&A for not living up to those standards. If you're of that disposition on such a site, you're probably more interested in stroking your ego and watching some arbitrary points accumulate rather than actually helping people. There are lots of hobbies in development that don't expose you to beginner questions: go join a more esoteric users group, or contribute to an open source project without looking in the users forums/chat channels. Just do something that doesn't involve alienating inexperience developers.
  - umvi 8y ago
    But if you answer such questions at face value, the asker still doesn't know how to write concise questions and will continue to post walls of code, since, after all, it worked and produced an answer for them. It's almost like you need to pivot the question at that point to be "how do I isolate problems?" or "how do I debug?" because the asker lacks those basic skills needed to ask a good question.
    - chefandy 8y ago
      False dichotomy. It's not like you can only tell the poster one thing. There are questions on SO where someone says "this is how you fix your problem. This is how I figured that out. Here are some good docs/articles/etc. on this topic." Both pointing out the problem with the code/methodology/etc. and helping them see something from a different perspective so they do better next time are valuable educational goals, and I don't understand why so many people think SO should address only one of them. It's almost as if people think coding problems are OK, but helping people with more amorphous skills is either beyond or beneath them. Troubleshooting is a skill that can be taught— having someone more experienced giving you advice is an invaluable asset when you're trying to learn how to do it. Refusing to help people because they don't already know how to do it themselves helps nobody.
gota 8y ago
Could you please link to the question? I don't mean to be adversarial but in the past when I checked the questions people complained were downvoted for no reason there were indeed reasons. Perhaps the guidelines have subtly changed since your last experience and we can give you feedback on it.
- jve 8y ago
  > At this point I just deleted the question
  - fabian2k 8y ago
    Posts are soft-deleted on SO. You can see your own recent deleted questions at https://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/[your user id] This link is on your profile on the questions tab at the bottom.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      Mods and high-rep (10k +) users can see deleted questions.
- albertzeyer 8y ago
  There might have been reasons. But then when you ask for them in the comments section, people would just answer "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote". So actually you never learn. The other issue is, even when the reason is given, sometimes you would not agree with that. E.g. sometimes people claim it's a duplicate, although they are not deep enough into the topic to really tell, and then the question gets closed. Or people claim is subjective, while in fact objective answers are possible. Or many other things.
  - everfree 8y ago
    Do people really comment this? I've never seen anyone comment anything along the lines of "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote" on a question they are downvoting. I would probably call them out and/or flag a mod if I saw it. Is this a very recent thing? That being said, I agree that Stack Overflow has a duplicate issue.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
I tried so hard to understand the Stack Overflow mindset, but the costs were too much. They treat every question as the X-Y problem, so you have to anticipate that and preemptively answer them in your question. They'll criticize you for asking a question about Apache since it's not Nginx. They'll tell you you're too dumb to be trusted with Linux if you have to ask something about file permissions. This started to leak into my real-life conversations at work and I realized I was being condescending and arrogant. I feel like Stack Overflow and the related SE sites genuinely made me a worse person. I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic.
- baud147258 8y ago
  > I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic I haven't spend that much time asking questions, but I answered many (and commented, edited, flagged…) but Id didn't found the community that toxic, especially compared to other places.
- saywhatnow 8y ago
  > I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic. That's very odd to me. I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've been hard pressed to find anything as welcoming and helpful as Stack Overflow. I became a high rep user over the years, and I made mistakes that earned downvotes, but usually someone could give me a pointer to how to improve my question or answer. (Not always, but usually.) It does suck to get downvotes, especially without a comment about why, but honestly, when I look at other sites (ahem hacker news) where the rules are only ever referred to by experienced users and in tiny print below the fold, the clear rules and help on StackOverflow, and posters who are willing to link to them and clearly explain them seem like a breath of fresh air.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    I think you and I are totally different then. When I find a new community, online or offline, my first thought isn't "what are the rules here?". I'll pick up social cues subconsciously and rarely if ever think about it. I think that's one reason I love HN and hate SO. I don't mean to say my way is better, I just think we can't relate our experiences at all.
ratling 8y ago
The responses to your post are roughly what I would expect from posting on stack overflow. Everyone there is just looking for someone to snipe at for internet points or they're an academic who IMO are even worse. 2019 It's a joke. The archives are useful but that's about it.
- misterman0 8y ago
  >> Everyone there is just looking for someone to snipe at for internet points I agree. But not just there. Here too. I feel I do not always express myself like I would were there no karma points to be earned/lost. I often wish for a karma-less HN . Edit. Because I get micro depressed when I loose karma and I start to question myself. I feel I shouldn't care because I look upon myself as strong, well-behaved, clever. But I do care. Immensely.
adwww 8y ago
Came here to say a similar story. After ~12 years of development, StackOverflow has gone from invaluable to irrelevant. These days my questions are either so niche nobody answers them, or like you, I get a tonne of abuse for asking in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or not including the right info, or whatever it may be.
tokyodude 8y ago
sounds like you wanted someone to debug your code for free and were then surprised they wouldn't
- detaro 8y ago
  OP "wrote up [a] code example" as is generally asked on SO, and that's somehow now bad asking "someone to debug your code for free"?
- mark-r 8y ago
  I had to chew a guy out the other day. He freely admitted that he wasn't a Python programmer and was looking for working code that he could run without modification. He tried to justify it by saying he was only asking for someone to "share their expertise".
  - misterman0 8y ago
    Good of you too chew him out. Gatekeepers are what we need to keep those who do not belong from entering into our domains.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    "pls send the codes" or homework questions But for every response of, "What code have YOU tried?", there's someone who posts the answer to the question, and the user gets their one-time answer and never comes back
    - misterman0 8y ago
      So what? Someone earned money off of a snippet of code. What's the big deal?
      - mark-r 8y ago
        It's a question of motivation. Being used as a source of free labor is very demotivating. That's not why I contribute to the site.
jressey 8y ago
I had a similar experience back then. I actually grew out of needing it. I would just go to the site, type out my question and answer it myself when I dug in to the details of asking a good question. I'm not gonna sit here and say you asked a poor question, because answers/commenters can be jerks. However, learning how to write software is hard, and the idea that a magic site can answer any question you need to make 6 figures is ridiculous. The tough love I received on SO made me write better questions and think more atomically. I have had this conversation with my wife many times, who is working her first development job: "Yes the people can be cruel, but there's no better way to see the obvious gaps you have in your expertise than to expose yourself to them."
tedmiston 8y ago
Please make sure you are familiar with the best practices of providing a minimal, complete, verifiable example (MCVE). https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve In my experience, 90% of moderating questions on SO is linking people to this doc and asking them to apply it. A lot of these users just didn't know this doc exists or haven't read it yet and are then able to edit their question to be answerable and meet community standards. I've been on Stack Overflow for almost 10 years and very rarely to never see a question with a MCVE and steps to reproduce get downvoted. The more effort you put into asking a question well the more likely it is to get rewarded with upvotes and good answers.

sampo 8y ago

Your question was about one of the big languages or frameworks, probably? SO can still be nice in its smaller corners, outside of the busiest mainstream topics.

umvi 8y ago

> Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. The solution may have been trivial - maybe even a single character fix, but this smells like you posted a wall of code and wanted someone to go through it with a comb for you. You likely got downvoted because you didn't provide a minimal verifiable example and instead posted way more code than was necessary to produce the bug. If you post anything more than a few lines of code, you are probably providing TMI and need to spend more effort distilling down the problem. 9 out of 10 times, you'll find the root of the problem yourself during this distillation process, especially if the problem is trivial. Then again, this is wild speculation, but I see this a lot when I am helping newbies.

chefandy 8y ago
The problem with being a beginner is that you probably don't know what those few lines are that make the most difference. Mods haughtily saying "You're doing it wrong; come back when you can do it right; here's a wall of meta-documentation that only tells you why your post sucks and doesn't help you figure out what part of your code matters" doesn't help anybody. If the bar to getting your question answered is to figure out on their own with no actual guidance how to ask the question perfectly, then you've already eliminated the 1/2 of developers out there who need the most help. I'll never understand the mentality of people who put themselves in a position of answering questions, but are genuinely perturbed by the prospect of helping people with basic/misguided/imperfectly conceived questions. If they're the kind of person who could just read the documentation and solve all but the most complex of their own problems, congratulations. They should feel free to set that as the bar for anybody you hire or collaborate with. Or even set it as the bar for questions that they answer, but don't penalize people who are coming to a Q&A for not living up to those standards. If you're of that disposition on such a site, you're probably more interested in stroking your ego and watching some arbitrary points accumulate rather than actually helping people. There are lots of hobbies in development that don't expose you to beginner questions: go join a more esoteric users group, or contribute to an open source project without looking in the users forums/chat channels. Just do something that doesn't involve alienating inexperience developers.
- umvi 8y ago
  But if you answer such questions at face value, the asker still doesn't know how to write concise questions and will continue to post walls of code, since, after all, it worked and produced an answer for them. It's almost like you need to pivot the question at that point to be "how do I isolate problems?" or "how do I debug?" because the asker lacks those basic skills needed to ask a good question.
  - chefandy 8y ago
    False dichotomy. It's not like you can only tell the poster one thing. There are questions on SO where someone says "this is how you fix your problem. This is how I figured that out. Here are some good docs/articles/etc. on this topic." Both pointing out the problem with the code/methodology/etc. and helping them see something from a different perspective so they do better next time are valuable educational goals, and I don't understand why so many people think SO should address only one of them. It's almost as if people think coding problems are OK, but helping people with more amorphous skills is either beyond or beneath them. Troubleshooting is a skill that can be taught— having someone more experienced giving you advice is an invaluable asset when you're trying to learn how to do it. Refusing to help people because they don't already know how to do it themselves helps nobody.

gota 8y ago

Could you please link to the question? I don't mean to be adversarial but in the past when I checked the questions people complained were downvoted for no reason there were indeed reasons. Perhaps the guidelines have subtly changed since your last experience and we can give you feedback on it.

jve 8y ago
> At this point I just deleted the question
- fabian2k 8y ago
  Posts are soft-deleted on SO. You can see your own recent deleted questions at https://stackoverflow.com/users/recently-deleted-questions/[your user id] This link is on your profile on the questions tab at the bottom.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Mods and high-rep (10k +) users can see deleted questions.
albertzeyer 8y ago
There might have been reasons. But then when you ask for them in the comments section, people would just answer "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote". So actually you never learn. The other issue is, even when the reason is given, sometimes you would not agree with that. E.g. sometimes people claim it's a duplicate, although they are not deep enough into the topic to really tell, and then the question gets closed. Or people claim is subjective, while in fact objective answers are possible. Or many other things.
- everfree 8y ago
  Do people really comment this? I've never seen anyone comment anything along the lines of "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote" on a question they are downvoting. I would probably call them out and/or flag a mod if I saw it. Is this a very recent thing? That being said, I agree that Stack Overflow has a duplicate issue.

PascLeRasc 8y ago

I tried so hard to understand the Stack Overflow mindset, but the costs were too much. They treat every question as the X-Y problem, so you have to anticipate that and preemptively answer them in your question. They'll criticize you for asking a question about Apache since it's not Nginx. They'll tell you you're too dumb to be trusted with Linux if you have to ask something about file permissions. This started to leak into my real-life conversations at work and I realized I was being condescending and arrogant. I feel like Stack Overflow and the related SE sites genuinely made me a worse person. I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic.

baud147258 8y ago
> I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic I haven't spend that much time asking questions, but I answered many (and commented, edited, flagged…) but Id didn't found the community that toxic, especially compared to other places.
saywhatnow 8y ago
> I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've never seen anything so toxic. That's very odd to me. I spend a lot of time in online communities and I've been hard pressed to find anything as welcoming and helpful as Stack Overflow. I became a high rep user over the years, and I made mistakes that earned downvotes, but usually someone could give me a pointer to how to improve my question or answer. (Not always, but usually.) It does suck to get downvotes, especially without a comment about why, but honestly, when I look at other sites (ahem hacker news) where the rules are only ever referred to by experienced users and in tiny print below the fold, the clear rules and help on StackOverflow, and posters who are willing to link to them and clearly explain them seem like a breath of fresh air.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I think you and I are totally different then. When I find a new community, online or offline, my first thought isn't "what are the rules here?". I'll pick up social cues subconsciously and rarely if ever think about it. I think that's one reason I love HN and hate SO. I don't mean to say my way is better, I just think we can't relate our experiences at all.

ratling 8y ago

The responses to your post are roughly what I would expect from posting on stack overflow. Everyone there is just looking for someone to snipe at for internet points or they're an academic who IMO are even worse. 2019 It's a joke. The archives are useful but that's about it.

misterman0 8y ago
>> Everyone there is just looking for someone to snipe at for internet points I agree. But not just there. Here too. I feel I do not always express myself like I would were there no karma points to be earned/lost. I often wish for a karma-less HN . Edit. Because I get micro depressed when I loose karma and I start to question myself. I feel I shouldn't care because I look upon myself as strong, well-behaved, clever. But I do care. Immensely.

adwww 8y ago

Came here to say a similar story. After ~12 years of development, StackOverflow has gone from invaluable to irrelevant. These days my questions are either so niche nobody answers them, or like you, I get a tonne of abuse for asking in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or not including the right info, or whatever it may be.

tokyodude 8y ago

sounds like you wanted someone to debug your code for free and were then surprised they wouldn't

detaro 8y ago
OP "wrote up [a] code example" as is generally asked on SO, and that's somehow now bad asking "someone to debug your code for free"?
mark-r 8y ago
I had to chew a guy out the other day. He freely admitted that he wasn't a Python programmer and was looking for working code that he could run without modification. He tried to justify it by saying he was only asking for someone to "share their expertise".
- misterman0 8y ago
  Good of you too chew him out. Gatekeepers are what we need to keep those who do not belong from entering into our domains.
- bluedino 8y ago
  "pls send the codes" or homework questions But for every response of, "What code have YOU tried?", there's someone who posts the answer to the question, and the user gets their one-time answer and never comes back
  - misterman0 8y ago
    So what? Someone earned money off of a snippet of code. What's the big deal?
    - mark-r 8y ago
      It's a question of motivation. Being used as a source of free labor is very demotivating. That's not why I contribute to the site.

jressey 8y ago

I had a similar experience back then. I actually grew out of needing it. I would just go to the site, type out my question and answer it myself when I dug in to the details of asking a good question. I'm not gonna sit here and say you asked a poor question, because answers/commenters can be jerks. However, learning how to write software is hard, and the idea that a magic site can answer any question you need to make 6 figures is ridiculous. The tough love I received on SO made me write better questions and think more atomically. I have had this conversation with my wife many times, who is working her first development job: "Yes the people can be cruel, but there's no better way to see the obvious gaps you have in your expertise than to expose yourself to them."

tedmiston 8y ago

Please make sure you are familiar with the best practices of providing a minimal, complete, verifiable example (MCVE). https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve In my experience, 90% of moderating questions on SO is linking people to this doc and asking them to apply it. A lot of these users just didn't know this doc exists or haven't read it yet and are then able to edit their question to be answerable and meet community standards. I've been on Stack Overflow for almost 10 years and very rarely to never see a question with a MCVE and steps to reproduce get downvoted. The more effort you put into asking a question well the more likely it is to get rewarded with upvotes and good answers.