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I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to the sa

by nv-vn 7y ago

I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to the same conclusions as I did. Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers and the downvoting beginner's questions and the "THIS IS A DUPLICATE" answers when the "duplicate" question is totally different and the "deleted as off-topic" on every interesting question, I find it really painful to support the site at all. The site has so much potential, but I find it less and less useful these days to the point where I can't justify ever checking the site out.

Ensorceled 7y ago
> Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Also, duplicates that not only are a completely different question but THIS question is ranked #1 by both DDG and Google.
- umvi 7y ago
  > This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Because of X/Y problems. People want to make sure the person asking the question is asking the right question (often, they are not). You see newbies a lot asking suspicious questions like "How do I extract the string between the carets in '>I want this string<'?". Of course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why they are doing this. They might respond "I'm trying to extract a string from a webpage HTML". In which case you would give a completely different answer. I've seen suspicious questions before where the asker didn't know what they really wanted was "JSON parsing" and were basically asking how to extract JSON fields using regex (but it wasn't completely obvious because they only pasted a small snippet of the JSON). You are saying I should've just given them what they wanted and not even questioned why they was doing it this way? Well, I'm sorry. I asked "is there a particular reason you need regex to extract these fields? Because this data looks very similar to JSON and there are better ways of extracting JSON fields" They replied that if there was a better way than regex, they were open to it, and I introduced the concept of JSON parsing. I personally think it's kind of conceited to believe that you know exactly what you are doing at all times and that it is an insult for people to question your methods. I only ask questions on SO extremely rarely, but when I do, I'm always open to such "why are you do it this way" questions because it indicates they believe there is a better way I could be doing it.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    But the other half of the time the question descends into chaos. I'm there because the question is the same as I asked, 9/10 the digression is not useful. Also, if you suspect that the user is doing something wrong or there is a better approach, a better way to do this is to ask "are you parsing JSON? because Python has a builtin JSON library" instead of "Why would you even want to do this?". I guess what I really want is for people to update the question if it no longer applies because a different question was answered and accepted.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

by nv-vn 7y ago

Ensorceled 7y ago

> Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Also, duplicates that not only are a completely different question but THIS question is ranked #1 by both DDG and Google.

umvi 7y ago
> This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Because of X/Y problems. People want to make sure the person asking the question is asking the right question (often, they are not). You see newbies a lot asking suspicious questions like "How do I extract the string between the carets in '>I want this string<'?". Of course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why they are doing this. They might respond "I'm trying to extract a string from a webpage HTML". In which case you would give a completely different answer. I've seen suspicious questions before where the asker didn't know what they really wanted was "JSON parsing" and were basically asking how to extract JSON fields using regex (but it wasn't completely obvious because they only pasted a small snippet of the JSON). You are saying I should've just given them what they wanted and not even questioned why they was doing it this way? Well, I'm sorry. I asked "is there a particular reason you need regex to extract these fields? Because this data looks very similar to JSON and there are better ways of extracting JSON fields" They replied that if there was a better way than regex, they were open to it, and I introduced the concept of JSON parsing. I personally think it's kind of conceited to believe that you know exactly what you are doing at all times and that it is an insult for people to question your methods. I only ask questions on SO extremely rarely, but when I do, I'm always open to such "why are you do it this way" questions because it indicates they believe there is a better way I could be doing it.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  But the other half of the time the question descends into chaos. I'm there because the question is the same as I asked, 9/10 the digression is not useful. Also, if you suspect that the user is doing something wrong or there is a better approach, a better way to do this is to ask "are you parsing JSON? because Python has a builtin JSON library" instead of "Why would you even want to do this?". I guess what I really want is for people to update the question if it no longer applies because a different question was answered and accepted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]