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It's okay to ask a question if 1) you have a thick skin and 2) you expect a negative reaction. Otherwise, yes, you're going to be disappointed.

• astrodust 7y ago
  The problem with most bad questions is it's hard to explain why they're bad in a gentle way when there's a fire-hose of bad questions pouring in and you can only spend so much time with each one. The experience from someone new can suck because someone was terse or dismissive, but they don't understand they were one of fifty people that day to make exactly the same mistake.
  • kickopotomus 7y ago
    If you do not have the time to appropriately respond to the question, then don't respond. Your phrasing makes it seem as though SO moderators are battling an onslaught of poor questions and the site will collapse if those questions are not deleted as soon as possible. It is the over-zealousness to close questions that is part of the problem. If you are unable to offer constructive feedback to the user who asked the question then you are really just acting as a stop-gap and not really fixing the root of the problem. People ask "bad" questions for a lot of reasons but it you are unable to steer them in a direction that allows them to understand what makes a question "good", they will continue to ask "bad" questions.
    • astrodust 7y ago
      Then you get bad questions with no feedback, they just get closed or deleted, and the experience is still "Stack Overflow sucks".