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Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow

175 points by pkilgore 7y ago

docflabby 7y ago
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information. I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....
- mettamage 7y ago
  I understand your sentiment (good tip about GH issues as well), but I found SO to be useful at times. I agree with the culture, which is why I always state: 1. How my question is different from related questions. 2. How I searched on Google and what I tried. 3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly". My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated. It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
- Someone1234 7y ago
  SO intentionally made the site peak. They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway. What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do. Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > no one answers any difficult questions any more New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything. This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    You're mistaken. You must be signed in to an account to post, but you can do it immediately on account creation.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested in. Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn more money.
- random_cynic 7y ago
  Yeah, I actually find the sister sites more helpful. The main problem is that there are far too many people on that site with their own opinions about how things should be done. There's less traffic on the sister sites like unix and linux, superuser, vi, emacs etc. They should break up the main site for different programming languages and platforms like git as well.
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    Nah, Because of NodeJs vs Javascript vs React vs React Native vs Typescript or c# f# and IronPython
- redler 7y ago
  SO questions and answers do sometimes seem ossified now, the ever-shifting flood plain of restrictions and gatekeeper culture having muted and chilled what used to be a more dynamic forum. I increasingly find more valuable and timely information poking around in the relevant subreddits.
zozbot234 7y ago
Related: How to ask questions the smart way http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- maxerickson 7y ago
  A rebuttal: It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.
  - listenallyall 7y ago
    Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort, unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject, who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question. Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.
      - showdeadplease 7y ago
        > deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go. No one said that except you. Your responses are based on your hidden assumptions about the meanings of ambiguous, loaded terms, aka "arguing past each other."
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      True. If they can discern a newbie question from a idle do-my-homework for me question, people tend to be very good. I grant there are some exceptions, but few (though irritating).
listenallyall 7y ago
>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this. SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete. While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Yes, call it inflation. Money/points earned in the past isn't worth as much as money earned today.
  - blowski 7y ago
    This happens anyway, because the number of points in circulation increases. 10 years ago, having 20K points on StackOverflow was both more rare and meaningful than today. If an answer is no longer relevant, it will, stop being upvoted, possibly even downvoted. So it’s score will become lower relative to newer, more correct answers. At least that’s the theory. The problem is the discouragement of asking new questions, the pointlessness of a new answer on a 10 year old question with 1,000 upvotes, search engines sending people to out of date answers, and that the upvotes don’t account for knowledge and experience. I have no idea how to solve those problems.
- pinouchon 7y ago
  I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea. One big issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation getting smaller. Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.
gregd 7y ago
I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also had to manage phones in their environment. There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.
- tormeh 7y ago
  I remember trying to figure out how to run YARN jobs in discrete cgroups with memory limits. It took us at least three working days to compile all the options and eventually discover that Cloudera didn't have new enough software versions, so we couldn't do it. I decided to write what I'd learned in Q&A format on SF (or maybe another SO site) so that in the future someone might benefit. Expensive knowledge, freely given. Promptly closed.
  - redler 7y ago
    I'm interested in this (closed) question/answer. Do you have a link to it?
  - robocat 7y ago
    I’ve done this a few times on SO: ask a well posed question, wait a few days, then answer it (perhaps with some fluff talk about the journey). If you do not follow the Q & A format correctly, your “question” should be closed. More regularly I have answered my own question because the Q was hard and got zero answers, then I eventually discover a solution so I wrote an answer.
- deleted 7y ago
ykevinator 7y ago
It's elitism like this that made me hate so. Is asking a question a skill? Please tell me more.
- Smaug123 7y ago
  Sure it is. Asking a question has several dimensions along which to afford skill. General social skills aside, question-asking specifically has the extra challenge of "get someone to give me the information I need", and some people are demonstrably much more effective at this than others. I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an answer that is useful to you.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Let's consider the question you have just asked here. As the article you are responding to has presented several arguments for the proposition that it is a skill, a good follow-up question would challenge one or more of the claims or inferences made in that article, or raise a point that seems to have been overlooked. A question that ignores everything that has already been said on the issue is not likely to elicit anything new.
- kleiba 7y ago
  I agree that a statement in this generality is non-sense. (If it were a skill, how would you acquire it without asking a question.) What is meant here (probably) is sth. like "asking a good question" is a skill -- where "good" could be defined in any number of ways. In this context, it's probably synonymous to "getting the reply you're actually after without someone closing your question, or marking it as a dupe". That probably is a skill. However, SO would be a more useful place, especially but not only for newcomers, if that skill wasn't required. If anyone could ask anything, and as long as there's someone willing to answer, it doesn't matter whether the question could be deemed "skillful" by any measure. There are a number of reasons why SO isn't that place, and I can see why these reasons exist. It's a fun thought experiment to think about whether SO would have made it to the place it is today if it had started out already with the same draconic rules and views on how questions should be written as are in place today.
kstenerud 7y ago
One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or SO. Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling. Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example. So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge. [1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
  - kstenerud 7y ago
    To do so, I would have to start keeping a log of each time I go through google to a SO answer that is being unfairly closed/downvoted/whatever. For Wikipedia, you never actually see what goes on without going to the discussion page, which I've never looked at except when someone pointed me there (once again, I've not kept a journal of such excursions, and can therefore not answer your challenge). I have, however, seen enough to never ever try editing a page for any reason.
  - gregd 7y ago
    "post a link so we can judge" is precisely the attitude on SO that I find reprehensible.
    - 7y ago
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Reminds me how the hardest thing in science is to find the right question to ask nature...
monster_group 7y ago
A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be prepared to answer the following - 1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find? 2. Tell me what all you have tried. 3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be. It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.
GrumpyNl 7y ago
Sounds to me that AI could play a big role in this.
rangerranvir 7y ago
I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community helps in stating the questions correctly. The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection. P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.
scarface74 7y ago
I’ve never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it’s already at the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have been asked and answered. SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions. On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out. I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend. On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.
- ken 7y ago
  It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users. For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Isn’t that the same thing? Lisp hasn’t been on the hype cycle since SO was launched. Personally, yet another reason not to focus on less popular technologies. As far as MacOS, I’ve heard too many horror stories about developing on Apple platforms from people like Marco Arment and other well known developers caused by Apple’s poor documentation, I’ve also avoided it even though I am rabid consumer of Apple products.
    - 7y ago
BrandoElFollito 7y ago
I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so. I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts. I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code. But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot. So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  There seems to be a disconnect between the effort that you expect goes into a question and that SO expects.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
einpoklum 7y ago
My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately; always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site is harsh. If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote. That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(
gesman 7y ago
Add to skill set: Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.
analog31 7y ago
Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.
- mark-r 7y ago
  The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.
  - gumoro 7y ago
    Sometimes the asker is missing a concept, and it's not always impossible to comment about it and rephrase the question to make it answerable & more useful to keep for posterity. It's far from the majority of questions, but not awfully rare either. Some of those are worth salvaging.
    - mark-r 7y ago
      If you understand enough of the question to rephrase it, you probably understand it well enough to answer it too. Adding a middle step just gets in the way. I've answered questions like that, and it's gratifying when it turns out your understanding was correct.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    And it is terribly annoying when someone changes the question and it no longer leads towards an answer that is useful for the asker.
    - gumoro 7y ago
      Yes, that's why I thought OP's idea of explicitly separating the derived "better" questions interesting, instead of allowing anyone to edit the original question and steer the discussion in a different direction. This is an interesting format that leaves room for multiple directions to explore… which SO does not want to do as they insist so much on focus.
einpoklum 7y ago
> I almost never ask question on Stack Overflow > ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing... I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution. So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.
- umvi 7y ago
  80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry, but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers per year though.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    I am about balanced in my number of questions and answers, to put things into perspective. But - it's true that I'm not a typical user; I'm often curious about "But why is it like that?" and "can we do something better than..."
magical_mishka 7y ago
I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because: - I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation. - If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer? - The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out. Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
- scarface74 7y ago
  Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
- darkerside 7y ago
  SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors. If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
  - silvat 7y ago
    Those low effort questions are often extremely popular though, which would imply that they are useful to a lot of people.
    - why-oh-why 7y ago
      “Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s not the right forum. I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.
umvi 7y ago
Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions. This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
This was great. Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets. I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers. This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers. Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence. Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score. That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO. As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such. I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice. I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.
Goladus 7y ago
One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by multiple mods. Stack Overflow's content is good because: 1. The site design is high-quality. 2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers. The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.
zubairq 7y ago
Funnily enough years ago I asked a question on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload-emacs-after-changing-it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload... : at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked

175 points by pkilgore 7y ago

I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information. I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....

mettamage 7y ago
I understand your sentiment (good tip about GH issues as well), but I found SO to be useful at times. I agree with the culture, which is why I always state: 1. How my question is different from related questions. 2. How I searched on Google and what I tried. 3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly". My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated. It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
Someone1234 7y ago
SO intentionally made the site peak. They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway. What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do. Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> no one answers any difficult questions any more New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything. This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  You're mistaken. You must be signed in to an account to post, but you can do it immediately on account creation.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested in. Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn more money.
random_cynic 7y ago
Yeah, I actually find the sister sites more helpful. The main problem is that there are far too many people on that site with their own opinions about how things should be done. There's less traffic on the sister sites like unix and linux, superuser, vi, emacs etc. They should break up the main site for different programming languages and platforms like git as well.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Nah, Because of NodeJs vs Javascript vs React vs React Native vs Typescript or c# f# and IronPython
redler 7y ago
SO questions and answers do sometimes seem ossified now, the ever-shifting flood plain of restrictions and gatekeeper culture having muted and chilled what used to be a more dynamic forum. I increasingly find more valuable and timely information poking around in the relevant subreddits.

zozbot234 7y ago

Related: How to ask questions the smart way http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

maxerickson 7y ago
A rebuttal: It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort, unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject, who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question. Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.
    - showdeadplease 7y ago
      > deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go. No one said that except you. Your responses are based on your hidden assumptions about the meanings of ambiguous, loaded terms, aka "arguing past each other."
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    True. If they can discern a newbie question from a idle do-my-homework for me question, people tend to be very good. I grant there are some exceptions, but few (though irritating).

listenallyall 7y ago

>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this. SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete. While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
Yes, call it inflation. Money/points earned in the past isn't worth as much as money earned today.
- blowski 7y ago
  This happens anyway, because the number of points in circulation increases. 10 years ago, having 20K points on StackOverflow was both more rare and meaningful than today. If an answer is no longer relevant, it will, stop being upvoted, possibly even downvoted. So it’s score will become lower relative to newer, more correct answers. At least that’s the theory. The problem is the discouragement of asking new questions, the pointlessness of a new answer on a 10 year old question with 1,000 upvotes, search engines sending people to out of date answers, and that the upvotes don’t account for knowledge and experience. I have no idea how to solve those problems.
pinouchon 7y ago
I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea. One big issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation getting smaller. Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.

gregd 7y ago

I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also had to manage phones in their environment. There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.

tormeh 7y ago
I remember trying to figure out how to run YARN jobs in discrete cgroups with memory limits. It took us at least three working days to compile all the options and eventually discover that Cloudera didn't have new enough software versions, so we couldn't do it. I decided to write what I'd learned in Q&A format on SF (or maybe another SO site) so that in the future someone might benefit. Expensive knowledge, freely given. Promptly closed.
- redler 7y ago
  I'm interested in this (closed) question/answer. Do you have a link to it?
- robocat 7y ago
  I’ve done this a few times on SO: ask a well posed question, wait a few days, then answer it (perhaps with some fluff talk about the journey). If you do not follow the Q & A format correctly, your “question” should be closed. More regularly I have answered my own question because the Q was hard and got zero answers, then I eventually discover a solution so I wrote an answer.
deleted 7y ago

ykevinator 7y ago

It's elitism like this that made me hate so. Is asking a question a skill? Please tell me more.

Smaug123 7y ago
Sure it is. Asking a question has several dimensions along which to afford skill. General social skills aside, question-asking specifically has the extra challenge of "get someone to give me the information I need", and some people are demonstrably much more effective at this than others. I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an answer that is useful to you.
mannykannot 7y ago
Let's consider the question you have just asked here. As the article you are responding to has presented several arguments for the proposition that it is a skill, a good follow-up question would challenge one or more of the claims or inferences made in that article, or raise a point that seems to have been overlooked. A question that ignores everything that has already been said on the issue is not likely to elicit anything new.
kleiba 7y ago
I agree that a statement in this generality is non-sense. (If it were a skill, how would you acquire it without asking a question.) What is meant here (probably) is sth. like "asking a good question" is a skill -- where "good" could be defined in any number of ways. In this context, it's probably synonymous to "getting the reply you're actually after without someone closing your question, or marking it as a dupe". That probably is a skill. However, SO would be a more useful place, especially but not only for newcomers, if that skill wasn't required. If anyone could ask anything, and as long as there's someone willing to answer, it doesn't matter whether the question could be deemed "skillful" by any measure. There are a number of reasons why SO isn't that place, and I can see why these reasons exist. It's a fun thought experiment to think about whether SO would have made it to the place it is today if it had started out already with the same draconic rules and views on how questions should be written as are in place today.

kstenerud 7y ago

One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...

tempguy9999 7y ago
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or SO. Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling. Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example. So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge. [1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
- kstenerud 7y ago
  To do so, I would have to start keeping a log of each time I go through google to a SO answer that is being unfairly closed/downvoted/whatever. For Wikipedia, you never actually see what goes on without going to the discussion page, which I've never looked at except when someone pointed me there (once again, I've not kept a journal of such excursions, and can therefore not answer your challenge). I have, however, seen enough to never ever try editing a page for any reason.
- gregd 7y ago
  "post a link so we can judge" is precisely the attitude on SO that I find reprehensible.
  - 7y ago

BlueTemplar 7y ago

Reminds me how the hardest thing in science is to find the right question to ask nature...

monster_group 7y ago

A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be prepared to answer the following - 1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find? 2. Tell me what all you have tried. 3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be. It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.

GrumpyNl 7y ago

Sounds to me that AI could play a big role in this.

rangerranvir 7y ago

I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community helps in stating the questions correctly. The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection. P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.

scarface74 7y ago

I’ve never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it’s already at the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have been asked and answered. SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions. On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out. I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend. On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.

ken 7y ago
It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users. For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Isn’t that the same thing? Lisp hasn’t been on the hype cycle since SO was launched. Personally, yet another reason not to focus on less popular technologies. As far as MacOS, I’ve heard too many horror stories about developing on Apple platforms from people like Marco Arment and other well known developers caused by Apple’s poor documentation, I’ve also avoided it even though I am rabid consumer of Apple products.
  - 7y ago

BrandoElFollito 7y ago

I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so. I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts. I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code. But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot. So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.

bmn__ 7y ago
There seems to be a disconnect between the effort that you expect goes into a question and that SO expects.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

einpoklum 7y ago

My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately; always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site is harsh. If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote. That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(

gesman 7y ago

Add to skill set: Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.

analog31 7y ago

Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.

mark-r 7y ago
The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.
- gumoro 7y ago
  Sometimes the asker is missing a concept, and it's not always impossible to comment about it and rephrase the question to make it answerable & more useful to keep for posterity. It's far from the majority of questions, but not awfully rare either. Some of those are worth salvaging.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    If you understand enough of the question to rephrase it, you probably understand it well enough to answer it too. Adding a middle step just gets in the way. I've answered questions like that, and it's gratifying when it turns out your understanding was correct.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  And it is terribly annoying when someone changes the question and it no longer leads towards an answer that is useful for the asker.
  - gumoro 7y ago
    Yes, that's why I thought OP's idea of explicitly separating the derived "better" questions interesting, instead of allowing anyone to edit the original question and steer the discussion in a different direction. This is an interesting format that leaves room for multiple directions to explore… which SO does not want to do as they insist so much on focus.

einpoklum 7y ago

> I almost never ask question on Stack Overflow > ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing... I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution. So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.

umvi 7y ago
80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry, but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers per year though.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  I am about balanced in my number of questions and answers, to put things into perspective. But - it's true that I'm not a typical user; I'm often curious about "But why is it like that?" and "can we do something better than..."

magical_mishka 7y ago

I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because: - I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation. - If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer? - The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out. Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!

scarface74 7y ago
Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
darkerside 7y ago
SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors. If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
- silvat 7y ago
  Those low effort questions are often extremely popular though, which would imply that they are useful to a lot of people.
  - why-oh-why 7y ago
    “Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s not the right forum. I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.

umvi 7y ago

Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions. This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

This was great. Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets. I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers. This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers. Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence. Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score. That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO. As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such. I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice. I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.

Goladus 7y ago

One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by multiple mods. Stack Overflow's content is good because: 1. The site design is high-quality. 2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers. The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.

zubairq 7y ago

Funnily enough years ago I asked a question on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload-emacs-after-changing-it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload... : at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked