4 ms·

I think it's unfortunately something which has been reinforced by the majority of poor questions. You may legitimately want to solve X, but nearly all of the qu

I think it's unfortunately something which has been reinforced by the majority of poor questions. You may legitimately want to solve X, but nearly all of the questions active users see are just poorly researched questions about Y. Attempting to take your X question literally means giving that same latitude to every other question, which increases the volunteer's workload by orders of magnitude. I'm not sure how to best get around this, other than making your X question extremely clear, and describe why Y is not what you're looking for.

daviddever23box 4y ago
There are many poorly-researched questions on Stack Overflow, though this tends to be generational (and not exclusive to StOflow).
- tomrod 4y ago
  This speaks to discoverability issues more than it speaks to generational gaps. As a really specific example: if people don't know that certain generations of Intel microprocessors calculated sine(epsilon close to 0) incorrectly, and ask about it, it really is incumbent on the answerers to not be a-holes. Extrapolate out and consider various IRC channels. Python has massive documentation. A common answer is to point people to the docs, as they are large, and to encourage reading the docs. This is helpful and encourages discoverability. C, on the other hand, is an almost incomprehensible mess for discoverability. So a newbie asks a volunteer channel in IRC about what may be causing a segfault simply because the newbie has no sense of the tooling to help them discover the issue. Newbie gets berated (I have both experienced this and watched this happen). C channel is therefore toxic for newbies because it pushes them down arbitrarily, Python is good because lifting newbies up. Common thread? Make it really, really easy to use tools, have copious amount of well-described examples organized in a sane way, and crosslink definitions and concepts.
wccrawford 4y ago
It helps to provide all the things you've already tried to fix the problem. It helps the answerers not waste their time, and tells them more about the actual problem based on what you tried and how the problem responded.

daviddever23box 4y ago

There are many poorly-researched questions on Stack Overflow, though this tends to be generational (and not exclusive to StOflow).

tomrod 4y ago
This speaks to discoverability issues more than it speaks to generational gaps. As a really specific example: if people don't know that certain generations of Intel microprocessors calculated sine(epsilon close to 0) incorrectly, and ask about it, it really is incumbent on the answerers to not be a-holes. Extrapolate out and consider various IRC channels. Python has massive documentation. A common answer is to point people to the docs, as they are large, and to encourage reading the docs. This is helpful and encourages discoverability. C, on the other hand, is an almost incomprehensible mess for discoverability. So a newbie asks a volunteer channel in IRC about what may be causing a segfault simply because the newbie has no sense of the tooling to help them discover the issue. Newbie gets berated (I have both experienced this and watched this happen). C channel is therefore toxic for newbies because it pushes them down arbitrarily, Python is good because lifting newbies up. Common thread? Make it really, really easy to use tools, have copious amount of well-described examples organized in a sane way, and crosslink definitions and concepts.

wccrawford 4y ago

It helps to provide all the things you've already tried to fix the problem. It helps the answerers not waste their time, and tells them more about the actual problem based on what you tried and how the problem responded.