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I think it's important to set a good example. You could start trying to be less nit-picky about other peoples answers. As long as there is a good answer on Sta
by hooby 4y ago
I think it's important to set a good example.
You could start trying to be less nit-picky about other peoples answers. As long as there is a good answer on Stack Overflow that gets up-voted, accept that and just ignore the rest.
You could start being less pedantic about people making suggestions to avoid the problem entirely by using a different tool/library. Those answers might not be useful to you, but to someone else reading the SO overflow post they might.
You could try being less of an evangelist for "the one and only right way to answer a question" - and accept that different people have different discussion styles. Again - as long as you get the answer you wanted, allow those other answers to exist next to that.
As for the voting/karma behavior... when you ask the question, you get to accept the answer you like the most. It's in your hand to "reward" the kind of answer you like the most.
- throwaway_au_1 4y agoI almost commented something along the lines of "oh come on; unless this is your first day on the internet, you know exactly the unproductive pedantry OP is talking about" but I'm starting to think your response is some kind of satire.
- hooby 4y agoLet's just say that the way the OP reads (more like a rant than a serious question) - I have low expectations that it will attract a lot of highly productive answers.
- rrwo 4y agoI could ignore the bad comments if someone actually answered the question. But questions like "What are the most restrictive permissions I can put on /var/lib/foobar without breaking foobar" are not actually answered by saying "Don't use foobar. bobaz is better". And questions like "I am using foobar v10, and I am wondering if there are performance issues with the bleep function, or problems upgrading to v11 or later" shouldn't be answered with "The bleep function violates the sacred separation between model-view-controller. Do not use it." None of these are answer the questions in any way. It's not a matter of "different people have different discussion styles". It's as if they see the mention of certain keywords and want to post a dogmatic criticism.
- hooby 4y agoI assume you are more interested in venting, rather than actually getting links to "pedant-free" forums. Right?
- rrwo 4y agoPart venting, but I really would like to know about decent forums.
- hooby 4y agoYou probably don't want to hear this - but I think you are chasing the wrong rabbit. Not getting the good answer you want is an entirely separate problem from getting "pedantic" answers you don't want. Reducing the amount of pedantic answers will NOT increase the amount of good answers. A lack of good answers is NOT caused by having pedantic answers. People giving good answers do exist on SO - but just like everyone they have limited time - and they can choose which questions to spend that time on. They answer the questions they like most - well laid out, all relevant information contained, information about prior research/efforts to fix things, asking party seems to know/understand the basics, etc. - whether they pick your question to answer or not, depends solely on your question - not on the pedantry of other answers. The big problem here is, that cracking down on "pedantic" questions through strict moderation - will ultimately have a negative effect on the amount of good answers on the platform. Simply because there will be less answers in general, an people will feel more reluctant about writing an answer - or leave entirely, after being punished for a not perfectly on-topic answer elsewhere. But if you want to increase the amount of good answers on the platform as much as possible, you'll have to adopt a fairly lenient stance toward the pedantic answers... foster a free-for-all atmosphere, where all answers are welcome - but only the good ones get upvoted and accepted. Consider it training the next generation of good answer-givers. So the big question is - if you can't have both - do you want a forum that has MORE good answers - or do you want a forum that has LESS pedantic answers?