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Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted me!!". And people either refuse to give

Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted me!!". And people either refuse to give examples (because they know they're lying), or when responding it's quite obvious why they got the reaction they got. Mind you, I believe SO could be more friendly. But if you've tried moderating and being active there, you quickly understand the bluntness. With hundreds of useless questions being posted an hour, you quickly get jaded. Like, I genuinely want to help people there, but when you spend literally no effort asking your question you're not getting much in return.

jmuguy 4y ago
I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just an endless sea of low effort shit.
metabagel 4y ago
Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast-a-rust-variant-enum-to-an-underlying-struct https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
- kapep 4y ago
  "Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    They didn't answer my question, so I don't regard them as dupes. I had my question answered in Discord or IRC somewhere, I forget exactly where.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      I would say based on the linked conversation that they linked answers do answer your question. Or at least, from an outsider perspective, they should have allowed you to reach a workable solution (though maybe without directly answering you actual question). I've had similar questions where I'm told it's a duplicate or that the error message says exactly what the problem is, but I'm just so uncomfortable in the language that I can't recognize it. It feels really bad when people roll their eyes and link you (or tell you to go back to the documentation, which is the ultimate "fuck you" from someone you've asked for help) to something that you also don't quite understand. If I "got" it I wouldn't be here asking this question.
RHSeeger 4y ago
A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly, blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no answer to the new question.
- funnymony 4y ago
  Moderators like to close questions and link to questions/answers posted by them. (Possibly hoping for upvotes) I guess this could count as petty corruption.
dkarl 4y ago
There are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who struggle to tell if an existing answer is an answer to their question or not. They might copy something verbatim from an answer and have it not work because their shell is configured differently, there's a separate bug in their code, or even because they accidentally copied a PHP code snippet into a Javascript file, and whether through laziness or genuine confusion, they simply post the errors back to SO saying the answer doesn't work for them. People these days are taught to always seek help as soon as they encounter difficulties, and I think they feel like as long as they're asking for help, then they're doing the right thing and deserve to have their problem solved. But when they need somebody to work through multiple issues with them, in multiple layers of their setup, and there's quite a lot they don't understand that's unrelated the concrete question they posed, then that crosses the line of relevancy to the question asked, as well as the line of what most SO contributors are willing to do. Most people who answer a Stack Overflow question do it because they're happy to take a few minutes out of their day to share their knowledge, not because they want to a second job as an unpaid private tutor. If someone needs that level of support, then they should ask another developer on their team, ask a teacher at their school, hire a tutor, etc. Obviously there are a lot of circumstances where it's good to give back and give someone a little bit of extra help, but if you need someone to help you debug your Dockerfile, that discussion doesn't belong on a question about Python asyncio, and it doesn't justify posting the same question again and again because copy-pasting the original answers didn't solve your problem.

jmuguy 4y ago

I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just an endless sea of low effort shit.

metabagel 4y ago

Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast-a-rust-variant-enum-to-an-underlying-struct https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...

kapep 4y ago
"Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.
- metabagel 4y ago
  They didn't answer my question, so I don't regard them as dupes. I had my question answered in Discord or IRC somewhere, I forget exactly where.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    I would say based on the linked conversation that they linked answers do answer your question. Or at least, from an outsider perspective, they should have allowed you to reach a workable solution (though maybe without directly answering you actual question). I've had similar questions where I'm told it's a duplicate or that the error message says exactly what the problem is, but I'm just so uncomfortable in the language that I can't recognize it. It feels really bad when people roll their eyes and link you (or tell you to go back to the documentation, which is the ultimate "fuck you" from someone you've asked for help) to something that you also don't quite understand. If I "got" it I wouldn't be here asking this question.

RHSeeger 4y ago

A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly, blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no answer to the new question.

funnymony 4y ago
Moderators like to close questions and link to questions/answers posted by them. (Possibly hoping for upvotes) I guess this could count as petty corruption.

dkarl 4y ago

There are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who struggle to tell if an existing answer is an answer to their question or not. They might copy something verbatim from an answer and have it not work because their shell is configured differently, there's a separate bug in their code, or even because they accidentally copied a PHP code snippet into a Javascript file, and whether through laziness or genuine confusion, they simply post the errors back to SO saying the answer doesn't work for them. People these days are taught to always seek help as soon as they encounter difficulties, and I think they feel like as long as they're asking for help, then they're doing the right thing and deserve to have their problem solved. But when they need somebody to work through multiple issues with them, in multiple layers of their setup, and there's quite a lot they don't understand that's unrelated the concrete question they posed, then that crosses the line of relevancy to the question asked, as well as the line of what most SO contributors are willing to do. Most people who answer a Stack Overflow question do it because they're happy to take a few minutes out of their day to share their knowledge, not because they want to a second job as an unpaid private tutor. If someone needs that level of support, then they should ask another developer on their team, ask a teacher at their school, hire a tutor, etc. Obviously there are a lot of circumstances where it's good to give back and give someone a little bit of extra help, but if you need someone to help you debug your Dockerfile, that discussion doesn't belong on a question about Python asyncio, and it doesn't justify posting the same question again and again because copy-pasting the original answers didn't solve your problem.