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The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It's meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of "authoritative" answers to "gene

The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It's meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of "authoritative" answers to "general-purpose" questions. For better or worse, it's not a forum by design. In fact, forum-like behaviors are effectively banned. Stack Exchange wants the site to be an FAQ database, "there's no chit-chat." This mode of operation, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the Web, unlike most things that came before or after it. A question must be asked and answered in a very particular way. For example, one is expected to do the following: 1. Show one's knowledge. Whenever a question is asked, one should write an introduction to present the background of the question to fit inside the knowledge base format. One should also write down all the previous solutions one has already attempted and why one has failed so far. 2. Case minimization. If one has a question from a large system, one must extract the core part via minimal reproducible example and present the problem in isolation (but also introduce just enough background to show a clear motivation and that it's not an X-Y problem). Ideally, the question must have a laser focus on an extremely narrow technical point. Come up with a proper minimized case may take an hour, just like when one's submitting bug reports to Bugzilla or mailing lists. 3. Encyclopedic tone. Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question. If anyone's asking for clarification, it means this question is probably not properly asked. A question must be as "non-specific" and "objective" as possible. Similarly, the answer must also be as "authoritative" and "objective" as possible. I found Stack Exchange is a great site and the knowledge base model works extremely well if you have a suitable question, or if you have the writing skill to frame the question into the proper form, as I've received helpful answers from multiple experts in the fields. However, the fact that Stack Exchange is not a fourm is completely alien to most visitors, and there's an strong and serious need of forums. The large amount of negative feedback from new users is hardly a surprise. Another problem is that it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. If the question is opinion-based, it's out of scope. If a question is extremely specific for your setup, the question is out of scope. If the question needs discussions for clarifications and conversations, it means the question is probably out of scope. It's also extremely difficult, by design, to debate on anything should a disagreement arise, since the site intentionally does not support replies or threads (comments are only usable for quick remarks) - anything that can't be answered with hard facts is out of scope.

JohnFen 3y ago
> it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. So it's only useful for trivial questions?
- segfaultbuserr 3y ago
  No, it's possible to ask rather difficult questions and receive deep answers. To make an analogy, one can ask the programming equivalent of "why can alternative current flow without a closed loop" and receive a summary of classical electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations. For some actual examples, I've read some questions and answers on how to interleave x86-64 instructions in a way to maximize instruction-level parallelism, some of the answers are comprehensive enough that they can easily be expanded into a conference talk or research report (or rather, these answers often summarize them). So if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model. But if the question requires many rounds of conversations like many threads you see in a forum, it's definitely not going to end well.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model. Hmm. It's probably my fault and not yours, but this clarified little for me. At least, it doesn't make me feel confident that if I have a question, I'd be able to tell if it's one that would get a reasonable response on SO. Perhaps So would be better served if they separated out the "Q&A" from whatever entries they feel are worth being preserved, rather than combining the two. Doing that might make interacting with SO less unpleasant or more helpful, and then the particular ones that fit SO's model can be copied to a separate reference section. What I do know is that SO as it is puts an awful lot of people off, including experienced devs who might otherwise be willing to help answer questions.
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
> Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question. Ironically enough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_manual,_guidebook,_textbook,_or_scientific_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

JohnFen 3y ago

> it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. So it's only useful for trivial questions?

segfaultbuserr 3y ago
No, it's possible to ask rather difficult questions and receive deep answers. To make an analogy, one can ask the programming equivalent of "why can alternative current flow without a closed loop" and receive a summary of classical electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations. For some actual examples, I've read some questions and answers on how to interleave x86-64 instructions in a way to maximize instruction-level parallelism, some of the answers are comprehensive enough that they can easily be expanded into a conference talk or research report (or rather, these answers often summarize them). So if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model. But if the question requires many rounds of conversations like many threads you see in a forum, it's definitely not going to end well.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model. Hmm. It's probably my fault and not yours, but this clarified little for me. At least, it doesn't make me feel confident that if I have a question, I'd be able to tell if it's one that would get a reasonable response on SO. Perhaps So would be better served if they separated out the "Q&A" from whatever entries they feel are worth being preserved, rather than combining the two. Doing that might make interacting with SO less unpleasant or more helpful, and then the particular ones that fit SO's model can be copied to a separate reference section. What I do know is that SO as it is puts an awful lot of people off, including experienced devs who might otherwise be willing to help answer questions.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

> Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question. Ironically enough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_manual,_guidebook,_textbook,_or_scientific_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...