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Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentim

by NBJack 1y ago

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

zahlman 1y ago
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc. If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output. It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing. But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag: "I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there. "Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658) "Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site. Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    >>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. >If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is. > Either what I was looking for was already there The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      > You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. > That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply. That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter. > The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO. > When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem. I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
Arnt 1y ago
I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.
  - Arnt 1y ago
    Show, don't tell. Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.) Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
    - daedrdev 1y ago
      This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
      - mcejp 1y ago
        Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.

by NBJack 1y ago

zahlman 1y ago

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc. If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output. It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing. But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag: "I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there. "Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658) "Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).

surgical_fire 1y ago
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site. Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
- zahlman 1y ago
  >>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. >If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is. > Either what I was looking for was already there The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    > You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. > That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply. That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter. > The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO. > When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem. I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.

Arnt 1y ago

I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.

daedrdev 1y ago
surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.
- Arnt 1y ago
  Show, don't tell. Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.) Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
    - mcejp 1y ago
      Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.