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I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother. Something about the SO incentive
by brap 3mo ago
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
- smallmancontrov 3mo agoBullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful. That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
- Dragas 3mo agoDuring the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author. I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
- tayo42 3mo agoIt felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
- unreal37 3mo agoI just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed. And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
- Sammi 3mo agoHow good are the questions?
- evilduck 3mo agoDoes it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.
- sfn42 3mo agoHow else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working? They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
- evilduck 3mo agoYou just described the complete opposite of the StackOverflow experience.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI disagree. Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow. The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites. It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
- porksoda 3mo agoNever had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why. What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
- rcxdude 3mo agoIt's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).
- lynndotpy 3mo agoI have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.
- xeromal 3mo agoI went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-way-to-design-a-media-player-on-windows-phone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trouble-determining-a-proper-way-to-divide-resources-evenly-in-a-exc https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-generate-a-list-of-datetime-intervals-that-are-in-between-two-dates https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener... As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.
- lysium 3mo agoAt the second you got an interesting answer, though
- laughing_man 3mo agoI asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoOnce had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.