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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

You see people ask basic questions on SO. And people will downvote them to oblivion.

This is why I don't bother with SO anymore. I once spent a good 45 minutes carefully explaining how something worked to somebody that was obviously a beginner. When I went to submit the answer, I was informed that I couldn't because a moderator had closed the question.

When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed.

I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.

This is a real problem with SO. SO is still the best place to go to find answers, but they do quite a bit - though not nearly as much as Wikipedia - to frighten off beginners. Arbitrarily closing perfectly fine, sometimes even great questions, is only the half of it.

Bill_The_Lizard does this so much I actually remember his name. I assumed it was just because he only had time to make snap decisions since he handling so much content. Now it sounds like this is a conscious decision to push beginners out.

It's also the manner in which it is done. About 5 years ago I asked a (dumb) question, I had no idea how to ask the "right" question and was closed down and told "this isn't your personal code writing service". I had phrased the question as can you give advice on how to proceed, I wasn't asking for code samples. Yes, SO wants you to post code, but if you have no idea where to start, some advice could go a long way. Being snarked at was unnecessary and it was 3 years before I posted there again.

Its surprising to me the amount of snark that is allowed from the moderators. Perhaps of the last 5 questions I've posted, I've received rude responses from moderators twice. Each time was in response to a mistake that I had made, so criticism was welcome, its the rudeness that was unprofessional.

A contributing issue might be that the moderators are the result of elections. This would weight moderator personality types towards people who crave recognition, perhaps even more on the narcissistic end of the scale. As opposed to more "level 5" type leaders who are probably less likely to run in an election and talk themselves up.

SO has a few bad mechanisms that encourage behaviorial issues that the SO people just like to stick their heads in the sand about. Closing valid questions is one example. Making most questions a race to copy and paste the correct response out of Google by awarding the first response that looks vaguely correct with a permanent "accepted answer" badge is another bad thing, and really hurts people trying to give thorough or good answers. It also really hurts when that accepted answer turns out to have issues. How many times have you come across a question and found an answer with 10x the upvotes of the accepted answer and a thorough explanation about why, while that answer may seem right at first glance, it's actually wrong?

I spent a day or two trying to get karma on SO and then gave up. SO is still a good resource for some types of questions, but for the most part, it's not worth hanging out there to answer questions.

I am saddened by his response. I have noticed that over time, it is becoming a much more negative environment - for beginners especially. I don't understand why the people in charge have chosen that direction. Up until now I did not know it was a conscious decision. I thought it was just a side effect of becoming larger and having too many mods who don't ask questions (only answer them).

Over the past 5 years, I've probably increased my skills 10 fold by actively asking questions on there, its really sad that other people will not have this opportunity: http://stackoverflow.com/users/84131/chris-dutrow

Contributing to what ChrisDutrow said, SO used to be great for asking questions. However, they retroactively changed their points value for asking questions. I found this to be a bit counter productive.

I realize that they are trying to "fight the people gaming the system." But I just felt like asking questions wasn't valued well enough. My participation dropped on SO like a rock after that.

I wrote an article about SO 4 years ago, and many of the points still remain and there are newer issues: https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...

My participation in SO now is primarily focused on asking questions only when I have something I've been struggling with for quite a while. By that time, I won't get an answer on the questions because it's so obscure.

My reaction was different. I chose to keep asking a lot of questions and just brace myself to get kicked in the teeth by some people.

The value of just the chance that someone will clarify things and suggest things that I wouldn't have known about is worth the inevitable online beat down.

This is essentially what I do.

I've deleted some of the questions afterwards, after receiving a lot of down votes or having it closed, but generally within 30 seconds there'll be a two line answer to a question that I spent several hours trying to figure out.

It's still an amazing resource, just a broken points/closure system.

I don't disagree with your point, but I have to ask: How do you design a site like SO that is simultaneously valuable for both beginners and experts?

By letting everyone (almost) regardless of rep upvote or downvote questions and closing questions only when they're downvoted into oblivion. The trick is to get a wide variety of questions, and that means vague and confusing beginner questions need their fair shot as well.

SO did go through that phase.

People appear to be forgetting how it used to be. Before SO, that was how it was, and it sucked. You constantly found answers to beginner questions that were wrong or useless because of lack of context, or just unanswered questions when you searched.

SO is regulated because it means the content that is there is quality. Getting rid of stuff that doesn't work on SO makes it a better resource. Trying to shove that stuff back in would be terrible.

By all means, go set up that 'SO for newb questions', and when it's full of ananswered questions (because all the answerers get fed up trying to decode incomprehensible questions and feeding the help vampires), and content no one wants, maybe you'll get it.

Beyond all that, it's better for those asking too. Getting a short answer out of context isn't what those people need. They need proper, in-depth tutorials.

This is the reason i stopped contributing to SO. It has become very insular and discourages interesting questions that are challenging to answer. The problem SO has is that the effort to become a mod is only put in by people who align with the rigid mindset of existing mods, and this perpetuates and reinforces a hostile culture.

Consider that the vast majority of beginner questions are already asked and answered on SO; inability to Google is appropriately selected against, as it's a core skill.

The problem, I believe, with this line of thinking is that at a beginner level one simply does not know what to Google. You need a certain foundation to be able to simplify the problem down to a few key words. You need to understand the problem you're having on some level that beginners simply don't.

And I think it's a fairly elitist attitude that's prevalent in programming that leads people to treat the field as if there is some innate quality that makes for a good programmer that we want to filter for. It's a similar fallacy that leads people to believe that they're "just not good at math," I think.

I think there's a world of difference between the existential question of "what is a programmer" and the concrete question of "should SO allow yet another list comprehensions syntax question".

There exists a category of programmer who has so little knowledge that SO is not the place for them. They can be, should be, and are directed to Google and the documentation.

I think you may have misunderstood me if you boiled down my point to an existential question.

My point was that directing to Google or documentation is a basic misunderstanding (or simple forgetfulness) of what it means to be a beginner in the field. It is that telling someone to "Google it" or "read the docs" fails to understand the fact that beginners often simply can't comprehend documentation and can't use Google effectively because they do not have the foundation necessary to understand the problem they are facing.

This isn't an existential question of "what is a programmer." It's the statement that if SO is exclusive to "beginners" then it is doing the field a disservice. And it's a statement that directing beginners to Google or documentation is elitist and inherently exclusionary in practice.

I think that the people behind SO have weighed up the pros and cons - a million questions about the most basic parts of a language are not that helpful to anyone but the person asking, and are better answered in the context of a tutorial or whatever. Generally those kinds of super-beginner questions are not useful without context, so they get either a useless answer or a small tutorial that doesn't really work because it's on SO.

Expecting people to be able to learn a language from nothing by going on SO and asking questions just isn't going to work well. It'll burn out answerers and fill the site with mostly useless content. I respect the decision made by the SO guys to focus the site and avoid that, because a useful resource for one group is better than a bad resource for everyone.

SO should not be the point they start, then. They need some sort of mentoring/tutoring service, or start with a low-level beginner Online Course to help them learn the terms.

Once they have that under their belt, their knowledge/experience has been "bootstrapped" enough such that they know what they don't know, or where they need help, etc.

That's not helpful if those things aren't available or easy to find - which, for most beginners, they aren't.

(An online course in what, exactly? Web design? C? JavaScript? Scratch? CS fundamentals? "Coding"?)

The SO approach is just nasty - unforgivably so, IMO.

SO could at least have split into abs. beginner/more experienced beginner/journeyman/professional/expert levels.

Currently it just seems to provide an excuse for not very interesting people to bully beginners instead of helping them.

This is a fairly well known problem for SO (see people trying to explain a question about the ternary operator - a name you only learn after you first try to find out what it is - in any language where it's all symbols).

SO does account for this though. Questions can (and regularly are) closed as 'already answered'. Those questions then link through. This means that all those questions hang around as pointers with all the ways of describing the issue people tried, hopefully increasing the search term surface area.

So their slogan should basically be "There are stupid questions". It's not how I was raised, and I don't agree with it, but at least they would be honest.

Because they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them at all and generally it's fairly clear the asker hasn't even checked if the question is asked before.

All the basic questions have pretty much been answered quite thoroughly already. Any beginner is extremely unlikely to ask something that someone else hasn't already thought of.

But beginners often don't know what to ask or how, or even what to Google for. You need a year in the field just to pick up the right terms to type into a search engine to point you in the right direction.

I'd debate that a bit. Personally I hardly had to ask any questions when I was a beginner, and I'm not even particularly good with Google. Relevant vocabulary can be picked up from tutorials quite quickly.

Though Google does seem a little worse at programming queries now than it was circa 2009. :/

I support your position 100%. There was no Google when I had questions. I cut my teeth on pointers in C with nothing but the K&R book. That people can't be bothered to put some effort into that miraculous white textbox doesn't make me feel any pity for them. Google is good enough just literally typing what you're saying with your mouth into the search bar. The other thing here I feel pretty strongly about is that programming has a barrier to entry, and that barrier to entry will not go away until robots are writing software. In twenty years of programming, I have met people that cannot think in that way, try as they might. At some point, people will hit a test of wherewithal. Their ability to reason and think logically about pure abstractions will be put to the test. Whether they fail the test in their first semester, their first SO question, or their first time trying to Google something, trying to do something about it is just shifting the time when that happens. There's a reason programmers have the salaries we do.

Sometimes that's true. But often it's enough to google the actual error message which is returned to you and people still don't do that. I don't think that's a case of beginner not knowing what to google for.

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22NoneType+object+has+no... - ~900 cases of people spending time to upload their code to SO and waiting for answers with explanations, rather than trying to understand what the error means. (or even reading the first link that comes up in "Questions that may already have your answer")

It is never OK to be mean to someone asking a question. But more importantly, it is clear that too many questions have "enough" effort put into them that they don't deserve a withering response.

As for copy-pasting error-messages into google, the results may not apply, in the asker's mind, to what they are doing. The results might have information which is too technical to understand. If the error comes from a turgid framework, it might very well provide no useful clue at all because its just detritus from leaky framework abstractions.

"detritus from leaky framework abstractions" - good line.

Here's an example of me screwing up a pretty basic question on SO: I was new to Angular, and didn't even think to follow the really obvious URL that they included in the error message.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19671962/uncaught-error-i...

Luckily, I was met with a kind and thoughtful answer, and it turns out that I'm probably not the only one with the problem: the question has had some 42K views. But I've been coding for 20+ years, and I still screwed up my question. Yes, even on a Q&A site, folks should research before posting. But some grace to beginners who don't even know the proper etiquette would go a long ways.

You're one of the first ones who reported it, it's also a terrible error message that you said yourself was not googlable at the time. You provided as much information as you could. I see nothing wrong with your question and don't think it's in the same category as the list I posted.

>they're usually poorly phrased with no effort put into them

Or they're new to programming and lack the vocabulary to research what they're interested in or phrase a question well.

This isn't true or fair to beginners. Some people would call me an expert in my field. Beginners are perfectly capable of throwing me a hypothetical that neither I nor any of my peers had previously considered. Perhaps you are confusing beginner with idiot? They are not the same thing.

Seymour Cray once said he liked to hire inexperienced engineers, because they don't know what's supposed to be impossible.

There's so many assholes on SO, but there are also people who are incredible at explaining stuff.

Unfortunately the assholes are far more promiscuous with downvotes, closing and toxic-responses than the good people are with _any_ response. To make it worse assholes see it as their duty to "police" SO to maintain the quality of the forum and will be laughably smug about justifying their actions.

The sad thing is it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the person with the most high score, Jon Skeet, is remarkably gentle and kind in all his interactions. It is a pity more folks don't see him as a role model to emulate.

I participate in a circle of people who e-mail new questions that we ask (and answers). If we think the question needs work, we make suggestions. If we like the question, we up-vote it.

The extra up-votes help with other people taking the question seriously and it actually getting good answers.

If you or anyone else wants to be included, shoot me an e-mail (its in my profile)

That's a really cool idea... To be sure I understand, are you saying you're in a group that preps questions for SO and then buttress them against spurious closures/downvotes?

If we think it is a good question, we upvote it. I believe this conforms to the rules :)

Definitely email if you are interested. And to everyone else reading this: its an open invitation, we'd love to meet some more hackers!

I don't think this problem is as big as people make out. There definitely are the asshole types (unfortunately, a lot fo them are the helpful people after they got burnt out trying to feed the help vampires).

There is a middle ground. There is a need to get rid of low quality content or content that doesn't fit on SO - if you remember the time before SO, you remember the experience of wading through the piles of rubbish and nothing that was forums and resources for programmers of the past. The reason SO is different to those and better is because they know what type of content works on the site, and they intentionally limit the site.

The right answer is to try and help those people who post the wrong stuff in a nice way (point them at the right places, explain the issue), move on quickly, and answer good questions.

> The right answer is to try and help those people who post the wrong stuff in a nice way (point them at the right places, explain the issue), move on quickly, and answer good questions.

Indeed, I wish that behavior was more common on SO. Unfortunately, smug remarks, closure and downvotes are the norm. This might be understandable for questions which are clearly ill-conceived, but it happens to ernest, sincere questions as well.

To be fair, they have been cracking down on those kinds of comments - there are even filters that stop you posting certain common toxic comments. It's not perfect, but they are pushing the culture away from that as much as they can.

It's worth noting closure isn't always a negative thing - questions closed as a duplicate give the asker an answer and work as pointers for others.

It depends what you mean by "basic questions". There are basic questions which are about general issues. There are also basic questions which are super-specific to one issue of a trivial program and can be solved by literally searching for the error message. [going to SO to grab the one on the front page right now]

- 5th question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-...

- google: pip install "Operation not permitted"

- first link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-...

- second link: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-...

(downvoted, marked to close as dupe)

Yes. People get downvoted into oblivion by asking questions which they (demonstrably) did not spend a moment researching. The front page of SO contains a steady stream of them anyway. The downvote arrow means (tooltip): "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

But! If someone actually posted something that's not googlable and that they actually tried to understand, they do get good answers in my experience. If a good question in closed, you can always report it for review. I'm not saying it never happens - but I helped to reopen a few.

SO needs help turning this impression around. I upvote any question that's halfway comprehensible. I nearly always comment in order to help resolve the ambiguity in the question. It works out best when the asker engages SO in the comments section.

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