I swear to God I was so pissed off. Here I am , genuinely asking for help, and then these tech oligarch's were blocking me sitting in their ivory towers.
Hope this paper helps me out!
SO wants curation and objective answers to objective questions. Vague or poorly-scoped questions? Toss em in the bin. Questions about "best way" "best library" or "best tool for"? Subjective or not-software -- in the bin.
As a question-answerer, a frustrating question would be one that tries to articulate a bug/problem but never cites any code, compiler error or runtime error. When posed by anyone who is not already an expert these questions very often cannot be addressed without a roundtrip involving "ok, please share the code so we can reproduce the problem".
No joke -- that tip about the MCVE or SSCCE was super valuable. Unfortunately I'd bet that just the act of making this example would probably yield an answer to the person's question most of the time, without even needing SO. Novice question-askers lacked the expertise/experience to know to do this or just the patience required. I'm not faulting them, I remember what it was like to be a novice. It's a reasonable expectation to turn to a mentor and show them the code and ask them what you're doing wrong.
> Hope this paper helps me out!
> > Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style.
This matches my experience. But I'd love to hear how the results might change if they filtered on low reputation question askers.
When HN bashes SO, I feel conflicted. I totally understand why so many folks are disappointed. But I also think that it's good for what it wants to be.
the first viable answer is giving you the solution, except it doesn't work because the API has changed many years ago.
the second viable answer is telling you that you don't want to do that and it's certainly wrong to try.
the third viable answer is a guy advertising to use another library for just that. (Just because you use C++ doesn't mean you have boost or Qt available but fair enough).
The fourth viable answer is a guy advertising for his own library to solve that same problem. It may or may not be shameless advertising. The github link is dead half the time.
The topic is closed. It will never be possible to post the right valid answer to that problem.
Answers cannot be edited. They will rot forever and mislead an entire new generation.
I never ask questions in SO. To be honest, I'm not dissatisfied either, I just gave up. When I saw a question for which I knew the exact answer, I was unable to answer because... I don't know. I wasn't reputable enough to answer and I couldn't get a reputation because I couldn't answer. Or something like that, I don't remember or I don't care. I just google for answers.
So I would reconsider the "invariably". But that's just my two cents.
Hasn’t happened to me, but nothing is more frustrating that having someone else ask my exact question then it gets flagged.