Comment by olooney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olooney | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of those behaviors.

Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers. These two aren't the same because of the concept of a "high" or "low" quality question. If you go to a consultant (or even a helpful fellow employee) with an vague, ill-formed question with a lot of specific detail about your exact context and problem they'll help you through it. Stack Overflow doesn't give a shit. No one is going to waste time giving you a nuanced answer to a complex real-world situation; nor is it with their time to cross-examine you to find out what your real question is. That would be both time consuming and unrewarding - unrewarding because it will help at most one person. No one else will care about your specific situation, so your ceiling is at most one upvote. If you want that kind of help, you have to pay for it, in one form or another. Unfortunately, most new users ask a question about something their genuinely confused about in a topic area they've just started to learn. Big mistake. Such questions were already asked 5 years ago and you'll get closed as a duplicate, or your confusion will be interpreted as cluelessness and closed as unclear. You'll get a ton of downvotes in either case.

I like stack exchange; I have a few thousand points on two different sites. I enjoy answering questions, or even just seeing what kinds of questions are being asked, and of course use it almost hourly when googling for different problems. I rarely ask a question though, and usually regret it when I do. But at this point let's just admit it's basically just a wiki with a psuedo-Q&A gimmick.

[1]: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/avINNb1_Dg2h6QfDRJOpnWVFWu...

Learning how to ask a good technical question is an extremely valuable skill in and of itself, and StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to do it. Just as you've said - if you ask a coworker (or a real person in general) they'll work with you to dig the question out, but they aren't really teaching you how to ask it more efficiently in the first place. They aren't giving you specific feedback on your question.

StackOverflow on the other hand will often give you an actual critique of your question. That criticism can be really frustrating, but it's often good for you (it has been for me). Often the problem is a problem only because of how you perceive the problem space, or you're wrong about fundamentals. Other times you're not including important details because you didn't know they were important and just having that pointed out can help, or this problem is of a known form with a known solution - you just didn't know the "magic words."

There's even something to be said for forcing people to learn a bit about the community before jumping into it. As annoying as that is and as much as it is an on boarding obstacle - it helps people work together. The on boarding process for a driver's license sucks and puts up tons of barriers, but with good reason.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, or deny that super rude and unhelpful behavior occurs there, I just want to say that some of the "bugs" of StackOverflow are probably "features."

>StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to do i >StackOverflow on the other hand will often give you an actual critique of your question.

You really are giving too much credit to SO here. It hasn't been my experience with it at all.

Same here, most of the times I get a negative comment (And I mean 90% of the times) there is no critique at all just a "I think you comment with malice so you don't respect strange rule interpretation here so I am gonna close|modify|signal this question."

    > StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to [ask good technical questions]

I partially agree.

The fear of a withering dismissal does motivate many people to carefully formulate questions. In fact, I've answered my own questions more than a few times by just starting to write out my questions on stackoverflow.

It still pains me, however, to witness the persnickety behavior, close-votes, down-votes, and cold commentary that people get when they ask an earnest question. No one deserves that, not novices, not pros. It's never OK to be mean to someone even if they aren't abiding by the very long list of arbitrary and inconsistently enforced rules for asking a question.

I am not hopeful that stackoverflow will change any time soon. There are factions which actually relish the gamification of the site and their own personal insanely rigid interpretation of the rules. Some even rage-quit a while back when the first steps were announced towards addressing inclusivity and rampant meanness.

> Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers.

I'll add that experienced Stack Overflow users don't care about helping other users. They care about badges and reputation, which is a proxy for helping users but not quite the same.

So to me it's more like a wiki with a pseudo-Q&A gimmick with a LinkedIn-meets-github-repository-activity-bragging aspect to it, which is particularly inviting to people who like taking down others and feeling intellectually superior, even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid – which means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other Q&A setting.

A metric stops being a good metric once it becomes a target, they say.

>even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid – which means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other Q&A setting.

Although I'm sure that happens, the site is explicitly designed to be a pseudo-wiki (Jeff counted Wikipedia as one of its inspirations), so if you ask a question that's too specific to your use case (i.e. that other users will not be able to put into practice) or a matter of opinion, then there's a legitimate reason to close it as not an appropriate question for Stack Overflow. Most other Q&A settings, such as Quora, are not trying to be pseudo-wikis, so these questions make more sense for those contexts.

For example, if you asked, "Should I use MySQL or SQLite", that's not a great question for Stack Overflow. You might instead ask, "What are the key differences between MySQL and SQLite" which can then provide the insight to answer your original question as well as help other users.

> You might instead ask, "What are the key differences between MySQL and SQLite" which can then provide the insight to answer your original question as well as help other users.

I'm pretty sure if you ask that exact question, an even if nobody has asked it before so it isn't a duplicate, someone will find some reason to shoot it down.

It's "too broad".

Even worse, it was obliterated: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630/sqlite-vs-mysql

And the reason: closed as not constructive by Kev Feb 28 '13 at 13:12

I cannot even see it :-/

You can find it in the Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20140327041948/https://stackoverf...

Note that as time went on, it became one liners and anecdotes... and everyone has their own anecdote of what the differences are and how important those differences are to that person... and that leads to discussions and page finding the answer you're looking for on page 40 of the answers somewhere deep in the comments of an answer.

That wasn't the goal of Stack Overflow.

Every new question is, paradoxically, very low quality, unclear, AND off-topic, yet somehow at the same time an exact duplicate of an on-topic question with 653 upvotes. :)

> For example, if you asked, "Should I use MySQL or SQLite", that's not a great question for Stack Overflow. You might instead ask, "What are the key differences between MySQL and SQLite"

That's just really the same question rephrased. If you think the latter shouldn't be closed, then just edit the former to read like it and leave it open.

I came across an article recently about Joel Spolsky believing there was no gamification in SO and then realizing there 'was a little'.

Which is 100% disingenuous, when Jeff Atwood was first working on SO, gamification was high on his list of things he wanted to do, and it's been a part of SO since day 1.

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