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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work.

Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.

I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"):

https://web.archive.org/web/20231016163745/https://stackover...

The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"

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I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014. And it was an awful experience. I got over my Java block by not just reading my Uni's textbook but by also reading another much older textbook.

I got so good at Java that I became a Lab/Teaching Assistant my last two years in college. And I helped folks the best I could in person: always kind, always patient, never blaming the student even if they didn't want to learn and just wanted to pass the Lab; that is an obviously wrong student attitude to have, but whether they cheat or want the answers without learning is between the student and god. I can only try my best to help.

Who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project? Who cares if their question is not deep enough or poorly written? Just answer their question or don't. You don't need to impose your moral sense of fairness unto them: it's not that deep. And you especially don't need the snark and the putting down of others. Again, the simpler thing is to not engage at all which is obviously not what happened or happens under the sludge and grime of SO answers.

Being polite in answering questions is pro-social.

It's a more pleasant interaction when someone is polite. -- Whereas, if you get rude answers, you'll be discouraged from participating.

Asking good questions is pro-social. People are going to be more willing to help if the questions are well thought out. -- Whereas, asking in an anti-social way discourages people from helping out.

It's still possible to ask questions even if you get snarky responses back; and it's still possible to answer lazy questions... But in either case, it's easy to see why people might not like that.

You are interpreting ability as a social gesture, taking disability as an insult. Thusyou not participating in the part of society that is learning is a good thing.

There's a difference between "I haven't paid the full effort to figure the answer out myself" and "I haven't paid the effort that makes it easier for you to help me". -- There's no setting in which being rude is going to be more helpful than being polite.

Expectations vary; in some settings, it's going to be more acceptable for questions to be a more raw "I'm stuck and I need help" than in others.

There is an asymmetry: people giving answers are more able to help those who are asking questions. If the people learning don't like the teachers, they'll have to go elsewhere (& learning is harder). If the teachers don't like the students, they don't have to teach.

> I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014.

Please link them! They should still be there, and we should be able to analyze them. The strength of Stack Exchange is that it is factual, like on Wikipedia, users are discouraged to be emotional and encouraged to to prove their theories.

> who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project?

A visitor from Google, who doesn't want to search through dozens of "too localized" problems, that don't apply in his case. There are other places to ask such questions, and the strength of SO/SE lies in its ruleset.

I'd phrase this a bit differently, for the questioner's side of things.

I know from experience that when I'm frustrated, I need to keep trying something smaller (or otherwise get more information) until it becomes clear what's not working.

The kind of steps it takes to ask a good question goes hand in hand with the kind of steps you'd take to solve the problem yourself. (Similarly: with domain knowledge, you know what to look for; without domain knowledge, you don't know what to ask about).

If I put too high a value on other people's time, I'm never going to ask questions, and may be slower than if I'd asked a question at a suitable time. (Whereas, putting too little value on other people's time ... can cause friction).

This used to be a good reference "back in the day"...

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Yes, indeed, it takes a superhuman amount of patience and empathy. I don't particularly have those, and it sounds like you don't, either.

So your course is just to avoid those, not downgrade them.

If people had your level of insight and self-reflection, then SO would be less popular but much more helpful and probably not known for all the needless hostility.

It takes a lot of guts to ask for help. And being put down when you're vulnerable: exposing an ignorance or a lack of understanding, is not a good feeling at all. For me, it always sticks for a long time until I forget it.

> It takes a lot of guts to ask for help.

Among coworkers you know, yes, but among internet strangers?

Yes, that's beginners in nutshell. It's why it's so important to educate them rather than take the opposite stance which is to chastise them for being so inept. I wouldn't take their bad questions that personally myself, it's what it is, but also I am not a person to answer SO questions so there's that.

Those who answer questions want good questions but those who ask good questions probably solve them on their own. Leaving things as they are.

Who cares, people with homework need help too. They're beginners so asking them to formulate a perfect question or conduct research is basically a non-starter. If the barrier to entry is become a professional first, it's no wonder why the company and its user base are shrinking.

I think "professionals who can't figure this obscure things out" is the best use-case for SO, really. Perhaps being a professional is something to be required. I'm speaking only from my own experience. I have only ever asked a handful of questions on SO (going back to about 2011), and that's because I spend hours and hours trying to figure it out first. So yes, I think I do expect that of other questioners as well.

"Why won't my docker container build?" Well, because there's a typo in your instructions and it says so clearly in the error output. Of course we get tired of answering these types of questions.

I can agree with you to an extent, but the model doesn't scale and they're getting beat by alternatives that are seemingly better for the majority.

Can you name those alternatives? I don't think SO/SE is being beaten by anything, it has no competition within the set of questions it allows. When it comes to other questions - of course other websites are better for answering the questions that are offtopic on SO/SE.

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