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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

I don't know... I'm not bothered at all by new users or dumb questions. What bothers me are experienced users questioning my intentions, being patronizing and thinking I am dumb. I have to include a disclaimer with almost every second question: "Yes, I know what I am doing. No, I am not suffering from the XY problem. No, I will not treat you answer as legal advice. Yes, I have tried to solve the problem on my own. Here is a bunch of useless code to prove I am worthy of getting an answer." If I don't do that, I'll get - within seconds - comments like "show what you have done" or "don't do that! what are you actually trying to achive!"

The other thing is that, increasingly, the kind of questions that would a) help me and b) I could answer with expertise are the kind of questions that are banned on the various SE sites. SE has ceased being useful to me a while ago.

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I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the case most of the times.

What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?

On stackoverflow, it is not so clear-cut and I can't tell you one single kind of question. But on physics.stackexchange.com, my problem is that apparantly medium-level questions are frowned upon. We have some very high-level (research-level) questions, and many very low-level (popular science or below high-school level) questions. People rightfully complained about the low ratio of high to low level questions, but one thing they did against it was to ban "homework" and "homework-like" questions. This does not just include actual homework, but basically anything where you say "I'd like to calculate x, how do I do it?", and anything where you have to go through a few steps to find an answer.

The problem is, after ~10 years at the university, studying and teaching, I'm basically an expert in "homework". I can answer most university-level questions. I prefer answering (and asking) questions where the answer is "do this, then this, and then you get that", maybe with a few formulas, to a few paragraphs of prose. After all, I personally think that fits better with the SE model and with physics. But actually, what's welcome at the moment are mostly "conceptional" questions where an answer explains an abstract concept with prose. The community has narrowed down the allowed scope a lot out of fear of 1) low-level questions, and 2) accidentally helping somebody with their homework (god forbid!). But instead of getting more expert-level questions, they get less mid-level questions. I've found that I can currently neither ask nor answer anything there.

wow. you pretty much summarized that feeling - that last sentence.

I fully agree with the first paragraph.

This issue is compounded by the flood of naive questions: patronizing users will thus spend less time reading decently written questions/answers/comments, and their reading comprehension will suffer from that. End result: even if you posted something that was actually helpful, you can easily get downvoted.

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