
Evidence-Based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow - lainon
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04692
======
menacingly
My main encounters with SO are top google results that point to questions they
closed or complained about as somehow inadequate.

I love that the questions are not "good enough" for the community, but still
good enough to milk for search placement.

It's a useful place, but I have to wonder if its main purpose was to suck up
all the available SEO oxygen and concentrate it. I think they even still
nofollow the highly relevant links to other sites, because not doing so would
dilute their position as the relevant result for virtually any programming
query.

EDIT: After a few seconds of googling, it looks like there has been effort on
the nofollow front since I last checked. That's cool. I can see that it's
nuanced. Still, my current experience with arriving at a "bad" question with
great SEO is super frequent

~~~
mcguire
Or google results that point to unanswered questions or questions with answers
that are years out of date. I think of it as Answer Roulette.

~~~
user5994461
And the unanswered question is either locked or I can't post an answer because
I don't have enough points.

Stack Overflow is aging pretty poorly.

------
bmitch3020
I've seen my share of downvoted and closed questions from others, and often it
comes down to users expecting the site to adapt to their needs rather than
realizing they are a guest on someone else's site. SO doesn't exist to be your
personal support site where others are obligated to help you on your terms.

When you're a guest, you follow their rules. And their rules are fairly
simple:

\- Stay on topic

\- Don't duplicate existing questions (look before you ask)

\- Ask a specific question ("how do I fix it?" is not a specific question)

\- Be polite (no one is getting paid to answer your question)

\- Don't be a spammer (and avoid looking like a spammer)

With coding questions, it really helps to:

\- Reduce the problem to a specific detail and be concise, if I haven't
finished reading the question and have an idea of the answer in 30 seconds, I
move on.

\- Provide enough detail that someone else could reproduce your issue. So many
people assume I have remote access to their laptop, not to mention what they
are thinking inside their head.

\- Write it in English, with punctuation, and capitalization. If there's a 10
line block of text without a single capital letter or period, I move on. Same
goes for anyone with their capslock key stuck in the on position. I try my
best to understand non-native English speakers, because I sure can't talk in
their language, but sadly when there's a language barrier, I move on fairly
quickly.

~~~
nix0n
I understand that SO's rules prohibit "what is the best tool for this job?"
type questions.

Yet, a closed SO question is almost always the first Google result.

What is the correct place to find this type of info?

~~~
IshKebab
I agree it is stupid. There are other stack exchange sites but it takes about
5 minutes to read through their FAQs to work out where to go - Software
Enginering? Superuser? Nope you need Software Recommendations. Obviously. A
tiny meta-site where nobody will ever see your question.

Why do they need to separate clearly popular and related questions onto a
graveyard site? Sure they might go stale quicker, but I have a load of
questions and answers from Android 2ish that are totally irrelevant now and
they are allowed to stay apparently.

Stack overflow doesn't have any solution for any answers going stale so I
don't think they should use that as a reason to pick on questions that pretty
much everyone except the pedantic editors think are fine.

~~~
nix0n
Thank you IshKebab,
[https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)
is the answer I was looking for.

------
godelmachine
There was a time in my life, and that time is still persistent even now, when
every question that I asked on SO was flagged, and I was banned for 7 days
with a message which said something like this - "It seems your basic concepts
are unclear. Kindly revise then and get back to us"

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!

~~~
lostlogin
Flagged as duplicate.

Hasn’t happened to me, but nothing is more frustrating that having someone
else ask my exact question then it gets flagged.

~~~
foepys
I often reach assumed duplicates via Google but still get very insightful
answers. If I click on the link pointing towards the assumed original, it's
sometimes completely deserted with a single two-line answer that's been
outdated for three years.

~~~
menacingly
And they're happy to leave the duplicate up for the inbound google benefits it
provides.

------
doug1001
a mod can close find support in the SO guidelines to close any question they
wish.

a tightly defined, clearly written question with a single correct anwswer?

Rejected: RTFM

a question with more than one correct answer (but which almost certainly has a
"best answer" which a community like SO is in the obvious best position to
judge)?

Rejected: subjective; opinion-based

no axe to grind here--i used to participate in SO (50K rep, and one of the
highest rep-to-post ratios)--i honestly just find it too difficult to navigate
that narrow straight

~~~
autokad
I find SO is a great place to find answers, a really bad place to ask
questions.

there are people (such as the comments above) get judgmental just because a
post didn't use capitalization. sure, nobody is getting paid to answer them
(well SO kinda is), but there is no reason to berate people for asking
questions and missing minor details. just move on.

~~~
user5994461
Also, a really bad place to write answers.

~~~
autokad
why is that?

~~~
user5994461
Because the question is closed. Or it's open but you don't have enough
reputation to answer to something that already has an answer.

Or you replied and your answer got deleted for being a duplicate. It was not a
duplicate, it was the solution in python3 while the existing solution is
python2.

edit: Just remember another one. That horrible time when I couldn't post the
reply the OP was looking for, because the answer had to be at least 100 or 200
characters and the solution wasn't that long.

------
mulvya
SO moderation is often finicky and sometimes absurd. Somewhat recently, there
was a Q which was closed as unclear _after_ I posted a reply & the OP marked
it as accepted. The Q had enough context for someone who knew the app
concerned (ffmpeg).

But yeah, in the tags I stick to, many Qs are incomplete. A bespoke template
or "wizard" triggered by the selection of a tag would go a long way.

But neither this nor the tips in the paper solve the issue of how to draw
attention (and answers) to a Q with high-volume tags.

~~~
mark-r
When a question is closed only a single reason is given, even though each vote
may have used a different reason. It's not always informative.

~~~
mulvya
I assume that the displayed reason is of either the latest vote or a plurality
of them. Absurd either way.

------
ry_ry
The problem with SO isn't overly zealous moderation, it's that the self-
moderation aspect is so poor. I've often wondered if the former is an indirect
product of the latter.

If you don't know the answer to a question then anything that works is great,
regardless of how good it actually is (or how relevant it is X years later).

I'm also convinced a huge number of ARBITRARY_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE SO
contributors are just random students googling the answers for sweet, sweet
internet points (if I was being generous, to build themselves a 'profile' for
job hunting or something) but that is another thing entirely.

~~~
mark-r
I've gone to Google for answers quite a few times, but only because I'm truly
interested in the question and/or answer. Internet points don't motivate me,
being helpful does.

------
user5994461
Meanwhile... trying to fix a typo in a popular answer.

Can't submit because an edit has to be at least n character changes.

~~~
mark-r
There are a lot of arbitrary rules baked into the code to theoretically
improve the quality, as the original designers (particularly Jeff Atwood)
believed that overall site quality was crucial to the long-term viability of
the site. Unfortunately there's a lot of collateral damage.

~~~
user5994461
It seems to me that most rules will stop applying after some amounts of
points. The founders and early users are never subjected to them, while it's a
major hassle for everyone else.

~~~
mark-r
Not always true, I have every privilege available on the site and I still ran
into the minimum number of changes for an edit. I spent far too much time
looking for innocuous changes just so I could push an essential edit through.
I don't deny that some rules are like that though.

~~~
user5994461
Another example on edits then, you must be familiar with the "edit queue is
full" bug? You can clean the edit queue if you have enough points.

~~~
mark-r
If you have enough points your edits don't even enter the queue, they're
applied immediately.

~~~
user5994461
Wow. Privileges in action.

------
ferros
To be brutally honest this is absolutely pointless.

It is basically confirming simple online etiquette produces best results.

~~~
db48x
Even common sense needs to be studied; some of it occasionally turns out to be
wrong.

~~~
ouid
If this paper had implied that common sense was wrong here, would you have
trusted it?

~~~
db48x
I don't particularly trust this study; I haven't even read it. I'm just saying
that you can't skip studying something just because it seems like common
sense.

------
saycheese
TLDR: Be concise & unemotional.

