
Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners - exolymph
http://sonyaellenmann.com/2016/06/failures-learning-failures-teaching.html
======
Veedrac
> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that
> didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either.

Great, so you've learnt something for next time.

> Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get
> stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard
> Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place.

Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers,
people who write code because they love it." Stack Overflow's biggest problem
is that frequent contributors are getting fed up with the torrent of newbie
questions from people who haven't programmed for a month.

Imagine joining Math Overflow because you're an enthusiast mathematician...
only 19 of every 20 questions are about how to multiply two digit numbers.
Imagine joining a DIY group after years of practice only to find that you
spend most of your time building cubes out of playdough and sticks. Have you
tried reading the new queue on Stack Overflow? What does this[1] even mean?
(I'm actually kind'a shocked about how good it's looking right now; only about
half of the questions are utterly irredeemable.)

People from the outside don't see this. There are filters in place and people
who care to make them work. So all you see is the hostility and none of the
reason. But please believe me when I say that it's not just us being cronies.
We really do care about the site, and we just don't want to lose it.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-
di...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-disable-
tridion-cme-ribbon-based-on-any-metadata-field-value-chang)

~~~
Joeri
Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing
would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking
for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know
what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep.

You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the
site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to make the site useless.

~~~
Steeeve
I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were
all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I
warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked,
nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high
quality questions early on to have a high quality community.

Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to
an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed.

I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked
me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was
in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users
who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them -
and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are
interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support.

Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other
people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and
because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the
monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market
position very quickly.

------
matthewmacleod
I do generally agree that Stack Overflow as a community is too enthusiastic
about closing down some questions. It's always particularly frustrating to
Google for some weird error message and find a Stack Overflow discussion which
has been killed off because the question was inappropriate :)

But, that said… I'm not sure this is a particularly convincing example of this
phenomenon. This is an example of something which _can_ easily be found by
reading the documentation, and I'm not convinced that Stack Overflow is the
correct place to ask for other people to do your research for you! In
individual cases I don't doubt that it's fine, but I imagine it gets
frustrating to deal with repeated questions of this character, especially when
we now have the benefit of such easily-accessible online documentation.

There is a balance to be struck, I guess. No reason to be rude even when silly
questions are being asked.

~~~
jrumbut
I think the point the author is making is that what can be easily found in a
language's docs is subject to the same learning curve as what can be easily
done with the language. Skill in docs reading comes with skill in the practice
and understanding the concepts of a technology.

Someone can make an honest and unsuccessful search for something that is
blindingly obvious to another. If new users have difficulty using the
documentation, that is sufficient proof that the documentation doesn't
adequately serve new users (besides new users who magically know how to learn
like experienced users) and that's where Q&A communities come in.

The rules say you have to do research and you have to show what you've tried
to do. It doesn't specify a standard skill level you need to meet.

~~~
amag
The problem of writing documentation is that it's not possible to write it to
suite every person. While most documentation certainly can be improved upon
it's always the matter of where to best spend my time. Developing a feature or
document an old feature in _yet_ another way to serve people with a different
mindset than my own.

With the risk of sounding a bit of "it's programming it's meant to be hard", I
feel the author is a bit spoiled. It's not as if the information wasn't there,
she just needed ctrl-f "%r". This _is also_ something you need to learn when
learning how to program. In fact I would say that looking up information
online is a fundamental programming skill (it didn't use to be, back in the
days it was finding stuff in books, but we're mostly past that now, ctrl-f is
so much nicer). So she just learned a very valuable lesson, I'd say.

~~~
jrumbut
I agree with your take on documentation, and I agree that there are some
difficult concepts even in basic programming that you just have to work hard
to learn.

Reading dense documentation is a programming skill, so it doesn't seem
ridiculously out of bounds to be still in the process of learning it when on a
programming education site.

What I'm trying to say is more along the lines of "if you don't have anything
nice to say don't say anything at all." Saying "oh hey try ctrl f on that
documentation page you looked at" would be a valuable response, saying that
asking the question is dumb isn't a positive contribution and is likely to
make the asker defensive and unlikely to really learn from the experience.

~~~
exolymph
>Saying "oh hey try ctrl f on that documentation page you looked at" would be
a valuable response, saying that asking the question is dumb isn't a positive
contribution and is likely to make the asker defensive and unlikely to really
learn from the experience.

100% — this is the point I was trying to make

~~~
amag
I agree with the sentiment that being snarky doesn't help, but I think
ddebernardy is correct when saying:

 _" Sure, a good samaritan could do the work, figure it out, learn something
new in the process, and answer. Maybe they'll even answer it another few times
for the feel-good factor. But at some point they'll get bored or irritated,
and therein lies the rub."_

Personally after having answered a lot of questions - in a nice, helpful way,
mind you - questions whose answer could simply be "RTFM", these days I just
avoid them. The problem with these kinds of questions are that more and more
they offer nothing to the person answering them. A lot of them are asked by
people who created an account on SO just to ask that question and then throws
away the key (to that account). So don't expect to get any feedback, whether
karma, comments or to be marked accepted. Don't expect there to be an
interesting discussion with other devs with different experiences. I mean, I
was answering questions on forums long before there was any karma involved
just because I like to help/teach, but for that to be interesting to me who
answers questions, there must be some sort of feedback. Karma is one way but I
always preferred the good ol' discussion. It means I get to learn something as
well. Questions answerable with "RTFM" offer very little of that.

I guess what I'm saying is that people who answers question on SO (or similar
sites) are not getting paid to answers those questions. They do it for fun,
learning experience, karma, status or whatever. So there has to be something
in it for them as well.

~~~
jrumbut
I like your approach, just move on if it's not what you want to do. That
should be the general rule, and I think that's what most people do.

The other benefit is that it leaves the door open to new participants, who are
excited enough to know something that they don't mind not getting the upvote.
Online communication is one of the most important skills to have, and every
skill takes practice.

------
mehrdada
I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm
not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and
then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The
composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few
years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like
this with a grain of salt these days.

End of the day, I think it is important to keep in mind what Stack Overflow is
not: it's not Khan Academy. It's not college classes. It's not your IRC buddy.
It's more like Wikipedia (but not quite exactly that) than those things. Some
choices should be made to keep the content quality high.

~~~
jrumbut
What I think the experienced users are missing is that newbie questions are an
opportunity to let a newbie answerer learn to teach. When I decided I wanted
to start helping out on SO I found it almost impossible for months because the
easy questions were instantly shut down with a frustrated response from an
elder statesman user.

It's like when there's one guy who has maintained a system for years and won't
let anyone else touch it but also complains about having no time for other
projects. Eventually he has to let someone new take over parts of it, even if
it means that at first it takes a little longer and it's not done quite the
way he would.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I'm a 2k user and I've never asked a question. I find that the greatest
benefit to my learning has been trying to answer someone else's question. That
being said, I'd say on average there are 2 "async loop" questions on the
"newest javascript questions", both of which tend to get an answer by a newbie
and still get marked as a dupe. Just because it gets closed, doesn't mean you
can't work on answering it. The research will benefit you whether or not you
get the validation from answering it. However, I do understand that it's hard
to know if it's the right answer without the feedback of an upvote or two.

~~~
jrumbut
Ha! I'm in almost exactly the same place. I set a goal of asking a positively
ranked question recently and finally made it happen.

What I'm trying to get at is not that low quality questions should be
accepted, it's that when they are rejected a kind tone should be used so that
new users are able to take the suggestion without being defensive and so that
they feel encouraged to get better and try to keep participating.

------
mkoryak
Back in 2009 and 2010 I used to participate heavily on SO. I asked and
answered questions and it was a great resource for me.

At some point I stopped needing it, my questions became too specific and I got
tired of answering the same questions. At that point I had about 20k karma
points.

I've recently needed to ask a few answerable questions so I went back. All my
questions were closed or down voted and people reduced me for asking such bad
questions with 25k karma.

SO is now useless unless your question fits exactly into some mold they
require, ie questions someone with 2-3 years experience might ask.

------
callumlocke
The other StackExchange sites are just as bad. I once had a physics question
(I'm not a scientist, I was just curious) and I asked it on the Physics SE
site. The result was a torrent of intelligent, articulate people telling me my
question was stupid and that I should not have asked it. Imagine if a curious
schoolkid had that experience, they could be put off physics for life.
StackOverflow etc. can be useful at times, but it has a pedantic and hostile
culture that is anathema to learning.

~~~
gutnor
Well, that's ok, that's not the place to ask the question.

Or is it ? How do you find a better place ? Probably use google and find
yourself back on SO / Whatever SE again. That's the biggest problem. The #1
source of information does not accept dumb questions.

And anyway, what is a dumb question ? Lots of question on SO are pretty dumb.
Useful, because they save you 1 hour parsing the doc/spec, but dumb because
well that's literally a chapter in the manual. Ask OP question on Swift 2
years ago and it was ok (despite the doc being readily available too), ask it
today it is dumb, ask it on java, dumb again.

That would be like going on wikipedia and you would only find information
about Game of Throne Season 4, 5 and 6, but the pages on Season 1, 2 and 3
have been closed because a real Game of Throne enthousiast shouldn't need that
information.

I sort of see SO goals. Curated set of responses, move with the technology,
etc. But the human side of the site is still firmly and proudly stuck in the
worst of the 90's.

------
niftich
Just as the article observes, it's really ironic that many, many google
searches for "how to do X in language Y" lead to questions on SO that are
marked as [closed], 'not a good question', etc. Often, the accepted answer is
a variation of RTFM, but sometimes with an inline code example.

Also ironic is when the question asks for help in choosing between frameworks
or libraries of comparable functionality and it gets marked as [closed]
'opinion-based'. What's a good question then?

I understand that SO wants/wanted to discourage becoming just a copy-pastable
repository of code snippets for common patterns, and that they also don't want
to be full of thinly-veiled marketing posts about why framework X is better
than its competitors. But then what content DO they want? (Rhetorical, but in-
depth questions about API usage are probably the best ones to ask.)

I treat SO as read-only, and that makes it a valuable resource for me.

~~~
edem
> What's a good question then?

Read the FAQ and you will know.

~~~
jedberg
With respect, I have to vehemently disagree.

I've been using the site since the beta, have thousands of karma and twenty+
years of experience, and yet I can't ask or answer a question anymore.

When I answer a question, it gets downvoted and then an inaccurate answer gets
accepted and upvoted.

When I ask a question, it gets marked as a duplicate, and then they link to
the question it's a duplicate of, which is a question I found in my own
research _that was exactly the opposite of the question I had_.

That community has become completely toxic and I can't participate it in
anymore.

~~~
edem
I experience the exact opposite. Maybe something else is going on.

------
Animats
This is really a complaint about the Python docs. The poster is using a book
that makes you look for info that ought to be in the book in a convenient
table.

If you search for "Python formatting", you get to [1] which doesn't list the
"%r" format effector. Neither does [2], which is the same document for Python
3.6. See, on that page, "Form specification mini-language":

    
    
        format_spec ::=  [[fill]align][sign][#][0][width][,][.precision][type]
        fill        ::=  <any character>
        align       ::=  "<" | ">" | "=" | "^"
        sign        ::=  "+" | "-" | " "
        width       ::=  integer
        precision   ::=  integer
        type        ::=  "b" | "c" | "d" | "e" | "E" | "f" | "F" | "g" | "G" | "n" | "o" | "s" | "x" | "X" | "%"
    

Not seeing an "r" in there. There's an example further down on the page which
uses "%r", but the syntax description and tables do not mention it.

Stack Overflow isn't the one to blame here.

[1]
[https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html)
[2]
[https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec](https://docs.python.org/dev/library/string.html#formatspec)

~~~
exolymph
My point was more about the attitude toward beginners than the actual
accessibility of the information, but you're right that Python's docs could be
more user-friendly.

------
maxlybbert
The StackOverflow question given as an example is a terrible question.

Odds are that neither the person asking the question or the person who wrote
this blog post realize how big the subject is, but since the question just
says "tell me everything and I'll figure out if it's relevant," there really
is no good way to answer, other than a link to the doc page and a little
prodding along the lines of "what are you actually trying to do?"

------
keithnz
SO is a bit of a culture shock from other places. Its not a forum, it's a
little bit wikipedia ish. Having your question closed is not a hostile act,
it's part of creating crowd sourced editing of content. Sometimes questions
that could be good get closed, sometimes questions that are bad don't get
closed ( at least for several years ). While you may wish it to be a little
more friendly, its main goal is to provide high quality content especially for
professional developers, and the thing is, it is very successful at doing
that, so be careful to understand how it gets a lot of high quality content
because a lot of other sites tried and failed to do the same thing. Be very
careful to fit into the culture of SO, if you want to chat about problems,
find a forum, go on gitter, or some other space. On SO, best thing you can do
is edit the original question if its badly done and you care about the
question. Make it better.

------
msftie
Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to
participate in. It's a shame.

~~~
grawlinson
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile
responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been
answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of
these.

In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the
internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.

~~~
reitanqild
It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off
comments with your Facebook account.

The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people
who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or
people with "correct" opinions.

Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections
suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively
moderate them beyond ground level.)

------
sklivvz1971
Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod.

Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow.
We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12
millions of which are questions.

Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can
answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a
reason. We aim to build a library that will last for years longer than solving
the problem for a single person.

Another thing that people don't get is that Stack Overflow is basically a
school. When programmers say their profession is a life-long learning
exercise... they do it mainly on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is not _a_ community. Is the school of _all developers_. We can
only ask them to be nice, but you can't expect everyone to be exactly how you
expect. It just won't happen.

While we do moderate rudeness, it can only be a post-hoc exercise where users
help us identify such behavior.

EDIT: I removed a paragraph that was very misleading and added a clearer one.
Sorry about that.

~~~
jrumbut
I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the
community than rudeness and vitriol.

If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in
and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a
little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional
personal attacks?

~~~
sklivvz1971
Thanks for your comment, let me give you more context.

> I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to
> the community than rudeness and vitriol.

Lists were allowed, turned out to be an unmaintainable mess with our current
format, which was sincerely hurting the community. The top voted content was
bad content. This in turn primed and encouraged users to post even more bad
content.

Rudeness and offensive behavior against other users are not tolerated. No ifs
and no buts. I might have given you the impression that we allow users to
insult each other. We don't.

[http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-
new-b...](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-
policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback)

However, unless we put a word filter on any possible bad word, there will
always be rough comments. The only thing we can do is ask the users to flag
such comments and remove them as appropriate.

A user flagged the comment one hour ago and the comment has since been
deleted.

Read facebook. Read twitter. Stack overflow is not remotely like those places,
yet it is one of the top 30 networks in the world by traffic.

We heavily moderate rudeness, but we are not going to be able to moderate
every opinion that someone is going to find remotely offensive before it
offends anyone. What you are expecting is simply not realistic.

> If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in
> and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a
> little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional
> personal attacks?

As I said, we do delete such comments, as we did in this case.

~~~
jrumbut
For my own context, I've been a StackOverflow user since the more free-form
days. I appreciate the focus on quality, it has created a culture of quality.
I think a focus on kindness can similarly create a culture of kindness.

I'm not looking for advanced sentiment detection algorithms or even new rules,
just a few blog posts and some leadership.

------
lloyd-christmas
SO for true beginners is like asking questions about 16th century French
literature when the only french you know is "Je m'appelle Lloyd. Ou est la
bibliotheque?". The problem is that beginners don't have the ability to
actually know what they are searching for. Trying to ask _" how do I do string
interpolation in javascript?"_ means you have to know what _string
interpolation_ is in the first place. You're much more likely to get the title
_" var in text... HALP?!?"_ filled with details of an XY problem. While I
sympathize with it, I'm not going to answer the Nx10th question about async
loops. I remember those days, so I try to make it a policy to leave a comment
whenever I flag those types of questions. However, trying to make SO "beginner
friendly" is doing a disservice to the people who actually use it everyday as
well as that person who finally figures out the terminology for what they were
looking for in the first place. I can never remember `git rm -r --cached .`
any time I change my .gitignore, but finding that is super easy only because
_" what is git"_ doesn't float to the top above it. I'm definitely not
encouraging being an asshole, but it's a simple case of using the right tool
for the job. SO isn't that tool when you're at that stage.

~~~
exolymph
It would be massively helpful if SO provided this context for people who
arrive from Google searching, which it doesn't.

------
droope
Welcome to the programming community! People are generally kind and willing to
help, but there is one caveat: there is frequently little patience for
questions which you could have resolved yourself.

With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a
way that it reflects that you've "done your research."

~~~
reitanqild
Problem is when you are stumped with some small detail you have missed.

I must admit I have come to the point were I unconsciously just don't ask
questions on SO and instead try another hour on my own instead of even trying
to ask.

~~~
clover_leaf
I have never asked a question on SO for this very reason. I will do hours of
extra research and testing and searching because I do not want to be on the
receiving end of some of the comments I've seen like "you should really get
some training in that".

And yes, the extra work in forming a quality question does indeed often help
me answer my own question.

However, I have often benefited from someone else's stupid question; so, I'm
glad they asked even though I wouldn't have. I also benefit from the opinion
questions even though they are always shut down as "not relevant" or "off
topic".

It's getting to the point where it is difficult to even read some of the
answers because you have to sift through all the hateful snarky comments. I
have actually started deliberately avoiding SO and trying out the 2nd or 3rd
search result sites.

It's easy to say RTFM but sometimes what people need is context. Unless you've
programmed in C and used printf and scanf then format strings in whatever
language are pretty opaque.

------
tomb_
>Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get
stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way
and Stack Overflow exist in the first place.

No. There's a lot, A LOT of resources online for beginners.

let the nerds run SO, it's perfect as it is for people who know what they are
doing.

~~~
kylehotchkiss
Maybe SO could better integrate this type of thing with results. Example:
"Your question is simple but I know this great starter guide or Book on Amazon
that can help you find your way".

~~~
colejohnson66
Yet SO is filled with people asking "how to homework" or want something they
can copy/paste into their program. I've seriously seen an OP ask why the
answer's code didn't work because it used variable names not present in the
OP's code. Yet there was no way to know what the original variables were
called because the OP didn't provide any code.

------
brudgers
StackOverflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood disagreed over whether a
question can be too basic. Spolsky authored the famous "How do I move the
turtle in Logo" question [1]. Atwood's view won out providing asshats
plausible deniability for asshattery toward novices and students.

On the other hand, some languages are better than others. Ask a question, even
a homework question, about Racket and odds are that someone deep into
extending it will answer.

[1]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-
th...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-
in-logo)

------
k-mcgrady
When I was getting started I occasionally got some angry responses on SO. In
the end it was good for me. People were willing to point me in the right
direction but when you don't even know the fundamentals they're just wasting
their time and doing the work for you. If you take the time to learn the
fundamentals, any basic question you have already has an answer on SO and you
will be able to use it.

------
philwebster
Another example of SO managing to alienate a user (in this case, me): Posting
my very first answer to a question, finding a very similar post and adding my
solution there as well, then getting an email that I had posted the same thing
and that the second post would be removed. This was unfortunate because the
second question had a more lively discussion and seemed like a better place
for the answer. I deleted the first answer, tried re-posting on the second
question and wasn't allowed. After that, I gave up.

~~~
gbrayut
Sounds like you ran into one of the spam prevention mechanisms. I've done the
same thing before, and usually as long as you do some editing and don't just
copy/paste the answer it should let it thru. Or sometimes I leave a comment
with a link to the other answer so people can find it.

Sorry you had a bad experience with the site. I hope you try contributing
again in the future if you get a chance.

------
PythonicAlpha
Part of the problem IMHO is, that SO tries to be two things at once. It says,
it shall be a help portal for programmers, but at the same time they want to
be something like Wikipedia for programmers.

Both things do not fit well together. When you want to help others, you must
allow any question that is earnest. When you want to be an encyclopedia, you
have to filter questions very harshly.

Sadly, together with this, the self-moderation feature of SO attract people
that are more interested in enforcing rules, instead of helping people.

------
King-Aaron
I feel most people who complain about Stack Overflow, are people who rock up
without attempting to solve a problem themselves, and then get angry when you
tell them to come back with an example of what they've tried. That or they get
upset at being told that their question about "how to I make this div tag
blue" etc could be answered with three seconds of google searching.

There is a vast number of legitimate, interesting questions that get answered
all the time. But this leads the rest of the herd to believe SO is a free
homework completion service, then take to their blogs when they get told to
fuck off.

------
mmgutz
Many of the approved answers on SO are outdated and in some cases just
outright incorrect in their approach. You can't just read the selected answer
anymore, you also have to read hidden comments that may point to the correct
answer. SO needs a feature where the community can select a better answer.

~~~
brudgers
It has that feature...well kind of. Anyone can edit any question and any
answer. Until a certain level of internet points those edits get reviewed by
someone with enough points to be trusted. After a certain level of internet
points a person is trusted to edit questions without review.

Anyone can fix what is broken or at least do the bulk of the work.

------
laddng
I have found that as a beginner programmer, one thing that is really important
is to have patience and persistence. I have observed other beginners who want
to rush to become a good programmer in X language and basically throw every
question into Stack Overflow.

Slow down, learn how to read technical manuals, and in the long run you'll
thank yourself as you go on to learn more complex languages by reading
technical documentation with patience and persistence. Build that foundation
of how to learn and things will pay off in the long run.

------
doug1001
so my rep on SO is about 41K with an average rep per answer a little shy of
100 and about every third answer is the accepted answer. My numbers on Cross
Validated (the SO for "data scientists") are significantly better.

but i've given up trying to ask a question on any of the SO Sites. As far as i
can tell, most questions on SO et al are closed for violating one of two
boundary conditions. At one end: don't ask a question whose answer is
subjective. And at the other end: don't ask a question that can be answered
directly from the docs (or google).

when you look over a few dozen or more questions closed on these grounds, it's
clear to me that this window--the space between these two boundaries that
represents an acceptable question is very very small. It's so small that the
last couple of questions i've posted i've missed--aimed either too high or too
low.

------
edem
The problem is that most users are not reading the FAQ and they don't use
Google nor the search function on SO itself. This leads to the frustration of
the experiences users who see a lot of malformed/unanswerable/duplicate
questions. I see this every day. I usually don't comment and just vote on
"close" silently but there are some users who are openly communicate their
frustration and honestly they have a reason. I think that SO should come up
with some NLP solution which filters out those questions and informs the
offending users that their question is problematic. I have asked a LOT of
questions on SO (136) and if I follow the guidelines I ALWAYS get quality
responses. The problem IMHO is the lazy newbies who don't bother to read the
guidelines / FAQ.

------
fabian2k
This looks like a problem that would be solved by splitting that Python manual
page. All the information is there, it's just that the whole page is rather
long and it's possible to miss that it is in there.

~~~
niftich
Good point. The Python manual pages are actually rather long-winded, and try
to intersperse narration with sporadic usage examples. It's too long-form to
be a reference, and too context-free to be a tutorial. I'm not surprised
Python questions are so frequent.

------
phantom_oracle
The filter goes both ways.

Some may feel discouraged when SO closes/downvotes you to the coldest pits of
"I'm a newb and don't know anything", but imagine a situation far, far worse:

Imagine searching for this exact question and getting 36 SO questions all
asking the same basic thing, just tweaked ever-so slightly.

It sucks to have mods putting in some effort with strict-filter rules, but
without their filtering, the 'noise' ratio would be horrendous and would
render the generally useful SO into oblivion.

------
baking
Lesson learned is that if Google returns a result that doesn't appear to match
your request, then ctrl-f is your friend. This applies in many areas besides
programming.

~~~
reitanqild
Google really tried to unlearn this a couple of years ago.

Back when any question you would ask would have at least 20000 answers it
seemed only the pages never contained the text, they only where in the index
because of some link with that text.

------
rajadigopula
I am on SO and I once tried to help someone in similar situation. I could
easily say search on google, but instead I helped them. Guess what - the
converstion below my answer ended up me answering more fundemental questions
from the same OP which are far worse than the actual asked question. Some of
the follow up qustions, if I give them to the author of the above blog, might
ask me to google them!

------
british_india
Stack Overflow is full of snotty moderators just waiting to pounce on anybody
who violates what they see as the rules. Asshole moderators all over Stack
Overflow.

------
current_call
_But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people
to ~learn how to code~, then you’re doing it right._

I have all the community I want, thanks. If you think I'm being self centered,
you have it backwards. I don't care what you do, but you think a community you
aren't part of should cater to you.

~~~
reitanqild
Problem is a number of us were parts of the community and now treat it mostly
as read only.

~~~
current_call
You mean like what happened to Wikipedia?

