
Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow - pkilgore
https://blog.mattbierner.com/10-years-stack-overflow-learnings/
======
scarface74
I’ve never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have
found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it’s already at
the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have
been asked and answered.

SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve
found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.

On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to
depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS
and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business
support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close
to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy
button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure
something out.

I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge
of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.

On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects
outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.

~~~
ken
It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the
languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users.

For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and
it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and
most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss
-- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to
something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I
need.

~~~
ByThyGrace
> and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.

Tangentially, every time I google/ddg a problem, it's almost never taking me
to good blog posts addressing the substance of my issues. I usually find those
after two or three clicks, like e.g. an article mentioning a blog post.

And it's sad because there's a myriad excellent blog posts out there, somehow
unreachable at least without 10 minutes of browsing the search results pages.

~~~
scarface74
Unfortunately, half the “blog posts” take me to Medium.

~~~
dickjocke
What's wrong with Medium? I find lots of good tutorials there. It helps me
with going from 0 understanding of a framework to having some boilerplate I
can build on.

~~~
scarface74
The content is good. From a user side you have to log in to view content. From
a content creator side, why would you want your post to be under the control
of Medium instead of your own domain?

------
gregd
I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years
ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server
Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were
closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact
nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile
phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also
had to manage phones in their environment.

There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I
get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were
a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed
immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they
were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so)
and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff
of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I was the top-rated user on Server Fault from 2009 to 2014. I participated
less and less in 2013, and eventually stopped nearly "cold turkey".

The tenor of the questions changed in the last couple years I participated.
Early questions were more of the the "I'm having this strange thing-- here's
what I've tried already"-type. These were a lot of fun to research and answer.
They ended up sending me down rabbit-holes that helped in my work later on.
(There were also "explain xxx concept" questions, which were tremendous fun to
write for but there are only so many of those that can be asked.)

I was never one to "vote to close" because something wasn't "sysadmin-
related". That's likely because I've been asked by Customers to "sysadmin"
virtually anything electronic. A number of my answers ended up migrated over
to "Super User" as a result. The migration of questions to other sites didn't
bother me, because that wasn't killing the question out-right. The "community"
closing legitimate questions, however, made me sad.

I did "vote to close" on questions more of the "Can I get some free labor" vs.
"I'm having a problem, here's what I tried". The former seemed a lot more
common towards the end of my participation. I never saw closing these
questions as lacking in compassion. Often there were plenty of existing
questions the posters could've used as reference. It was clearly easier for
them to ask another question rather than research.

I hold myself to am unreasonably high standard w/ respect to researching
before asking anybody a question (at least, anybody who I'm not paying for
it). I tried to relax that standard when it came to answering Server Fault
questions, but there was still a lower limit. It was hard for me to be
"compassionate" in the face of such apparent laziness and disrespect for the
donated time of others, particularly when there were so many good resources
right at the poster's fingertips.

~~~
gregd
I'm in the top 2% on ServerFault to this day. I remember interacting with you
on numerous questions. I'm GregD on the Stack sites.

I totally understand the limits that had to be set on the low bar for quality
content. In those early days though, it seemed to me that when people asked
questions about managing mobile phones for instance, because it was only newly
related to being a sys admin, they'd get closed as not related.

Granted, in those early days, there weren't as many process "rules" in place
to guide users to ask better questions and perhaps that's still so. However, a
quick perusal of the site indicate this has gotten better and more friendly
towards new people.

------
listenallyall
>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure
what Stack Overflow should do about this.

SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on
all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer
(or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge
quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.

While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions,
when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might
provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering
new questions and/or updating prior answers.

~~~
pinouchon
I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea. One big
issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation
getting smaller. Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along
with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or
maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how
knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.

~~~
reportgunner
I have noticed that it is common among the high rep users to say that _the
reputation doesn 't matter_, so this would put their claims to the test.

------
kstenerud
One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a
similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established
"gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down
questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of
aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that
I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only
exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people
only strengthen their stranglehold...

~~~
tempguy9999
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or
SO.

Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been
treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been,
but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could
have been found with a dab of googling.

Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show
us an example.

 _So I 'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone
else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge._

[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in
the end we sorted it out civilly.

~~~
itsadok
These were literally the first 3 questions on my review queue:

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615](https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615) \- A question by an absolute beginner, trying to do something that they have no clue how to start with. Already closed.

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242](https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242) \- A question about parsing a JSON response with jQuery. Two votes to close. The asker clearly does not know the word "parse".

* [https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318](https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318) \- Someone trying to figure out an error message they're getting with kubernetes. This is exactly the kind of thing you get at the top of your google results when you hit the same error, and with one more vote to close, it will be forever locked with no useful information. Some asshole even downvoted the one answer that is there without adding any comments.

None of these questions are _good_ , but they could be made better, and they
all represent people with real problems that deserve help. Getting mad at
people for "being lazy" (because if I, the expert, could easily find the
answer to this, then why didn't you?!), is not productive.

Here's what I don't understand about all these SO deletionists: how is closing
the question helpful in any way? If you don't find the question answerable,
then don't answer it! But why block other people from trying to help? It's not
like you're somehow "teaching" these people how to ask by blocking them. The
user from question 59344615 (which got closed) did not post another question
with better details. They just left the site, one more developer that doesn't
have anywhere they can ask newbie questions. It sucks.

~~~
gumoro
First one was aptly closed IMHO, much too vague. SO is not the right tool for
absolute beginners to seek guidance when they have no idea what they're doing:
the format asks for a reasonably specific answerable question. Would be nice
if upon closing the asker was given pointers to beginner-friendly resources,
though.

The other two are better, and (aptly) not closed. Of course you'll get
inappropriate votes to close, but I hope they are correctly offset by other
votes the (hopefully vast) majority of the time.

Now about this:

> how is closing the question helpful in any way?

I suppose it's to stay focused. When googling I quite often get useful SO
results (& upvote those), and I'm happy not having to sift through tons of
useless questions.

~~~
LeonB
All 3 are closed now.

------
docflabby
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more
useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years
ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules
at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any
difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date
information. I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....

~~~
marcosdumay
> no one answers any difficult questions any more

New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably
positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned)
before being able to answer anything.

This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result
is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge
remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The
fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.

~~~
jodrellblank
_while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone._

Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know
how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to
learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested
in.

Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn
more money.

------
analog31
Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third
stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is
someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This
would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.

~~~
mark-r
The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question
unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part
of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
And it is terribly annoying when someone changes the question and it no longer
leads towards an answer that is useful for the asker.

~~~
gumoro
Yes, that's why I thought OP's idea of explicitly separating the derived
"better" questions interesting, instead of allowing anyone to edit the
original question and steer the discussion in a different direction. This is
an interesting format that leaves room for multiple directions to explore…
which SO does not want to do as they insist so much on focus.

------
zozbot234
Related: How to ask questions the smart way [http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-
questions.html](http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

~~~
maxerickson
A rebuttal:

It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.

~~~
listenallyall
Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from
someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort,
unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject,
who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.

~~~
maxerickson
There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question.

Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just
based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not
the way to go.

------
magical_mishka
I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com

Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets
is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly
daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the
platform. Because:

\- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.

\- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is
post an answer?

\- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to
somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this
code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.

Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can
resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!

~~~
darkerside
SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner
friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out
with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low
effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help,
isn't doing anybody any favors.

If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of
getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off
without your input.

~~~
silvat
Those low effort questions are often extremely popular though, which would
imply that they are useful to a lot of people.

~~~
why-oh-why
“Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s
not the right forum.

I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion
instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments
start becoming too chatty.

------
monster_group
A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me
some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some
upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do
that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be
prepared to answer the following -

1\. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?

2\. Tell me what all you have tried.

3\. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.

It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research
before approaching someone with a technical question.

------
BrandoElFollito
I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so.

I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not
understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful
answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for
these answers because I discovered new concepts.

I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther
with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using
pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a
minimally working code.

But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general
but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he
explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and
whatnot.

So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge
people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like
myself.

~~~
bmn__
There seems to be a disconnect between the effort that you expect goes into a
question and that SO expects.

------
umvi
Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions.
This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount
of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA
or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).

------
rangerranvir
I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community
helps in stating the questions correctly.

The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your
questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state
the reason for the rejection.

P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.

------
Goladus
One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its
moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to
questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with
thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day
to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the
Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about
compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The
question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is
apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by
multiple mods.

Stack Overflow's content is good because:

1\. The site design is high-quality.

2\. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive
encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.

The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam,
harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate
questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand
similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like
"A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A
v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on
SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality
posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to
making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.

------
einpoklum
My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately;
always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn
that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site
is harsh.

If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I
might downvote.

That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although
usually that's not the case :-(

------
ChrisMarshallNY
This was great.

Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy,
but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.

I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.

This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that
it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many
questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively
than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.

Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or
refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by
my absence.

Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend
any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned
about getting a high SO score.

That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are
ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an
answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.

As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been
treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap
back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned
to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on
earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of
big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.

I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly
well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground
code, which is nice.

I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems.
Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's
fine.

------
zubairq
Funnily enough years ago I asked a question on StackOverflow:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-
reload...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload-emacs-
after-changing-it)

: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can
I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later
a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first
search result as the stack overflow question that I asked

------
einpoklum
> I almost never ask question on Stack Overflow

> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll
> find that someone already asked the exact same thing...

I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I
find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask
80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero
(often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a
geometric distribution.

So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming
you're doing.

~~~
umvi
80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry,
but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only
need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers
per year though.

~~~
einpoklum
I am about balanced in my number of questions and answers, to put things into
perspective.

But - it's true that I'm not a typical user; I'm often curious about "But why
is it like that?" and "can we do something better than..."

------
BlueTemplar
Reminds me how the hardest thing in science is to find the right question to
ask nature...

------
gesman
Add to skill set:

Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close
relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.

------
GrumpyNl
Sounds to me that AI could play a big role in this.

------
ykevinator
It's elitism like this that made me hate so. Is asking a question a skill?
Please tell me more.

~~~
Smaug123
Sure it is. Asking a question has several dimensions along which to afford
skill. General social skills aside, question-asking specifically has the extra
challenge of "get someone to give me the information I need", and some people
are demonstrably much more effective at this than others.

I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were
completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled
question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you
need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an
answer that is useful to you.

