
Is there an alternative to Stack Overflow? - Madcatm2
I&#x27;m a junior developer and like the overwhelming majority of new people on that site, I am regularly abused for my dumb questions.  I know that less than 5% of first time users ever return or try to contribute but I don&#x27;t see any other options. I do want to participate in a community like this but not if these people are so condescending and nasty...where can I go?
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brudgers
Sure there are alternatives, for example: IRC, mailing lists, bulletin boards,
paid consultants, conferences, official documentation, unofficial
documentation, videos, books, podcasts, magazines, and trial and error. For
some things, for some people sometimes, they're even better than
StackOverflow. For many things, much of the time, for many people, they
aren't.

Good luck.

[Edit] There was a difference of opinion about StackOverflow between Spolsky
and Atwood. The famous question (or infamous, depending on your perspective)
is Spolsky's "How do I move the turtle in Logo." [1] Spolsky thought it was an
example of a good question (that's why he wrote it). Atwood disagreed.
Atwood's view won out and people were given license to decide basic questions
were stupid. Some of StackOverflow's tribes use that license more than others.
Partially it's a survival mechanism...I can only imagine maintaining PhP,
Javascript, or Python. Partially, it's just people being bullies (bullying of
people posting 'homework' questions being sanctioned, _de facto_ ).

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

------
jasonkester
Looking at the questions you've asked, it's clear why you're having such a bad
time there. You're posting homework questions that you've clearly not put even
a little bit of effort in to solving yourself. To take an example at random:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39001373/extracting-
middl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39001373/extracting-middle-of-
string-javascript)

Imagine you walked in to my office and said "Hey, mentor, I wrote str.length()
and the browser told me that "str.length is not a function". Help!"

I'd say "OK, so what did you try?"

And you'd say "I came here and asked you."

Can you see why that might not get you anywhere? Asking people is not the
first thing you do. It's the thing you do after you've exhausted every other
option.

You're not doing any research, not trying anything, not even googling the
error messages you're seeing. You're just giving up and asking Stack Overflow
to do your homework for you. In half your cases, you're just asking the
homework question directly before even opening the editor.

So the thing to change is not the site you ask your questions. It's your
approach to learning. Try things, experiment, look things up. It's OK to fail
and ask for help. It's not OK to ask for help before you've even made an
effort.

~~~
soneca
Interesting that your example question has plenty of answers. Those people
apparently did not have a problem with the question.

I believe it is hard for experienced developers to remember how it is to be a
complete newbie at something. People just assume is a lack of research.

I started learning to code last November. More than once I spent hours
(literally hours) googling around why my code wasn't working when it was very
stupid, simple details. Lot's of things only present themselves as obvious
once you know the answer. Error messages are a knowledge in itself. They are
designed for experienced people to understand, not to beginners.

Tangentially, for some reason, experienced developers usually recommend MDN as
reference when learning how to code. I always find W3Schools more clear and to
the point. MDN might be good if you already is a senior developer and is
learning a new language. But if you are starting to learn to code at all,
W3Schools is a better site for me.

Back to Stack Overflown, I don't have any resentment for it at all. I love it!
It helped me _a lot_! Mainly because most questions are already there. But
when I have a doubt that isn't, I don't even consider asking it. Hours of
google sounds better than being noticed in a hostile environment. That is why
I believe SO is great for PHP, Python, Javascript... now. But won't be all
that useful for NodeJS or any new languages/frameworks in the near future.

------
Belar
There are tons, maybe not direct alternatives, but you are not looking for
one. It's hard to suggest anything without knowing what kind of "junior dev"
you are, but usually specializations, frameworks and even languages have their
own communities (Slack, Gitter, forum, Discord, subreddit, you name it), you
should look there.

Just don't forget about doing your homework first, amount of effort you put
into a question directly influences answers you get. If you take time to do a
research, share what you already learned/tried, build a good case with code
example (e.g. minimal reproduction on jsFiddle or Codepen) and make it easy
for people to help you, you will get help. Otherwise, everywhere you will
experience what you did on SO.

------
xrisk
Don't bother visiting a community if you can't make the effort to adjust to
its values and culture -- Stack Overflow doesn't care about answering poor
questions with no long-term value (this isn't a debugging forum).

Take some time to elaborate on your question and flesh it out so that other
people might benefit from it later.

~~~
Madcatm2
There are allot of uniformed assumptions being made here...

You don't know the quality of my questions and the degree of my
contributions...and you never will. What most people do know is that Stack
Overflow is a shit show in decline.

~~~
sivanesanms
Been there experienced that. I realized that they are stupid, but after a
while from their point of view, they don't want redundant questions. But still
my questions were closed, but those were narrowly different from existing
ones. I used this trick. create additional 3 accounts in SOF (have them in
each browser like Firefox, Safari, IE) and you post your questions through
your main account in CHrome. And then upvote from 2nd, 3rd and 4th account
from all other browsers, to keep the question alive.

~~~
harpocrates
You realize _why_ the questions are being closed, and instead of cooperating
with the people trying to keep StackOverflow clean, you just go around them. I
never understood why StackOverflow would try to find correlations in user
votes (voting fraud) until now.

I am disgusted.

~~~
vonklaus
I agree that OP is pretty unashamedly doing "bad" stuff. That said, if it was
a jr dev who really had a different question that was closed, and had searched
through SO and couldnt get help, I would be more apathetic/agree with the
decision.

That said, SO should link the duplicate question to the answer question if it
does exist. It would stop this behavior and be very useful

~~~
Shog9
That's already mandatory, and has been for nearly 8 years.

------
zondo
There is a common misconception about Stack Overflow that it is there to help
the people asking questions. While it doesn't sound nice to say it, that isn't
really the purpose.

 _Stack Overflow is here to help all the future people who see the question_.
This is why someone who posts a lot of highly-upvoted questions but no answers
is still a valuable asset and receives a high "reputation". This is the great
value in Stack Overflow, really. Answers you see there are generally not
targeted specifically for the asker, but rather are helpful to broader uses
and many more people. Questions used to be closed merely because they were too
specific and unlikely to be helpful to future readers.

Stack Overflow is meant to create a library of question/answer combos that
make (theoretically) all future programming questions redundant. If your
question is unhelpful in that ambition either because it already exists, it
lacks clarity or specificity, etc., it will be closed. Granted, SO has the
nasty people that come with any community-run site, but there are also many,
many helpful and friendly people who will take the time to explain things
either about your question or why the question doesn't fit the guidelines of
the site. Without seeing your posts, it is impossible for me to say what was
wrong with them if anything. I can only speak from personal experience.

My first question was posted after weeks of research and headaches. I read the
help pages that were linked for me. It took two bounties before I got an
answer, but I got one. While waiting for that answer, I decided to see if
there was some way I could pay back for the answer I expected to receive. I
learned a lot about the site by seeing the responses to other people's
questions. I also, incidentally, learned a lot about programming by how others
responded to my answers. By the time I posted another question, I knew the
site pretty well. I have now posted 11 questions, and my only downvote was on
a post with 10 upvotes.

~~~
ngokevin
This is why although we have an active Slack with a #questions channel, we try
to direct people to StackOverflow. Because you end up having people ask the
same questions because Slack is not indexed by a search engine (unless you do
something fancy).

What we do a lot is when someone ends up asking a question on Slack, I'll just
cross-post to StackOverflow and answer there. We even have a bot that posts
StackOverflow questions back to the channel.

Slack also isn't great because you'll have multiple people asking a questions
at the same time with long code snippets. It gets messy.

Currently at 320 questions for our project's
tag...[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/aframe](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/aframe)

------
PhilWright
You are likely falling foul of three possibilities...

1 - Making your questions far to specific, so nobody else could ever benefit
from seeing the answer to that question in the future. These tend to be down
voted very aggressively. So you need to try and find a more generic way of
asking the question so that others might be helped by the answer as well.

2 - Just plain dumb questions. Such as 'I needz site like Facebook. Hope to
make? Helpz'. If you are doing that and do not understand why it is a bad
question then I probably cannot explain it to you.

3 - Making you question so that it looks like you are lazy and getting others
to do the work for you. For example, questions that look like someone's
homework. No one wants to spend time answering if the questioner has obviously
made no effort to solve it themselves. Stackoverflow should be the last resort
after several hours of trying.

The site is basically made up of professionals and that often determines if
the question is considered too simple or not.

~~~
bigbonch
He asked for alternative websites. You gave him the same kind of response he's
getting on Stack Overflow that's prompting him to seek alternatives in the
first place.

~~~
Latty
And the answer is the alternatives all suck because they are filled with
people asking rubbish questions. If you want a community of people ready to
help you, maybe consider putting in enough effort to make them helping you
easier.

------
sova
Definitely check out Slack channels for the languages you're using. Many
bright and helpful people hang out on IRC / Slack, and now it's easily
accessible via browser.

------
oelmekki
Hi Madcatm2,

First, I want to tell you I know exactly what you mean.

When I learnt programming, SO was not around. I mostly learnt by reading
source codes, their authors' blog posts, and asking them questions. I started
to use SO mostly by answering questions, since the languages and tools I used
were already well known for me, and I had my previous ways to learn new
things.

And then, I started learning golang. At some point, I said to myself : "why
not start asking questions instead of learning everything by myself the hard
way, like I usually do?". I asked a question on SO and was immediately
downvoted. This came to a surprise to me, because my question was concrete,
detailed and was wondering about something that wasn't explained in any
publication. Then I started looking at other questions, and it was alarming :
most were downvoted. Actually, I computed an average of questions scores and
realized it was negative. That's when I stopped contributing to SO : blaming
people for asking questions is not OK. If the question is really bad, suffice
not to answer it.

I've been looking for alternatives since then - that is, general programming
discussion platform with specialized areas - mainly to contribute, because
explaining to juniors how things work is a perfect way to learn to document
things, know what they find complicated, and learn to address it before
questions arise. I found none. The best I could find was to fall back on
mailing lists.

There are two pieces of advice I could give you :

* don't hesitate to mail people you regard as the most experienced to ask for their advice. Worst case scenario, they won't reply

* Choose ways of communication that don't allow downvoting - like email, forums, google+, whatever - because downvoting features do encourage hive mind and condescendent attitude

Also, please keep this experience in mind next time you'll be the one to
explain something to someone having less knowledge than you. And remember that
downvoting == bullying.

Hope this helps.

------
sivanesanms
Quora.com - Infact you can ask top writers of certain topics like Android,
Secuerity to answer your questions. SOF lacks that feature.

------
vonklaus
If this is genuine (and it feels that way) then flagging it not the right way
to handle this. Downvote the post and hope the community agrees but flagging
something that isnt outside HN guidelines is a bit strong unless you believe
itvis a new user trolling

~~~
x1798DE
I dunno if flagging is right here, but you can't downvote submissions on HN.

------
devmunchies
Most languages or frameworks will have a Slack or Gitter channel set up for
that community specifically.

The people who help you in these mediums don't do it for the points.

The bad thing about these mediums is that there is absolutely zero SEO, which
would totally kill SO.

------
mathgenius
They could add a "newbie" tag: this makes the question immune to downvoting
(?) and is by default (?) not shown in the main feed, people have to opt-in to
help with the newbie questions...

We are all lazy, but when a newbie is lazy it looks rather heinous to the
expert. I got a friend that I am helping to start programming. I see that he
"gets" it, but guess what, he's fairly lazy (like me) and is constantly stuck
on simple simple stuff. If he went to SO with that he would get obliviated for
sure.

------
pier25
Try Reddit.

For example:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/)

------
averageweather
Find the subreddit for the particular language you are using. r/learnpython
and r/djangolearning have been amazing when I couldn't find any answers on
Stack and people seem eager to help all levels.

------
pizza
Why is this flagged?

------
DanBC
Set up your own community on Imzy. You're guided by the Imzy rules, and you
can set your own on top.

------
xiaoma
Why is this flagged and where's the vouch link?

~~~
grzm
The vouch link is available if you have sufficient karma and the submission is
dead (not just flagged).

------
serge2k
Yeah, RTFM. Read the fuckin manual.

You have google, you have docs on whatever you are working with. Figure out
the solution for yourself. Worst case you can't, but you might learn something
else while trying.Depending on what you rae doing you might find some mailing
lists, forums, or other dedicated communities.

oh, and there is always the person sitting a few feet away.

