Comment by brap
18 hours ago
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
18 hours ago
I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.
Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.
During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.
I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.
I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener...
As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.
At the second you got an interesting answer, though
It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).
I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.
And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.
How good are the questions?
14 replies →
I have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.
It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same
Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.
What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla
Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.
That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.
I asked two questions which were both locked as dupes. The referenced questions mine were supposed to have duplicated were not, in fact the same question. After that I didn't bother. If I could find my answer with a search engine, fine, but I wasn't going to waste time trying to engage on the site.
Once had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.