Comment by unreal37
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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?
Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.
I am happy they are dead. Humanity gets +1 for this one.
How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?
They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
2 replies →
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)
On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right.
On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.”
And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.
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Here’s one:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
Why do questions need to be good? Often times, you don't know what you don't know.
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.
I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.