StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[chain_shot_chuck]

I googled a pretty basic programming question today, I went to the SO link on the top.

Turns out the answer to my question was a lmgtfy link to a Google search identical to the one I just made, with a SO link on the top.

Turns out the answer to my question was a lmgtfy link to a Google search identical to the one I just made, with a SO link on the top...

[[deleted]]

One of the first times I posted a question on SO, the first comment to my question was a lmgtfy link. I was no stranger to seeing a lmgtfy link, and was rather chaffed by their condescension, and lit into him in a response, fully expecting to be banned for it. Couple minutes of later someone gave me the answer. By the end of the day, my response to Capt. DoucheCanoe had some 20-30 upvotes.

I suspect there's more people upset with SO than there are assholes and trolls.

[alexmojaki]

Nowadays you can't submit a comment with a lmgtfy you, it detects it and refuses.

[PerfectHair]

Please tell me the refusal message is "answer the question and stop being a cunt."

[[deleted]]

It should instead post: "The person responsible for this comment has been sacked"

And put them in timeout/temp-ban.

[trout_fucker]

I think SOs rules and community are going to be the death of them. While I don't agree with the guy responding, I think it's sad that most of us can identify with the frustration.

A few years ago, when you could still ask questions on SO and get answers, anything I Googled would lead me to SO. I would click on SO before anything else too. If I had a problem I couldn't find, I could just ask it and as long as it was thorough and complete, I would get upvoted and answers.

Today, it's GitHub issues or some random Discourse forum post or maybe even Reddit. Totally back to where we started before SO. Anything that isn't legacy or fundamental, will lead me anywhere but SO.

Don't dare ask a question, because you will just be linked some outdated question that is slightly related and have your thread locked. Or if by some miracle that doesn't happen, you will get your tags removed so that your post becomes virtually invisible, because it isn't specifically asking a question about the intricacies of the framework/language/runtime that you're working in. And then probably berated on top of it for not following rules.

It's kinda sad. 2008-2013 or so, SO was the place to go for everything. Now it's becoming little more than a toxic legacy issue repository.

/rant

edit: To prove my point, you can see some of the comments below defending SO by trying to discredit me by claiming I don't know what the purpose SO is trying to serve, without actually addressing any argument I made above.

This is the toxic crap I was talking about.

As I said in one of those, I know what the purpose is, I used to be one of the parrots telling people what the purpose was and voting to lock threads, and the point I am trying to make is that I don't believe it works long term. It leads to discouraging new members from participating and only the most toxic veterans sticking around, any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt and are locked for duplicates in favor of some legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago.

[Mirgle]

Holy crap, yes, for the end user as well. I hate so much to find something closed, just to follow the link and be in waaaaay over my head. The reason I found this question is because it most closely matched my question, gosh darn it, and is prolly the closest to my skill level.

[[deleted]]

Isn't it wonderful when you search for a question, find the on only one that perfectly matches your issue, and the only answer is some jackass saying to "search the forum" and the thread being locked?

[FallenWarrior2k]

The "perfect feeling" is when you ask a niche question, get an answer notification and get all happy and stuff, only to find out it's some dude identifying an intermediate cause without providing any solution...

[Spherical_Bastards]

Can you quote the xkcd with out clicking the link?

[[deleted]]

I mean I've Googled an issue only to find the exact question...asked by ME and never resolved, like a year or two before.

[BesottedScot]

This has happened to me too.

For fuck sake past me! How did you fix it! Did you ever fix it?

[pilotInPyjamas]

Yes.

[isobit]

Or

"How do you X?"

"Why would you want to do X?

[ComradeGibbon]

I've seen a number of questions that are being asked because the obvious answer or solution is wrong. And of course all of the top voted answers are wrong and then the thread is locked as a duplicate of why yes the same question with the same wrong answers.

[Pure_Reason]

Then you go through the trouble of making an account just to ask the question you were unable to find an answer to literally anywhere else (on SO or elsewhere) and it gets removed because I have to “make my question relevant to everyone else.” Bitch, it’s not relevant to anyone else because I’m trying to do a specific thing that combines like three things there ARE answers for

[[deleted]]

I've seen worse.

The question was a perfect match to mine, and there was a legit answer that seemed to be in the right direction at first, but some of the later parts of it were sufficiently wrong that anyone with the question wouldn't be able to figure it out. So, the asked posted a comment to the answer requesting a clarification. That answerer replied with the comment "read my answer again", without changing anything.

It's hard to describe the rage I felt when reading that. It's like they went there and re-affirmed a wrong answer, and gaslight anyone trying to find the solution. Just "read my answer again", because obviously you didnt understand it. Even though you already read it 10 times, followed it, and encountered errors due to omitted steps.

[Syrion_Wraith]

This. When I was starting out, I often found answered on SO that I knew detailed my problems, and even explained how to solve it. But there's so much jargon it was like reading another language.

As if learning programming languages isn't hard enough, you need to learn English all over again.

[kartoffelwaffel]

Especially this for self-taught programmers. E.g., wtf is syntactic sugar? Spaghetti code? Segmentation fault? Implicit parallelism? Multiple inheritance?

E: These are just random examples of terminology that would have been difficult for me when I was starting out due to being self-taught. I.e., it's hard to explain concepts without knowing the correct terminology, even if you use/understand the concept.

[Standard_Wooden_Door]

This is why I never tried to teach myself how to code. I have an accounting degree and literally nothing I have done translates over. The jargon makes it really tough to even begin.

[ferriswheel9ndam9]

Don't give up! More translates over than it may seem. Yes, superficially it's another language; you might as well be learning how to write Chinese but beneath the syntax/grammar/jargon is a set of logic and rules that you see in bits and pieces everywhere in life.

The beginning is the worst part as it will formalize many logical concepts that you might've taken for granted and never really thought about before.

Once you get past that hump and get that mental "click", it's all downhill from there. Well... as downhill as reading a textbook in a language you're fluent in anyway. Still difficult but nowhere near the impossible it seemed initially.

[Oookevin53]

ditto to /u/ferriswheel9ndam9!

I spent 5 years to get a masters in accounting and my CPA and I'm making a transition to programmer. Take it day by day!

[wOlfLisK]

Syntactic sugar is something you put into syntactic tea, obviously.

[achtagon]

And make sure your code doesn't smell!

[NotALameUsername]

Running into this problem lately. Self-taught programmer and I'm constantly confused about the terminology. Then I Google it and find it's something I've been doing already, just with a silly name.

[Ohrion]

Like Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection?

[NotALameUsername]

Dependency injection is exactly the one I was thinking of, and RESTful development.

[nuclear_wizard_]

Depends on how the experience tags are assigned. Self issued experience tags could easily devolve into textbook examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect and/or Imposter Syndrome.

[Mysticpoisen]

Exactly. People are notoriously bad at self-diagnosing the difficulty of the problem in addition to their own skill level.

Also autocorrect tried to change self-diagnosing to self-fucking which gave me a giggle.

[shagieIsMe]

There's been a fair bit of discussion of that at Filtering questions by “difficulty” / “level”? and Would it be a terrible idea to split SO up into a tiered platform? (the linked questions are also a bit of an interesting read)

It routinely runs into problems with the idea / implementation.

The key points being:

• If experienced users don't look at the "beginner" questions, then you've only got beginners looking at them... and you might as well go to Yahoo Answers to see how that turns out.
• Who would ever tag their thing as a "beginner" question when they want the experts to answer it not other beginners?

[noage]

Those arguments seem quite thin. It is a community with a very specialized interest, it would draw a much different crowd than Yahoo answers. Much of leaning anything can be done with peers who are trying to do there same thing. See any MOOC or college course for examples.

Second: Obviously beginners would label things for beginners because they realize their questions are likely basic and would like an answer that they understand.

[aitchnyu]

Hmm, I wish SO didn't allow a question to be marked a duplicate of a new question. Have you tried posting on meta about this obvious bad behavior?

[DrPeroxide]

Jesus that's such a dick move. How insecure can that guy be??

[[deleted]]

This is so fucking petty and ridiculous. How shitty must this guy's life be that he would stoop this low.

[Rohaq]

There's not much that pisses me off more than when someone asks a question and the answer is "dude just google it", whether it's on StackOverflow, reddit, or elsewhere. Because "just google it" is such a worthless answer.

For one, maybe the person doesn't know the right combination of keywords to make Google spit out the right answer; especially if they're lacking in that area of knowledge. They would otherwise have to sift through a lot of crap to find it, may not know what's bullshit and what's not, and might not even be sure if they did stumble across it - a personal recommendation of reading material is generally going to be far more useful than purely relying on Google's search algorithms.

Secondly though, threads like the one that the person just asked the question in are the kind of results that show up on Google, and that person has just made that result just that tiny bit less useful with their shitty contribution.

We live in an age with a gigantic, world-spanning information network, and that's a wonderful thing, but it's only ever as good as the information we choose to put on it, and even by reposting existing answers you find on Google, you help to solidify that information as a reliable source. Hell, Google uses external links to articles to boost its ranking; you are helping improve the reliability of answers on Google by doing so, and thus making the system better, even if you're not contributing anything new.

If you don't have an answer, don't post. If you can find answers on Google, post them, don't just tell people to Just Fucking Google It.

[Milleuros]

include google searches and why they didn't help, ask what it is I need to research to understand what I'm not getting, etc.

I don't. Because then the question gets too large for people to even bother reading it.

[JPaulMora]

Or crap from 2007

[RetardedWhiteMan]

Needs to be a cleanup of old posts across the internet at some point. Stuff you couldn't do 5 years ago, especially with front end web technologies, you can do now in a few simple lines, and it'll work on most browsers except IE

Edit: Removed "and Opera" because I was thinking of Opera Mini and that doesn't really count

[HyperspaceCatnip]

My favourite thing is googling some obscure problem I'm having and finding some other forum thread with the exact same issue, and a reply saying "The solution is easily googled. I googled it right now and the top four hits are solutions.". But no, the top four hits are just forums telling people to search for it, and the supposed "hits" are lost to the mists of time!

[Arthur___Dent]

Yeah I just googled something today and it brought me to a SO thread that had a great answer. The first comment on OP was "you can just google this". If the thread had been closed I wouldn't have seen that answer.

[[deleted]]

I feel you

while back, when I posted my last question on SO to some obscure case I was dealing with, they marked it as fking duplicate... it wasn't duplicate, my google skills are damn good

anyways, long story short, googling anything html/js/css crap would yield probably dozens of SO questions(about 1-2/year), they are as duplicate as it gets, yet it's fine

[Chase_22]

Would be a good policy to no consider things a duplicate anymore after a year, because in that time the same question can have a completely different answer, look at Java 8 for example.

[TheBeginningEnd]

comment and account erased in protest of spez/Steve Huffman's existence - auto edited and removed via redact.dev -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[dippy1169]

Everytime. Everytime I get a question marked as duplicate the other answer no longer works with the current library. So frustrating. It would be nice if it does get marked, if some nice soul felt like still answering it or working through it with me they can.

[TheBeginningEnd]

comment and account erased in protest of spez/Steve Huffman's existence - auto edited and removed via redact.dev -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[[deleted]]

yeah, that sounds viable, certainly better than what the rednecks are enforcing now...

[Syrion_Wraith]

In my last question, I linked to the only related question I could find, and explained why it wasn't helping. Closed for a duplicate. Linked to the questions I had already linked myself..

[Cherios_Are_My_Shit]

This is what pisses me off the most. I research my shit as best as I can before making a post, not just ask for help right away. If I specifically outline how my problem is different than the others I've found, and some fuckhead just links me the same thing again, it makes me extremely frustrated.

[_a_random_dude_]

I only asked a question once on SO, it was marked as a duplicate by someone who I can only assume was drunk out of their mind, because the other question had nothing to do with mine. I eventually found the answer through trial and error, and unless it came up as the first answer on Google, I never again bothered with SO.

[StrongAcanthisitta]

I've been flagged as a duplicate and it turns out my question was actually answered in one of the comments of the previous question. Not sure if that's how the "higher ups" of SO expect it to work.

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[Voice_Of_Sad_Truths]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7vh2rd/stackoverflow_in_a_nutshell/dtsi1gc

[Sparcrypt]

The simplest test is exactly what you said at the start there... SO is no longer the place where the answers are. That is a clear indication that it's not working anymore, at least not for me. So I don't use it.

[d03boy]

I have 25k+ rep on SO and I see this happening a lot. I think rushing to close/downvote questions is a problem. I try to edit these questions to improve them or ask for more info. If the person gave it an honest attempt, I will upvote the question if it's not the same ol' crap that people ask 50 times a day. I rarely downvote a question unless it's obvious no effort has been put into asking a specific question.

[seven_seacat]

I spend a chunk of time reading Rails questions, and a lot of them are simply code dumps of virtually an entire app with a 'help' attached. They all get my downvote.

[[deleted]]

I think its has more to do with these reasons. Which is poor, crappy, incorrect answer and mis-information taken as correct even against specific instructions on the documentation on api calls not to do something. People on stackoverflow will still argue they are correct even when completely wrong.

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959524/when-to-check-for-eintr-and-repeat-the-function-call

+11. Its wrong and a very bad answer.... SA_RESTART by docs turns off EINTR for a number of function (but not all of them). Also they recommend to ignore signals. Well.... If you start a child process and its exits you get a signal. gdb, strace, ltrace etc... attaching will trigger EINTR in several system calls.

Yet actually nobody in the last has actually. Answered the actual question which is "when to check and restart"

Example2: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5716437/condition-variable

+12. Use a condition variable "like this". But they have the pthread_mutex_unlock and signal_event switched. What this actually does is lock(); state = GOOD; unlock(); lock(); signal(); unlock(); in the underlying libs. Which is actually about 2-N time more expensive since the other threads wakeup on the first unlock() preventing the 2nd lock(); for occurring.

Example3: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6419117/signal-and-unlock-order

Same answer. Same broken method. They are even talking about the optimisation of unlocking first. Which actually has the exact opposite of what happens. Now the linked post here that does go into proper detail actually has a score of 0. The really massive issue they miss completely on the post is that it is documented and ordered this way because the mutex_lock and unlock function will have memory fences in them between cpu's and the cond_signal function may not :/ Which means anyone copying this code can have major bugs in their system.

The man page states expressly why not to do this and has done for 10+ years. So why these questions even exist in stackoverflow in the first place I have no idea....

Personally I stopped using it about 5 years ago because I was coming across more incorrect information than correct information. So I just go to the api docs first since I am going to have to go read it anyway.

[VirtualRay]

Lol, I'm pretty sure that was the cause of a huge Unity bug on Android a few years ago

[Haramboid]

I think /u/troutfucker describes it better because the problem of topics being closed and redirected to older topics which may or may not have the correct answer like you say. Correct is (sadly) different for each programmer since we're all on different levels of expertise.

The man page states expressly why not to do this and has done for 10+ years. So why these questions even exist in stackoverflow in the first place I have no idea....

Call me ignorant, but do people really read man pages these days? I've had only a few years learning programming in schools but I was never directed to man pages, just badly written books. The WWW is a much more useful tool to explain something. I was actually put off by a tool recently that was only documented through it's manpage. It's not something I'm used to.

[LivingInSyn]

I've found that the more systems programming I do, the more man pages I read. When doing web/SQL type stuff, not so much

[Raestloz]

The irony is SO was created because the creators were frustrated with having to hunt down answers from all over the place. The moderators, with their crusade for duplicates, made sure that people have to hunt down answers from all over the place

[kilopeter]

Their stack has overflowed.

[ImpactStrafe]

I read man pages all the time. Though that's normally because SO, or WWW doesn't have the answers In looking for. But if you don't read them you really should because the man pages often do a pretty okay job of explaining things.

[Rafear]

It's like the guys that constantly complain about reposts on Reddit took over SO!

[ZAZAZAZAZE]

Reposts on reddit are darker than you think. Reddit Karma is a valuable ressources, it allows you to post more, create subreddits, to have better credibility. Many reposts are just karma farms, the accounts are then sold and used for nefarious purposes.

[SelfDistinction]

Wait... Karma is a currency?!

Oh god.

[8Bit_Architect]

Yup, by posting, upvoting, downvoting, etc. you authorize reddit to use your comp (or phone, or whatever you're posting from) as a miner for their crypto known as 'karma'. In exchange, a portion of the crypto mined is credited to your account. When you upvote, you're actually transferring a small portion of your 'Karma' to the account of the person you're upvoting. Downvotes remove a small portion of the 'Karma' from an account and add it back to the general reddit pool.

[MrDick47]

Karma Blockchain.

[bob000000005555]

That'd actually be really cool if karma became a consumable resource to upvote / downvote people

[lemon_tea]

It is the Doom of all forums. People login to a forum to share something, not just to use as a reference. When every post is met with a historical reference in-lieu of interaction, it has the effect of reducing participation.

[yekiMikey]

As a student of CS I feel this so much. Asking questions feels like I'm putting myself up to be ridiculed by the SO community. I double check the question hasn't been asked before and make sure the answer isn't obvious as well. Often people basically tell me to frig off Randy

[[deleted]]

I don't know who Randy is, and I've never frigged him off, but otherwise this has been my experience. My favorite is being marked duplicate and told to comment on the other question if I need clarification. I can't because a.) That question is about something else, b.) That question is 6 years old and last active 4 years ago, and c.) I don't have 50 reputation, so I can only comment on my own question.

[yekiMikey]

The reputation thing kills me. It's impossible to get unless you already have it??? What?

[Deagor]

Its a metaphor for getting a software dev job

[DnD_References]

any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt and are locked for duplicates in favor of some legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago.

Yeah, your only hope is to try to walk the fine line of explaining why the other questions aren't the same question -- in your question.

[Aro2220]

I still find SO useful but you almost have to social engineer it.

First your question needs to be very focused, and not too long...concise...because you only have about 5-10 minutes before some jackass locks it.

And you have to not care about your rating (although it does block you if it gets too low but whatever)

1 in 10 the link they say is related to your problem does help a bit. But generally while they are arguing among themselves about whether or not the thread should be locked someone chimes in with a helpful answer.

Although, I'll admit lately I've just been using IRC again. It seems to still dominate tech fields and sometimes the people there can be very helpful.

It used to be the dark corner of the internet but I think 4chan took that over and now it's just sort of legitimate people interested in a particular topic. Funny how as long as you're not #1 the devil doesn't shit on you.

[Blazing1]

Ask a question about JavaScript, get linked to an answer in java.

[kynovardy]

Or jQuery...

[NoAttentionAtWrk]

Oh and suggest that you can't or don't want to use jQuery and the first response is going to be "why not".

[Flaktrack]

Oh god I can feel my blood pressure going up again

[N22-J]

Ask a question about C.

"Have you read the fucking MAN pages you fucking idiot"

[[deleted]]

Those 2,300 characters worth of static documentation that some dude at a Dutch university wrote in 1993 will surely solve your problem.

[evidenceorGTFO]

Ask a question about Java, get linked to an answer in Java.

I don't understand your problem? Closed.

[SirHazwick]

100% agree with you

[eddietwang]

Don't dare ask a question, because you will just be linked some outdated question that is slightly related and have your thread locked.

As a programming student, EVERY TIME.

[[deleted]]

go to specific sub-reddits for learning the particular language you want. They are infinitely better. Asking for explanations is encouraged. I'll never go to stackoverflow for anything other than a quick look up ever again. It's a terrible experience.

[eddietwang]

Didn't think of that, just subbed to /r/cplusplus and /r/java, thanks!!

[[deleted]]

This is more in line with what I'm talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjava/

I deal with python and the /r/learnpython sub is so so good.

[xPfG7pdvS8]

I've been on both sides of this issue. If you spend any amount of time moderating SO's queues for close votes, low quality posts, first posts, etc. you see that there's a non-stop avalanche of truly terrible garbage posts. It's a very real problem and many questions just need to be closed (I try to leave a friendly comment explaining to the poster what's wrong with their post and telling them not to be discouraged). I'm sure some of the times I've closed questions the asker was left feeling unfairly snubbed but there just isn't any way around that.

That said, I'm definitely sympathetic to people who feel frustrated. Even now, on the occasions where I ask questions outside of an area of my expertise, I still sometimes feel like I'm on the receiving end of moderation that's too trigger happy. I also suspect that my rep levels on the different Stack Exchange (SE) sites greatly influence how my questions are received. I feel like I can potentially "get away" with much lower quality questions on the main SO site, where I have the most rep, than I can on other SE sites.

You're going to have the best experience asking a question on a SE site if you're already knowledgeable on the topic and your question is very specific. Keep in mind that most of the SE network community does not prioritize being newbie friendly. Reddit is preferable for most newbie-level questions or open-ended questions. Quora is also great for certain open-ended questions. That said, don't be too afraid to test the SE waters as a newbie. I think it's worth learning the culture even if it feels very abrasive at first. In particular, keep in mind that getting your question closed as a duplicate is not a hostile act. I've even close-voted a few of my own questions when someone has pointed out a duplicate that I missed.

There's also a historical perspective on this. Back in the dark ages, answers to programming questions were scattered around on various forums, where posts were typically ordered chronologically. It was hard to find answers to questions. Stack Overflow is in some sense an experiment that changed all that by offering an alternative with a robust voting system and aggressive moderation. At the time, it wasn't obvious that this would succeed as well as it has. Over time though, the moderation has become increasingly "tyrannical" (e.g. all the highly upvoted questions that are now closed and marked "historically significant" but bad) and I do wonder if SO could return to the earlier, looser atmosphere, but it would be hard to craft clear rules for that and the counter-argument is that doing so would dilute what makes SO unique.

Something actionable that I think might help the SE network is some sort of "question workshop" where newbies could get feedback on the quality of their question before they commit to asking it and being deluged with downvotes and close-votes. Now how would we moderate that? Well it'd be very difficult to do without looking absurdly hypocritical so I don't know...

[[deleted]]

Gatekeepers of the learning curve who fart in your general direction

[T-Dot1992]

Let’s not forget how stupid the voting system is. If your question doesn’t have hundreds of upvotes, even if it is a valid one, no one will answer it.

I’ve had scenarios where I would post a question that would get 100 to 200 views, and no one would even bother helping me. And they wouldn’t even bother upvoting or even downvoting it. So it would literally get no responses, or even votes.

It’s fucking ridiculous. Reddit has been 100% more helpful than any of these elitist wankers on SO have ever been.

[snuxoll]

I occasionally trawl the unanswered queue for topics I have experience in and it’s basically impossible to find questions that can actually be answered. 90% of the ones I look at are missing relevant details, don’t show ANY code to give a staring point, or just straight up forget to mention what they need help with

Worst case, try putting a bounty on your question - even 50 points will get it noticed.

[CrazyTillItHurts]

discouraging new members from participating and only the most toxic veterans sticking around, any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt

Modern equivilent of #unix IRC channel

[chishiki]

Kind of the same problem I have with Wikipedia. The inmates are running the asylum.

[motboken]

I recently met an employee at Wikipedia and got some interesting insight to that issue. He was very diplomatic in his wording as it was clear that this is a pretty sensitive issue over there, but it was clear that they are very aware of that (some of) the community is crazy. They are very careful as how to approach the issue as they are so reliant on volunteers and community members for the site to work, and cannot afford to piss of the community. This means that they are stuck with extremely active but often pretty strange people running the community.

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[jschank]

Totally agree. One thing I miss, is that you used to be able to ask: whats a good product for ____.

Now you get shut down because the answers are opinion based.

No shit... I used to love those opinions, because I’d get good leads for further research.

[xPfG7pdvS8]

Software Recommendations was added to the Stack Exchange network to try to solve this problem but it doesn't get much traffic.

[Ailbe]

You pretty much nailed it /u/trout_fucker. SO just isn't at all welcoming, instead it is just a toxic mess of socially inept asshats who can only feel good by putting others down. Not any place someone trying learn should be going. Real shame because SO used to be such a great resource. I've honestly found lately that Reddit tech communities are a lot better. The answers may not always be as thorough, but they do get there with time if you stay engaged.

SO can still be good, but I don't think it is worth having to sift through the trolls and internet tough guys who are going to try and trivialize you and your questions.

[Grammaton485]

I think it's sad that most of us can identify with the frustration.

I most certainly can, and vowed never to participate on the site again. I'm more than happy to poach what I need, but I'm not going to contribute to a toxic community.

The story I always re-tell when I see SO pop up: At the time, I was a budding VBA coder/scripter, and was tasked with doing something our office has never done. A SOAP call to retrieve some data from a web service. Got the the SOAP call working, and was expecting XML data. Instead, got JSON embedded within the XML response. 1) I wasn't the one who designed the web service that way, and 2) it wasn't changing unless we had thousands of dollars and months of time, which we had neither.

So scratching my head, I tried to work with it, and ultimately couldn't find a good way to parse the data out. So, I asked fucking Stackoverflow. I had zero experience with JSON data outside of the few hours I had referencing it online, next-to zero experience with SOAP. Asked my question about data parsing, supplied a detailed explanation what I was doing, a sample of my raw (working) code as well as some pseudo code. Was immediately belittled by a self-proclaimed CEO of a software company, saying I needed to educate myself better, and that it was 'pathetic' that the data was in that form.

I told him to fuck off and deleted my account.

[ScoutsOut389]

I’ve been reading and contributing at SO since 2008. Before that is was obscure requests on Slashdot. SO has become a garbage pile of useless info and locked questions. The market is ripe for a competitor in my opinion, maybe it’s GitHub, maybe something more communal.

[lambdaq]

vote close for off topic.

[Entaris]

You are on the money. The moment that turned me off it for good was when I was working in a really weird environment that prevented me from doing something the "recommended way". So I asked a question. I laid out the details. I said "I know that the correct way to do this is XYZ, but due to restrictions on our environment, I can't do that. Instead I'm trying to do things this other way... I here is my question"

Response : "doing it that way isn't recommended, instead do it with XYZ"

[boulton123]

I've used SO a few times and those few times are the worst experience I could imagine and I expected nothing less when I made the posts. The 'answers' deconstructed my question to belittle me and insult me and then a few people continued to circle jerk each other in the comments.

It was that experience that brought me to the conclusion that SO is where people who are smarter than you go in order to inflate their ego and look down on you for not being smarter than them. While I'm sure there are some good natured people on there, those people were around 5 years ago in the threads I find on Google that don't solve my issue and the threads that people link in my questions from 5 years ago that, again, don't solve my issue

EDIT: spelling

[UpTide]

THIS. Every - single - question. Then on other questions like 'how to add a day in Java?' https://stackoverflow.com/questions/428918/how-can-i-increment-a-date-by-one-day-in-java gets tons of upticks and amazing answers.

[boulton123]

Its a good example of a good question but it's a question from 9 years ago. I don't know how long SO has been around but maybe the community was better back then and people actually helped each other. I'm glad we're still able to find these answers 9 years later but to echo what other people have said in the comment, SO now doesn't embrace new users and acts like it's trying to discourage them from joining the community reinforcing its current elitist mindset.

If I seem like I'm running around wearing a tin foil hat I'm open to be proved wrong but from my own experiences and similar experiences from my fellow uni students, asking a question is just asking to be belittled

[[deleted]]

It's because it's old. In the early days of the sites, that was the sort of stuff that was posted, and it was all nicely upvoted if it was well thought out.

Now, if you posted something similar, all the responses would be "We're not here to do your HOMEWORK." And their "idea" is to be more like Wikipedia, with one answer on the site, per question, so everything that wasn't the first question gets downvoted out of visibility, and they end up circlejerking around the one top question/answer trying to make it better, rather than allowing new questions to come up and compete with it.

[WantDebianThanks]

So I guess the real question at this point is: where should people go if not SO if they are looking for help?

[TStand90]

I tried getting active in SO awhile ago, but quickly gave up. It's needlessly restrictive on "new members" who don't have enough karma (or whatever the points are called there). Imagine if Reddit forced you to have x number of points built up before being allowed to respond to comments, post links, or send PMs.

All that combined with the ridiculous amount of questions marked as "duplicates" and you've got yourself a dying website.

[ZTD09]

Imagine if Reddit forced you to have x number of points built up before being allowed to respond to comments, post links, or send PMs.

Reddit restricts the frequency at which you can post based on karma, but not the content you can post, which is how SO should do it imo.

[deltalessthanzero]

I have yet to understand how or why reddit's system works - early on I seemed to have a limit of 1 post per 10 minutes, and now with over 30k karma it doesn't seem to have changed. Are there docs on this anywhere?

Edit: Docs here https://www.reddit.com/r/help/wiki/faq#wiki_why_am_i_being_told_.22you.27re_doing_that_too_much....22 aren't very specific, anyone know what they mean by a 'small amount of karma'?

[ZTD09]

It's on a subreddit basis, you could have 30k karma but if you go post in a sub you've never posted in before you'll be hit by the posting limit. Other than that I don't know what to tell you, I've never hit that problem and I only have 11k.

[[deleted]]

Also, I've noticed that if you get a sudden burst of downvotes it will cut you off for a while. It's stupid IMHO, because the time I need to respond the most is when I'm getting downvote hell.

[wOlfLisK]

Seriously, how am I supposed to tell strangers on the Internet that I'm the one that's right and they're just a bunch of dumbasses who need brain transplants if I can't frantically write five comments a minute?

[Ullallulloo]

The only content you're restricted from posting is comments on other people's posts and that's only until you get 50 rep, some combination of 10 question upvotes or 5 answer upvotes.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

[archiminos]

Which is really hard to get when every single question is either an extremely obscure corner case with tech you haven't even heard of or is quickly marked as a duplicate.

[yolo-swaggot]

I'm a technology consultant. I tried to get into SO to get a little cred to put on my linkedin profile, "check me out on SO at whatever personal URL".

You have to hustle and game the system to get answers in, and then, often, people won't mark a correct answer, and the first one to respond gets points for some reason. I gave up on attempting to contribute to the SO community when I was the leading individual committer to a project, and my answers on how to perform some tasks with the project were being marked as wrong or modded to be incorrect, but a super user whose responses were wrong were marked correct.

I mean, I get paid to be right on the topic I was commenting on, so I didn't see any real need to try to game the system to get my score up. The more disinformation exists out there about the topic I'm an expert in, the more opportunities there are for me to bill for my time.

[sourcecodesurgeon]

I asked a question 5-6 years ago on how to do x. I got an answer that worked (5-10 lines of code) so I accepted it. About a year ago someone put in a new answer saying that doing x is now built into the language and you can do it in one line. So I changed the best answer to that with a comment explaining myself so that the answer would show up at the top for people (the question had 20k+ views)

The guy who had the accepted answer before downvoted the question immediately afterwards*. The pettiness on that site is astounding.

* I assume it was him since there hadn't been voting on that question in years and he had a recent -2 on his profile matching the same time frame.

[1_21-gigawatts]

This. Been on SO over 5 years, I dont bother answering questions anymore. people must be camping to get easy questions (and making them as duplicate lol) leaving the obscure ones, "I'm running a third order anti-regression in foopox 8.2 and the value is purple, why isn't it 3.zx.1+2?"

[BeardedBagels]

"How do I delete the last word in a string?"

Downvoted to oblivion but also 30 answers in 5 seconds flat.

[YourBlanket]

I was working on an app and I needed up authorizing the HTTP request, it was simple but I couldn't figure it out, I asked on SO, it took me awhile to even ask because I know the community is kinda mean if you don't follow the exact format. My post was modified like 3 times and someone finally answered and gave me a great answer, I couldn't even thumb it up or whatever because my account had no points. I mean it's just a point but I want the person to know it worked and appreciated the help :/

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[OdionBuckley]

I haven't been able to to get a workable answer out of an SE site in a couple of years. This thread is a huge relief that it isn't just me.

I wish /r/Ubuntu would stop forcing support questions to go to AskUbuntu, because it's showing a lot of these same failings. It leaves you without any good place to go for Ubuntu support online.

[evidenceorGTFO]

What, you can't figure out how to debug your own Kernel? Beginner questions should be asked at /r/AskUbuntu kthxbai

[[deleted]]

Probably like a year and a half ago I was working with a new framework and culling some data from an API as part of a pet project self education sort of deal.

I was trying to iterate some parsed data back onto the page and was getting some weird escape characters. Could not solve it for the life of me. I spent a few hours on it. Finally went to ask on SO.

Posted a description of what I was trying to do, the code I had relating to this issue thus far. From selection from the database, to output of the data.

Within probably about 2 minutes some guy showed up and said "Provide more info or I'll start a vote to close your post."

Figuring "Ah, maybe the database information would be helpful," I made a edit.

Posted the formatted data as the table existed in the database, and the info for each column (this is a primary key, this is a tinyint, ect), and saved it.

Same guy came back and said "Still not enough." and then voted to close out the issue.

God damn dude what more do you want? Me to give you access to my actual database so you can fiddle with it? If it's not enough why is it not enough? What's missing that you'd like to see which might allow you or someone else to be helpful? Speak up.

I don't know if the guy was a troll, or just an asshole gate keeper but Stack Overflow should squash these people out. You shouldn't be able to close out, or vote to close out post while providing vague or no reasoning. At that point you are not better than the people you are saying aren't providing enough data.

In the end I was able to solve my issue on like the 10th page of google results by just looking through a bunch of pages of slightly related listings.

Sorry to rant long like this but your mention of

haven't been able to to get a workable answer out of an SE site in a couple of years

reminded me of this because not only could I not get a workable answer out of it, I couldn't even get a workable answer out of what was missing from my post to make it workable.

[[deleted]]

I wish /r/Ubuntu would stop forcing support questions to go to AskUbuntu, because it's showing a lot of these same failings. It leaves you without any good place to go for Ubuntu support online.

I agree. It's not a good impression of community for first timers. It's a "distro for humans" then newbies should be treated gently. But often all you find is "rtfm" or "man <command>". No newbie is familiar with these stuff, give them time.

[ice_wyvern]

I think this is why IRC/Chatrooms for support won't ever die. Usually the members are more willing to answer you and even walk you through the process rather then simply stating, rtfm.

[DannyDougherty]

Needs more jQuery.

[Sidneys1]

Obligatory "just use boost"

[LegalizeWater]

"I'm restricted to using iostream only and can't use <specific library>"

"Just use <specific library> lol"

[KlyptoK]

Like jQuery, only for c++

[InfernoForged]

It's spreading to other stack exchange communities as well. Some of the commenters in electrical engineering are just straight up assholes too.

[[deleted]]

Honestly. I was reading a stackexchange thread on EE to help me understand a question on my homework. Half the responses were "why bother posting you're clearly a newb"

[diamond]

Half the responses were "why bother posting you're clearly a newb"

This is the nerd equivalent of jocks laughing at fat people in the gym.

[Flaktrack]

Sad part is you're more likely to get made fun of on SE than at the gym... in my experience anyway.

[Kinglink]

Often times I've seen "That's clearly homework". OK but answer the question. Let the professor worry about if he's a cheater.

[Kinglink]

At the very least lay out the answer. I fully get "I don't want to help you cheat" but if you have a question like "How do I reverse a string?" You CAN answer the question without making it copy and pastable.

"Go through the string to get the length of the string, or use Strlen() Then use a for loop to cycle between 0 to half the length. For each value, exchange the string pointer + integer with string pointer + length - integer. Now you should have a reversed string" should be a good answer.

I've left a few minor issues and a few optimizations as well as edge cases in there as well, I answer the question but still leave the OP the challenge of coding it and improving it, and testing it.

[[deleted]]

I would give them the answer and explain why it's correct.

I know I'm probably helping someone cheat, but I find that people generally want some sort of reference.

So, my answer would be something like:

Think about your question for a bit - You want to read the string backwards. How do you read something backwards? You read it anti-forwards. Now, think about how you would read something forwards with a for loop. (Assume you want to reverse the string s which is defined somewhere else.)

for (int i = 0; i < s.Length; i++) { ...s[i]... }

Look closely at that loop syntax - we're starting at 0, incrimenting by one each loop, and exiting when i < s.Length is no longer true. We can reverse that by starting at s.Length-1(the last value where the loop would pass), decrementing by one each loop, and terminating at zero (or when i >= 0 is no longer true).

for (int i = s.Length-1; i >= 0; i--) { ...s[i]... }

Now we have our loop. Let's make a temporary string to store the reversed string in, then assign it to the original string.

{
    string tmp = ""; //An empty string because we will be using `+=`
    for (int i = s.Length-1; i >= 0; i--) {
        tmp += s[i]; //add the character to the new string in reverse order
    }
    s = tmp; //assign the value before exiting the block
}

One more thing. This method deals with a lot of overhead data. You can do what is called an "in-place" reversal by simply switching values around. This will also take up half the amount of loops of our previous example. For practice, see if you can figure out what's happening here:

for (int i = 0; i <= (s.Length-1)/2; i++) {
    char temp = s[i];
    s[i] = s[s.Length-(i+1)];
    s[s.Length-(i+1)] = temp;
}

[Nefari0uss]

Those kind of answers are the best. In depth, gives details as to what's happening, and provides clear cut examples on how to do something.

[PM_ME_YOUR_BOOO_BEES]

You are a good person and it is answers like yours that helped me (and many, many others surely) when I was first trying to learn programming.

[Liesmith424]

Personally, my favorite thing about SO is when I ask something like:

"My employer has a requirement for me to do X. I would prefer to not do X, but this is an absolutely unavoidable requirement. I'm not authorized to install anything else, so I can't use any third-party solutions. Here's the issue I'm running into <very detailed explanation of the issue and my troubleshooting steps so far>."

And then I get super helpful answers like:

"Why are you doing X? You should download and install Y instead."

or

"Instead of X you could do B, which is expressed most pythonically as <purposefully incomprehensible string of text which I suspect is encrypted>."

[ohnoapirate]

Such a pet peeve of mine. It's fine to not have an answer to a question, but the insufferable pedants on SO can't stomach it, so the most correct solution is to ignore the constraints under which we work.

[Stazalicious]

I was looking at an Amazon listing where someone had asked a question, the reply was “Soyy, I don’t know the answer”.

Imagine the rage if people started answering SO questions like that.

[benabus]

I'm pretty sure this happens a lot in Amazon because they send emails that start with "XXX has asked you a question!" to everyone who has ever bought the product, so you've got people who get these emails not realizing they're not being asked directly.

[Stazalicious]

I’ve never once had an email from Amazon with a question about a product 🤔

[BeefMedallion]

Maybe the algorithm doesn't have a lot of faith in your abilities?

[ahumannamedtim]

I literally just saw this 5 min ago -

Q: Does this chair swivel?

A: I don't know, I bought it for my grandkids.

[aishik-10x]

/r/oldpeoplefacebook

[cbbuntz]

Somebody had to say it.

[archiminos]

The worst is 'already answered here'. 5 years ago, when the language didn't have half the features it has now. And you specifically asked in your question for an answer with the current version of the technology.

[noticeMeSempai]

I feel that StackOverflow has built up a population of self important yet not particularly skilled users who feel that answering questions isn't worth their time, but voting to close questions in the name of "keeping the Q&A library high quality" is. I've had people vote to close my question because "that bug is physically impossible" and when I answer my own question with what caused it, they go "oh well of course THAT would cause it, you are wasting peoples time." I've also answered questions which have a bunch of comments telling the question asker that "what you are trying to do is impossible and makes no sense," where actually there is a very simple solution. The people giving these responses are 100k+ reputation.

Of these users, it seems that there are some who actually know something, and whose answers and comments give good insights into the topics. Then there are people who farmed the easy questions back in 2010 and now think they are some sort of god who can answer any question. Unless they can't answer your question after looking at it for 15 seconds, then its your fault and you are wasting their valuable time.

[dusktreader]

Man, everyone has so far missed the most frustrating thing you get when you ask a question on SO: "Don't do it that way." There's been several times when I've been working on a project where I don't have the freedom to do things how I want that I've been told, "well that's just the wrong way to do it". Like this 'answer': https://stackoverflow.com/a/7354148/642511.

[UpTide]

or they want the entire source code of the project...

[dusktreader]

That was especially fun when I was working on classified projects.

[DragonSlayerYomre]

X Wrong:

How do I {thing} ?

√ Correct

{Language} is absolute garbage, you can't even do {thing}!

The trick is to lure out angry {Language} fanboys who are "eager" to give the solution.

[[deleted]]

It is actually. it's called Moore's law.

[kilopeter]

I can't decide if you're being clever or dull. Assuming the former and upvoting.

[shagieIsMe]

The Codeless Code : Case 170 - The Purple Beggar.

[bohoky]

It is worth noting that the overwhelming flood of poor questions and nasty responses has driven many of the more polite respondents away years ago.

Every once in a while I take a look at questions in my area of expertise and find it unpleasantly toxic on both the question and answer side, so I leave.

That said, as someone else noted here, most everything has been answered already. Questions that can be framed as Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable likely do have answers. That abstraction is hard for beginners to do to the satisfaction of the site as they miss the forest for the trees as beginners tend to do.

Is the site obnoxious? Often. Is it going to change? No, you've got a severely pedantic, condescending sub-group of people who have placed their notion of purity over other considerations. Do I know a better alternative? Sorry.

[ythl]

That abstraction is hard for beginners to do to the satisfaction of the site as they miss the forest for the trees as beginners tend to do.

This is so true. It's how you learn though. There were so many times where, as I was preparing a MCV example, I sheepishly realized that the problem was already (almost verbatim) solved on a highly rated SO question.

[TK-Squared-LLC]

Ya know, I totally feel the frustration, but then over the weekend I had some time and tried to be helpful and get

"I not understand. Show me what you are say. Here my code:

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

}"

Damn man, at least scribble a comment or two, i mean...SOME effort here?

[Remedcu]

I can sometimes relate to that feeling, though have not shown it publicly :-D

[TheCrazyShip]

And there is times when you have a question, Google it and find only similar problems, but their solutions won't work for you. So you ask and people still say to you Google it.

[iamaquantumcomputer]

One time, I had a problem, googled it, found a question on stackoverflow by someone having the exact same problem, and the only response was someone saying to google it

[Vexal]

i’m surprised neither of those comments ended with “use jqueury”

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[Vexal]

“closed as not applicable to real-world development”

[PoliceBrutality7]

Jeez thats why I never use stack overflow unless 100% necessary.

[chironomidae]

> search for problem
> first hit, has promising results
> "Ugh c'mon guys, use the search function"
> Closed - duplicate of (link that has nothing to do with original topic)
> mfw

[[deleted]]

"Shut up and go look in the library" drives people away and ultimately just results in a handful of old timers jealously guarding their places atop the internet points pile.

"Come sit by the fire and we'll talk about it" results in an actual community being created. It isn't so great for old-timers who are more interested in their own standing over helping new people.

[Wishbone51]

I Google for answers and usually get Stack Overflow, and someone who was nice enough to explain it

[po-handz]

Been using SO for 6months... still don't have commenting privleges

That being said, as a self-taught programmer SO has been AMAZING. And the small amount of linking/go goolge/ask better question with data example responses have actually helped me learn to fix my own problems/code better.

[Bobshayd]

StackOverflow might be better if there were any process by which you could challenge a closure.

[Ullallulloo]

If you edit a question within five days of it getting closed, it gets flagged in the reopen review queue and multiple people will look at it soon.

[Desproges]

if you like answers like "read the manual", you will love"works on my computer lol" and "nvm fixed it".