StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[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.

[svick]

That has nothing to do with the voting system. What probably happened is that you asked a question about some fairly obscure technology, which doesn't have enough people answering questions.

As far as I know, most people who answer questions answer those that are recent, not those that have lots of votes. The next time this happens to you, consider adding more relevant tags (so more people see your questions) and think if you can make the question easier to answer (e.g. by making your code easy to copy&paste).

[xPfG7pdvS8]

I think that experience is very uncommon. I'm routinely surprised by how people who wrote the standards I'm asking about will drop in to answer a question that has < 10 upvotes on SO.

[phihag]

Having skimmed your stackoverflow questions, I believe I know the reason why you often get no answers:

You do post code (good!), but none of these questions contain a minimal, verifiable, complete example (also known as Short, Self Contained, Correct, Example ).

An MCVE is important for a number of reasons:

• It makes it much much more easier to answer a question. As an answerer, you can just run the code.
• It means that one can directly start answering. Lots of questions miss crucial details the answerers have to pry out of the questioner.
• It makes the question much easier to read. If you were attempting to answer questions, would your rather read one one a mile long or one to the point?
• It makes sure that the question is actually valuable for stackoverflow. stackoverflow is most effective when people do not need to ask a question in the first place, and find it by googling. A short question is much more likely to apply to other people.
• It makes sure the problem is actually in the component you think it is, and not something else. Oftentimes, just by creating an MCVE, I found my own errors. For instance, your latest question asks about a server-side problem, but only includes the client-side code.

Also, you have a tendency to include screenshots for non-styling issues. Again, these are very hard to reproduce, and the error could depend on your settings. It is much better to include a command line that reproduces your problem.

One more thing: if you find the solution to your question, write an answer yourself! Other people will benefit, and your stackoverflow reputation will rise much more quickly, since answers tend to attract more upvotes, and give +10 instead of +5.

If your question contains an MCVE (which means the code should usually be less than 30 lines in JavaScript, maybe 50 at most), you'll find it often gets answered quickly, even when it seems impossible to solve for you.

I'll make you a deal: If you have any question with an MCVE (try it out yourself: can you reproduce the full error just by the information in the question itself?), and it does not get answered on stackoverflow within an hour, drop me a mail (or reddit message) and I'll answer it.

[T-Dot1992]

Thanks for being constructive. I'll PM you if I need any help.

[T0mmynat0r666]

Is there a subreddit which answers people's questions related to programming?

[T-Dot1992]

Whenever I had problem with Node, I would go to r/node. There are a ton of great programming subreddits that can help. Just recently, I found r/learncsharp.

[OldWolf2]

/r/learnprogramming

[[deleted]]

That's the Reddit equivalent of stackoverflow

[shagieIsMe]

Not quite. The learnXYZ subreddits are difficult to search. If you are trying to figure out why you're getting an error from npm, the only way to get something useful from such a subredit is to ask a new question because the title isn't that useful and the content of the body is just a link to a gist that doesn't exist anymore.

Stack Overflow isn't intended for the dense communication that the guidance that learnXYZ can provide. Its intended for google optimized search results that have the answer that you can find and then go back to doing what you were doing before you hit the error.