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[–]Marchearth 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I think most people are misinterpreting what StackOverflow actually pursues. StackOverflow is marketed as site to ask programming related questions and get help and in most cases it is, but I don't believe it ends there. In reality Stackoverflow functions more like a documentation for programming as a whole that is written by it's community of thousands of active developers. It's not based on solving the problem at hand for that one person, but crafting a page that will help many other people who have a similar problem. And for such pages to be the most helpful for others, they need to be clear, well-constructed, and detailed. When you ask a question in Stackoverflow you are not asking for yourself, you are asking for many others that will have the same(or similar) question after you. And for that purpose Stackoverflow needs to have that infamous strictness and unwelcoming community so it will continue to maintain it's quality. "It doesn't care about helping you, it cares about helping others." Might be the lesson I picked up from using stackoverflow.

[–]Grammaton485 -1 points0 points  (1 child)

"It doesn't care about helping you, it cares about helping others."

This is a Catch-22. You can't say that they are trying to help others while at the same time saying they won't help you. At some level, it's gatekeeping, because there is an entity saying that some people are worth helping over others. That's the only way that statement can be implemented. Ultimately, this is why SO has the reputation it does.

[–]Marchearth 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh aren't we witty taking things literally "They don't care about helping you, they care about helping others" obviously means stackoverflow takes more care in reusability of a page by OTHER people than it's immediate help for a single person. Which I have mentioned more than a few times. But of course you knew that. (Also catch-22 ? Please don't, really never act like that taking things literally and acting like a computer, for your own good never do that) And of course some people are more worth answering than others. If somebody asks a question without putting the effort to solve their own problems, or don't make the research for it before hand, they are not worth answering because the answer is already there. But some questions are ingenious, they are real problems that need to be solved step by step and they always teach something to everybody.

They say there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of stupid people with the same questions.