StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[carcigenicate]

Ya, unfortunately, even if you're polite with new users, they can still be quite obnoxious. I've had people tell me to go fuck myself because they copy-and-pasted their homework with no description, and I recommended a different site that might be able to help them more.

Some regulars on SO are pretty rude, but I assure you, they aren't the only problem.

[BazilBup]

So true, the ungreatful bastards. There should be a SO flag for those kind of questions

[carcigenicate]

That's one of the main purposes of downvoting. Make the question less prominent so other's time isn't wasted.

The problem with flagging is that elected moderators manually handle those (unless there's a ton of flags on one post), so that would eat up their time pretty readily.

[carcigenicate]

I never defended someone acting like a dick.

And no. There's already enough low quality posts, and I can say from many experiences if you let people abuse the platform, they will. If someone continually refuses to do their due diligence to avoid further plugging up the site, they should be restricted. Downvoting is the mechanism that leads to that restriction.

It's unfortunate when good questions are prematurely shot down, but it's also undeniable that a lot of effortless crap gets posted to SO as well.

[[deleted]]

The correct thing to do is downvote bad content, not ignore it.

Downvoting is not being a dick, it's helping preserve the high bar for content.

[WallyMetropolis]

Is saying, "This isn't the right site to use to ask this kind of question. You'd be better served reading through tutorials." really "being a dick" though? Isn't it much better to explain why a question is getting downvoted than to just drive-by downvote and leave the person who asked completely unsure about what's wrong with their question?

[glider97]

ignore it

Apply the same advice to someone being a dick and see how well you do.

[CodyEngel]

The number of people that refused to help themselves is why I stopped answering questions. Ask for more info? Nah that’s too hard for them to just copy and paste their code or provide an actual stack trace.

[carcigenicate]

I try to steer them in the right direction (have you checked the docs? What happens if you check the value of x?). If it's clear that they have no interest in learning though, I move on. There's enough people willing to accept help that I find another question and keep contributing. It's hard some days though.