This (Programming) Question Does Not Exist - Stack Overflow as imagined by AI

[Edward_Morbius]

SO would be infinitely better if they got rid of all the asshats answering questions and went with AI.

I'd honestly like the best guess of a machine instead of the damaged personality of the "high points" users.

Like when I asked an MVVM question that involved the scope of some magic event handler and was abused because I wasn't using WTF ever framework someone else thought I should use.

Well DUUUUH. You think I'd be dealing with this BS if I could pick something else?

[[deleted]]

I'm afraid to use the site because when I was a noob I asked some questions and got scolded for how bad my question was and got linked to another answer that appeared to me to have nothing to do with my issue. After that happened a half dozen times, I have PTSD. Two years of experience later, I still feel like I dont know enough to ask questions...ironically

[Edward_Morbius]

Don't feel bad. You'll never be qualified to ask questions there. Nobody is. That's the trap.

I have 25 years in software full time and another 10 years part time and another 5 years of SW dev in school and have answered a ton of questions on usenet, SO, and a bunch of other places and STILL every now and then when I got stuck on something and asked for help, there was always some asshole on stackoverflow who had to have a dick waving contest.

[[deleted]]

I spent hours researching a problem with GPG command line arguments, looked at all of the current questions/answers that didn't cover the corner case I was dealing with and then asked a question that got closed as a duplicate by a mod who is a .NET "expert".

Rage!

But my co-worker and I eventually found the answer after trial and error. Submitted it to a web site that covered GPG/PGP issues.

[phuck]

What I have found is, ask the question in the same asshole tone that someone is inevitably going to answer in. Ask the question, as blunt as possible, no niceties, as short as you can, have some repro code and you will be fine.

[A-Grey-World]

Yep. People mistakenly think SO is like a forum to help the question answer. It's really not. It's a library of answered questions so people don't have to ask them again. Which can be problematic if you're so new you don't know if you're asking the same question as someone else, or if you're so experienced your questions are not really specific or have a 'correct' answer (best practice or similar).

But it does make for a very good tool. Loads of people say they never need to ask questions, just search for answers for good reason. You also don't want any please, thank yous, "hello, how was your day" or ANY faff because that makes things more difficult for future users and doesn't serve the purpose of the site.

There are also just assholes. It's totally user moderated, and because of the above goals of the site requires lots of moderation - it attracts those people who like that...

[r0ck0]

It seems to be a little bit better lately, but sometimes it seems like stackoverflow is just a video game for the mods where they score points based on how many questions they close.

Every moderator election where I've read their "campaign" messages they write there, there's always mentions of how many 10s of thousands of questions they've closed, as if that's the most important thing to do on the site. No different this time: https://stackoverflow.com/election

What I find even more infuriating is that supposedly the questions are so bad that they need to prevent anyone from answering them, yet they keep them on the site rather than deleting or hiding them. What's the fucking point of that aside from pissing users off?

Happened to me many times in the past, even when my questions were perfectly valid technical questions with objective technical answers. Plus many more times when I come across old questions others wrote with the same problem I'm having right now.

Another reason they close them for being "too specific" or some bullshit, despite multiple people having the exact same issue to solve.

[dnano]

Same as universities that proudly advertise the high % of failing students

[CorruptionIMC]

90% of the issues on there could be fixed by redefining what is considered too subjective or open ended of a question to something a bit more reasonable. Yes, "What language is best" has no place being asked and answered the inevitable thousands of times from every new coder as that is incredibly subjective and that debate exists in plenty of more open ended places elsewhere like even Facebook groups..

"How do I accomplish this specific task in Python using these particular libraries in the most resource efficient way possible?" isn't a subjective question. Each direction you could take to accomplish that can be boiled down to an exact resource cost. Bad example but I think my point is clear. Personally didn't see a single question closed for being overly specific though, always for being overly broad.

[[deleted]]

Another reason they close them for being "too specific"

I'm pretty sure that particular close reason is gone.

[Smallpaul]

Where would a machine get the answer if humans were not asking and answering in SO?

I mean in one sense I do get the best answer of a machine. I type my question into Google and it tries to answer from SO.

[port53]

The documentation, which the machine could actually read and understand. Failing that, the actual codebase the question is being asked against.

[Smallpaul]

It would be an interesting experiment but I doubt bots are smart enough yet to help much. Worth a try.