271–280 of 808 posts
Later on when I had more experience, I wanted to give back:
- try to answer -> "you need cred"
- okay, upvote -> "you need cred"
- try to comment -> "you need cred"
- Ask a question -> "Duplicate. You should RT(Free)M we built."
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sprinkle in a 100K+ reputation user commenting "this is easily answered with `man Y`" — oblivious to the fact that Y's manpage is a 188 page monster, and manpages being awkward to search in. Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
Here's a question maybe someone can answer for me, or maybe I'm just stupid and other people don't need it, but... What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of…
tldr ffmpeg
I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleas…
With such a stark barrier to entry, why would I spend much time on there? Also, at the beginning of my career I got much more value from "explaining articles", and much less from ultra-specific answers. Later on when I had more experience, I wanted to give back: - try to answer -> "you need cred" - okay, upvote -> "you need cred" - try to comment -> "you need cred" - Ask a question -> "Duplicate. You should RT(Free)M…
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The issue is that sometimes poeple just want 'X by Y'. To get a question answered, you shouldn't have to list every constraint and design descision that led you to that point. Comes up all the time when people ask how to do things in bash/sh. I know there are better tools for the job, but this is the one I have.
Since I apparently did a terrible job explaining it (the link does a much better one) -- it is when someone has a problem that they are trying to solve in a way which will not solve their problem adequately or at all -- it is not when they are using the perceived wrong tool for the job.
Explaining what the XY problem is to people who are telling you about it's high false positive identification is, itself, an XY misdiagnosis.
Your reply is an example of what people are complaining about - you are addressing the issue you wished was asked, not addressing the issue you were presented with.
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The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/
Often the better answer is to just explain what's being asked by strongly encouraging them in the Z direction. Sometimes people just want to understand what's happening behind the scenes rather than just looking to solve for Y.
"I'm trying to learn foo.js and attemt to do so by porting Tetris to it. I know foo.js is a terrible option for a game. So. How can I write to the canvas from foo.js?"
Is often answered properly, if only because to many it's a nice puzzle.
"How can I write to the canvas fro foo.js?" Is different in that it will attract a lot of people explaining that foo.js deliberately did not allow writing to the canvas, because Z"
The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…
Also answers becoming obsolete because newer versions of the technology came out. E.g. Python 2 answers aren't relevant anymore, but still there.
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And my opinion as someone with high reputation is that letting in silly questions has ruined the site and made me stop using it. SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher, it's a place for interesting knowledge sharing and if the knowledge is drowned in noise, well it's just noise then.
Moderation has ruined the site for me. Stupid people don't realize they are stupid. When they can't understand a question they conclude there's something wrong with the question, not with them. And since they believe the question is silly, they happily close-vote the question. This way they close questions which require specialized knowledge, experience, or deep understanding of the subject. Precisely the kind of que…