It just occured to me, that I haven’t asked anything on SO for a while now. It might even be years, the last I asked for help.
Most of the problems I come across were already faced by someone else.
Do you guys feel the same?
Last time I asked was in 2019. I’ve asked 30+ questions total, only about half of those are ever answered. I’ve found that, the more experienced I get, the less my questions get answered on SO. Usually because my questions are well thought out, explained incredibly well, and the problem isn’t that I don’t understand something. It’s that my problem is one of a kind. E.g. no one else on the planet is having it. So of course I’m not going to get help for it.
yeah… that’s what I realized too.
If you ask basic questions - “google it yourself” … closed!
If you ask anything specific (like in your case) - it’s just crickets
Never asked one. Answered my first one recently.
When the number one result in Google is a site answering my exact question with “did you try googling it first?” I have no incentive to interact with that site.
i got that once, except it was my exact question with no response at all, then i noticed it was me that posted the question 4 years earlier.
i used to use stack overflow a lot back in 2007/08 but i cant remember the last time i actually got an answer.
Ha I once googled some question, found a great answer in some random forum and was like about to write a reply saying what a great answer it was when I realised it was me, like 10 years ago.
I’ve stopped using most corporate message boards and forums since AI hysteria highlighted their greed and self-aggrandizement.
All of them act like they are indispensable and provide value, when their only value is the network effect, and their “products” are entirely user generated and moderated. It’s only a matter of time until they enshittify and rug pull.
“Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!” - every “volunteer Microsoft Support Forum” representative ever.
They all have that same irritatingly obsequious and simultaneously infantile dunning-Kruger customer support agent vibe when responding. Never posted there myself, but all the responses feel like they’re written in that tone.
Never, end up there a lot when googling though.
Never. For the most part i haven’t had a question that hasn’t already asked or that couldn’t be answered from reading the docs or some other source. For the cases i get stuck i ask the question to a more focused group
A bunch of people that either failed to understand the value of the moderation system or are just crybabies about being expected to follow the rules answering here.
It is easy to use and not nearly as toxic as most of the internet will claim. Research your question, ask clearly, include the code you attempted for a minimal reproduction, and include debugging details. If you don’t do those things, you are the problem, not the people closing your questions.
I use it often per month.
I’ve never asked a question there. Typically if there’s no quick answer to my question already available, I’ll just dig through documentation.
I haven’t asked that much on SO. Often I can find the answer myself. In other cases my question is so niche I don’t know how to formulate it into a good SO question.
One of my questions got closed for being duplicate because it was tangentially related to a different question. I got the answer, but it left me a sour taste.
Did you get the answer from the duplicate? If so I don’t see what the problem is, they’re building a knowledge repository so all dupes must be closed
Only from the comment saying it was a duplicate. The question wasn’t even the same and the answer was barely touching my question.
Rip
Never. IIRC, I also couldn’t upvote good solutions because I had never posted or something, though I may be mis-remembering.
This was my experience as well. They seemed to angle the system away from the casual user, which I didn’t have time to sit around and answer questions to get enough fake internet points to interact more.
Yeah, it sucks. In the cases where it was really helpful, I couldn’t upvote the answer that helped me solve my issue (usually with some more poorly-documented library or something).
You can however always accept the answer, which is similar and pretty helpful
I’m not the one asking anything in this case, just findingnothers’ questions and answers
fake internet points
Your take is a valid one, but not very fair.
Points are a reputation system. People who are contribute and provide quality get increased trust and power.
It’s not “fake”. It’s a designed system of points with meaning.
A casual surfer not being able to vote is by design. Which has a cost of missing out on valid votes, but the benefit of evading trolls and misuse.
Some of my saltiness comes from the fact that I tried to answer questions a few times, but told I wasn’t worthy enough to participate in the conversation, and so I was confused by the system. Also, I saw people answering with lots of points, but their answers were trash and I couldn’t impact that response/point gathering, and just made me think it was just another gamified system, and engineers love to game a system. :)
If that were really true then they would give users with 100k rep some benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions… but nope. Still get closed as “too vague” by people who haven’t even heard of the thing you’re asking about.
At least that’s a testament to neutrality - in a shitty way.
Very rarely, but if it’s a specific enough question that I’ve actually researched before I usually get a good response.
It must have been over 5 years ago. It turned me off. The culture there was so painful. People would refuse to answer a question just because they deemed the premise of your question unacceptable. Or even recommend you change your whole project’s language.
It was like that both in questions and in chat. I never tried again.
I think I’ve asked only two or three questions there, ever, and those were on topics obscure enough that the answers ended up coming from me.
There was a time when I answered other people pretty regularly, but that was more than a few years ago. I stopped mainly because I’m not very comfortable giving them free labour so they can be the gatekeepers of community knowledge.
I wonder if anyone is working on a fediverse Q&A platform.
Last time I wrote a question - probably a couple of months ago. Last time I posted a question … aaaaages ago.
By the time I get sufficiently frustrated to contemplate asking a question, I find the clarity that comes from stopping and trying to clearly lay out a question usually results in my figuring it out just before I hit post.
Most of the responses on that site are toxic, so I tend to avoid it.
So which one are you using ?
You should already know that. It’s such a simple thing. — first answer on StackOverflow
Usually iterations of:
“Closed and locked due to duplicate of: (question asked 9 years ago about Visual Studio 2011 and Visual Basic, when you’re using VS code '22 and C#)”
“This seems like an XY problem, what are you really trying to accomplish?”, after a one thousand word post describing in detail exactly what you are trying to accomplish and the many different reasons why you can’t just use #GENERIC_EVERYDAY_METHOD.
Either that or the quick and dirty method that I want for a one off data conversion that uses standard libraries is heavily down voted and lost while the elaborate, all-cases-considered, 7-third-party-library-using answer becomes the top result.
This is not my experience at all.
It seems we search for and look at different kinds of questions.
