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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

The thing with the RTFM moments, is that, when I'm experimenting with a new technology, I often ask Google a question and it points me to a stack overflow page.

Yes, the question is obvious. And yes, it can be answered via 10-20 minutes of RTFM. But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer.

So, don't knock the RTFM questions on Stack Overflow. That's part of its value to the greater community.

(I must admit that I've answered very few Stack Overflow questions because every time I find an answer. I did take the time to write out a well-written answer for an obscure problem, and it got me plenty of points. It's nice that the community has a 1000x ROI, too.)

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> But, the value of Stack Overflow is that it replaced 10-20 minutes of RTFM with a simple answer.

But at the same time you are learning with blinders on, i.e. you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation.

This is not particularly bad when you're just starting out. But if you see RTFM-level questions from people which appear to already be in the business of building complex applications then you start to wonder if this kind of thing incentivizes help-vampirism.

Personally I prefer to answer niche questions or things that are not well-documented yet.

> you miss out all those things you would have also learned by reading the documentation.

That's assuming that the documentation is articulately and technically well written. Unfortunately that's more often the exception than the rule. That's rather the whole reason that StackOverflow even exists, I think.

I agree where things are badly documented. But look at the top tags, java and javascript are generally well-documented.

Nope, they are not particularly well documented.

I find JS is well documented on MDN, but doc writers can't possibly imagine all edge cases and interactions. A lot of these cases are "If you knew about that simple feature of instruction A and the simple feature of instruction B and how they work together then you can solve this problem".

Oh. I actually clean forgot that MDN has docs on JS, not just DOM :)

Yes. You're correct about that

It's also assuming the SO answer is less considerate of context than the documentation; this can be the case, but I find quite often good answers are quite comprehensive and explain things broadly.

thats exactly the point.

before: questions were always open. and over time people added those details.

now, after someone answer with a one liner and gets accepted, the question is "closed to prevent 'me too' comments"

it's going downhill for the same reason every internet community does: power crazy moderators who completely misses the point of the site they moderate.

The "me too" functionality is protection, not closing - registered users with a certain amount of reputation can still answer them. Similar to Wikipedia's system.

Every "me too" protected item I've seen has half a dozen "me too" answers deleted at the bottom. It's likely necessary.

I don't think it's just the moderators, there's also an incentive problem because a popular question/answer has no limits on its point-payout.

This leads to a kind of popularity gold-rush pattern. Hard important stuff languishes while easy stuff is has a glut of volunteers.

I'd be interested to see what happens if questions and answers only gave up to a fixed limit of Internet-points to the authors or contributors. Would it lead to a broader knowledge base?

Or that the docs exist in the first place.

Generally if I'm going to SO instead of RingTFM, it's because I don't particularly need to learn. I just need to fix this one thing that's tangentially related to my work. And usually my deadline precludes me spending time learning it anyway, even if I'd like to.

Meh, it's just another resource. Sure you can make a case it encourages help-vampirism, but I would argue that help vampires are largely incapable of becoming competent anyway. Basically, anyone that will become a competent programmer has a hunger to learn and fit all the pieces together, and will be frustrated by endlessly googling and posting questions that take hours or days to receive a reply; no matter how much googling/documentation is involved, ultimately they will learn to synthesize solutions efficiently. Meanwhile there are many people who believe being able to program is just a question of accumulating enough facts and they never progress past asking whole-cloth questions. I'm sure some are capable of crossing the chasm, but if it doesn't happen early I don't think it ever happens.

For a help vampire, even SO is not rich enough to make them competent. For a competent developer, SO is not efficient enough for them to learn helplessness.

You'll become a better programmer in the long run if you take the time to resist Google and read books/manuals. Unless you're on a deadline I guess.

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