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Comment by Const-me | Hacker News Reader

Not just for new users. I’ve been using SO since 2009, have over 7k reputation there and 375 answers, but recent changes make me want to stop using it.

The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard questions instead of answering them.

E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal strength for the connected network.

10 minutes later it got a vote to close “migrate to superuser”. I immediately updated the question explaining that I only interested in C API. An hour later it got closed as offtopic. I flagged to mod, nothing happened. It gathered a few votes to reopen but not enough to reopen. And now it’s just deleted by “Community” saying “RemoveAbandonedClosed”.

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Sorry mate. As you might have guessed, Community is a bot. Some quick tips might help for next time:

* Never, ever, write a question without tagging it with either a language or language-agnostic, though in the latter case you're still better off using a language tag as well. This is basically the only reliable way to get views.

* Try to give people a jump-in point. If your question gets 50 views, which is far from guaranteed, only expect 10 of them have the time to write an answer. If your question isn't approachable to at least one person in your mostly-random panel of 10 people, you're going to suffer for it. Giving people a minimal piece of code massively improves engagement rates.

* State your problem clearly. Your newest revision would likely never have had these problems, but your first revision was not obviously about C APIs, and by then it was too late.

* If your question is just closed and you think you deserve reconsideration, flag it with a custom reason for an actual moderator (rather than just a user with a vote). They're the only people who really have power to reopen fast enough to matter.

* If your question stays closed for a nontrivial amount of time, it's dead unless you post it to Meta (meta.stackoverflow.com) and people reconsider. There are too many questions posted to this site to spare a second glance to closed ones.

In short: be clear, be proactive, and focus on quality from the get-go.

The fact that you need "tips" to make a question answerable is part of the problem.

If people's time was an abundant free resource, sure.

> by then it was too late

“By then” it had a single vote for close. Other four people choose to support the vote, after they already saw the second edition. Why did that happen, herd instinct? If yes, theoretically there’s a moderation mechanism on SO for that, doesn’t work either?

Anyway, I don’t care too much about my particular question. You might be right about the initial version wasn’t good. I’ve copy-pasted it to a new one, let’s see whether I’ll get a relevant answer.

But I’m using SO quite a lot, and I see many good questions downvoted and/or closed. Especially questions about niche technologies. Apparently, too many people think if they didn’t understood the question, it must be something wrong with the question, not with them.

Another example: https://superuser.com/q/1258345/31483

It’s now open (and unanswered) because in this case moderation mechanism worked.

But again, it was close-voted as “exact duplicate” even after I’ve updated the question explaining why it’s not a duplicate. Too many people just love confirming other people close votes, without thinking too much and without even reading the question.

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