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Comment by xenoterracide | Hacker News Reader

I've answered my own questions many times on SO site's... but I don't think that you should ask a question you know the answer to when you ask.

I do not think SO is a wiki for programming question. I feel it's a place for people to go for help when they have a problem.

Given I occasionally ask questions I could have looked up, so it helps other people, and occasionally I end up answering my own question (by looking it up), after I've given others a chance to provide an answer.

It just feels like abusing the system by asking a question you know the answer to. That will stay unanswered for 2 days (since that's how long it takes before you can accept your own answer). At the very least he should have given other people a chance to answer, instead of rep whoring.

(unix.stackexchange mod here)

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See, this is why I chose the HN title.

As soon as a site adds rep, there come the accusations of rep whoring. I don't care about my SO rep, as long as it's not libellous or something. I don't need a job, I don't want a job. I want (in this specific case) to teach.

What if people don't know they have a problem?

If SO becomes a standard destination (and it appears to be from watching the devs around me), then what is not on SO / accessible to Google might as well not exist.

Re: the letting others answer. Let them edit my post instead, if they think there's a problem with it.

Idk about you but my blogs return quite quickly on google if you search for something I wrote about. This seems like a more appropriate outlet for this kind of thing. Of course if the dev's around you have forgotten how to search... well I doubt they are worth what they're paid.

You need enough rep to edit a post, but really the question isn't the problem. It's the fact that you didn't actually need an answer.

I'd much rather have a SO question as a search result than a blog post.

Blogs are often littered with other information, have weird color schemes, don't always have proper code display, aren't editable by somebody who finds an error, sometimes have spam etc etc

I'd much rather have excellent documentation, and less crappy defaults so I don't have to ask so many questions, or do as much search, or blog as many "how to's", but we can't all get our wishes.

I think it is a wiki for programming questions, and Joel and Jeff repeatedly said so on the SO podcast. The fact that you think it is somehow "unfair" to get reputation that easy illustrates Jabavus point: SO has become less about being information source and more about being a game.

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