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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> “If you bothered to read my question, you’d know it’s not a duplicate.”

2 of the 4 examples of unacceptable behavior are responses to overzealous moderation. I can't see this helping with any of SO's real problems.

Every SO question I've asked for many years has required constant monitoring to correct people who don't actually read the question and either 1) try to answer a totally different, easier question or 2) try to get my question closed. It's exhausting and really makes me wish it had competition so I could abandon it entirely.

The first few items in their code of conduct should be:

1. Carefully read the question before you answer or comment.

2. Carefully read the question before you answer or comment.

3. Remember you're not helping the asker if you repeat answers he already tried or specifically anticipated and said aren't helpful in his question.

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Questions that are not duplicates getting flagged as duplicates - this one drives me crazy! Honestly, it's one of the things I hate most about SO - it's so common I've come to hate asking new questions.

I really just don't understand how someone can want to be moderator, but not even be arsed to read the questions they pass judgement on.

Your #3 rings so true to me. I hate seeing my problems getting the XY treatment. They should add a checkbox that says "Yes, I'm asking about a specific approach to a problem. Don't worry about the problem itself. I've already considered alternative approaches."

Also, sometimes the approach itself can be more interesting, or integral to the learning experience. Sometimes you need to implement a few shitty solutions to really grok the pitfalls you're trying to avoid. They cannot always be spelled out.

XY treatments should just go into the comments IMO. They are always relevant to the question (even if you know you want Y -- remember that SO is not just about giving you an answer but also about building a knowledge base), but they never even try to answer the question asked.

Sometimes the asker can't recognize that it is a duplicate - especially if the linked duplicate is a foreign concept to them. For example:

Q: "How do I extract just the last names from this list of contacts?"

A: Closed as duplicate of "How to use regex capture groups"

Asker then gets mad because they don't even know what regex is and the examples in the duplicate seem unrelated to contact lists so they are left without a plug-n-play solution like they were hoping to get.

Sure, that's possible. But it's also not what happens in most cases. The amount of times I've searched for an answer, found something that sounds like my problem but isn't, and then posted my own question just to get it closed is just stupid.

The voting system already provides feedback on the quality of answers. Turning a less than thoughtful answer into a conduct violation is bad. Conduct violations should be reserved for actions that are less than kind, and being uninformed or dumb or distracted doesn't fit that.

Here is an important key to written communication. If someone doesen't understand your written message, the problem is not with the reader. The problem is with you (the writer).

I write clear Stack Overflow question and I don't have the problems you describe.

This is incorrect. A lot of times people are still learning about the topic they are asking a question on, so its often a case of they dont know what they dont know and simply do not have the means yet to properly ask the question. Mostly because they do not have a great depth of knowledge on the subject already, hence the question.

This is also why questions should not be closed as duplicates; it is perfectly acceptable to ask the same question in a different manner as for someone else may find it useful. Do elementary school teachers not answer a child's question because another child asked it similarly in the past? It's more harmful to click on a dozen links to see them all closed as dups and try to find the one that isnt a dupe that hopefully can help you with the question.

Do not blame them for trying to learn, or how they are going about doing it. It's a QA site, not a rewrite the manual on programming languages site.

> If someone doesen't understand your written message, the problem is not with the reader.

Not necessarily on SO. Pretending to not understand a question has become a form of mockery on SO in many cases. You see these responses in many questions that have valid and accepted answers.

There are badly worded questions, sure. But there are also pretentiously shallow attempts to close some questions as quickly as possible.

There is also a difference between people who find it difficult to explain complex technical questions in a manner that is easy to understand and thos who probs dont care cuz thei r 2 lzay 2 write and its ur problem

If someone doesen't understand your written message, the problem is not with the reader.

Someone could ask a question about computational fluid dynamics and regardless of good their writing is I wouldn't ever be able to understand it because I lack the necessary domain knowledge. The problem would definitely lie with me.

This is part of the problem with SO - there's an assumption that any developer should be able to answer any question. When you ask a moderately complicated JavaScript question and get a series of answers saying "Use jQuery!" that isn't because you worded the question poorly. It's because SO points incentivizes people to guess at answering questions they don't have the knowledge to answer. You can't always blame the question writer.

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