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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I agree the people answering the questions and moderators could stand to be a little more kind.

Can we talk about the elephant in the room though - the tsunami of low effort questions from 1 rep users who are clearly students looking for help on their homework?

I didn't use StackOverflow until I was a working professional - while I was in school I hung out in the labs and talked to TAs or my professor if I was stuck. Now it seems like SO has become the default TA service for everyone foreign and domestic. It's exhausting to see question after question of people essentially asking for hand holding/TA service.

I stopped answering questions for that reason because I felt like I was only helping one person at a time instead of doing the community a service.

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I completely agree, but on the other hand there's another problem as a corollary here. Stack overflow's knowledge database is quite immense. And it's a fraction of the knowledge that's available on the internet. Whenever I get stuck on a technical type issue it can usually be solved in a matter of seconds of searching. And I mean that even applies to really quite esoteric things. Want to have a discussion about converting reflection calls into cached and strongly typed delegates when the types involved are only known at runtime, and how to most effectively optimize this? Yip, there's a great discussion on SO about it.

So when I run into a isolatable technical problem that I can't find a solution to, it's incredibly obscure and incredibly esoteric. So you end up with this sort of dichotomy where it becomes more and more difficult to formulate 'good' questions. It's either somebody asking something that's been asked already, or could otherwise be found in a few seconds of duck-duck-going (damn.. that really doesn't roll off the 'tongue' as well as googling, does it?) or something so incredibly obscure that you'd be better off on a specialized outlet than on a general purpose one like Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow needs some type of beginner area. I should have the ability to choose to exclude the beginner area from my Google and Stack Overflow searches.

This used to be a common feature of the type of forums that predated SO... For example, https://www.gamedev.net/forums/forum/71-for-beginners/

>doesn't roll off the 'tongue' as well

I use DDG's bang codes extensively, almost more than DDG itself (!yt !gi !so etc.), so I would have almost suggested duck-banging.

I feel your pain. I'm a very early user of the site (3 digit user id from when it was initially a closed beta) and used to answer questions regularly in my specific area of expertise. But the torrent of low quality questions from users who severely lack any fundamental knowledge in their subject area became too much.

I gradually drifted away from participating and imparting my knowledge. I'm not going to spend time explaining the basics to users (who often show very little gratitude or appreciation) and cajoling them to provide other information that might help me solve their problems.

It's a damned shame because the idea of SO is really good, but the site is overrun by vampires and I'm all out of stakes and garlic.

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