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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

I've had okay experiences on StackOverflow, but only because

1. I tend to answer questions thoroughly, in keeping with the spirit of StackOverflow being a common target from web searches

2. I dare not ask a question, ever

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Same. Thought I do ask questions, but I end up spending half a day researching and trying other alternatives to post a proper question in the hopes that it won't be closed. Mine rarely are.

But few people seem to put in the effort to ask questions.

It is funny that for a site which spent the better part of the last two years to be more welcoming (which they IMO approached unsuccessfully), this is still the prevailing strategy. And it works, so I can't disagree. Now I don't think SO is that bad, if you really try to write a good question, at least in my experience, the reception is good. But I know I'm the odd one out among my dev friends and colleagues about not being afraid of posting questions to SO. Others, like you say, don't dare.

I have a question I want to ask, but haven't. This is mostly because I feel that asking it properly, describing what I've tried, linking to (not) duplicates and explaining why they're not relevant, and linking to the docs to try and explain why I don't understand them, etc., etc, is a great deal of work. In other words, explain why the top 20 Google and SO results and workarounds aren't relevant to the answer I'm looking for. Doing it "properly" would take about 30 minutes. ... and thus I haven't asked.

I went with a workaround that I'm unsatisfied with because it was easier than asking a good question.

I see what you mean, but when it comes to the rigor required to putting together a good question, this is no different than say filling in an issue template when reporting a bug or asking for support in a Github repository, right? Do you avoid that for the same reason? Not that I would blame you, I for one hate filling in overly defensive issue templates designed to discourage drive by shitty issue posters, but inadvertently alienating otherwise decent posters, such as (hopefully) myself.

> Others, like you say, don't dare.

I'm in that camp. I'm not afraid (they aren't going to send goons over to beat me up or anything), but looking at the most common responses to questions posed by others gives me the clear message that it's not worth putting up with that stuff.

That's a fair point, I haven't considered that it is entirely possible to just not want to bother due to one's experience with read only SOs perceived pedantry, as opposed to hostility.

It's okay to ask a question if 1) you have a thick skin and 2) you expect a negative reaction. Otherwise, yes, you're going to be disappointed.

The problem with most bad questions is it's hard to explain why they're bad in a gentle way when there's a fire-hose of bad questions pouring in and you can only spend so much time with each one.

The experience from someone new can suck because someone was terse or dismissive, but they don't understand they were one of fifty people that day to make exactly the same mistake.

If you do not have the time to appropriately respond to the question, then don't respond. Your phrasing makes it seem as though SO moderators are battling an onslaught of poor questions and the site will collapse if those questions are not deleted as soon as possible. It is the over-zealousness to close questions that is part of the problem.

If you are unable to offer constructive feedback to the user who asked the question then you are really just acting as a stop-gap and not really fixing the root of the problem. People ask "bad" questions for a lot of reasons but it you are unable to steer them in a direction that allows them to understand what makes a question "good", they will continue to ask "bad" questions.

Then you get bad questions with no feedback, they just get closed or deleted, and the experience is still "Stack Overflow sucks".

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