Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow
blog.mattbierner.com
blog.mattbierner.com
SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.
On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.
I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
As far as MacOS, I’ve heard too many horror stories about developing on Apple platforms from people like Marco Arment and other well known developers caused by Apple’s poor documentation, I’ve also avoided it even though I am rabid consumer of Apple products.
Hype cycle doesn't mean "currently being hyped". Every technology is somewhere on the hype cycle [1]. Lisp is well into the Plateau of Productivity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
> Personally, yet another reason not to focus on less popular technologies.
Because its expert users don't hang out on one particular website?
It also makes recruiting and as you’ve found, ecosystems matter.
But - it may be difficult to know in advance whether SO is good for a given language.
Tangentially, every time I google/ddg a problem, it's almost never taking me to good blog posts addressing the substance of my issues. I usually find those after two or three clicks, like e.g. an article mentioning a blog post.
And it's sad because there's a myriad excellent blog posts out there, somehow unreachable at least without 10 minutes of browsing the search results pages.
I agree. I've tried alternatives to Matlab for technical computing at work. So far I have not found anything to match both the quality of the product and the fast technical support I can get from the Mathworks through our support contract.
There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.
Well put. This is what I've experienced with most of the stackoverflow communities. It WAS definitely better previously.
But I'm experiencing some trouble asking questions in certain tags where moderators are easily closing down or downvoting the question. Even I saw the person who answered my question replied in the thread that he/she doesn't understand why is it getting downvoted. People just don't stay on point. Neither do they refrain from their cocksure way of replying.
What the author says about the scope of the question is not there with answers or comments.
I was there too and I left cause mods were more interested about my english than about my answer - mostly correct.
SO beccame one big egoistic mess.
The tenor of the questions changed in the last couple years I participated. Early questions were more of the the "I'm having this strange thing-- here's what I've tried already"-type. These were a lot of fun to research and answer. They ended up sending me down rabbit-holes that helped in my work later on. (There were also "explain xxx concept" questions, which were tremendous fun to write for but there are only so many of those that can be asked.)
I was never one to "vote to close" because something wasn't "sysadmin-related". That's likely because I've been asked by Customers to "sysadmin" virtually anything electronic. A number of my answers ended up migrated over to "Super User" as a result. The migration of questions to other sites didn't bother me, because that wasn't killing the question out-right. The "community" closing legitimate questions, however, made me sad.
I did "vote to close" on questions more of the "Can I get some free labor" vs. "I'm having a problem, here's what I tried". The former seemed a lot more common towards the end of my participation. I never saw closing these questions as lacking in compassion. Often there were plenty of existing questions the posters could've used as reference. It was clearly easier for them to ask another question rather than research.
I hold myself to am unreasonably high standard w/ respect to researching before asking anybody a question (at least, anybody who I'm not paying for it). I tried to relax that standard when it came to answering Server Fault questions, but there was still a lower limit. It was hard for me to be "compassionate" in the face of such apparent laziness and disrespect for the donated time of others, particularly when there were so many good resources right at the poster's fingertips.
I totally understand the limits that had to be set on the low bar for quality content. In those early days though, it seemed to me that when people asked questions about managing mobile phones for instance, because it was only newly related to being a sys admin, they'd get closed as not related.
Granted, in those early days, there weren't as many process "rules" in place to guide users to ask better questions and perhaps that's still so. However, a quick perusal of the site indicate this has gotten better and more friendly towards new people.
People like you are why Server Fault sucks. I once asked a simple question about logging in microseconds instead of milliseconds. I received a bunch of condescending responses to RTFM and that I should "hire a developer" to figure it out. Site admins closed the question as being "low effort" or something equally stupid.
I'm a developer with over 20 years experience. I read the whole manual and the product clearly only documented milliseconds. I have thousands of karma points on the main site, but because I never used Server Fault everyone treated me like a newb who's first reaction was running to Server Fault.
Server Fault is filled with arrogant admins who would rather be assholes than help.
I think the main problem is actually the reputation system. People like you get MAD because someone asks a question you can't answer in 5 minutes because then you can't get your karma points so easily. You get MAD because someone else might earn a bunch of karma from "easy" questions you don't want to bother answering.
If you do not follow the Q & A format correctly, your “question” should be closed.
More regularly I have answered my own question because the Q was hard and got zero answers, then I eventually discover a solution so I wrote an answer.
It's pretty obvious when that's the case. Ironically, using SO for work assignments is OK, but that's probably because the questions are more interesting, esoteric, or have longer term value than a question about while loops.
I've been a Usenet user since 1987 and am reasonably aware of how to write questions to technical groups. My last two or three Stack posts regarding "I want to do x, I've tried a-e" were summarily closed with no responses to appeals even though there may have been useful although not conclusive suggestions. The claim was that the questions asked for product recommendations, even when I wrote "Not looking for product recommendations" in the posts. That's when I deleted my account. "Lack of compassion" is very accurate. I think the gatekeepers have gotten carried away.
SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.
While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.
If an answer is no longer relevant, it will, stop being upvoted, possibly even downvoted. So it’s score will become lower relative to newer, more correct answers. At least that’s the theory. The problem is the discouragement of asking new questions, the pointlessness of a new answer on a 10 year old question with 1,000 upvotes, search engines sending people to out of date answers, and that the upvotes don’t account for knowledge and experience. I have no idea how to solve those problems.
An idea that I had was to hide reputation entirely from users and move to a flair system based on fuzzy metrics[1]. If the signal isn't precise, find ways to reflect that when displaying it.
[1] I imagine this as a system independent from badges, which are permanent and triggered by certain milestones/events.
I think you could scrap it as a whole.
I'd also like to see the ability to re-ask questions after a few years without them being dismissed as duplicates.
There have been a few questions where the answers no longer worked due to being obsolete, and I had to figure out the new solution myself. And in some cases, the answer never worked properly but was accepted as the best known at the time, and I had one that worked. But there was no point posting, because the accepted answer from X years ago dominated, and it was unlikely that a contribution from little me would be noticed.
In fact that's why I never ended up joining SO despite being a heavy user - on each of the occasions I felt I could make a useful contribution, it happened to be a question that was old and "settled", and I felt it wouldn't be worth the effort.
> You haven't explained why "this would be terrible UX"
What's with the tone? I'm not your child
But it's a Q&A site, not a point-gathering exercise. Leave the displayed score of the answers/questions but decay the benefit the author gains from it.
As far as "theory" questions, such a designation could simply be another moderator privilege -- high-rep individuals would have the ability to vote to prevent a question from decaying. Perhaps an additional requirement would be that the question must have been transferred to Community Wiki.
An answer will already decay naturally if it goes out of date as people will downvote it for being wrong. There are plenty of relevent 10yr old questions and answers. Decaying old answers will just make good info harder to find.
imo they should get rid of the gamification. change the upvote to a "thanks" button and don't so the totals
Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling.
Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.
So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge.
[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
For Wikipedia, you never actually see what goes on without going to the discussion page, which I've never looked at except when someone pointed me there (once again, I've not kept a journal of such excursions, and can therefore not answer your challenge). I have, however, seen enough to never ever try editing a page for any reason.
Ideally people would just be polite, and questions could just be answered by anyone who cared to answer them, with low-scoring exchanges de-emphasized instead of being shut down.
Prove there are no questions where someone has been treated unfairly.
I posit you cannot.
Person A: I have been treated unfairly.
Person B: I hear this often, but no one ever offers any proof of it; I don’t believe any of these people, and posit that they are all wrong.
You tell me who seems unreasonable here.
I personally have had fights with moderators, and took my complaints to meta because they were behaving inappropriately.
Now, I cannot believe you can honestly say you’ve never seen that, because https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92064/is-there-some..., its a damn FAQ question.
So... say what you will. I support the parent comment; you’re being totally unreasonable.
Oddly, Google seems to throw up SO search results a lot less often for me these days though, so I don't get send there in the first place.
You do get one bit of information from this: You learn about a question you definitely can't get the answer to on SO!
* Closed questions due to the reason "subjective" are very popular amongst the subscribers but not in line with Stackoverflow rules
* Closed questions with reasons "duplicates" and "off topic" are the prime question areas for reputation gaming
* Deleted questions are very low in quality and are pretty much unrevivable with interference, unlike closed questions. Pyramidal structure of decreasing quality - Normal -> Closed -> Deleted
* If your question is accidentally deleted, such ones are revived quickly
Some side notes
* Deleted questions are clearly against guidelines and the style of writing is enough to give away these questions are just poor even without the actual content.
* Most closed questions are relatively good in content quality but against site guidelines (off topic, subjective etc.)
Personally, I see more often than not that people are just annoyed they can't ask their question on Stackoverflow rather than accepting that SO isn't the right place to ask their question. In addition, I also see answers/comments very hostile and don't lead to constructive feedback. A typical example of this behavior is Person P asks Question Q. An expert E makes a comment "Why are you doing this? You shouldn't do this - this is not the right away". Such a comment is not helpful because it passes a judgment on the approach of the question rather than answering it even if the question approach was not correct.
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615 - A question by an absolute beginner, trying to do something that they have no clue how to start with. Already closed.
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242 - A question about parsing a JSON response with jQuery. Two votes to close. The asker clearly does not know the word "parse".
* https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318 - Someone trying to figure out an error message they're getting with kubernetes. This is exactly the kind of thing you get at the top of your google results when you hit the same error, and with one more vote to close, it will be forever locked with no useful information. Some asshole even downvoted the one answer that is there without adding any comments.
None of these questions are good, but they could be made better, and they all represent people with real problems that deserve help. Getting mad at people for "being lazy" (because if I, the expert, could easily find the answer to this, then why didn't you?!), is not productive.
Here's what I don't understand about all these SO deletionists: how is closing the question helpful in any way? If you don't find the question answerable, then don't answer it! But why block other people from trying to help? It's not like you're somehow "teaching" these people how to ask by blocking them. The user from question 59344615 (which got closed) did not post another question with better details. They just left the site, one more developer that doesn't have anywhere they can ask newbie questions. It sucks.
Are these your questions, as I asked? Of course you can find such problems, that's not what I was asking. But let's go on.
As to your questions, the first has been closed, and quite correctly as it's too vague.
The 2nd is not closed, and has answers. Problem?
The 3rd is not closed, and has an answer (albeit downvoted unhelpfully as you note). But the answer's there.
Not your questions anyway, and 1 closed correctly and 2 still open and with answers.
I don't accept this as strong evidence of wrongdoing.
[0] edit: ahem, not that I'm in a position to accuse others of this at times.
The other two are better, and (aptly) not closed. Of course you'll get inappropriate votes to close, but I hope they are correctly offset by other votes the (hopefully vast) majority of the time.
Now about this:
> how is closing the question helpful in any way?
I suppose it's to stay focused. When googling I quite often get useful SO results (& upvote those), and I'm happy not having to sift through tons of useless questions.
This feels more like an invitation to start some drama and nitpick pointlessly over an example than to actually reasonably discuss any issues. Like other commenters have mentioned: reasonable people do not keep lists of examples like this, just like reasonable people don't keep "burn books" of every time they've felt slighted.
> reasonable people do not keep lists of examples like this
Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21796919 you don't have to.
The lack of such delinquent SO examples here is telling.
How most people discuss things: by relating their experiences and impressions, and listening to those of others with an open mind.
Here's mine: it can be very obnoxious to extract a good answer out of the SO community for a challenging question. Often all you get are answers to different easier questions or a useless "don't do that." It takes a lot of annoying policing and preemptive anticipations of SO's typical bad answers to keep things on track. I've also personally come across many closed questions that were helpful and exactly what I wanted. I've also found myself having to pre-emptively address the closers because they're too trigger happy.
What I've just said is true, but the few examples I have would link you to my SO account, and honestly, you don't seem like the kind of person who I'd feel comfortable sharing that with.
> I suspect most of these "issues" don't exist.
I suspect you have a perspective that makes you blind to them. I would suggest listening more and holding off on the aggressive challenges rather than opening with them.
> The lack of such delinquent SO examples here is telling.
It only tells that people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
> 1) by relating experiences and impressions, 2) and listening to those of others with an open mind
1) may not be correct (plus my own impression that SO isn't terrible doesn't count?) and 2) I've a perfectly open mind, that's why I asked the question. I asked for evidence. That's a reasonable request.
> it can be very obnoxious to ... to keep things on track
I've experienced some of that, in a minor form. That people are having trouble showing much evidence is what I keep coming back to. It may be that you're asking higher level questions than I am.
> What I've just said is true...
That's useless to me or to this argument. I want evidence.
> few examples I have would link you to my SO account
well, OK, I can sympathise with that - to an extent.
> people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
Garbage. What 'precise hoops'? I asked that those hard done by post some personal evidence, which is easily found (if it exists).
It does, but you didn't just contribute it to the discussion. You've been outright declaring your interlocutor's impressions to be wrong and making demands of them in a way that discourages me from wanting to listen to you.
>> people might be reluctant to jump through the precise hoops you've laid out for them.
> Garbage. What 'precise hoops'? I asked that those hard done by post some personal evidence, which is easily found (if it exists).
It's not garbage. You just outlined your hoops again. I'm not jumping through them--for reasons you can sympathize with, and I'm sure there are others like me.
And honestly, I just don't like your attitude, which is actually not a very helpful one. I can see why you're so defensive of SO and Wikipedia.
Might be worth asking yourself whether "Garbage" is a worthwhile contribution to the discussion here. In this thread you stress that you have "a perfectly open mind" and yet when people disagree you seem to take it extremely personally.
> you stress that you have "a perfectly open mind" and yet when people disagree you seem to take it extremely personally
I do not take it personally. I asked for evidence. Very little was forthcoming. I've an open mind to opinions backed up by evidence. Opinion without some basis is useless or worse. QV. anti-vaxxers, chem-trailers etc. Or do you support these people's views just because they opine so? Please answer this point specifically.
Civil and open dialogue on HN is important. We can disagree about things without using dismissive language of that kind.
I agree with the culture, which is why I always state:
1. How my question is different from related questions.
2. How I searched on Google and what I tried.
3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly".
My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated.
It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway.
What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do.
Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything.
This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
Why does rep have anything to do with this? People answer questions they know how to answer, and want to answer. Having upvotes doesn't obligate you to learn other things so you can give free help on topics you aren't interested in.
Rep isn't a promotion at a company where you get more responsibility and earn more money.
It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.
Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.
It is funny that you can also learn things like that without questions, but how could it be any other way? We are all born dumb!
A dumb question might be something like "I can't log into my server with `ssh server.com`. It keeps rejecting my password when it asks for `user@server.com's password`. What's going on?" The user might not know to explicitly add `admin@` on the command line.
A lazy question is "My server that I bought doesn't let me log in!" Come on, you need to address 1) what result you expect, 2) the exact steps you take, 3) the result you obtain instead, and 4) any other details a non-omniscient being might need to answer your question.
Like maybe they don't realize there are different ways of interacting with servers. I wouldn't expend a great deal of effort helping someone asking a question like that, but I hope I wouldn't make a bunch of a priori assumptions about why they were asking that question instead of another one.
If I asked a question about something I have no idea about, such as training a sheepdog, I'd still be able to put forth effort into describing the steps I take to someone, so they know what I tried to do. The question "The dog isn't learning this command!" isn't bad because of my lack of sheepdog knowledge, it's bad because it omits tons of important information about my situation. Therefore it's a lazy question.
The second question is more because of a misunderstanding about the particular platform. These type of lead-in questions are common in tech support and even many forums where they expect someone will get back to them with more specific questions (they may not have an idea what sort of information will be relevant). A simple comment clarifying this will not only prevent confusion due to arbitrarily closing the question but will help them make a better question.
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.
1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?
2. Tell me what all you have tried.
3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.
It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.
I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.
I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.
But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.
So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection.
P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.
Stack Overflow's content is good because:
1. The site design is high-quality.
2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.
The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.
If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote.
That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(
Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.
I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.
This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.
Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence.
Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score.
That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.
As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.
I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice.
I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload...
: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked
> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing...
I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution.
So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.
But - it's true that I'm not a typical user; I'm often curious about "But why is it like that?" and "can we do something better than..."
Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.
I've certainly witnessed people who really needed to know something and were completely unable to express what they needed. If you're talking to a skilled question-intuiter then this is less of a problem, but if you're not, then you need to be correspondingly better at asking your question so as to get an answer that is useful to you.
However, SO would be a more useful place, especially but not only for newcomers, if that skill wasn't required. If anyone could ask anything, and as long as there's someone willing to answer, it doesn't matter whether the question could be deemed "skillful" by any measure.
There are a number of reasons why SO isn't that place, and I can see why these reasons exist. It's a fun thought experiment to think about whether SO would have made it to the place it is today if it had started out already with the same draconic rules and views on how questions should be written as are in place today.