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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I was always partial to the aphorism "The only stupid question is the one we don't ask."

I used to participate in StackOverflow, quite a bit (not so much, these days).

They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site.

Just look at the question counts of the high-numbered folks. It's usually a single-digit number, with that digit frequently being "0."

It's fairly obvious that people that actually ask questions are treated badly.

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> They have a culture that really doesn't like asking questions, which is weird, as they are the raw materials of the site.

I totally disagree!

I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow.

That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day.

Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.

> Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.

Only if your question is common, and possibly common enough to already have an answer. That's rarely the case for me, and this issue is why I've stopped using SO beyond just reading.

> I totally disagree!

Well, I guess we'll just have to "agree to disagree," then...

I have "only" about a 4.5K rep, but almost twice as many questions as answers. Most of my rep comes from questions.

My SO tagline is "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

I have become quite good at writing really good, well-researched questions, which usually get ignored. I generally end up answering them, myself.

Instead, simple ones get answered; often with a somewhat passive-aggressive "slap." I've learned to ignore the insult, and still be nice and thankful for the answer.

It's been a valuable resource for me, but is now a lot less valuable.

There do seem to be a lot of angry individuals on there. It's usually on questions that if you have expert knowledge in an area you can answer without missing a beat but would require a beginner a lot of time to find out and it's not just "a google search away". I think a lot of people like to make others feel inferior and that's a huge personality flaw.

I wonder what allowing paid questions would do to the incentive structure on a site like SO? I would be very happy to pay a small sum to get unblocked on a technical problem.

Lots of questions get deleted too.

I asked this question on the math site https://mathoverflow.net/questions/373993/is-the-haversine-f...

I am not a "math person" and was struggling to understand how these various functions fit into "norms" or not.

I think by-and-large none of these communities are helpful or welcoming to most people. And that is a shame.

To be fair, mathoverflow.net has always been for professional mathematics, mostly for professional mathematicians.

Though these days even professional questions are sometimes treated poorly.

I remember asking a question[0] on Webmasters Stack Exchange. They nuked it, and told me to ask it on regular StackOverflow.

Apparently, you are not supposed to ask non-SEO questions on Webmasters SE.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52060900/strange-behavio...

StackOverflow is kind of horrible. I keep waiting for someone to disrupt that market with a less awful product.

Yeah, I would love for there to be a new StackOverflow where newbies could ask questions ad nauseum without being blocked for not having answered enough questions or received upvotes from others.

It has turned into a walled garden where the people who got in early have the credentials to participate and get help while also risking losing the clout that got them there and everyone else has little opportunity to get help overcoming their personal hurdles in becoming competent programmers.

If you ever find out how to make that product but not be flooded with newbie questions when you search professionally useful answers you could turn that into a lot of money.

I wonder if it's viable to have a site where you pay for asking questions (there are thematic sites like this, we call them "support forums", but AFAIK, no generic one).

Volunteer based answering will always lead to some kind of reputation economy, and those seem to attract assholes.

Would people pay though?

Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to.

It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem.

If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer.

Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.

People pay for online courses all the time, why wouldn't they pay for tutoring?

Anyway, if you are going with this, billing by the question and gathering your answering team by random are sure ways to break it. You have to somehow limit the amount of questions people can ask, have long term relationships with both sides, and make sure the asking ones won't expect that every single question can be answered.

Personally, I would bet on Stack Overflow being positioned in a way where trying this would certainly fail. It looks way more likely that something like a "Red Hat School" could do it.

(But when one can make a comment saying "I know who can enter this market! It's IBM!" that's clearly a problem.)

I remember an experience that I had on a LinkedIn group (and is also why I stopped taking them seriously).

A member of the group (it was a Swift Language group) asked a fairly reasonable developer question. It was sort of a "I have this technical problem, how do I solve it?"

This was something that I had actually solved, many times over, quite easily, so I answered it.

Surprisingly, my answer was ignored, even though it was the first one, and nailed the problem on the head.

Instead, a flood of "answers," came in, all recommending some developer tool/site.

They all got acknowledged. Some resulted in a bit of back-and-forth, between the asker and the answerer.

I noticed that all of the answerers were of the same nationality as the asker, and realized they were shills.

It was "guerrilla marketing."

This is true in so many systems like MMO games too. I was an avid player of one for a few years, did OK but not especially well, lost interest. A few years later I visited again in a moment of idleness, mainly to see if my account was still live. Completely different experience: other players would look at my account age and flee, assuming that I was packing all kinds of whoop-ass.

I use SO all the time but just search for other people's answers and apply them to my existing problem. To some extent this is simply more convenient for me (I don't have to wait and translating a solution to my context builds my skills anyway), but the institutionalized antipathy to general/conceptual questions make it feel like an unfriendly environment.

I was a newbie, and SO deleting questions didn't hurt me. If anything, they ensured that the #1 or #2 search results were exactly what I was looking for.

What benefit is it to learners if search results are full of SO threads going back and forth on the exact same topics across multiple threads?

There's a difference in finding a solution that works specifically for your case in your setup rather than finding something that is close but has to be adapted.

Sure, it's better for a new programmer to learn how to adapt solutions to fit their use case, and sometimes you will stumble across gold, but there's still a walled garden that decreases the likelihood that a new user will stay around long enough to be able to utilize the resources.

Not to mention the rampant elitism and dismissiveness of the current user base where new users are frequently spoken to rudely and condescendingly, in my experience. There is psychological punishment around every corner for incompetence even though many people try coming there in order to eliminate their incompetence.

It could be a lot less horrible if people with a bit of knowledge weren't horrible. They like to feel elite or something and look down on people with snide comments on there.

For some reason, public technical forums often seem to develop that way.

The Arduino official forums, for example, are filled with toxic people who are often fairly skilled but whose replies nearly always drip with condescension. It's to the point that when I'm searching for a problem and find a discussion on their forum, I already expect to see it, and I'm nearly always right.

I'm sure there are other similar forums.

Theory: Highly technical people tend to be less socially capable, which leads to making newcomers feel less welcome.

early unix culture was overtly hostile about beginner'ish questions and other fumbling. The advanced practitioner was marked with extra awd sed chops while those questioning poor man pages were essentially spanked publicly. This happened repeatedly in different contexts that I saw.

awd = awk?

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