Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking (e.g. poor English).
Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had, that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.
I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.
By the way, if you don't want your answer go to waste in this situation and the question was on-topic, you could open your own question (reword the original question if it wasn't clear) and then immediately self-answer it.
About half of my questions are self-answered. Many because I found a solution before anyone else answered. Some because I found a solution while preparing a question but didn't submit it yet (this happens quite a lot to me). Some I even planned as self-answers from the beginning, when it took me a lot time to find a solution an issue that wasn't on SO yet. All of those questions were well received.
> but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.
I mean you can argue that, but I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.
Point is the founders made a choice and it was a choice that pissed some people off, so I'm answering the "I don't have a problem with SO" comment to point out that I did because their choices made me dislike contributing.
> I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.
Dictionaries can be difficult to read but I would compare SO more to Wikipedia in its writing style, which is very readable. Wikipedia is much more strict and without those style guidelines it would be way less useful.
> Point is the founders made a choice
Unless you mean recent choices, I would say the founders choices made SO so successful. There are a lot forums/platforms that are better suited for getting help, were discussions and expression of individual personalities are welcome and beneficial for community building. But at the same time those forums mostly help the people who are asking questions, but not people who google their issues, because long threads are less searchable and answers are harder to find. That's were SO shines, it scales because it prioritize people looking for answers instead of people looking for individual help. I too used to contribute in such forums, but knowing the limited reach of my answers there, I stopped helping individuals and choose to contribute to the much larger audience of SO (even if that means being subject to occasionally questionable mod actions or a few downvotes)
Sometimes I'll go through and undo lots of those trivial "improvements" that people make where they slightly change the wording of the questions and answers.
There seems to have been a swell in beginners learning to code perhaps due to economic motivations rather than curiosity. These people seem to want SO to do their homework for them without having done any leg work themselves. I can sympathise with people trying their best to find the answers but lacking the domain vocabulary to find the answers; Usually closed questions point them in to the right place anyway. However a lot of the questions are 1) duplicates or 2) high level questions for which there isn't a definite answer it's a matter of taste.
That's not what SO is for. It's your job to figure out the high level picture, learn the absolute basics of the tech stack you're working with and SO can fill gaps where information is too esoteric to find easily in docs. The questions are generally unique rather than duplicated and improve over time rather than a constant stream of crap that reddit is.
Inevitably when their questions get moderated they'll feel personally slighted without dispassionate consideration of the situation (because why would they; they have a question and they want the answer NOW), thus to them SO is now "toxic".
Many just don't have the right mindset for SO, it's unfortunate.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
if let V6(sock6) = addr {
// use sock6: SocketAddrV6
}
The first-linked duplicate answer will answer your question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9109872/how-do-you-acces...Searching "rust enum" gives me https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/custom_types/enum.... immediately.
Perhaps it is worth it to put it on SO, but it's akin to asking "how do I access the field of an object in JS".
Stack Overflow works best when there is a well defined problem that can be reproduced and you are a specific answer rather than guidance for how to proceed or a tutorial.
If someone needs to come back to a question to answer comments and work through it, SO becomes more and more difficult to use in that format. AN important thing to remember is that it isn't the right site for every question (and trying to use it as such will run into those intentional design choices made at the very start to make it difficult to use for certain types of questions).
I would have to look again, but I believe that SO explicitly asks you to post what you tried. And now you're saying that posting what I tried muddies up the value of my question. Can you see how this seems like a no-win situation?
Edit: Also, my question was marked as a duplicate. It doesn't seem to have been rejected for reasons related to asking too many questions or requiring a tutorial answer.
> I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction.
And then in a comment:
> @Lukas, I had seen your solution, but you didn't actually explain the syntax, and I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I tried again today, and I think I have something which appears to be working, although I still don't understand the syntax.
This might have been something to work through in a more interactive form such as Stack Overflow Chat - https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/62927/2023/2/8
The Q&A part of SO doesn't work well with back and forth communication but rather "here is a question, assume this is the final form, try to answer it and move on." There is far too much material there for people to try to curate and cultivate the questions and answers too much.
This is standard polite phrasing indicating that I would be happy with any response, regardless of how minimal. I wasn't asking for a tutorial. I don't recall SO requesting me to strip out polite extraneous wording when I made my submission, but perhaps I missed it?
Lukas' solution didn't answer my question. So, yeah, there's going to be back-and-forth when the question wasn't answered. That's what this part was about: "...but you didn't actually explain the syntax..."
And again, my question was flagged as a dupe, not for wording or structure or back-and-forth.
Your edit suggests that it did solve the problem, though it didn't answer the "I don't understand" aspect of the question.
If the solutions given in the linked duplicates didn't work, then specifically applying and showing how they didn't work would be the next step.
> Edit: Based on @Lukas solution, the following seems to compile, but I don't yet know whether it is doing what I want.
Stack Overflow itself is poorly suited for the "explain" type questions - especially if it is going to involve back and forth. The comments are intentionally poorly designed for that. The thing that SO comments are trying to avoid is the forum like "the real answer is buried deeply on page 10 of 15 of 30 comments per page on a phpforum". If the understanding is only uncovered after 50 back and forth comments, then the question and answer themselves are a poor fit for SO.
If you are after that type of interaction and a "here is the answer" isn't going to suffice then other formats may be better for your question. The corresponding difficulty is that Stack Overflow's framework can't be made to handle everything well. It handles Q&A well and doesn't try to handle conversations well.
Your question was marked as a dup because the solution that you are after is in those other Q&A sets.
If you need back and forth of explaining the syntax then /r/rust may be better. Alternatively, if you have something that works, get it reviewed on https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rust or if you are after a more real time back and forth conversation, https://discord.gg/rust-lang
You will note that if you are trying to find an existing match to your problem, /r/rust and discord are poorly searchable and you might have to scroll through a bunch of comments to try to get the context around the problem... and that is what SO tries to solve.
Also this skill is not taught actively, or at least not widely.
So people end up asking these poorly worded or poorly aimed questions. And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when using SO).
I've never asked a question in order to know what the question guidance is like, but _undoubtedly_ there is a well written "how to ask" page <https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask> and (one that I cite in comments so often I have a bookmarklet for it) the "please rubber duck your way to the question before vomiting into SO" that used to be called MCVE <https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example>
Now, saying "ain't nobody got time to read all that text, I got bugs to write!" is a reasonable response, but saying "there's no guidance on how to write a question less likely to be closed" is untrue
Some of them are quite active and fun to work with, others are brutal. And it also depends on how much effort you put into your questions, also.
But any complaining that goes beyond "googling my question doesn't get me my complete answer anymore" should include examples of when it failed, because often people complain who just wanted SO to do their legwork for them.
> The response time is like 10 minutes or less
I have to say, you do, and I want to live in it. I've asked detailed, well formatted, clear questions and they usually got like 10 views in a month.
For trivial questions/broad categories maybe. Ive asked a question 8 months ago for a very specific issue and it has nearly 50 views and no comments other than mine itself when i thought i found solution.