Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.

Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.

I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.

Then I find another question on how to do X, and the mods close it as a duplicate of that earlier question. Even when the questioner specifically notes in their question that it is not a duplicate of that earlier question because they really need to do X the idiot moderators close it.

View on HN

I ran into that a lot when I was doing low level firmware programming. The answers to someone's question would be something like "that feature is only intended for ultra-specialized low level programmers". And it's like "in this case, I am an ultra-specialized low level programmer".

I'm thinking of things like assigning constants to pointers in C and/or manipulating pointers directly.

> Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.

> I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.

I know what you mean. Whenever I (rarely) ask a question on Stack Overflow, I always have to defensively load it up with language anticipating misinterpretations and instructing people to answer my question and not some other one.

Otherwise, internet-point-chasers will fall through the woodwork giving easy, worthless advice. Even with all the defensive language, a few always show up.

Sounds like you’re good at prompt engineering

> defensively load it up

Agree. This isn't a problem on the partner/sister sites as much. They are very helpful too. But they don't show up on Google

I've never really thought about how contributors trying to avoid the XY problem really stands at odds with StackOverflow's mission of being a repository of answers, rather than a helpdesk. Not all Ys present as X, and not all Xs are actually Ys. Sometimes its an XZ problem.

The best you can hope for is some answer down the page that says something like "to answer the actual question..."

Sometimes X problem is just an X problem.

The mods are so ubiquitous and so busy on SO, I wish they'd spend some of their time silencing the "let's figure out what your real question is" pseudo-trolls.

I call them pseudo-trolls because I think they are well-meaning, but they function as trolls: overrunning a web site, hijacking discussions with repetitive and irrelevant content, and making most potential users feel that participating isn't worth the time and effort of interacting with them.

Even if X isn't the right solution to my use case I still often want to know _why_ X (or my implementation of X) doesn't work. The answer to that might be a really valuable learning independent of the problem at hand.

The XY comic has done irreversible damage to stackoverflow.

I've seen this example thousands of times, it's both as infuriating as it is frustrating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com