It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated
Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
Q: how do I do thing X in C?
A: Why do you need to know this? The C standard doesn't say anything about X. The answer will depend on your compiler and platform. Are you sure you want to do X instead Y? What version of Ubuntu are you running?
My message contained greetings and the question in the same message. I was banned immediately and the response from the mods was:
- do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit
- do not use natural language questions; submit a test case and we will understand what you mean through your code
- do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them
The ban lasted for a week! :D
Don't even get me started about how dumb rule 2 is, though. And rule 3 doesn't even work for normal English as many things are abbreviated, e.g. this example.
And of course, you didn't greet and wait, you just put a pleasantry in the same message. Jeez.
I'm 100% sure I'd never have gone back after that rude ban.
upon saying this, the young apprentice was enlightened
I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question".
I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been. It's a lot easier if you send the question you have instead of sending "Hi, how are you?" and then wait for 3 minutes to type out your question.
Yep, it's in there with "please use the public channel rather than DMs".
Some nettiquite, please.
Of course, in the process of typing out their question, they usually find the answer on their own.
That is really absurd! AFAIK, it is not possible to pose a question to a human in C++.
This level of dogmatism and ignorance of human communication reminds me of a TL I worked with once who believed that their project's C codebase was "self-documenting". They would categorically reject PRs that contained comments, even "why" comments that were legitimately informative. It was a very frustrating experience, but at least I have some anecdotes now that are funny in retrospect.
I will no longer work anywhere that has this kind of culture.
Here's a made-up example:
// Parses a Foo message [spec]. Returns true iff the parse was successful.
// The `out` and `in` pointers must be non-null.
//
// [spec]: https://foo.example/spec
bool parse_foo(foo_t* out, const char* in, size_t in_len) {
assert(out);
assert(in);
// TODO(tracker.example/issue#123) Delete the Foo v1 parser. Nobody will
// be sending us Foo v1 message when all the clients are upgraded to Bar
// v7.1.
//
// Starting in Foo v2, messages begin with a two-byte version identifier.
// Prior to v2, there was no version tag at all, so we have to make an
// educated guess.
//
// For more context on the Foo project's decision to add a version tag:
// https://foo.example/specv2#breaking-change-version-tag
uint16_t tag_or_len;
if (!consume_u16(&tag_or_len, &in, &in_len)) {
return false;
}
if (tag_or_len == in_len) {
return parse_foo_v1(out, in, in_len);
}
return parse_foo_v2(out, in, in_len);
}
(1) Function comments are necessary to define a contract with the caller. Without it, callers are just guessing at proper use, which is particularly dangerous in C. Imagine if a caller guessed that the parser would gracefully degrade into a validator when `out` is NULL. (This is a mild example! I'm sure I could come up with an example where the consequence is UB or `rm -rf /`.)
(2) The TODO comment links to the issue tracker. There's no universe in which a reader could have found issue#123 purely by reading the code. On the aforementioned project, we were constantly rediscovering issues after wasting hours/days retreading old territory.
(3) Regarding the "Starting in Foo v2" comment... OK, fine, maybe this could have been inferred from reading the code. But it eases the reader into what's about to happen while providing further context with a link. On balance, I think this kind of "what" comment is worth including even though it mirrors the code.
> - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit
and
> do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them
So they have apparently enough time to read full words, it seems!
edit: I remember how some communities changed into: The help isn't good enough, you should help harder, I want you to help me by these conventions. Then they leave after getting their answer and no one has seen them ever again rather than join the help desk.
With “u”, I have to pause for a moment and think “that’s not a normal word; I wonder if they meant to type ‘i’ instead (and just hit a little left of target)?” and then maybe read the passage twice to see which is more likely.
I don’t think it’s quite as much a contradiction. (It still could be more gruff than needed.)
Now that Rust is succesfully assimilating those communities, I have noticed the same toxicity on less well moderated forums, like the subreddit. The Discord luckily is still great.
It's probably really important to separate the curmudgeons from the fresh initiates to provide an enjoyable and positive experience for both groups. Discord makes that really easy.
In the Ruby IRC channel curmudgeons would simply be shot down instantly with MINASWAN style arguments. In the Haskell IRC channel I guess it was basically accepted that everyone was learning new things all the time, and there was always someone willing to teach at the level you were trying to learn.
If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?
To be clear, I'm taking OP's experience as a common case of IRC newbies at that time on many channels. I certainly experienced something like it (though I can't remember the exact text), and I've read many others post on HN about the same behavior from the IRC days.
Edit: clarifications
Maybe that was the point?
Oh my, this reminded me how some 20 years ago I was a high school kid and dared to install a more nerdy Linux distro (which I won't name here) on my home computer. After some big upgrade, the system stopped booting, and when in panic I asked for help at the official forum, I got responses that were shaming me for blindly copying commands from their official website without consulting some README files. That's how I switched to Debian and never looked back.
I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)...
... I'm kinda envious.
Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software.
There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else.
Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation).
But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.
Sometimes, I really want to do X, I know it may be questionable, I know the safest is "probably don't want to do it", and yet, that's not someone else's (or LLMs) business, I know exactly what I want to do, and I'm asking if anyone knows HOW, not IF.
So IMO it's not a flaw, it's a very useful feature, and I really do hope LLMs stay that way.
That’s when I stopped investing any effort into that community.
Turned out it, counter-intuitively, was impossible. And not documented anywhere.
After some point it came to a point that if you're not asking a complete problem which can't be modeled as a logic statement, you're labeled as stupid for not knowing better. The thing is, if I knew better or already found the answer, I'd not be asking to SO in the first place.
After a couple of incidents, I left the place for the better. I can do my own research, and share my knowledge elsewhere.
Now they're training their and others models with that corpus, I'll never add a single dot to their dataset.
Someone who tells you something along the lines of "this is is common misconception, maybe you're looking for X instead" is being helpful and kind, and is not at all "labeling you as stupid". On Stack Overflow, it's not at all required that you actually need the question answered, as asked, in order to ask it. (You're even actively encouraged to ask and answer your own questions, as long as both question and answer meet the usual standards, as a way to share your expertise.)
It has never been acceptable to insult others openly on the site - but moderation resources are, and always have been, extremely strained, and the community simply doesn't see certain things as insulting or "mean" that others might. In particular, downvotes aren't withheld out of sympathy, because they are understood to be purely for content rating - but many users take them personally anyway. Curators commonly get yelled at when they comment (thus identifying themselves) to explain policy in polite but blunt copy-paste terms; and they get seethed at when they don't comment. There is a standard set of reasons to close questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476), and a how-to-ask guide (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask), and a site tour (https://stackoverflow.com/tour), and an entire Meta site with a variety of FAQ entries and other common references (for example, I wrote the "proposed faq" of https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808); but very few people seem interested in checking the extant documentation for the community norms, and then feel slighted when the community norms aren't what they assume they ought to be (because it works that way everywhere else). Communities should be allowed to have their own norms, so that they can pursue their own goals (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770).
A ton of users confuse "know better or find the answer ahead of time" for debugging. Stack Overflow allows for what are commonly called "debugging questions", but this does not mean questions wherein you ask someone to debug the code for you. Why? Because that can't ever be helpful to someone else - nobody else has your code, and thus they can't benefit from someone locating the bug in your code. The "debugging questions" that Stack Overflow does want are questions about behaviour that isn't understood, after you have isolated the misbehaving part. These are ideally presented in the form of a "minimal reproducible example" or MRE (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example).
Stack Overflow explicitly expects you to do research before asking your question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) - because most of the goal of the site is to cover questions that can't be answered that way. Traditional reference documentation is only part of the puzzle (https://diataxis.fr/); the Q&A site format allows for explanations (for "debugging questions") and how-to guides (in response to simple queries about how to do some atomic, well-specified task). (Tutorials don't fit in this format because they don't start with a clear question from the student.)
SO does suck, but i've found that if you clarify in the question what you want, and pre-empt the Y instead of X type answers, you will get some results.
In other words, perhaps in your very specific case, your question is not XY problem but for the vast majority of visitors from google it won't be so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Personally, I always answered SO from at least two perspectives: how the question looks for someone coming from google and how the author might interpret it.
Increasingly, the free products of experts are stolen from them with the pretext that "users need to be protected". Entire open source projects are stolen by corporations and the experts are removed using the CoC wedge.
Now SO answers are stolen because the experts are not trained like hotel receptionists (while being short of time and unpaid).
I'm sure that the corporations who steal are very polite and CoC compliant, and when they fire all developers once an AGI is developed, the firing notices will be in business speak, polite, express regret and wish you all the best in your future endeavors!
Additionally, these platforms tend to attract a fair amount of spam (self promotion etc) which can make it very hard to find high-quality responses.
Then equipped with the right term it's way easier to find reliable information about what you need.
Maybe we can get this multi-headed advantage back from LLMs by applying a team of divergent AIs to the same problem. I've had other occasions when OpenAI gave me crap that Claude corrected, and visa versa.
- do a task
- criticize your job on that task
- redo that task based on criticism
I find giving the LLM a process greatly improves the results.
Although if I’m truly honest with myself, even after many years of developing, the true cycle of me writing code is: over confidence, then shock it didn’t work 100% the first time, wondering if there is a bug in the compiler, and then reality setting in that of course the compiler is fine and I just made my 15th off-by-one error of the day :)
I too can write made up criticism if that’s what my boss wants in the workplace — but that doesn’t suddenly invalidate my ability to criticize my own work to improve it.
I've been arguing with Copilot back and forth where it gave me a half-working solution that seemed overly complicated but since I was new to the tech used, I couldn't say what exactly was wrong. After a couple of hours, I googled the background and trust my instinct and was able to simplify the code.
At that situation, where I iteratively improved the solution by telling Copilot things seem to complicated and this or that isn't working. That led the LLM to actually come back with better ideas. I kept asking myself why something like you propose isn't baked into the system.
I don’t want to be that guy saying this, but 99% of the top results on google from Medium related to anything technical is literally the reworded/reframed version of the official quick start guide.
There are some very rare gems, but it is hard to find those among the above mentioned ocean of reworded quick starts disguised as “how to X”, “fixing Y”. Almost reminds me of the SEO junks when you search “how to restart iPhone” and find answers that dance around letting it die from battery drain and then charge, install this software, take it to the apple repair shop, go to settings and traverse many steps while not saying that if you are between these models use the power+volume up button trick.
End of rant.
Blogging platforms are the worst though. Medium looked pretty OK when it first came out. But now it is just a platform for self-promotion. Substack is like 75% of the way through that transition IMO.
People who do interesting things spend most of their time doing the thing. So, non-practicing bloggers and other influencers will naturally overwhelm the people who actually have anything interesting to report.
The best Q&A platform would be the one where experts and scientists answer questions but sites like Wikipedia and Reddit showed that broad range of audience can also be pretty good at providing useful information and moderating it.
But to me the worst issue is it's now "Dead Overflow": most answers are completely, totally and utterly outdated. And seen that they made the mistake of having the concept of an "accepted answer" (which should never have existed), it only makes the issue worse.
If it's a question about things that don't change often, like algorithms, then it's OK. But for anything "tech", technical rot is a very real thing.
To me SO has both outdated and inaccurate answers.
On the one hand, good new answers can remain buried under mediocre and outdated answers more or less indefinitely, because they received hundreds of questionable upvotes in the past. (Despite popular perception, the average culture of Stack Overflow is very heavily weighted towards upvoting. I have statistical analysis of this on the meta site somewhere.)
On the other hand, there are tons of popular reference questions that had to be "protected" so that people couldn't just sign up and contribute the 100th answer (yes, the count really does range into triple digits in several cases, especially if you have access to deleted answers) to a question where there are maybe five actually reasonable-considered-distinct answers possible. And this protection is a quite low barrier - 10 reputation, IIRC. (I'm not sure what motivates people to write these new answers. It might have something to do with being able to point to a Stack Overflow profile which boasts that you've "reached" millions of people, due to its laughably naive algorithm for that.)
Doesn’t seem to be a great strategy to always need these things retrained, but OpenAI’s o1 has things from early 2024
Don’t ask about knowledge cutoffs anymore, that’s not how these things are trained these days. They don’t know their names or the date.
Not to mention there will be no data for the model to learn the new stuff anyway, since places like SO will get zero responses with the new stuff for the model to crawl
It is really difficult if you need project flags and configurations to make things work, instead of just code
Github issues gets crawled, where many of these frameworks have their community
That said, when that is not available, LLMs do an excellent job or rubber ducky-ing complicated topics.
Some of them are so overburdened that navigating all of the rules and expectations becomes a skill in itself. A single innocent misstep turns simple questions into lectures about how you’ve violated the rules.
One Slack I joined has created a Slackbot to enforce these rules. It became a game in itself for people to add new rules to the bot. Now it triggers on a large dictionary of problematic words such as “blind” (potentially offensive to people with vision impairments. Don’t bother discussing poker.). It gives a stern warning if anyone accidentally says “crazy” (offensive to those with mental health problems) or “you guys” (how dare you be so sexist).
They even created a rule that you have to make sure someone wants advice about a situation before offering it, because a group of people decided it was too presumptuous and potentially sexist (I don’t know how) for people to give advice when the other person may have only wanted to vent. This creates the weirdest situations where someone posts a question in channels named “Help and advice” and then lurkers wait to jump on anyone who offers advice if the question wasn’t explicitly phrased in a way that unequivocally requested advice.
It’s all so very tiresome to navigate. Some people appear to thrive in this environment where there are rules for everything. People who memorize and enforce all of the rules on others get to operate a tiny little power trip while opening an opportunity to lecture internet strangers all day.
It’s honestly refreshing to go from that to asking an LLM that you know isn’t going to turn your question into a lecture on social issues because you used a secretly problematic word or broke rule #73 on the ever growing list of community rules.
Toddlers go through this sometimes around ages 2 or 3. They discover the "rules" for the first time and delight in brandishing them.
The fundamental problem is that communities/forums (in the general sense, e.g., market squares) don't scale, period. Because moderation and (transmission and error correction of) social mores don't scale.
Maybe initially, but in the community I’m talking about rules are introduced to prevent situations that might offend someone. For example, the rule warning against using the word “blind” was introduced by someone who thought it was a good thing to do in case a person with vision issues maybe got offended by it at some point in the future.
It’s a small group of people introducing the rules. Introducing a new rule brings a lot of celebration for the person’s thoughtfulness and earns a lot of praise and thanks for making the community safer. It’s turned into a meta-game in itself, much like how I feel when I navigate Stack Overflow
Sounds like that one is on its way out anyway...
Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working.
Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man.
That is a sinking ship.
If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search.
Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform.
That’s some high level BS.
Why all the hate? AI answers can suck, definitely. Stackoverflow literally holds the modern industry up. Next time you have a technical problem or error you don't understand go ahead and avoid the easy answers given on the platform and see how much better the web is without it. I don't understand, what kind questions do you have?
As for the AI, it can only erode the quality of the content on SO.
I had one question that was a bit odd and went against testing dogma that I had a friend post. He pulled it 30 minutes later as he was already down 30 votes. It was a thing that's not best practice in most cases but also in certain situations the only way to do it. Like when you're testing apis you don't control.
In some sections people also want textbook or better quality answers from random strangers on the internet.
The final part is that you at least used to have to build up a lot of karma to be able to post effectively or at all in some sections or be seen. Which is very catch 22.
So it can be both very useful and very sh*t.
- it's less likely that the question even gets shown
- it's less likely that people will even click on it
- it's less likely that people who think it's bad will bother to vote on it, since the votes are already doing the right thing
- if it's really bad, it will be marked for deletion before it gets that many downvotes anyway
SO has its problems but I don't even recognize half the things people complain about.
SO is not a pure Q&A site. It is essentially a wiki where the contents are formatted as Q&As, and asking questions is merely a method to contribute toward this wiki. This is why, e.g., duplicates are aggressively culled.
The thing is, the meta community of Stack Overflow - and of other similar sites like Codidact - generally understand "Q&A site" to mean the exact thing you describe.
The thing where you "ask a question"[0] and start of a chain of responses which ideally leads to you sorting out your problem, is what we call a discussion forum. The Q&A format is about so much more than labelling one post as a "question" and everything else as an "answer" or a "comment" and then organizing the "answers" in a certain way on the page.
[0]: which doesn't necessarily have a question mark or a question word in it, apparently, and which rambles without a clear point of focus, and which might be more of a generic request for help - see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236.
It's working just fine. The decline in the rate of new questions is generally seen as a good thing, as it's a sign of reaching a point where the low-hanging fruit has been properly picked and dealt with and new questions are only concerned with things that actually need to be updated because the surrounding world has changed (i.e., new versions of APIs and libraries).
>Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform.
On the contrary. Almost everyone who comes to the site seems to want to use it in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the site's intended purpose. The goal is to build a searchable repository of clear, focused, canonicalized questions - such that you can find them with a search engine, recognize that you've found the right question, understand the scope of the question, and directly see the best answers to the highest-quality version of that question. When people see a question submission form and treat it as they would the post submission form on a discussion forum, that actively pollutes said repository. It takes time away from subject-matter experts; it makes it harder for curators to find duplicates and identify the best versions thereof to canonicalize; and it increases the probability that the next person with the same problem, armed with a search engine, will find a dud.