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Comment by Dragas | Hacker News Reader

During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.

I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.

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I went to my old SO account and found these questions that were closed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6067227/what-is-a-good-w...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8968434/i-am-having-trou...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20154313/how-can-i-gener...

As someone who was a budding programmer, I felt like my questions were decent attempts at laying out my problem but they were closed anyways.

At the second you got an interesting answer, though

It's not uncommon for me, while debugging, to find that someone has had the exact same problem as me, asked the question on stackoverflow, and that it has been closed a duplicate of a question which is only slightly related to it (and therefore any answers to that question are pretty useless).

I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.

And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.

How good are the questions?

Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.

How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?

They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.

You just described the complete opposite of the StackOverflow experience.

I disagree.

Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.

The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.

It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.

I relate to sfn42. That *is* the stack overflow experience. That is the average programming forum experience when you frequent it for more than just to get your problems solved.

I am happy they are dead. Humanity gets +1 for this one.

This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)

On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right.

On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.”

And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.

If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.

I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company

Or another LLM layer that takes a chat and formats it into a StackOverflow style Q/A post

Why do questions need to be good? Often times, you don't know what you don't know.

The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.

I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.

Here’s one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...

-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.

So, they should allow questions about installing random software?

It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same

I have had questions edited and closed and I have also been reticent to ask questions just from my own personal experience.

Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.

What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla

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