Alain_Reve

It didn't happen only once and I tend to delete downvoted or closed questions.

There's one I'm currently trying to get re-opened: https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/117556/reasonin...

I use the same name on Stack Exchange sites. I'm not hiding my opinion :).

And if you're asking me this so you can go and downvote me because I dared criticize SO, feel free :p

Long live HN! Here nobody rushed in to say "SO is not a forum, it's a Q&A site". Ooops, I've just said it! Help, I got contaminated!

Seriously, I've seen what you mention happening with ubuntu forum (now mostly replaced by ask ubuntu). I think I know why.

Ubuntu forum had a section for beginner's questions. It was a nice idea, both for beginners and for not-so-advanced people who still wanted to contribute. There, you found questions you knew the answer to.

So you received faster replies if you posted in the beginner's section.

So more and more people started posting in the beginner's section. It got to the point where not only I didn't know the answer to most questions, but most of the time I couldn't even understand the questions. So I stopped reading them.

If the questions get more and more complex, the set of people able to answer them becomes smaller and smaller. People unable to answer them give up.

SO could very well go this way. Some experienced users are saying that there is a finite set of distinct questions people can ask about programming. The chances that your question is going to be closed as a duplicate is thus increasing. The accepted questions are getting more and more esoteric.

But... Wait until we all get our hands on quantum computers!

Thank for for making me laugh. What do you mean, "their job"? Are people actually getting paid to downvote?

"Be sure to upvote good posts to encourage new users." This guideline should definitely receive more attention.

Oh, having a question closed as a duplicate is often justified, at least in my case. Last time it happened to me, it was because I used "style sheet" as a search word instead of "CSS".

If you can't be bothered searching, just post and then follow the link given in the duplicate closure message. (I'm joking, yes? I'm not really advising people to do that.)

That's another problem and I admit is is annoying. You can get asked for information you don't know how to obtain and so you spend time searching how to get that info and (at least in my case) quite often searching what this info means.

Then you post it and nothing comes out of it.

Once it happened that I was the person asking for more info, because I knew the answer in one particular case. Turned out that case was different and I had no advice to offer. What was I supposed to do, post "Thank you but I'm sorry, I can't help you in this case"? I decided against it, thinking that if we started behaving like that the place would be full of "I don't know" replies.

I consider that the person asking for more info meant to help. When he doesn't follow up, it doesn't mean he never came back. Maybe he came back and found out he couldn't reply in that case. Maybe he wanted to come back and couldn't find the post again. Maybe he forgot. There could be hundreds of reasons, including "maybe he died". I can't know that.

When this happens to me, I feel disappointed but not angry. IMHO, the most important point is that this person, at one point, showed he wanted to help me. And he didn't waste my time. My question is probably better with the extra information included.

In fact, that could very well be the reason why the extra info was required. My question seemed unclear or incomplete to someone, so this person asked me to improve it. That's helpful in itself.

Because people who distribute funding don't read your papers - they wouldn't understand them -, don't look up any supplementary material, they just count how many papers you've published.