Especially in my early days venturing into Python (with which I am still only casually acquainted), I’d google a problem and end up on an SO question outlining my exact problem, only see “closed as duplicate” or a bunch of snarky comments about how the questioner didn’t RTFM or whatever.
Why do they hate people asking questions on this site specifically about asking questions? Part of being a noob is not just about not knowing the bare facts of a thing, but not knowing where to look for answers or even what to ask.
While I’m on this soapbox, I hate it when people say “just google it.” because most of the time I see that phrase it’s because that forum post is the first google result.
At some point people forget this didn’t feel easy or intuitive to them either. Then “simple” questions and complaints come off as more annoying or funny.
(For context they are replying to this link https://sherlockproject.xyz/installation)
(Accidentally replied instead of editing)
Why do they hate people asking questions on this site specifically about asking questions?
This is literally what I thought multiple times now after posting questions there.
I have to say that each of the stack-network sites feels a little different. I think it heavily depends on the mods themselves and how they manage it.
For example, I found the AskUbuntu site very accepting, even to broader questions on Linux and hypothetical issues surrounding it.
The Electronics Stackexchange I’ve had mixed experiences. Some were very helpful, but others seemingly demanded that I measure every single component with an oscillator and give them the readings, even listing manufacturer specs wasn’t enough, question closed as “not enough info”.
That’s when I got frustrated, because, why not just leave it open, maybe someone would still be willing to chime in?
This feels weird to me, because I will not use this site as a scientific researcher with a nerwork of equally educated colleagues, but as a hobbyist, I simply don’t have all the means/knowledge some people expect, so who is the expected userbase?
I’ve done some research after posting the OP, by which I mean watching a few YT videos of people who have looked into the matter. It seems the founder was insistent that the site not become another Yahoo answers, so the process of asking a question was made to be high friction in order to improve the signal to noise ratio for people looking up answers later, such as with google.
While they succeeded in not becoming another Yahoo Answers, they’ve instead become so impenetrable as to be useless. It got to the point I’d avoid clicking on SO when it came up in search results because I figured the question wouldn’t be answered anyway, so they ended up not making the experience better for future googlers after all.
Toxic-culture won.
Period.
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I have good experience with all the stack/exchange etc. sites. I once tried to ask a question there, and that was horrible, but for finding solutions it’s good. Of course one actually has to click on links provided, or scroll down to further answers, or even read comments.
It’s a horrible meritocracy for people participating, but for people looking for answers it’s definitely a net positive.
When they attack you and delete your question or lock it because they don’t want “your kind” polluting their forum, that isn’t meritocracy: that is national-narcissism.
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Used to spend a lot of time reading meta.stackoverflow (looked an awful lot like work at a quick glance). The sentiment from the question answerer side is something like: “I’ve answered this exact question 100s of times, why won’t anyone search”. Then this expands into enough irritation that you get a closing frenzy and similar sounding questions get caught in the cross hairs. And then everyone’s mad. (plus a sprinkle of people who are just assholes on top of that)
If I was a mod here I’d lock this post with “duplicate” as a parody.
SO was good 10-15 years ago, but it has gotten bogged down in a combination of user elitism, mod incentives to do anything, and outdated answers remaining canonical.
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User elitism: You see this anywhere else too. Older users hold power on the site, and this tends to result in walling out those with actual refreshing ideas.
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Mod incentives: The system rewards mod actions, even if those actions aren’t the correct one. For example, closing a question as duplicate, even if it’s not, rewards the closer.
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Due to the above, the “correct” answer to a question never gets updated, and it doesn’t take later versions into account. As such the site becomes a collection of outdated answers to questions that may or may not still be relevant.
Source: Formerly prolific user of multiple stackexchange sites
If it’s gotten worse in the last 15 years - yikes.
I used it a lot my first few years in IT, and it was horrible back then. I mean, as far as the issues described by OP.
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My personal theory:
The internet has changed quite a lot in the last 20 years. At the beginning it was almost only nerds on the internet who were running their communities on their free time. Back then there were no algorithms which decided what you see. Everything was sorted by date and recent posts and as such every user saw the same content. So a netiquette developed around that time: Don’t post duplicate stuff. Don’t double post, edit your post. Read the site rules. Search for information first. No low effort threads. Don’t necro a thread without substantial new information. And so on.
That was basic internet netiquette and at least my feeling is that it was universally understood and followed quite strictly. On all the forums, not just a specific one.
I also violated some of these netiquette rules and got reprimanded for it - not by mods, but even by other users. The point is, those were universal internet rules and the whole community was enforcing it.
Then social media happened and changed the way the internet worked. Algorithms were now deciding what you can see. There was no need to actively mod content. On social media the netiquette that ruled the internet had no purpose. And as such people never really encountered that.
Now Stack Overflow is one of the last of its kind where that ancient netiquette still plays a major role. An internet forum which tries to categorize and keep a “clean” library of knowledge. Against a flood of new users who do not know the netiquette. In such an environment mods are the only ones left to remind user of the netiquette. Slowly but surely they lose patience and start power tripping.
It’s a case of Eternal September
Then social media happened
Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:
- they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
- it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
- everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
- the site becomes hard to maintain as a side hobby, including server costs
- they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
- ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the blowback
- people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
- ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
- search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
- costs also rise because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
- the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them
- someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
- back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and need to be replaced by rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and lousy moderation starts to erode the experience
- heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too
- everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but this progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly by hand to select individuals. But this works against exponential growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may go unpaid and necrosis may inevitably set in without more robust growth. One day the site goes offline.
The folks who say “just google it” are often unaware of how their own experience allows them to determine good instructions from bad.
For instance, if I told you to flummox the bumdarten by fluxing the foogartner, how would you begin learning what any of those words mean? How will you know if the bumdarten docs you’ve found are even the current version?
But at some point we have all encountered someone who simply asks for help instead of figuring out how to do it. And those people are usually in management.
Anyone who unironically says just google it, and doesn’t google it themselves and provides a link to a concise answer should be shot on sight.
Same for the RTFM crowd. So many manuals are filled with so much fluff that just gets in the way of actually being useful.
I recently came across a horrible piece of software called Silverfast which now doesn’t have a manual anymore. They still have their manuals up to some windows xp version which may or may not still be how certain parts of its operation are done, impossible to know. In lieu of a manual they’ve posted some videos on YouTube, some on Vimeo, different narrators each time, some terrible quality, some just fine, some of them seem from the screen recording to be a couple of versions old, some are more recent. They’re covering single topics so that it SORTA functions like a replacement for the manual in that you can search for topics like one would in a manual and hopefully find a video but it doesn’t function like a manual does since it’s obviously not static and not a proper reference and you’ve got to imprecisely try to seek around to get back to bits where the info you needed was. To add insult to injury, of you search the website for the manual, they have a document referred to as the user manual so you think you’ve finally found it, but it turns out it’s a quick start installer guide which would annoy me at the best of times because normally I’d say the steps are so basic that this document need not exist because it would be impossible to have the level of competence necessary to operate the software without also possessing the necessary competence for basic install but, but astonishingly those instructions are WRONG!
The frustrating thing is that the videos broken up by topic aren’t a bad idea at all, IN ADDITION to a real manual but as a replacement!? I was so pissed.
Yeah. If you’re gonna be all high and mighty at least prove you’ve read it by citing chapter and verse to help the noob.
What perplexes me about the rtfm and google it answers is why would someone waste their time to type it out?
They must think there’s something in it for them. I guess they place some value in being seen as a twat. Granted at work I work hard to cultivate that image for productivity reasons. But why do I care about random internet strangers on a pseudo anonymous webshite?
And sometimes it’s impossible to google something if you don’t know the correct keywords to find what you are looking for.
Yes. I tell people that IT isn’t about knowing the answer right away, it’s about knowing which questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the results. These skills are in no way obvious if you aren’t familiar with the system you’re working with.
Problem is that more experienced folks forget that they were noobs once, too, and there was a time they didn’t know what ARP was, let alone that not sending ARP response packets could cause a device to stop communicating.
Another thing about seasoned professionals - they have top-down and bottom-up knowledge of how their product works. They can discard a lot of superfluous information out of hand, which allows them to narrow the scope very quickly.
So when a newb is parsing an error log, they look at any and all related errors. 90% of their mental capacity is being used to judge each entry, asking themselves “Is this thing relevant to the problem?” Chasing red herrings.
Meanwhile, the senior engineer can glance over and see the 100 lines of network errors are just an uncaught exception from a deprecated module because a line of code never got commented out. Or some such shit.
Never understood the issue with “closed as duplicate”, it always links to the original question so you get your answer there. And for most things even the duplicate has a solid accepted answer too. Maybe I visit a different part of the site through my questions?
I’ve also usually done OK when i come across these types of answers. I mean when I see it as answer to other people’s questions. I have never needed to actually ask my own question in about 15 years of using it - which is testament to how many answers are already on there somewhere. It’s very much not evidence that I know stuff.
I think sometimes it takes lateral thinking or jargon translation to interpret the old answer in context of the new question - which could make the old answer inaccessible to the new person - however technically applicable it might be.
In my experience the question is either not actually a duplicate or the answer is no longer valid.
What turned me off of SO entirely is when you actually do google it and the results are all SO posts with “closed as duplicate” and no actual answers :(
The snake fully ate itself.
if it was actually a duplicate, that would be perfect but it seems the majority of the time, its just a question similar and in some cases I’ve even seen them link a question that if you knew anything about it, wouldn’t have been even remotely related.
Then you’re going to hate “just LLM it”.
I saw that in the wild a week or two back. Friend was learning a new job, all her trainer was able to say was “just ask AI” and send her to copilot.
I felt so bad for her.
I feel especially bad for the trainer. They really are asking to be replaced if that’s their attitude to teaching.
It’s a family run company so super unlikely that they would replace the trainer due to relation to the owners. Probally what is encouraging that lack of effort.
