this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
56 points (92.4% liked)
Programming
17406 readers
94 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't really think that's the problem here. It's pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here's a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I've had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:
If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It's clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.
In fact if you look back at most of my questions you'll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn't provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it's just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand
there's a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice 'feeling' of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It's literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much 'reward' as possible.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.