> The goal of Stack Overflow is to create a repository of high-quality questions, and high-quality answers to those questions.
That's confirmed by Jon Skeet's responses to Rob Conery's tweet. Skeet keeps focusing on downsides of what he calls "'bad' questions."
To be precise I'd say SO is about generating high-quality answers that people can actually find. One way that SO does this is by trying to incentivize high-quality questions.
Another way SO achieves this is by having questions that use the same or similar words to the ones most people use to construct a search engine query.
Yet another way is by having any question at all that induces or references a high-quality answer that shares keywords with common search queries.
Of those two additional categories, a large number of SO questions can be and are low-quality questions.
A significant number of my routes into SO high-quality answers come from what I'd consider low-quality questions. Sometimes the high-quality answers are inline. Sometimes I arrive at them through a mod message about duplicates or another hyperlink.
Especially when someone is first learning a topic, they need those low quality routes more than ever. After all, they don't yet know how to ask high-quality questions!
At least in my experience, those routes from low quality questions to high-quality answers are the one thing that makes SO unique. Those routes are essentially the skeleton bones of the scary, sometimes humiliating process of asking a noob question. (And now I learn it's also the exhausting and soul crushing experience of experts submitting their high-quality answers.)
So on the one hand, it'd be great if SO had figured out that when herding problem solvers it's a good idea to minimize their propensity for being obtuse and condescending.
On the other, it's a testament to the hacker spirit that SO instead caches the results of all that humiliation and sniping so that others don't have to go through it to find their answers. That's actually a big step for the subculture that came up with the error message, "You don't exist. Go away."
It's not just noob questions that get roasted though. Last week I had a C++ Windows API problem where something was working when compiled in 32 bit mode and not working in 64 bits. I have over 100K points so I know what I'm doing - I knew it had to be condensed into a toy example that could be examined carefully, or I'd get the same treatment any noob would get. The problem was I couldn't get the toy example to work in 32 bits either. Finally a coworker found a hint somewhere on the web (not StackOverflow) that pointed to a problem with the manifest in the 64-bit version (and both versions of my toy example). I couldn't craft a good question because I didn't know the answer yet!
Frankly you've essentially hit on the main issue there - the problem with SO in its current form is "bad questions". But people who are asking questions are typically not people who understand how SO works and don't know how to ask "good questions".
The other day I was having a weird problem and after much googling I found this:
This was sitting at -1 because the asker didn't know how to "craft" his/her question. Its a legitimate problem/bug in NodeJS LTS itself. It still hasn't been touched after I attempted to answer it =/
> I couldn't craft a good question because I didn't know the answer yet!
This might be what you meant originally, but either way, I think there's an important moral there: sometimes, the SO rules encourage people to ask good questions, and sometimes, in formulating a good question, the rules encourage good debugging/distillation skills, and askers end up solving their problem on the way!
But in this case the vital clue still came from the internet, just not SO. And I wasn't able to find it on my own - I generally consider my search skills among the best. I hope that's not just the Dunning-Kruger talking.
Sometimes it is possible to get these questions to fit so format by framing them as "how do I debug this" instead of "how do I solve this". But yeah, it is kind of awkward and doesn't always work out...
That's confirmed by Jon Skeet's responses to Rob Conery's tweet. Skeet keeps focusing on downsides of what he calls "'bad' questions."
To be precise I'd say SO is about generating high-quality answers that people can actually find. One way that SO does this is by trying to incentivize high-quality questions.
Another way SO achieves this is by having questions that use the same or similar words to the ones most people use to construct a search engine query.
Yet another way is by having any question at all that induces or references a high-quality answer that shares keywords with common search queries.
Of those two additional categories, a large number of SO questions can be and are low-quality questions.
A significant number of my routes into SO high-quality answers come from what I'd consider low-quality questions. Sometimes the high-quality answers are inline. Sometimes I arrive at them through a mod message about duplicates or another hyperlink.
Especially when someone is first learning a topic, they need those low quality routes more than ever. After all, they don't yet know how to ask high-quality questions!
At least in my experience, those routes from low quality questions to high-quality answers are the one thing that makes SO unique. Those routes are essentially the skeleton bones of the scary, sometimes humiliating process of asking a noob question. (And now I learn it's also the exhausting and soul crushing experience of experts submitting their high-quality answers.)
So on the one hand, it'd be great if SO had figured out that when herding problem solvers it's a good idea to minimize their propensity for being obtuse and condescending.
On the other, it's a testament to the hacker spirit that SO instead caches the results of all that humiliation and sniping so that others don't have to go through it to find their answers. That's actually a big step for the subculture that came up with the error message, "You don't exist. Go away."