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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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The idea of SO is a little awkward too I think. With something like Wikipedia we're presumably in an academic mindset. Carefully gathering information, sources, structuring it all. And even then people can get turned off by the 'bureaucracy' or nitpicking or whatever.
When people show up at SO they're probably more in a "I can't figure this damn thing out!" mode. We're struggling with a problem, keeping a bunch of junk in our head, patience being tested, but we're still expected to have a bit of academic rigor in our question and discourse.
I don’t think it’s awkward, it’s kinda necessary.
Because the people who are answering questions there are doing it for that ideal of having a knowledge repository. No one is helping you because they think you and your specific problem are so important to demand their time. Especially with very tricky errors.
Not SO or it's methods, I mean the human experience. It can be awkward to be new to it all and to feel the frustration/tunnel vision associated with being stuck on one problem... and then step back and have to dissect your issue, structure your question correctly, etc.
It's just how it is, for exactly the reasons you stated. You can capture every little problem people face in programming, or you can hone in on useful patterns in goals, problems, and solutions, and educate people on how to see these things.
Yeah maybe SO should have this kind of warning when you’re writing your problem or question, or maybe it does already (it’s been a long time I posted a question myself).
In any case, it is an interesting case about a tricky social problem to solve. I used to listen to the SO podcast many years ago, and they always had multiple problems to deal with. One of them was to show the experts good questions, because beginner questions really turn off the experienced people and too much of that would drive them off the website, and at the same time beginners don’t have the habit of searching duplicates etc. so it’s common to spam the website with duplicate.
At some point they also restricted questions about opinions, because they lead to never ending threads with no objective answers. I’m sure they had a reason for that based on SO history, so the baggage if restrictions start increasing for newcomers to understand the rules. It’s tricky to balance the needs of power users and casual users because they’re often conflicting.