But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)
Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.
"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.
As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.
The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.
So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.
>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening
Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.
Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.
But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.
> (with seemingly little recourse)
As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:
> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)
> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.
"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .
> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.
Links:
https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions
Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.
If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.
(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373801 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334870
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352575
Rudeness happens all around, really:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326494
Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/523612
(And, of course, all of this really blows up once assumptions start getting made about who is or isn't especially sensitive: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665)
It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.
I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.
I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.
Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.
That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
