alt Hacker NewsI loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
I have engaged with some younger devs who don't even bother turning the thought into a question. They make statements and expect you to do the work of inferring the question. Which I feel like they got from chatbots since it's faster and LLMs don't care if you make them jump through hoops.
> The better my questions got, the fewer responses I got.
There is a sweet spot of providing just enough detail but not too much in asking a good question. And even the best only “bat 300”. I've posted answers to my own questions plenty of times when I got no response.
I hear you on the hostility. Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow. The first time I tried asking a question on IRC I got mocked so bad I logged out and never tried again. Most forums were like that.
I gravitated to Ruby back then because it was one of the only forums people would be patient and empathetic with me.
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I have heard great things about the Ruby community. I don't use the language, myself, so I wouldn't know from experience.
Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.
Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting
I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email
> I loved it when I iterated on my question so much that I accidentally solved it before I got to posting.
Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).
> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.
SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.