Never say never but I don't think it's very easy to build a broad and helpful community where the factors you listed aren't at play in people's motivations.

I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with. Discord servers are a great example

As someone who used to frequently help out online in the past, the problem is that the questions never stop coming and most are usually from people who refuse to do the bare minimum amount of research or reading. This would be fine were it not typically bundled with a lack of respect for your time and a strong sense of entitlement.

Probably true for some sites and not others. I would definitely say the more niche you go in subreddits, the more helpful people are, but that's not really true of Stack Overflow communities.

But it's not

That's what made Slack so appealing early on - IRC-like communication with history

Edit: typo

It's 2022, not 1988 :)

Too much hassle, imo

I've also seen quite a few instances where the person needed fundamental corrections for their problems before their main problem could even be addressed, and they absolutely refused to accept those basic corrections first. It makes it impossible to help them with their real problem.

The tech support example of this is when the phone tech requires someone to reboot the device before they'll continue diagnosing the problem. I only worked phone tech support for a year, but in that time I had quite a few people who thought they knew better and refused to reboot the device when asked, but when I forced them to do it, the problem fixed itself. When it didn't fix it, I was able to get on with the rest of the diagnosis.

When I first took that job, I even let them refuse to reboot. After a handful of times that I couldn't figure out what was wrong because it made no sense, and finally rebooting fixed it, I followed the company line of requiring the reboot up front after all. OTOH, I did believe them when they said they rebooted it already. If they lied about that, it generally caused it to be a very long, frustrating call for them, and my call times were already too short, so I didn't worry about it. (Yes, too short. My call times were low enough that it looked like I might be just getting people off the phone without fixing things, though of course none of my recorded calls showed that happening. My boss literally told me to chat with the customers more.)

YOU are not wrong. But this answer is the wrong answer. I believe you fall in OPs category no 2.

He’s asking for specific forums.. so, you know any? :)

What if, there was a StackOverflow like forum which, for a given question ONLY the person who asked could see all the answers, and only the answer they chose as correct/relevant/good would be the one published. That might decrease the noise in different conversations.

It's one of the things I liked about the SlashDot moderation system: There was a "-1 Offtopic" flag. No matter how good or interesting your answer was, if it is offtopic it should be marked as such.

Stack Overflow has recognized that it has significant enough of a problem with accepted answers becoming outdated or just being plain wrong. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/411352/outdated-ans...

As an example, I point to https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1313... which for a long time had https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/131401 as the accepted answer.

> ... That might decrease the noise in different conversations.

While it may, I fear (and having seen this in other places) that this would lead to some entitlement by the person asking the question seeing it as a personal help service instead of trying to build a repository of information.

As someone who might answer, the related part would be "I don't want to be waisting my time duplicating work that someone else is doing."

That one is so annoying because it's equally likely that step was put in as a generic "why not", or as a crucial step. Half the software installers will tell you to restart when they're finished even though it's not necessary anymore. Many first level support people will tell you to restart your device when you're reporting their page returning 5XX. It's an issue with the industry conditioning people with BS rather than with customers expecting BS.

Methinks you either don't know what is "necessary", assume you know more than the developers of said software as to what is "necessary", or that you know better than OS vendors what is "necessary"

Rebooting is simple, fast, and basically pain-free 99.99% of the time

It clears memory, hung processes, file handles, and a host of other things - any (or all) of which could interact poorly with whatever software you're installing/upgrading may rely on

If an installer wants a reboot, I fully expect the software to likely not work 100% correctly until said reboot has completed

That's an end user view. For a server used by many employees, rebooting is disruptive, has to be scheduled out of hours, and requires extra testing afterwards.

> It clears memory, hung processes, file handles, and a host of other things

So does restarting a given process / service. (unless we're in the "your system is broken anyway" territory)

Basically if the app is not modifying GPO, there's a tiny number of reasons to restart.

Nope, it's a server and datacenter management view

Been doing this for close to a quarter century across all kinds of platforms

When the vendor says to restart, it's the Right Thing™ to do (whether you like it or not)

Heck, just last week I got locked out of VPN on Mac OS due to not being up to date even though the system claimed it was. Guess what I had to do to get the update to appear?

Comes back on the phone: "you were right, the outlet isn't working."

No money came out.

He called the support number on the machine.

They said "before we proceed, please humor me, put your hand in each pocket, and check the money is not there."

The money was there.

In my experience, order isn't actually that critical. Sure, answering the question they asked won't solve their problem, but it will answer their question. Maybe solving their problem isn't what they want or need. Even if it is, the quickest and most painless way to navigate this social dynamic is to just answer the question they asked, and let them run into the other problems you predicted.

This is especially important on StackOverflow (but also important to forums in general), because the entire point is to publish an answer to the question so others can find it later.

By answering a person's problems instead of answering their question, you are just leaving more noise for the next person to dig through.

Of course, it's still common to stumble about and ask the wrong questions; so how do we reconcile that? I think what StackOverflow is missing is a path for users to answer a question with another question. If we could communicate with the question asker to rephrase their question, then we could have them edit it, and trim the search engine noise for everyone else.

I'm still half convinced they did something on their end and just didn't tell me. If they didn't, they've got another "stupid user lied about rebooting" story on their hands.

Far too many companies treat tech support as a necessary evil trash cost center, instead of the absolute goldmine that it can be.

Tech support is a highly concentrated vein of real-time descriptions of things that can, and in many cases must be improved for your product to thrive. Don't ignore it — actively mine it!

When I see users forced to waste time with elaborate workarounds and hacks to use software I made I feel real guilt even if I had no way to know it wasn't well suited to their needs.

I didn't realize this is a problem I had, until my kids started emulating it.

  daughter: 'Dad what are we having for dinner?'
  dad: 'um, not sure'
  daughter: 'is it something baked?'
  dad: 'uh maybe, don't know, why'
  daughter: 'will you use the oven?'
  dad: 'ok, whats this about?'
  daughter: 'can I bake some cookies, and ask my friends to come for a baking sleepover?'
  dad: ffs

Absolutely!

It will also help if people can see what you already tried, e.g. code, links, screenshots, and photos.

1. Ask your question

2. Create a new account and give your question a wrong answer (or point out mistakes or whatever)

3. Watch as 90% of pedantic idiots focus fire on that guy who clearly doesn't know things

4. Profit

http://bash.org/?152037

Are you asking this question because you want to contribute hundreds of answers for free to this better forum?

However much it would take to distract them from their day jobs where they're adding tons of value.

Hope that helps :)

/s, but like others said I think it does get to the heart of the problem where only people who get a kick out of pointing out flaws in small details in their free time hang around on technical forums.

[0] a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.

[1] fussy or pedantic fault-finding.

Then they take this mentality to human interaction/conversation and turn into the insufferable nit-pickers that OP is complaining about. You write a 3 paragraph comment in a web forum like HN, and someone inevitably swoops in, ignoring your main point to argue: "Aha! On paragraph 2, line 5, you said 'all' but probably meant 'many' because I can clearly find counter-example A, B, and C. Therefore your entire comment is incorrect!"

4. Enthusiastic X-Y-Problem solvers. You asked about X but the replier is an expert in Y, so he asks “what problem are you really trying to solve?” Hoping to steer you to Y so he can shine. No, sorry. I really do want to just solve X thankyouverymuch.

XY Problem in an Ideal world: Consider that Y, not X, may be the best route. But feel free to respond and discuss how your problem relates to X and Y.

XY Problem in actual forums: You're wrong. X is bad, you should do Y. X is forbidden knowledge. You're not even allowed to ask how X compares to Y. Y is axiomatic.

In the forum, the forum has likely been there long before the person posing the question. Often the people in the forum have seen that exact XY problem many times before and it is necessary for the person asking the question to demonstrate additional knowledge to get past the "yes, I know this is an XY problem and these are the constraints I have" to get it to be a novel problem once again.

This isn't saying it is ok to be a jerk, but it is important for the person asking the question to be aware of the history of the community and the forum.

Often this is best done with lurking for a while before asking questions (this was the norm on Usnet - https://www.24hoursupport.com/netiquette-for-newsgroups/ "Lurking is the practice of reading the postings in a group for a week or so before posting a message yourself. No one will know you are lurking, and you can get a feel for the types of personalities in the group, what types of things are discussed, and what topics or behaviors are frowned upon.").

I would contend that in many places today, the "join in and participate now" precludes lurking and so it is much easier to run into the stuff that is common knowledge (not forbidden) to the community that the new person hasn't become acquainted with.

I'm not sure how to best get around this, other than making your X question extremely clear, and describe why Y is not what you're looking for.

As a really specific example: if people don't know that certain generations of Intel microprocessors calculated sine(epsilon close to 0) incorrectly, and ask about it, it really is incumbent on the answerers to not be a-holes.

Extrapolate out and consider various IRC channels. Python has massive documentation. A common answer is to point people to the docs, as they are large, and to encourage reading the docs. This is helpful and encourages discoverability. C, on the other hand, is an almost incomprehensible mess for discoverability. So a newbie asks a volunteer channel in IRC about what may be causing a segfault simply because the newbie has no sense of the tooling to help them discover the issue. Newbie gets berated (I have both experienced this and watched this happen). C channel is therefore toxic for newbies because it pushes them down arbitrarily, Python is good because lifting newbies up.

Common thread? Make it really, really easy to use tools, have copious amount of well-described examples organized in a sane way, and crosslink definitions and concepts.

Most people don’t seem to understand this.

Maybe it seems rude or condescending to address a poorly formed question, but I'm not sure what else you can do since you have to realize that low effort questions also have a cost.

For example, have you ever tried helping someone where you have to ask a 20 questions just to glean enough info just to help them? You can see this on SO all the time.

Beginner question: "How to make a webserver using bash?".

Non-beginner question: "How to make a webserver using bash? I have this weird embedded system and it is missing SDK, http daemons or programming languages, but somehow comes with coreutils and fully-featured bash 5.0.17. And I really need to serve a single static webpage off it"

The first question will get X-Y answers like "here is how to install apache" and "you probably want to make CGI script instead, here is how you do it". The second one will get the interesting answers.

    One time my car wouldn't start at an Mc Donalds, and I asked inside if I could leave my car there while I went and got jumper cables.  I didn't want them to tow my car while I was gone.

   The person behind the counter didn't know if they would tow my car or not but told me the best way to get around was the bus, and here is why public transit was a better way to get around, and so on.

   My mistake was having a car at all.

This doesn't help your problem in the past, but maybe problems in the future. Helped me a lot in the winter.

[0]: https://xyproblem.info/

As such, answering a poor question (unclear explanation, bad code, unusual use of an idiom, etc.) as it is written, while helping the person who asked it, would likely confuse future readers and eventually cause more harm than good. The pedants/nitpickers are thus serving a crucial purpose in caring more about the long-term value of the Q&A resource than the individual question-asker; a question asker who is unwilling to implement feedback and improve the question (within the bounds of reason) is not a valuable community member, and their questions might be deleted for the benefit of others.

OP is aware that StackOverflow is failing to meet their needs. That's the entire point.

If the ultimate goal is to serve StackOverflow itself, that may be valuable; but it still sucks for users.

The way I see it, in Stack Overflow's model, the people asking questions are not the users, they are the contributors. The actual users are the folks coming from web searches (or howdoi) later on.

As some other comments here said, if the OP wants a platform where they would be the customer, they would probably need to pay for that. And as for my recommendation to the OP based on that: codementor.io

I find general forums to give answers that don't answer the question. I find product-specific forums provided by the vendor as a level of customer support, to be much better. I guess that's not always a thing for programming though.

As you and many others have noticed, it appears that the type of people who can and do spend dozens of hours every month answering questions or writing instructions tends to overlap with "insufferable pedants" to a very large extent.

Thus I don't believe a forum that works the way you want can exist. The pattern you're observing is simply a reflection of the people that use the Internet today. By discouraging pedantry and by reducing opportunities to show off perceived intellectual superiority, you are effectively excluding the exact group of people who make tech forums work in the first place.

You could start trying to be less nit-picky about other peoples answers. As long as there is a good answer on Stack Overflow that gets up-voted, accept that and just ignore the rest.

You could start being less pedantic about people making suggestions to avoid the problem entirely by using a different tool/library. Those answers might not be useful to you, but to someone else reading the SO overflow post they might.

You could try being less of an evangelist for "the one and only right way to answer a question" - and accept that different people have different discussion styles. Again - as long as you get the answer you wanted, allow those other answers to exist next to that.

As for the voting/karma behavior... when you ask the question, you get to accept the answer you like the most. It's in your hand to "reward" the kind of answer you like the most.

But questions like "What are the most restrictive permissions I can put on /var/lib/foobar without breaking foobar" are not actually answered by saying "Don't use foobar. bobaz is better".

And questions like "I am using foobar v10, and I am wondering if there are performance issues with the bleep function, or problems upgrading to v11 or later" shouldn't be answered with "The bleep function violates the sacred separation between model-view-controller. Do not use it."

None of these are answer the questions in any way.

It's not a matter of "different people have different discussion styles". It's as if they see the mention of certain keywords and want to post a dogmatic criticism.

Not getting the good answer you want is an entirely separate problem from getting "pedantic" answers you don't want.

Reducing the amount of pedantic answers will NOT increase the amount of good answers. A lack of good answers is NOT caused by having pedantic answers.

People giving good answers do exist on SO - but just like everyone they have limited time - and they can choose which questions to spend that time on. They answer the questions they like most - well laid out, all relevant information contained, information about prior research/efforts to fix things, asking party seems to know/understand the basics, etc. - whether they pick your question to answer or not, depends solely on your question - not on the pedantry of other answers.

The big problem here is, that cracking down on "pedantic" questions through strict moderation - will ultimately have a negative effect on the amount of good answers on the platform. Simply because there will be less answers in general, an people will feel more reluctant about writing an answer - or leave entirely, after being punished for a not perfectly on-topic answer elsewhere.

But if you want to increase the amount of good answers on the platform as much as possible, you'll have to adopt a fairly lenient stance toward the pedantic answers... foster a free-for-all atmosphere, where all answers are welcome - but only the good ones get upvoted and accepted. Consider it training the next generation of good answer-givers.

So the big question is - if you can't have both - do you want a forum that has MORE good answers - or do you want a forum that has LESS pedantic answers?

If a lot of people ask questions where there are significant problems with the premise or the context they assume, or people doing things in a fundamentally wrong way, or people asking about something which is not really the problem they have, then you'll end up with the "answerers" assuming most questions have those problems.

In any case, sorry I can't help you find such a place.

It's the main place - outside of politics - where reading the worst, most twisted and nonsensical interpretation of people's words is the norm.

The current example of "I like oranges" with the response of "what!? You think apples are bad!?" is the perfect example.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any large places that have more reasonable behaviors. The only places where I've found the good behavior persists are small, sculpted communities where most of the people know each other in the real world.

- "But I never said anything about vitamin C"

What about that oversized restrictive packaging that is only useful if you also have a knife? Let's be honest here, nobody even eats oranges, they make juice. Let that sink in for a moment. What the fuck are we? Five-year-olds? Guavas are edible straight from the tree, just grab this bad boy, stab your crooked veneers into it and let that substance with the superior amount of vitamin C flow all over your mouth.

- "... You're talking about juice? What?"

Well, since you're insisting, take a seat there, Peter Pan, 'cause I'm about to blow your mind: guess what else Guavas can be besides clearly preferable over oranges? They can be juiced. It's not only for advanced users. They really put some thought into that beginner's journey.

Look, I'm gonna be truthful with you, people see you with oranges, they know immediately you're not serious about your tropical fruits. Be better. Get Guavas.

1) Observer expectancy bias, when they expect you to be wrong they work from there to prove their expectation

2) Anchoring bias, or prefering the solution you already know. Dogmatists will always exist, the upvote/downvote system helps them gain prominience and egg each other on.

3) Pro-innovation bias. People being exited by new shiny toys is another basic bias that is hard/impossible to overcome. same if the opposite of status quo bias and some people being terrified of changing anything.

I think the issues you find are made worse by the upvote downvote system. But the reality is that forums without that system still exist but have other problems. Such as discoevrability. Secondly by having no input from lurkers into the best solution, you will have to shift through the same haystack of domatics, evangelists and nitpickers (and hopefully those actively trying to help) without external validation.

You are arguing that the external validation (the unhelpful replies in stack overflow) is currently misaligned with helping your problems, and I agree. I have sometimes found the same problems in those websites. But they have some clever solutions, like the discussion below proposed solutions allows for a back and forth related to a specific proposed solution.

So if you ask about a performance issue and 3 guys mention MVC stuff and 1 guy brings up moving it to Electron and finally someone mentions a particular way to multithread your problem, you can comment below that guys comment and start a discussion there completely side stepping the ones you don't care for.

I think perhaps the person who asked could have a bigger sway on which answers rise to the top instead of people outside upvoting. But I believe there is a way to pin a reply as having worked so thats another way to dissuade the nitpickers and evangelists from showing up

In my experience, everything you said is 100% true -- once groups get big enough. But each of those points is, equally, 100% false for small groups.

For example, the Raku community is fairly small, so the r/rakulang subreddit is friendly. For that matter, even the [raku] StackOverflow tag is friendly! Last I checked, the same was true of the corresponding Rust tags, though I know they've grown a lot since I was a regular there.

Hopefully they got the mods under control but I think #4 should be "out of control mods". I think all 4 can be applied on almost all public forums and #4 is the most killer because of how impactful it is.

In my experience, these are typically quite accurate. I’ve seen a small percentage get reopened upon clarification, but people often whine about the dupe closings because their question is “how do I calculate 2+2?” and the linked answer is “how do I calculate 3+3”.

Add in "I am getting an error" (without providing the actual error) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem posts, times a couple hundred thousand instances, and fairly strict community moderation becomes the only thing permitting a little signal in amongst the noise. SO's original intent was never to be a free-for-all Q&A with repeated similar questions; it was intended to also be a big reference of existing answered questions.

(See https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/... "Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit." That "meets wikipedia" bit is key.)

If I land on a page with the question "What does the blue button on the back of a Mark 3 defrobulator do?" at the top in large friendly letters, I am likely to be interested in that question, and I'm unlikely to be interested in any of the conversation that follows on from "Why do you think you want to press the blue button?".

Sometimes that conversation nets out as "you will kill someone if you press the blue button in certain circumstances", and that's an important clarifier to have access to.

"How do I increase the PHP memory limit? I'm getting a memory error when I foreach through lots of rows." is likely best answerable not by increasing the memory limit (and running into the same problem with a few more rows), but by chunking the rows to avoid the memory leak.

I don't see a downside to "there's probably a better way of doing this you should at least consider, here's why" as an answer to a question. SO permits multiple answers; someone'll likely be along shortly and give the php.ini answer, but it's not the best approach.

But it's much better if it comes after answering the actual question, not instead of it, because (as you say), SO was intended to be a big reference of answered questions.

A well written answer doesn't have any of "the conversation that follows" in it.

One of the challenges with users unfamiliar to the Q&A format is that they treat SO like a forum and try to force in doing replies and back and forth into questions and answers (collectively posts) when the site's design is actively and intentionally hostile to such.

I've noticed that not being able to silently disagree/disapprove results in a community where people who genuinely and fundamentally disagree with each other end up interacting a lot and often become friends.

I don't think any particular format is right, just adding my experience.

It is useful when used correctly but as can be seen on Reddit (and somewhat on HN but it typically balances out) it is used as "I disagree" / "I don't like this" vs being used more like a moderation tool "this has nothing to do with the conversation".

I like how HN restricts the downvote for a while but I think with Reddit being so popular there should be an opt-in where you have to acknowledge the statement "The downvote is a moderation tool and isn't used to express disagreement" (I feel like that near exact verbage is somewhere like in the guidelines but I am meaning making it required acknowledgement).

On HN before I had access to the downvote, getting one felt so strongly negative I decided I wouldn’t use it, and have stuck to that ever since. But in the mean time, I started to see real utility in it’s effects as a soft moderation tool. Downvoting someone who’s relevant but wrong or making invalid assumptions wouldn’t meet your strict moderation requirement, but downvotes do tend to sort the conversation correctly helping keep the good stuff at the top, and also being a signal (albeit imperfect) for readers. Using upvotes also helps with the sort, but doesn’t change the color of comments (maybe it should!). So I’ve questioned myself whether I should stick to not downvoting, and I only keep avoiding it out of some sort of ritual or pride or something, I dunno.

It’s interesting because upvotes here are used far more frequently than downvotes, and downvotes are strictly limited, but we still have disproportionately strong reactions to downvotes. It’s also worth noticing how because downvotes change a comment’s color, it often prevents people from piling on; many comments stay at 1 or 2 downvotes and people leave it alone after that, even when many many people notice it’s wrong or breaking guidelines.

Not letting people just say "I disagree with this" without a reason might help remove this pendantry and echo filterness.

Sometimes you want that! Other times you don't.

I guess it’s a strategy to increase their counters/stats or something?

Anyway, that really unacceptable.

Reddit is a mix of all of the ones you mentioned, but there are some amazing subreddits out there. At the same time, answer.microsoft.com is in the worst end, and have made me angry hundreds of times. For non-tech, Facebook groups (yeah yeah I know) can be pretty amazing, and often the only resource.

- I recently busted my laptop from a BIOS upgrade, and there was a very frequent thread on r/LenovoLegiin that one-shot fixed it.

- I'm having some driver issues that prevent me from updating Windows 11. Literally hundreds of search results on answer.microsoft.com are canned responses by the same guy named Sumit, and with hundreds of web sites that simply scrape that Microsoft site, fixing a Windows bug is quite painful.

- For non-tech, I prefer Facebook groups. I'm setting up my first DIY solar setup at the moment, and a few very active Facebook groups were the only resource to source certain stuff, and very elaborate guides especially on making LiFePo4 battery packs. Building a battery pack isn't as easy or straight forward, and having a bunch of people often in the same geographic location helps to borrow tools, pick some brains, and even to trade.

For expats, especially in Asia, Facebook groups are the mainstream. Everything from pub crawls to apartment rentals happen on Facebook group.

It requires a defined culture, a bit of shared value, and active enforcement, so it is more the domain of paid services or private niche communities.

Ancient anecdote: it was specifically this difference in responses to questions on the mailing lists that lead me to use MySQL over PostgreSQL.

It is a problem everywhere, particularly where the barrier to entry has been lowered or removed, and it’s mostly a signal:noise issue in the absence of a fitness (quality) function.

There was also another reason behind not having an archive: I treated every question as a bug in the documentation, because if the documentation had been better, the person would not have had to ask in the first place. Especially when a similar question came up a second time, I thought hard about how I could improve the documentation to clarify the issue there.

A classic beginner mistake is to mistake legit a major misstatement as a trivial error. “Gosh, stop focusing on the minutiae and answer my question!”

“Gosh everyone is such a pedant that won’t just answer my well-thought-out questions” is a red flag. It’s like complaining that everyone around you is always an asshat.

I think this meme would be quickly dispelled if HNers were to start posting links to their own negative interactions on SO.

That being said, it's worth looking around on Reddit's more focused subreddits for what you're asking about. No guarantees, though.

And less people answering your questions.

Frankly, few people are so selfless that they spend time answering other people's questions simply to help them. Many of them do so precisely because they can judge other people and feel superior. You take that away, and you'd have to pay people to waste their time doing your work instead of theirs.

There are things that would have to be done to produce a solution:

- understand the behavior: what drives people to post answers in the first place?

- define moderation rules that would shape the desired behavior

- build a community that focuses on this

- reward the best answers by the new metric

Community building is hard. We should remember to thank dang for doing a tremendous job of it here.

I searched my browser history for “stackoverflow” and randomly picked out a few SO answers I recently searched for:

"in C++, why do I need to use `this->` when a template derived class accesses members of its template base class?" [0] All of the answers to this question are extremely informative and to-the-point.

"in bash, how do I sleep infinitely?" [1] Again, super informative answers that both answer the question concisely, and then delve into the intricacies of why it's a more complex task than meets the eye.

"why are Python hashes different between sessions?" [2] Highly informative answer that highlights something not easily found in the docs

"apparmor is hanging mysql service on Ubuntu" [3] top answer gives a one-line solution to fix this problem, and explains why it arose in the first place.

Even fairly high-level questons ("what is a Python metaclass?") have great SO answers. In fact, I have that one bookmarked to share with people who ask me, since it's the best description I've ever seen. [4]

I wonder if my experience is due to the sort of question I usually search for: very specific and technical, leaving little room for pedantry, dogmatism, or evangelism. For instance, "how do I flush the Linux disk cache," has exactly one right answer: `echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` [5]. One cannot be pedantic about this ("there are many definitions of disk cache, and it is meaningless to answer your question without clarifying further"), dogmatic ("the disk cache exists for a reason, and there is no reason to flush it"), or evangelistic ("why are you not running BSD?")

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1120833/derived-template...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2935183/bash-infinite-sl...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27522626/hash-function-i...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40997257/mysql-service-f...

[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100003/what-are-metaclas...

[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9551838/how-to-purge-dis...

"how to change scope of np.seterr"

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53634965/change-np-seter...

"bash set dummy exit code"

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/626723/is-there-a-s...

"Java lossy conversion from int to short"

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24173965/possible-lossy-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72366267/matching-ip-add...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71374202/why-mov-instruc...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70738756/proper-way-to-u...

I got what I'd call high-quality answers and I'm completely satisfied by that experience. Those questions are not top 1%.

The only subpar interactions I come across in the wild on SO are when the person asking the question has put zero effort on the table.

It would be helpful to see links to the interactions everyone is talking about.

As a test I just clicked through 10 threads with answers in new, and found answers/comments that could at least vaguely fit the OP in these:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74042398/showing-some-te...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74042276/checking-if-an-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73197170/nullpointerexce...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74042013/how-to-sort-the...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64704634/flink-schema-ev...

None of these are among the worst I've seen, but there's certainly already a few here that would discourage me from trying to contribute

There are a few major issues with that approach:

1. The question asker probably doesn't know there clearest way to phrase the question, so they are ill-equipped to find duplicates before asking.

2. The question asker may ask a totally unique question that really ends up boiling down to a duplicated answer. Does that mean their question was simply an abstract duplicate? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, usually something in between.

3. The solution to a question asker's problem is often the answer to a totally different question. So their problems get answered, and their question goes into limbo. Now the next person dutifully searches the original question, and must waste time reading the answers to someone else's problems. Then they go ask the question again, and it gets marked as a duplicate!

---

So what can we do about it?

I think the answer is actually more pedantry, but with better paths. Give the pedants somewhere satisfying to go.

In situations where the asker's problems were answered, but the question is not, the question should be rephrased/edited.

In situations where a duplicate question is asked, just merge them.

In situations where a duplicate answer is given, have both questions clearly reference (link to) each other. Maybe even structure answers as separate objects that questions can point to.

Right now my go-to resource for answers is SO and my go-to resource for opinions are reddit and HN.

Also recently I tried to embrace telegram chats. I think that it could be the feature of communication, so you might want to check it out. That said, so far they were of very little use for me.

Anyway, the real solution here is to get better at speed reading the answers. Usually on any SO question there are lots of answers, and a few good ones, but the votes do not indicate which ones are good. You just have to quickly scan the entire list of answers and come to your own conclusions based on that information.

Most of the time I open 8 'simular' topics, close 6 of them after scanning and then dive into the two I find most suitable.

About the scenarios you describe. Maybe different types of commenters are needed for a forum ecosystem. I can imagine someone spending more time writing a helpful comment after noticing the scenario's you describe. Maybe we need bad topics/comments so people with (writing/educational) experience step up to save the day.

Forums can be confusing in situations you describe but compared to closed communities like Discord it's something I cherish most on the internet.

Consider that many questions posted in online help forums don't seem to have much clarity or effort to express the problem. Many questions already have answers, which makes those who do try to answer wonder why the questioner didn't search first.

When asking strangers for free help online you don't have the right to demand anyone conform to your definition of useful. You don't get to set the terms. If you want to set the terms and get only helpful answers you will have to pay experts.

Have you experienced good interactions on SO as well?

I have and I’ve experienced difficulties. So I use the site for what it’s good for and take my troubled questions to other places. This includes other forums, google groups, discord and meetups.

Some problems just take longer to sort out.

What I don’t know I don’t know.

How to write the question in a way readers are not triggered and recall a distracting association in the problem space. Some details I think relevant are not relevant, or show my ignorance about something—even if it seems unrelated to the question.

And some communities on SO have very strong biases and protect their sandbox.

I personally appreciate strong opinions from volunteers. I appreciate a strongly held belief.

Then again, some people are just awful people and behave badly to others. It’s good to recognize when you’re in this kind of situation, deal with the emotions and move on. It makes you a better person :)

I mean, honestly. You can't relate to having a specific and narrow technical question, where overhauling some/all of the entire approach just simply isn't on the table for whatever reason?

Maybe you should create a forum where this kind of behavior is not tolerated.

But then again, once your community grows large enough, you’re bound to get obnoxious pedants who will make a flamestorm about whether X or saying X or doing Y constitutes nitpicking or not and will beat the issue to death abd beyond. Somehow your moderators will get caught in these and take sides. Or you will find that the moderators are the worst offenders.

No, I don’t know how to fight it, it’s bad enough in the workplace already.

Suffice to say I keep fighting the tendencies in myself, and sometimes I lose.

I don't have personal experience with the Recurse Center community, but I imagine it's pretty close to what you're looking for. The Recurse Center is a community of 2000+ technically inclined people. They have a very active Zulip forum. They rigorously protect [social rules] that discourage the behaviors you listed.

It's free, but very difficult to get in. You have to first apply and then dedicate at least 6 weeks of your life to learning.

[social rules]: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules

That said, I'd try to join smaller groups where people are more into friendly-bunch-playing mode..

ps: Since it's free, you have to pay by bowing to whoever you're talking to because they don't enjoy talking, they want something else, a quest for perfect information, precise protocol converging toward a solution. They're not wrong but it often goes wild (just two days ago someone ended up shouting at me for not giving server details regarding a tiny unicode issue, it went up to "I am the one with the most answers here so obey me" full with caps lock as bonus)

In other words, don't leave much room for interpretation or bike shedding.

There's no reason to not use Stack Overflow, it's still one of the biggest forums besides GitHub to get answers to questions. Why not focus on the good parts of it such as the visibility and instantaneous feedback rather than the bad parts of it? You can just ignore those.

There is no amount of reformation that would change these forums. I know many people believe that the toxicity of Stack Overflow could be changed with different incentives or algorithm changes, but that's just a silly thought. You'd have to significantly displace users to make that happen and it's easier to just build a new platform at that rate.

It's impossible to have a real discussion with the "evangelist" crowd anymore, or if anybody from the evangelist crowd is within earshot. Not just forums, but they've pretty much ruined meetups and conferences.

Don’t know if this answers the OP question, but it’s an example of a great technical forum.

I've been using StackOverflow for around 10 years and it hasn't always been as bad as it is now but there certainly have always been some ornery folks answering.

You could try to preface your question with something like "I'm not sure I'm asking correctly" or something like that and then if they persist ask them respectfully to not be pedantic as you just want a solution.

As a new user of the site, im not allowed to post, very few of the posts inspire me to comment anything (mainly because I’m not that knowledgeable about founder problems, but if there were more tech conversations then i would comment more), and there is a low throughput of new discussions as well. I feel like it could be done better.

But to answer your question. - if there are better forums or sources to get answers, than SO, we would know by now

And a followup for others. Have you as well seen a decline in the "questions" quality, rather than the answers? I'm worried, our industry is being polluted.

I wonder what makes the HN community such a pleasure to interact with? Is it really only the fact that a few down votes make your comment more transparent? How did we all come to the agreement to have in fact civil discussion? Most communities have similar rules but the HN community seems to really strive for a healthy environment.

HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.

Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.

As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.

And yet, against all odds, it retains its original magnetism - drawing throngs that grow in number and diversity while seers like tptacek continue to return - dispensing worldly wisdom worth its weight in gold from corner tables.

The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.

Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."

May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.

Pay them to be nice. This will also give value to their answers, since clearly an expert advice you paid for is more worth than free advice.

The next best thing to paying people is to actually thank them for their time and answers.

[0]: https://xyproblem.info/

Choose to not focus on replies that don't contribute and you'll have a better time online.

The anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in people so after 25 years on the internet I've just honed my own internal filter to not let them upset me. I think that's the real solution because we won't change humanity, so start with yourself.

One aspect is that as you get experience, you kinda outgrow asking questions on SO but when you do your questions are increasingly arcane anyways. So the average HNers perception of SO was mostly formed when they were at their most beginner fragile stage, most likely to ask poor questions and receive humbling responses.

I also part of http://www.clubdelphi.com, that is very old-school.

This places exists. But I think:

1- Are relatively small (even the Rust reddit). 2- ARE NOT GENERAL. Instead are more domain specific 3- REFUSE TO BE GENERAL. Not politics, social, music, fashion, sports, etc. Only the thing.

But yes, I also found that most of the time people would nit about the way you asked a question rather than just answering it.

The people who enjoy SO are just not the people you really want answering questions.

(But to answer your question, not a clue.)

- Asking questions in more niche communities yields more positive response. Use tags like "timescaledb", "web3py", which are watched only by few people who understand and care about the topic

- Tagging questions with generic tags like "javascript" and "python" will attract toxic moderation, from people who do not understand the topic or generally are assholes

If someone is competent and straight to the point, what would they be doing answering someone else's question on a forum for free?

Cunningham's law is your greatest ally, rather than trying to find what can't exist by definition (except in small and specific communities that pop up here and there)

Whenever I feel proper stuck on something, I go search the relevant repo’s issues page and more often than not, it’s in a closed issue with 73 emoji heart reacts on it, and 9 times out of ten the repo author joins in to say “nice, I’ll add that to the readme” in response, an infinitely better experience

This is the most aggravating one for me. A minor ambiguity will completely derail the conversation.

Often, it’s simple enough to say: ”it’s not clear whether you meant X or Y. If you meant X, the answer is Such and such. If you meant Y, the answer is blah blah blah.”

Try Github Copilot

The problem is that SO is not a Q&A site in the sense of "I have this exact problem; I'm going to describe it badly and not really tell you what I want". It's much more for more generalised problems with good minimal reproducible examples and specified outcomes, so that questions can help others in future.

If someone is offended when asked for those things, they won't necessarily communicate what happened objectively; they may well just say "People on SO are elitist" and be believed with no evidence. Not to say that SO is perfect, but I see so much patient helping of new people that I can't help but fight its corner a little.

I don't see that on either Reddit or SO. I get accurate and thoughtful responses and answers to a range of technical topics on both platforms. My life is much improved as a result. Granted, I engage in very niche groups and ask very specific questions.

The problem is when people treat questions as having fundamental flaws when they don't.

We often have to maintain legacy systems running on ancient servers, or with code that doesn't quite fit with a perfect theoretical framework of system design.

99% of the time when someone on SO asks "how do I decrypt a password hash?" the correct answer is "you do not, being able to do so is very bad" because it's a common newbie point of confusion. 1% of the time it's "hashing isn't encryption, you want a form of reversible encryption for this particular use case". At no point is a user going to get a "how to reverse a bcrypt hash" answer.

Every once in a while the questioner gets pissy about both of those correct answers, because they're so focused on the answer they wanted they can't understand the problem.

There is no fundamental flaw in using very old software that still works.

- open and free

- well-known

- respected

- has knowledgeable people

- willing to understand and discuss the unique context of every post in good faith

- also able to identify when you truly DO have an XY problem (because they do exist)

- scalable

- knows the domain well enough to ask a well formed question about what they want done, with precise terminology.

- doesn't know the domain well enough to be able to find an answer.

That, combined with the flipside: if you're responding to questions, and most questions aren't very good, your default is to assume that the question isn't a very good question.

I think people get to a point in their life or their expertise where they lose sight of the fact that there are always new people. Literally people who didn't even exist when they were first learning their craft. Children can only learn by making mistakes. You have to be generous and sacrifice for them. These kind of forums do a bad job of handling the "children" of the subject matter who would be willing to learn. And I don't necessarily mean the forums have to change, just that they may be bad places for channeling that kind of generosity and sacrifice.

I heard Soylant News is good.

1. StackOverflow's original goal was to be an open-sourced archive of technical information, as I understand it, not a free tutoring service for anyone with a question. This accounts for closing duplicate questions.

2. There's a reason remote IT help is a big online business - they hire people who are paid to be polite and helpful, clarify questions, and solve them efficiently while helping you implement them. It's unreasonable to expect members of any free open forum to behave in this manner, ever.

3. On SO, a major goal of many participants is to up their SO score, by providing popular answers or popular questions. This often conflicts with the archival repository goal (see 1) of the site. For example, I'd say 95% of the time I have a question that seems appropriate for SO, a diligent (time-consuming) SO search usually turns up an already existing answer, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to up my points by asking questions. Throwing out a question without doing any research is considered poor behavior (but see 2, time is money) although the actual motivation may be more about upping that SO score.

Finally, there's another reason people try to answer questions that has nothing to do with any of the OP's 1-3 points, and that's that there is really no better way to learn a subject, and to test your own understanding of a subject, than to try to explain it to someone else. However, this is not really 'altruistic motivation' - it's a way of rapidly grasping the fundamentals and issues and common edge cases in say, learning a new programming language. Also, a poor response to a question will bring out the correctors, a useful tactic other comments allude to, i.e.:

https://xkcd.com/386/

Thus, don't expect any member of a public forum to ever behave like a paid employee of an IT help company - which means, practically, the ability to ignore the nitpickers, evangelists, dogmatists, preeners, dismissive jerks and so on is a necessary skill.

There's a flip side to that, though. I've been guilty of XY problems in the past, and the experience of having them pointed out was illuminating; I learned both why not to do something and what the better way of accomplishing the goal was. That new knowledge is often widely applicable.

It seems a bit goofy to go to a site, ask for help, and reject the assistance offered out of hand just because someone suggests you might be on the wrong track.

The insufferable pedants don't stop correct answers.

Except if you are asking questions that have no answers.

Which is most of Stack Exchange but not Stack Overflow unless the question is badly worded.

Do you have an example on Stack Overflow where this has happened?

Half of your pedantic nitpickers (of which I suppose I may now be counted in the number of) are at least providing you a concrete example of what the answer isn't, and what may ultimately be direction/inspiration for where an answer may lie.

I guess I'm just saying, be thankful you even get lackluster answers in lieu of the alternative.

As far as how to divorce honests attempts to solicit input from the social mediafication of the programming space, (i.e. aggressive building of mindshare in terms of dogmatic adherence to the One True Way to Parse a Lolcat), or people arbitrarily rearchitecting your problem space (Your lolcats must be partitioned, sharded, highly available, with 9 9's uptime, with no greater than 300 ms from disk to eyes, when all you needed was a Lolcat that'd get there eventually when a friend came looking in the afternoon in less than 7kb total)...

I'm not sure. It's rather annoying. The latter I find less annoying than the former, but generally speaking, just be both polite and willing to patient game of code golf til a bored grey beard has some time to kill, or you figure it out.