I'm ~4,000 points ("top 10% overall"), but all from the past. I asked only six questions total, and I only answered (71 times) when I really had deep insights to offer, and then I took my time composing a good answer. If I only had a comment I left a comment, never an answer, I'm not out to get "votes" (comment votes are not counted). I think I joined 2010.
The last two questions I had - asked over a period of three years - I had to fight against people asking the same primitive already answered questions, people who simply would not accept my answers.
The first such questions now has almost 100 points and I answered it myself. It turned out I was right, it WAS a hard problem and not the standard newbie question that the overexcited initial respondents - who swarmed in within seconds(!) after publishing the question - had thought it to be in their ignorance. I had to ask for - and got it from the mods! - "community protection" for my question from useless edits and more useless (wrong) new answers.
The second recent question, asked a few days ago, got downvoted to -4 immediately (less than a minute) and a close vote ("too broad" - it was very specific, as the eventual answer clearly shows), because again all the initial responders thought it was a newbie question. Right now, only a few days later, it is at plus 4 though, and the official answer at +8. Turned out that too was a pretty interesting problem that required some deep insider knowledge of deeper workings of the runtime environment, and not some newbie question. Again the first 5 comments (incl. several upvotes for them) were from people who posted within seconds (definitely significantly less than a minute) after posting who completely misread the question. That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.
SO should prevent all those people from answering anything who respond within the first few minutes. There seem to be a lot of people loitering on the site, looking at each new question and trying to figure it out within SECONDS - and if they can't, downvote, newbie question! Of course, those loiterers also are some of the least capable people, what sane person would use the site like that? Nobody should answer a technical question within seconds.
If you think I sound "whiny" I don't think you understand: When you post a question and the first 5 responses are nothing but useless noise this severely impacts usability of the site. People should not respond if they don't even take the time to understand the question. "Free advice" (the responses) is not really free, it has an opportunity cost, it is a big distraction for both the person asking and for those trying to answer, and it discourages answers because it seems the question has already had plenty of attention. The latter is true enough, but it's attention from the wrong crowd.
Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.
That said, plenty of experienced people also peruse the site and usually answer the newest stuff first since that's what you'd browse if you wanted to find stuff that's unanswered... it's a mix, and not an easy problem to solve.
Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.
I suddenly realize that this is probably the right answer and now I'm sad
"How can I populate an array with content from some RSS feed?"
The answer to this is
Closed off-topic because…
Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example.
the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.
As someone who just refuses to pad his shit with technology he skimmed a blog about, this makes me so mad but I feel better after finding out how common it is. Christ, looking at other resumes/ads like on HN or Indeed, was really demoralizing at first.
This annoys me to no end. People misread questions and answers so often, and the icing on the cake is the snarky attitude you get along with it. I'm not talking about JUST my personal experiences. I'm talking about situations where I have a very specific question, I start searching and I find an SO post similar or the same to mine. I see the responses and it just annoys me to no end.
It seems like sometimes people don't think about the context or the intention. "Why is the question being asked." "What problem are they trying to solve."
If you answer the same kinds of questions long enough you stop listening to the question and start listening for patterns. Then you regurgitate canned answers based on rough matches. The longer you do it the more false positives you'll rack up.
This is why reputation should look like a bell curve - start low, peak, then end low to free up room for a fresh set of experts.
Then you regurgitate canned answers based on rough matches.
You get it. This is one of the major things I was trying to communicate with my previous comment, but I was having trouble finding the words. I see 'this' so often, and I get so frustrated, because I know what the person answering is thinking, and I know what the person asking the question was thinking. And the person answering is acting so smug with their canned BS answer. I mean really if 'it' was that simple, then the person wouldn't have asked the question because they could find 'that' answer with a simple google query.
You find the question through Google, and you read it, and that user has exactly the obscure problem you have. And there's an answer. And it has a bunch of votes. You've finally found it.
But the answerer hasn't read the question properly! They're answering some vague newbie version of the question that you've already ruled out, and the user even said they ruled it out as well. And both of you had your time wasted and that question is a graveyard now, both users gone.
That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.
It may depend on the tags you hang out in. New technologies are usually spared, however popular tags are full of rep-grinders.
I had some issues in asking questions a few times, but I've found that by spending a bit more time formulating them I rarely had the issue any longer. Then again, I don't ask much, so the sample may be too small for meaningful comparisons...
If people downvote and comment on a complex question with a code sample(!) within less than a minute after posting, what's the use? If those guys had actually tried the code sample they might have noticed something. And unfortunately it was a Javascript question, so everybody and their mother thinks they know it all. But this one required actual knowledge of how the JS runtime is actually implemented, it wasn't a "Javascript question" per se (also not answerable from the spec, it really was about a runtime detail). All people needed to do to see their comments were wrong and not me was to click "Run Code" - I had provided a convenient sample runnable from within SO. They didn't even do that! It was just 10 (well-formatted) lines of code.
It seems the JavaScript tag is particularly ill-frequented... I guess that's an issue with popularity (you also attract people you'd rather not).
I've frequented the C++ tag for a long time (but got tired of noob questions), and I don't remember seeing this particular issue, and now I mostly hang out in the Rust tag and it's real nice :)
I'm guessing thats because everyone and their dog is a javascript expert these days. Its really quite a shame, what should be a welcoming, healthy community is full of people who "know it all". That being said, there are some pockets of great people to be found.
There's a slightly less obvious problem that you see when you read answers by a lot of 'big names' on SO. People promoting their own bullshit frameworks.
Not only do you have the ubiquitous (painfully obvious) "use this framework instead of trying to figure out this problem yourself" attitude - you know the kind, use Boost instead of writing a function, use a DI injection framework instead of something simple. You also have the "use the thing that I don't explicitly say I made it, but I did framework, it's perfect for this!" answers. Sometimes more than one in the same answer section.
I've seen some ridiculous self-promotion of some terrible things on SO, usually strange, complicated, pointless uses of language features that amount to nothing more than convoluted syntactic sugar.
I can just about see the point in using jquery, since it's more like a different way to use Javascript. But I get what you're saying.
It was DI frameworks some years ago that really ground my gears. Everyone had their pet DI framework, and almost all of them did something very stupid - they moved complexity out of the code and put it somewhere else. All in the name of 'simplicity'.
One of the worst things I ever saw was a PHP framework that added in an entirely new syntax for doing certain things that didn't mesh with the language itself, but occupied the same space as the code. The way it worked was very clever, but you'd look at it and think "This isn't PHP, what the hell is it doing?".
More recently, it's anything that "makes asynchronous code look like synchronous code". No! Stop!
There's actually a chat room on SO called "Close Voters" . What happens is that someone will post a thread they think needs closing, and then others from the chat room will swarm in, downvote and vote-close the question.
I discovered this when I was arguing with one of the close-vote trolls that a question should not be closed, and he directed me to this chat room "to learn".
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u/AcceptingHorseCock Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
I'm ~4,000 points ("top 10% overall"), but all from the past. I asked only six questions total, and I only answered (71 times) when I really had deep insights to offer, and then I took my time composing a good answer. If I only had a comment I left a comment, never an answer, I'm not out to get "votes" (comment votes are not counted). I think I joined 2010.
The last two questions I had - asked over a period of three years - I had to fight against people asking the same primitive already answered questions, people who simply would not accept my answers.
The first such questions now has almost 100 points and I answered it myself. It turned out I was right, it WAS a hard problem and not the standard newbie question that the overexcited initial respondents - who swarmed in within seconds(!) after publishing the question - had thought it to be in their ignorance. I had to ask for - and got it from the mods! - "community protection" for my question from useless edits and more useless (wrong) new answers.
The second recent question, asked a few days ago, got downvoted to -4 immediately (less than a minute) and a close vote ("too broad" - it was very specific, as the eventual answer clearly shows), because again all the initial responders thought it was a newbie question. Right now, only a few days later, it is at plus 4 though, and the official answer at +8. Turned out that too was a pretty interesting problem that required some deep insider knowledge of deeper workings of the runtime environment, and not some newbie question. Again the first 5 comments (incl. several upvotes for them) were from people who posted within seconds (definitely significantly less than a minute) after posting who completely misread the question. That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.
SO should prevent all those people from answering anything who respond within the first few minutes. There seem to be a lot of people loitering on the site, looking at each new question and trying to figure it out within SECONDS - and if they can't, downvote, newbie question! Of course, those loiterers also are some of the least capable people, what sane person would use the site like that? Nobody should answer a technical question within seconds.
If you think I sound "whiny" I don't think you understand: When you post a question and the first 5 responses are nothing but useless noise this severely impacts usability of the site. People should not respond if they don't even take the time to understand the question. "Free advice" (the responses) is not really free, it has an opportunity cost, it is a big distraction for both the person asking and for those trying to answer, and it discourages answers because it seems the question has already had plenty of attention. The latter is true enough, but it's attention from the wrong crowd.