Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by magical_mishka on Sunday December 15, 2019 @04:09PM (#21799006)

I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com

Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:

- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.

- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?

- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.

Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by darkerside on Sunday December 15, 2019 @05:08PM (#21799317)

SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors.

If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by silvat on Sunday December 15, 2019 @07:08PM (#21799863)

Those low effort questions are often extremely popular though, which would imply that they are useful to a lot of people.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by why-oh-why on Monday December 16, 2019 @02:04AM (#21801285)

“Where is babby come from” would be a pretty popular question too, but it’s not the right forum.

I wish though that StackOverflow turned such questions into a chat/discussion instead of closing/deleting them. They have the tools to do that when comments start becoming too chatty.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by scarface74 on Sunday December 15, 2019 @04:26PM (#21799104)

Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Sta... by umvi on Sunday December 15, 2019 @06:09PM (#21799622)

Good luck attracting experts to your site... without incentive for experts to participate it will likely just be the blind leading the blind (i.e. newbies helping newbies - which could possibly be a good thing!).

[ Parent | on HN ]