I think many of these earnest but "bad" questions just need answers in the form of heuristic advice or pointers to get them on the right track.
This is true, but not necessarily the role of SO to solve. This seems more like a mentoring service.
SO was conceived as a long-term repository of questions and corresponding answers that are worth archiving for several years, so explainers don't have to rehash the same explanations many times and explainees have quick access to expert knowledge collected over a long time.
Remember the bulk of users are the passive readers of the vast question bank of SO, they come to SO because the questions and answers are relevant and helpful. The primary user is therefore not necessarily the novice user who cannot formulate a question well and cannot search for similar questions or break down their problem into pieces, explain what they did etc. We also need to make sure the site remains high-quality for the readership, people who read answers from months and years ago.
I agree that there needs to be some place for novices to get coarse-level guidance of what terms to search or what fields of CS may be of interest, etc. It's definitely true that formulating the question the right way is already a substantial step towards solving it.
But "I'm confused in a vague way about this specific file I was tasked to work with and I'm getting an error message I was too scared to read, so plz help" is not worth archiving in a question bank.
It sounds more like a support help desk for programmers, but you'd have to pay for it because answering such questions is exhausting and not really rewarding. The people who go to SO do it for free because they like the puzzle solving aspect of thinking and solving interesting questions. Rehashing the same thing gets old and you can not guilt trip people into doing it as some sort of unpaid community service.
This is true, but not necessarily the role of SO to solve. This seems more like a mentoring service.
SO, I agree, is not a mentoring service. The format of SO is a poor way to pick up foundational knowledge. It's ~usually~ awesome if you know exactly what you need and are able search for it. Or if needed, formulate a precise question. (to be fair, that is often NOT enough to avoid smackdown votes, VTC, dupe marking, and dismissive put-downs).
That said, it happens many times, that people end up having to do unfamiliar tasks in their work, and they might need to just get something done without having much directly relatable experience in the task. RTFM is not a realistic option as the F-ing Manuals's would typically be hundreds of pages of dense material. Often a push in the right direction and a little orientation is enormously helpful.
And, by the way, many people really do enjoy helping out individuals-- they take joy in helping someone out even if the help they provide doesn't take the form of "a canonical answer" (god, I hate that pretentious word, "canonical"). It doesn't detract from the quality of the site to loosen up on the strictness of the rules.
Comments
This is true, but not necessarily the role of SO to solve. This seems more like a mentoring service.
SO was conceived as a long-term repository of questions and corresponding answers that are worth archiving for several years, so explainers don't have to rehash the same explanations many times and explainees have quick access to expert knowledge collected over a long time.
Remember the bulk of users are the passive readers of the vast question bank of SO, they come to SO because the questions and answers are relevant and helpful. The primary user is therefore not necessarily the novice user who cannot formulate a question well and cannot search for similar questions or break down their problem into pieces, explain what they did etc. We also need to make sure the site remains high-quality for the readership, people who read answers from months and years ago.
I agree that there needs to be some place for novices to get coarse-level guidance of what terms to search or what fields of CS may be of interest, etc. It's definitely true that formulating the question the right way is already a substantial step towards solving it.
But "I'm confused in a vague way about this specific file I was tasked to work with and I'm getting an error message I was too scared to read, so plz help" is not worth archiving in a question bank.
It sounds more like a support help desk for programmers, but you'd have to pay for it because answering such questions is exhausting and not really rewarding. The people who go to SO do it for free because they like the puzzle solving aspect of thinking and solving interesting questions. Rehashing the same thing gets old and you can not guilt trip people into doing it as some sort of unpaid community service.
SO, I agree, is not a mentoring service. The format of SO is a poor way to pick up foundational knowledge. It's ~usually~ awesome if you know exactly what you need and are able search for it. Or if needed, formulate a precise question. (to be fair, that is often NOT enough to avoid smackdown votes, VTC, dupe marking, and dismissive put-downs).
That said, it happens many times, that people end up having to do unfamiliar tasks in their work, and they might need to just get something done without having much directly relatable experience in the task. RTFM is not a realistic option as the F-ing Manuals's would typically be hundreds of pages of dense material. Often a push in the right direction and a little orientation is enormously helpful.
And, by the way, many people really do enjoy helping out individuals-- they take joy in helping someone out even if the help they provide doesn't take the form of "a canonical answer" (god, I hate that pretentious word, "canonical"). It doesn't detract from the quality of the site to loosen up on the strictness of the rules.