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Part of the reason for the brutal honesty on SO has to do with eliminating bad answers. If you post an answer where your code is doing something stupid/horrible/etc you will get down voted, and I think that is appropriate.
I see a lot of people on this thread who sound to me like they got their ego bruised by some 'Murican, and are not equipped to deal with it. Remember we all have ego's including you, try and stop and think if it is your own ego getting in the way of understanding why people are flaming you on SO. Calling them names solves anything? Well maybe it protects your ego?
I don't answer questions on SO ever because I do not believe being involved in flame wars on a "professional" site is going to benefit my career. I have seen people get flamed even when it turned out the flamer was wrong!
I have asked several questions, and never got down voted or flamed.
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I appreciate the people here complaining about SO for self-identifying as morons. The software industry is better off without them.
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As a regular participant on the site (Matt Davis), I understand what you are referring to, but I take exception to the notion that all "the top uses" start voting down and ranting. I have never once seen Jon Skeet, for example, "rant" on SO. The same goes for Marc Gravell and most of the other truly top users. Most of the top users and many others, including myself, view SO as an opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with those that may be new or stuck on a particular problem. This covers the vast majority of my experience on the site.
Still, your criticism is not without merit. There are some users that do tend to lord their experience over newer users and abuse the privileges afforded by their reputation. But these are not ordinary SO users. They represent a small, but sometimes very vocal, minority.
In my experience, new users that ask a "simple" question are often asking a poor question. In many cases, the question has already been asked and answered before by other users. In these cases, the questions are closed quickly with a link to the duplicate. Other times, it is clear that the question is related to homework, which is a clear "no-no" on the site. Still other times, the question is convoluted or constructed with very poor English to the point that it is simply impossible to understand what is being asked. In both of these cases, the questions will be closed quickly, which may certainly add to the frustration of a new user but is in keeping with the policies that have been enforced for years now.
For me, SO is an invaluable resource. I find that many problems I encounter have already been addressed on the site, and I flag many questions so that I can use the answers for quick reference in the future. There is no other place like it on the internet for developers.
In closing, I regret that your experience with SO has been met with frustration. Despite your misgivings, I stand by my claim that the vast majority of users are there to help, not to tear down. I would encourage you to continue learning and, when possible, contribute to the learning to those coming behind you. That's how we help ensure the progression of our craft.
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Perhaps if the more powerful users who are being dickish had a way to get downvoted for their dickish behavior, it would help make it a more friendly environment. Newbs on the site have no power at all. They're encouraged to ask questions to gain reputation and then are often slammed for asking inappropriate questions. Sure, they should read the FAQ. But they're newbs. It's their job not to know what they're doing.
When one of the dickish power users inappropriately punishes a newb for being a newb, or punishes an experienced user for doing something the power user just doesn't like personally, we "rabble" should have some way to vote a**hole points on that power user. SO should put some effort into preventing the the site from becoming exactly what it isn't supposed to be - a bully den.
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This is the kind of request you'd make on the Meta StackOverflow site. Be forewarned, though, phrasing such a request the way you just did will elicit the same kind of venom you are decrying.
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"SO should put some effort into preventing the the site from becoming exactly what it isn't supposed to be - a bully den."
They do. SO is one of the most anal run help sites I've ever seen. Drop into meta sometime and read some of the conversations that go on in there, all over a help site.
Yes, occasionally people with the appropriate seniority will do things that don't seem fair, and probably aren't fair, but that's not the site as a whole. Further, that alone isn't an explanation as to why these people (like the OP) are having such horrific experiences at SO. The more likely explanation (which we'd probably see should he ever post a link to his question) is that they refuse to take the time to write a useful question.
The reason newbs don't get "dick points" to hand out anytime they get butt hurt over someone else is precisely the same reason they're butt hurt in the first place, because they haven't been around long enough to understand the community.
But hey, feel free to start your own QA site. Many start with the mission of "we'll take the time to explain anything to anyone" quickly devolves into "RTFM!" in due time as those spending their precious time answering questions start getting tired of people not bothering to do their own work before asking.
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Jadoti wrote: But hey, feel free to start your own QA site. Many start with the mission of "we'll take the time to explain anything to anyone" quickly devolves into "RTFM!" in due time as those spending their precious time answering questions start getting tired of people not bothering to do their own work before asking.
That's like saying, "hey, if you don't like Avatar, make your own movie." One doesn't have to be an expert in cuisine to know when food tastes spoiled. Any situation can be made better, and calling out the shortcomings of a system can indeed lead to improvement.
I'm not asking for people to give up on expecting users to know the rules; as software dev tools support engineer, I field all kinds of questions every day, from the idiotic to the supremely perplexing software failures. It's easier for me to approach it with care because I get paid a fair amount to do it. But the minority of SO (and all the unconnected-with-your-account sites that go with it) volunteers who are just bags of disdain, should not be left unchecked. It's really hard to get any traction when you're at the bottom of the food chain, and SO is worse in this respect than most food chains.
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Let's make sure we don't lose focus of what's going on, the user (like OP) is coming to the site asking for free help, and complaining when he doesn't get what he wants on his terms.
It's not a case of food tasting spoiled, it's a case of coming in, demanding stuff, and complaining when the free meal isn't up to the level they wanted. They can look around and see tons of others enjoying their meals, but since the newb's meal isn't as good it must be just because he's new and the senior people don't like him. It's *definitely not* because the newb didn't read the rules when he came in and proceeded to ignore them when making his demands.
Like someone else here stated, garbage-in garbage out. Take the time to write a quality question, and they'll get quality effort (again, free) out of people who want to help. Come in with a stupid question and it'll be taken as the lack of respect for other people's time that it is.
Thousands of users, many new, get by on SO every day... they're asking questions, getting answers, and generally everything is flowing well. The OP, complaining, refuses to even link to his own question. I believe he's well aware his question was poor, but it's easier to just come here and complain.
Br.Bill wrote: Any situation can be made better, and calling out the shortcomings of a system can indeed lead to improvement.
Agreed, but it's a matter of perspective. Wade through enough of those low quality questions and you'll be glad that the better system (downvotes and flagging to knock the poor questions out of site) is there.
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pandu web dev wrote: In stackoverflow, if a new one asks a simple question, then the top users starts down voting, ranting.
Can you link us the questions on SO that happened to?
I would be very interested in the questions myself.
pandu web dev wrote: If someone don't have knowledge on particular topic or another then the regular users start insulting them.
Could you please link to the SO posts in question that demonstrate this stated behaviour?
I make every effort to flag any insulting comments and posts regardless of the users reputation.
pandu web dev wrote: They call themselves as experts.
Could you please link to any SO comments or posts where users claim to be experts or what is your statement based on?
pandu web dev wrote: They are playing with site good reputation.
Not sure exactly what you mean by "playing with good reputation" 
I love SO and I love helping people, getting reputation for it is self rewarding, though I could start charging for my efforts a affordable daily rate if that is preferred 
pandu web dev wrote: Overall this website has became very funny.
I think that might not be the intend of SO.
SO is not intended to be funny but a collection of useful questions with useful answers that current and future users can benefit from,...for free.
If you are stuck and have tried several solutions but don't know any further ask a question on SO.
All that is required is a to the point question, describing the issue, a description of what they have tried and preferably some code demonstrating the issue, if possible.
Having read the SO FAQ on what question to ask and how to ask them does help in obtaining the desired results.
I had to do that too before I asked my first question. Reading FAQs and manuals are part of the learning process.
SO is not for users looking to obtain help without any self effort, though they do get their questions answered by users who care more about upvotes than teaching a guy how to fish!
SO is not oDesk, Freelancer or anything equivalent, though we do get sometimes users ask "questions" like: "Please write me an application that does X and Y. Thank you in advance"
SO is also not a social media site or discussion board, nor a hangout for friends and family to discuss random non related topics.
Looking forward to your links to the SO posts in question , maybe I can even help answer any of those unanswered questions you found problems with and help flag any inappropriate behaviour in them.
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Oh yes the "simple question."
Like one I saw today (paraphrased), "I am using pthreads. Something is wrong because when my thread finishes I notify my main thread but it never gets notified."
Oh yes. Like I can answer that. No, that question vaporizes in less than 2 minutes with 6 downvotes. Because it is useless.
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Why not post a link to the question you asked over there and got treated so harshly for so we can point out exactly why your question got pounded.
SO is a community, and they're very newbie friendly, they're just not lazy, stupid, or redundant friendly.
If your question could have been answered with a simple search, you're going to get pounded.
If your question could have been answered with a little research on your part, you're going to get pounded.
If your question shows you haven't thought about it at all, you're going to get pounded.
If your question looks to be a valid question, but you have such little concern for those you're asking help from that you can't include sample code, full error text, ample description of what you're seeing, or any other relevant details, you're going to get pounded.
Thought out questions that clearly state the problem including errors, what you've tried, how to recreate (if possible), etc., generally get answered.
"Experts" answering questions on SO are just like you and me, and many of them do it to help the community. While they might start out helping every random user with their "how do I double click a file" questions, they will quickly grow tired of it and degrade to "RTFM" or just not answering the question altogether.
Now, as far as part 2- why you get downvoted and deleted - SO is a community. The questions they are ignoring and not going to answer for above reasons need to get cleaned up somehow.
So again, post a link to your question and I'll be glad to point out why you're seeing the reaction you are.
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People have complained in meta many times that the website users are rude like here, but no use SO is continuing in the same way. Top users try to prove that whatever they are doing is right.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161539/rude-responses-from-the-community[^]
There are many questions where they post disrespectful comments or downvote etc. It is not a new thing.
Since, stackoverflow comes in top of google search results, it has a good set of QA, that doesn't mean whatever they do with new users or beginners is correct.
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Did you read the answers to the question? They make it perfectly clear that rude answers are (1) a minority, (2) impossible to rule out altogether, and (3) can be flagged.
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"Since, stackoverflow comes in top of google search results, it has a good set of QA, that doesn't mean whatever they do with new users or beginners is correct."
So what would be correct? How do you handle the large inflow of questions from users who won't bother to read FAQs, or lurk long enough to understand the etiquette?
How would you handle the users who can't be bothered to do their own research? Or search? Or think for two seconds?
How about the users who just post their homework questions? Literally, post their homework questions?
Whatever your answer is, I'm certain you'd probably do that for a little while. Maybe even a little longer than a little while, then you'll get tired of it and just start employing the mechanisms available to start cleaning up the environment.
You still didn't link to your question. With that we could help you understand why your question was a low quality question and how you could make it better.
Yes, SO as a public forum has to deal with issue of every person with an internet connection. Yes, sometimes people are just rude, or your perception of their text is that it's rude... but that's life. Do you go to SO to feel loved or get an answer to a question/problem? Focus on the latter and the former becomes moot.
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Pandu, you're still not showing a link to your question ...
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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I'm a happy user of StackOverflow community, I highly participate in Java Q/As mainly by answering questions. After seeing this thread and similar questions on Meta StackOverfow[^] I start thinking on what can possibly be the root of all evil (like premature optimization  ).
Anyway, let me try to provide a personal opinion on all the topics covered in your post:
Quote: if a new one asks a simple question, then the top users starts down voting, ranting
Define simple question. For example, if somebody in Java asks "how can I create a hello world app" then I would post a comment saying "that's covered in a tutorial" and vote to close. This question lows the quality of the site.
Ok, another (not that) simple question: "this piece of code doesn't work code that doesn't even compile I appreciate your help." ok now this is unanswerable at all, first because the code doesn't compile, and if it does compile but there's no stacktrace, then I usually have to read through a wall of code to tell OP: "you didn't initialize foo variable, thus you getting a NullPointerException...". There goes another simple question that lows the quality of the site.
And a last example of a simple but too broad question: "how can I create RESTful web services in Java?". Again, this is an unanswerable question that can is already covered in plenty tutorials. No need to reinvent the wheel in stackoverflow.
Quote: If someone don't have knowledge on particular topic or another then the regular users start insulting them.
I'm ashamed of this, and I see stuff like that for one of the following reasons (AFAIK):
- OP is really lazy to understand the answer. You spot a question like "how can I foo the bar" then an answer posts "Use quo, it will foo the bar as you expect: Here's a sample code fulfilling the answer" and I upvote it for showing a good example, but then OP raises a comment like "ok now I need to baz the bar from foo, how can I do that?" and I reply in a comment "OP please read about how foo and baz are very close you just have to change one line it's not that hard" and OP starts complaining about me insulting and giving him the bad eye. Then, another user reads all that and provides a new answer with the line to change and he gets the accepted answer. Now we have a zombie user and a rep w**r3 vampire in the site. Ugh.
- OP is really lazy to search for it before posting a question. For example: *how can I find a String in HTML using regex?* And the common answer for this (and I agree because I also tried to do this in the past, silly me): Don't use Regex to parse HTML[^]. And you provide of this to the OP to realize that at least 4429 people around the world have suffered the same and we know this should not be done, but OP starts complaining at us that we are all wrong and that his task is so simple that he/she should use regex and there won't be a problem with that... And after some minutes (or days) OP posts that we were right...
Quote: They call themselves as experts.
Sorry, but I don't see this in the site. For really high rep users (more than 100k) I cannot see such comments or related stuff. Not even from Jon Skeet or BalusC (check about them here [^]). I have even seen users with less than 1000 rep that are experts on what they answer, but they don't say it out loud.
Quote: They are playing with site good reputation.
Not only us, but also those new users that don't read the FAQ. Specifically, any user should first read How to ask[^] section to learn how to provide an answerable, specific, not too broad, not "first result on my SEO" question for the site.
Quote: Overall this website has became very funny.
Oh yes, it is, and I hope it keeps like that .
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No, it's you who suck. StackOverflow is an extremely helpful place; questions only get downvoted when the poster hasn't followed the site rules and is lazy.
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Yes, I've noticed the attitude over there as well. Since CP wants to compete with SO why not build a Knowledge Tree of posts and answers that they could quickly search and browse (and link to articles)? I have yet to see a proper Knowledge Tree structure implemented anywhere yet. And I've haven't had the time to write about it. But it's a proper and significant next generation step in the evolution of knowledge structures (another concept that needs writing about). If anyone is significantly interested I will do a CP article on this.
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SO works by the following rule: garbage in - garbage out.
Lets have a look at the question that you asked and we might figure out why it was down voted and how to improve your experience on SO.
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I like stackoverflow.com, though I have seen some limited behavior like you described. Many users are way too quick to down vote both questions and answers. I've used the site for several years and have only down voted once or twice. I reserve that for extreme circumstances such as abuse or repeating the same problems many times while ignoring question asking advice from other users.
There are a few recurring issues that people have with asking questions on there that could be helped with better research and communication skills by the askers of questions.
Sometimes there are disagreements about exactly what does qualify as a suitable topic for SO (or it's sister sites) as well as the tags used for questions. Once I asked a question on there about the using sed. Some people may have considered that question to have not been on topic because it wasn't enough of a programming question, but it was answered. If I had been asking a general user question, such as "How do I run a program on Windows 98?" then I'd probably have been down voted because it wasn't a programming question (and because it mentioned "Windows 98").
Asking a question on SO should almost never be the first thing anyone does when a question comes to mind. When you post a question there it takes up other people's valuable time to read, consider, research, and answer (ignoring the time that it takes for someone to down vote), so if someone asks a question on SO that could easily have been answered by Googling then people are likely to down vote that question because they take it as disrespectful of the value of their time. If someone does look for resources and is still confused, or even confused by the resources, then cite those resources in your question. If no resources can be found, mention what you've searched on (the keywords). It is quite common that people are calling a concept the wrong thing or at least something other than what it is commonly known as, which can make searching and asking questions not work out well.
SO is in English, so make sure that you're English is readable. It would be nice if native language wasn't an issue, but it is. If you're question makes no sense grammatically then it will be misunderstood, ignored, or down voted. People on SO will try to help fix up questions like this, and the asker needs to check back to read the changes, suggested changes, and pleads for clarity that other users have posted. Personally I often find it easier to read broken English if I know what the writer's native language is, and I suspect that is probably the case for others. At the very least it may allow you to get help communicating your question by someone who speaks your language. When writing this response I almost included an expression that is very understandable, but when translated literally might be confusing to others. That is another thing to be aware of.
Beginner programmers often have misconceptions and confusion about how certain things work that are difficult for more seasoned programmers to relate to. Most of us have been there, but it's hard to remember to try to scrutinize what someone is saying for clues about misconceptions, especially when the asker is often speaking with confidence about their unconscious assumptions being true. This is another communication issue. This often results in a question starting out as "How do I do _X_ with _Y_?" but end up being more about what Y actually is and how that's different than what the asker thought Y was.
Learning how to include relevant information without overloading with too many details about your particular instance of a problem is a skill that must be learned. It can take time, but reading other questions can help. Many times I've seen someone ask a question that included completely irrelevant information about what product they hoped to eventually have when they were really wanting to know some small detail about a programming language, algorithm, or library. Other times I've seen people leave out so much information about what they are trying to do that it's either not comprehensible to others or that it isn't clear to others that the specifics of this problem would actually fit solving the problem a different way than the asker was trying. For instance, asking how to send a message from one computer to another one over the Internet does not usually need to include what kind of information that message carried, but it may be relevant what protocols are being used, what operating systems, and how they are connected.
Another thing to be clear about is why the asker is asking the question. This may sound silly because the answer is obviously "Because he/she wants to know the answer.", but this is actually about if the asker is trying to solve a problem a certain way (and may be pursuing a more difficult path than have to pursue), doing homework (people on SO will almost never give you the answers to your homework, but they will often guide you), or just for your own understanding.
I hope that this is clear.
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I've been on Stack Overflow both making and answering questions, and I have found it a great community overall, however, to get a good answer, you should ask a good question, this is more evident on newbies, who often ask either, to give them the code, something that has been answered multiple times before, or you realize that they don't even understand some basic concepts; most of the time I try to help them (even when they should not ask that, do a quick search or it's not the purpose of SO), but when you're on the 100th question of the same style you may start to loose your temper, in the end we're all persons, so please don't be quick to judge the whole community just because someone freaked out.
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I just noticed that "It's 100% free, no registration required", but I had to register to post an answer to a question.
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You're totally right!
I've post some questions which i believe, there are many people asking the same question, but with no reason the downvoted it no even explaining why they did that...  
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Most of the time it's because the asker didn't bother to google it while the result can be easily got within the first page. Sometimes they need to improve search skill. When they enter the question they don't even have a look at SO's suggestions while I'm sure there are tons of duplicates already.
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Having read some of the Jon Skeet facts[^], based on the old Chuck Norris facts, it seems that it's time for us to do our own version here. So, I'll start you off with some OriginalGriff ones.
NASA is now transmitting recordings of OriginalGriff into space. He has prevented 8 alien invasions so far.
OriginalGriff was not born. He has always been.
OriginalGriff caused the Big Bang - it happened the last time his code failed to compile the first time.
OriginalGriff's tears are the cure for every illness ever.
Chuck Norris quotes OriginalGriff facts.
OriginalGriff IS every Stig.
Dr Who is the autobiography of OriginalGriff.
OriginalGriff knows where infinity ends.
modified 9-Aug-14 4:26am.
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