[the_af]

> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front

I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.

The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!

So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.

[1] "How to ask questions the smart way": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[2] "What is a help vampire": http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

[crispyambulance]

> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy,

Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy.

Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard.

It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly harsh standard that turns off a lot of people who need help.

BTW the dated, smug and dismissive ESR advice and premature labeling of people as "help vampires" doesn't help the argument on the SO side.

[the_af]

I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades.

Put yourself in the position of the people answering questions for free. It wastes their time. How long would it take to burn you if every day you had to answer the same questions by people too lazy to write with punctuation and to search for the answers to see if they already exist, who never come back to tell you if it helped them or not, who never reply to requests for clarification, who could have found the answer for themselves if they simply tried to run the code, and who are sometimes rude if you ask them a counter-question? There are so many times you can attempt to help someone asking "plz help this code doesn't run why doesn't it run plz help me" before giving up on the website.

Low quality, poorly researched questions also make SO as a whole less useful to other people. Forums full of garbage often devolve into more garbage. So there has to be a threshold -- arbitrary by definition -- and you may or may not agree with the precise one, but without one SO would be full of garbage. SO evolved into trigger-happiness because of the problem it was trying to solve: quality Q&A without the noise and garbage.

This has nothing to do with puritan work ethic or "worthiness" or gatekeeping. How to ask good questions is something every programmer (or tech-minded) needs to be good at in order to do their job. It's not too much to ask. How else would they know what code to write or what problem to solve?

[TheOtherHobbes]

If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.

Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

[the_af]

> If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.

To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?

> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)

> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?