[Sembiance]

Ahh, stack overflow. Hugely popular thread with a lot of engagement? Lets lock it. Wouldn’t want to encourage behavior that doesn’t match our narrow minded “vision” for the site. Still though, an improvement over the early years where they just outright deleted countless pages with countless contributions. In the end it’s their site and they can run it however they want, but it’s sad to see such massive potential squandered through a policy promoting deletionism. Hindsight is 20/20 though and it’s not like I’ve gone and coded a better one, so I should probably just delete this comment and move on.

[ChrisSD]

I do like that they are focused on being a collaborative Q&A site, nothing more and nothing less. Some sites care so much about "engagement" that they try to be all things to all people and end up simply becoming yet another generic forum.

I have other issues with SO but having a USP and sticking with it isn't their problem, IMHO.

[nyanpasu64]

I adblock Hot Network Questions because it always distracts me when I'm looking for programming help.

[bytesandbots]

I do that too! I try to block all kinds of Related/Hot/Recommended stuff on websites. Those can be more distracting than real ads if you ask me. Most useful has been to block the end card recommendations after YouTube videos.

[martin_a]

Pleae be nice to the 2374568234th user that could not manage to read any manual or just google for his error message before opening a new question!

[httpsterio]

It's not always that simple. Half of the time when I run into errors, there's no one solution that either works or 100% applies to my case so it's a lot of trial and error. I'm also not the most skilled developer and manuals are often way too verbose and difficult to parse if they don't contain very clear examples.

Sometimes, we just need someone to help translate our needs into a different wording and everything clicks into place. I'm sure that this causes a lot of repeated questions, but that's why when someone links a relevant question, it might be enough to solve the issue.

[gspr]

I think a lot of people's frustration comes from questions where it's abundantly clear that the asker searched neither SO nor the web first.

It only takes a few dozens of "why is [insert programming language]'s {addition, multiplication, subtraction, division} broken?!?!" questions that are all pointed to What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating Point Numbers before you lose all faith in humanity and get cranky. It's quite understandable.

If you can take the time to make an SO account and write a title and question body, why not Google that title first?

Another class of almost offensive questions is exemplified by this question on the front page for me right now: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64087844/programming-tiv... . The user states what he wants, then completely useless debugging information, then a wall of code that in no way complies with the SO guidelines of reducing your code to a minimal working example, and finally an all-caps expression of personal feelings. Come on – nobody would feel sorry for someone acting like this in the real world. There are a few basic rules for social interactions.

[oefnak]

Or, even more annoyingly, when you Google something and the first result is the exact problem you have, with the answer being someone pointing out that the solution can easily be found by googling...

People like you seem to forget that not only the question-asker profits from an answer, but future people as wel...

[nishmastime]

Did you consider looking at the other 1000s of results returned by Google?