| > But I'm also beginning to suspect that there are people who enjoy hammering others. Giving upvotes is no fun to them, but giving down votes makes their day. It’s entirely possible, but also pure conjecture unless you’ve got confessions from them. > If I posted this on meta stack overflow, it would immediately get downvoted. And my post would probably get closed. Yes, because you’re supposed to search for duplicate questions first and not ask them again. Meta is littered with thousands of prior questions exactly like this one. People have been naysaying for 15 years, but the site has been quite successful. At some point you just have to give up arguing with success. > Even constructive criticism seems to be illegal there. Stack Overflow choose a particular set of rules, and not everybody likes them. Few will say that they are perfect, but most will say that they are better than no rules at all. In particular, one problem with the rules is that new users are usually new to the technology that they are asking about as well. They frequently lack the ability reliably _recognize_ duplicate questions. Some minor details will be different, or the wording will be unexpected, so they fail to get any help from the existing answers. You should see the Emacs Stack Exchange: hardly a week goes by without someone asking how they can add a key binding to do X while in mode Y. Since the answer rarely depends on either X or Y, the answer is invariably the same, but nothing seems to slow them down. Learning to generalize is not the easiest thing to do. Neither is admitting that our first questions weren’t brilliant. It is difficult to have the grace to recognize that a question was already answered elsewhere, or that we phrased it badly, or that we didn’t do enough research before asking the question. That is a problem that predates Stack Overflow! See http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#stackover... for a resource that goes back even further, and has its roots in Usenet decades earlier still. Luckily nothing requires you to care about Stack Overflow’s curious rules. If you want a community with different ones, there are plenty tools you could use to create your own. Open–source forum software such as phpBB or Discourse is readily available and already in wide use. There are thousands of existing communities out there that are not part of Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange. Just be courteous and search their archives before you ask the same questions all over again. |
If you can't be bothered searching, just post and then follow the link given in the duplicate closure message. (I'm joking, yes? I'm not really advising people to do that.)