[ryandrake]

I've seen SO answerers who don't know the answer to a question try to force it into an "X-Y problem" and steer it until the question turned into something they could answer.

Q: "I'm trying to configure Foo to produce Bar, but it's giving me this error!"

A1: "What are you really trying to do?" [Unsaid: I don't know how to produce Bar either]

A2: "You should not be trying to produce Bar. Instead you should produce Baz. I know how to do that--follow the following steps..."

A3: "Producing Bar will not solve what I imagine your goal is. In the general case, you may need to produce many different results, which I would rather answer about..."

Q: "Uhh, thanks everyone, but I'm just trying to configure Foo to produce Bar."

[mhuffman]

My favorite is when they do that, then take the incorrect made-up answer to a question that was not asked to close the question due to: Duplicate of..., Off-topic because..., Needs details or clarity, Needs more focus and Opinion-based ...

Many such cases!

[theGnuMe]

ha! I see this in the dev/qa dynamic all the time. It also happens between product to dev/qa as well.

[spacemadness]

There is so much imposter syndrome and insecurity behind those type of answers. I wish we all had better filters online when our fragile egos go into defensive mode.

[OkayPhysicist]

The Q&A format of Stack Overflow isn't really built for complex questions. It works really well for being an easily searched repository of short, technical solutions to well-bounded technical problems.

The Elixir community talked about this a lot on the forums back when I was active on there, because language rankings look at Stack Overflow questions and Stack Overflow questions proliferate in languages with footguns. "Don't use obviously_named_function(), use obscr_wrd_fcn() instead" fits the SO formula quite well. Well designed languages, Elixir included, don't produce many of those kinds of question/answers. That leaves significantly more room for discourse around architecture and other higher-level conceptual stuff, which doesn't really have one correct answer, and thus is ill-suited for SO, being relegated to the lower-discoverability forums (and worse, the un-discoverable Discord).