[jason-johnson]

Sure, but the issue is that SO was used largely for people working in companies with arcane rules. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten one of these annoying “don’t do X, do Y” when I already know this. I have to do X for some reason, I don’t know how to do X because I do Y when given a choice and now no one will answer how to do X because someone killed interest in the question by apparently answering it. I use whatever points I get to downvote these answers.

The thing people don’t get is: when you answer on SO you’re not answering that poster. You’re answering anyone who will ever have this question. It’s quite arrogant to assume it will be an XY for every single person forever more.

The proper way to answer is to answer the question exactly as ask and then insert your “but you probably should be doing Y instead” at the end.

[underdeserver]

Disagree.

Doing things the right way is BETTER.

If you can't, you should add a bit to your question saying "I know the standard way is to do Y, not X, but because of reason Z I can't do it."

[jason-johnson]

Again, you’re not answering the person who asked but every person who ever will. Some of them will be asking because the “right way” is not an option in their situation.

[ivanbakel]

And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.)

Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wrong way, because they don't know what the right way is, an answer that simply tells them how is a bad resource.

It's not enough to tag caveats onto such dangerous answers, because people can't read. Instead, newbies should have to overcome a sufficient amount of opposition to filter out those who don't know why they're doing what they want to do, and the rest can make the little effort of being very explicit about why they want to do something the wrong way.

[lelanthran]

> And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves

Can't be done, will be marked as duplicate.

[chimprich]

Exactly. I've seen precisely this "documentation antipattern" occur many times. "How do I do X with Y"? "You probably want to do Z instead". Upvoted, question answered, all other related questions of "no, really I do want to do Y" get closed as duplicates.

Then Googling for doing X with Y gets you a bunch of closed questions and a labyrinth of links all leading to a question that was answered 10 years ago on a different software version where Z possibly was the right way to do it but now isn't.

And of course there's no way to reopen the question because it has been closed by a level 15 Magister Templi moderator and a lowly level 3 apprentice moderator like yourself needs to either answer 146 more questions or moderate 192 other questions to clear enough arbitrary hurdles to achieve holy question reopening powers.

And there's possibly an appeals process but that involves recruiting 13 moderators who you have to convince to give this question special treatment and declare that one of their number of sacred moderators made a mistake.

[underdeserver]

This is bad then. They are not duplicate questions.

[paulmd]

Yes. StackOverflow mods frequently mark questions duplicate that are not. That is something that has been observed by many many people.

Some of it is that SO has gamified shitting on and suppressing the question/asker instead of gamified providing the answer, and built a culture of toxicity that tolerates the abuse of the tools in this fashion.

And when the CEO asked them to tone it down maybe 5 years ago they basically did a collective “am I so out of touch? no, it’s the askers who are wrong”. Extremely funny to read the meta responses to that at the time.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942

(admittedly "women and people who don't speak english well are particularly unlikely to adopt to the pedantic neckbeard culture we've built" is a spicy take for your average SO'er, or wikipedian, but it's also not actually a wrong one either. SO's culture problems probably do disproportionately chase away users with marginal engagement, nobody likes putting up with formalized neckbeard culture and those users have absolutely encountered it before and absolutely have an aversion/revulsion to entering yet another online neckbeard nest. I think this is a case of “he’s probably right but the medicine would have gone down better with the manchildren if he hadn’t mentioned women and minorities”, and he’s also right that those issues have continued to bury SO over the last 5 years.)

[tivert]

> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way.

Then you have to do two things in your answer:

1. Correctly answer the question as asked.

2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.

If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."

[ivanbakel]

Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

[tivert]

> Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?

You know that's not your responsibility. If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).

And frankly, I think you greatly overestimate how valuable and essential your non-responsive "you're asking the wrong question" answer is.

> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.

Quit coming up with excuses for not answering the question.

[pasc1878]

Yes but the right way should be the answer unless it is explicitly stated why they can't use this.

Most readers will be able to use the "right way".

[jason-johnson]

No, the best thing is not assume you know better than anyone who will ever ask this. It’s good to mention what the right way is and why but your answer should always include the answer to the question exactly as asked at a minimum.

[pasc1878]

I agree but sometimes the answer exactly as asked leads to wrong things. So sometimes you don"t provide the answer to the exact question but include the reason why the exact question is not good. This gives the option for the questioner to comment why the exact answer is needed.

My experience with less experienced developers is that they ask the exact question as that is where they have stuck but they are ignorant of the better ways.

I do tend to answer differently depending on the questioners reputation. If they have a higher rep then I can assume they know what they are doing.