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by ncann 978 days ago
The biggest problem with SO is that it is self-conflicting in its mission. It wants high-quality answers, it wants to avoid duplicates, it wants to be wiki-like or even something that can replace official docs/man page. All those are good and noble goals, but you cannot have that and at the same time be novice-user friendly. Wikipedia has the same issue to a certain extent, but SO is much worse because it's a Q&A site, and yet because of the above goals it in effect prevents novices from asking questions because of duplicate, because they don't know what to ask (since they are novice), etc. If they want to be truly useful to question askers, perhaps there should be some spin off part of SO where people can ask question freely to their heart's content but somehow doesn't affect the main site's quality...
3 comments
passion__desire 978 days ago
Why can't Stackoverflow create queues for questions?

E.g. beginners will help novices

Mid developers will help beginners

It's like that meme where top people help people below them come up

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gregmac 978 days ago
I think this is a great idea.

People can learn a ton by answering questions. Trying to create a complete answer will make you realize the gaps in your own understanding. As an early SO user, I benefited from this greatly.

Sadly, I find this impossible these days. I've given up on SO as anything other than a mostly passive user. I'll vote, and make the rare comment, but that's it. The last time (a few years ago) I made a concerted effort to answer some questions, my experience was that many questions would be closed as dupe/low-quality while I was partway through answering. Flagging that it isn't low-quality (proven by the fact I can answer it) goes nowhere -- people are seemingly all too happy to yield their close hammer power, but not to re-open.

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IshKebab 977 days ago
I agree. It can be a Q&A site where you ask a question and get an answer, or it can be an FAQ style reference wiki where all the questions and answers are perfect and people edit any answer. It can't be both, but it seems like they just can't decide which it should be.
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_the_inflator 978 days ago
I side with you. On the other hand, there seems to be no business case left. You mentioned Wikipedia. I think that WP is highly profitable and even in the times of ChatGPT still is. And does not need such a high staff count.
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