Meh, just put your question and wrong answer in a meme and post it anywhere, within an hour everyone will correct it with the right answer 😂
Or post your question with a picture of Kurisu Makise saying "you should be able to solve this"
That's how they got a 4chan user to post the solution to an unsolved math problem
Holy shit that's actually amazing
A tangent about Haruhi and 4chan wouldn't even be the weirdest leap, if this somehow helped prove P=NP.
Quite often it gets corrected with another wrong answer.
Correct. Always provide wrong answer. No one can withstand someone being wrong on the internet.
Wow that's such a good approach :D
r/unpopularopinion might also work well
Obviously thats so wrong. The correct answer is to pray for the answer and keep taking naps until you get your answers.
Have you been stalking me?
Hacker news isnt an appropriate forum for most questions tho, that one is valid
Yeah, this list of sites is making me think of asking for a book by loudly asking a library, a series of coffeeshops, a chud microbrewery, and an 11-year-old bully. Try quietly reading in the library first, I guess.
Simultaneously the worst and funniest feeling, is searching for a solution and most of the responses/results are to go search for it. If your answer is that searching for an answer is an easy and quick solution, you contribute to disproving yourself.
Especially useful when the specific thread is now the first result on Google.
Yeah this is one of the main reasons why Stackoverflow's question closing policies are bullshit. We're going to close the question so nobody can answer it... but they can still upvote it and it will still be ranked highly on Google!
Bunch of idiots.
You know the SO Devs actually tried to improve this a while ago - I think you would be able to reopen your question once or something. Of course the power-hungry mods hated that idea and the abandoned it.
At this point it's unfixable. They depend on their unpaid mods and they've already attracted the sort of people you absolutely don't want to moderate a site.
The only hack I've found is that if your question gets downvoted/closed you are allowed to delete it, wait half an hour and ask it again. Much better odds of success than editing the question.
Skill issue.
most people don't know how to properly formulate questions and it shows. 90% of new questions on SO are just bottom barrel which is why the rules are so strict about quality.
Absolutely true, but it's also more difficult to ask a good question when you don't know anything about what you're asking.
People who know a lot about a topic can ask very good questions about that topic.
The problem I see with most questions people post online is that they make too many assumptions that their audience will will magically understand the context of their question.
Good questions require relevant context.
Determining relevancy requires expertise.
Expertise comes from experience.
No matter how many questions you ask and answers you get you'll never "understand" something until you do it.
Instead of asking questions like "How do I do X?" people should be asking "I'm trying to accomplish X, I've tried Y, but I'm encountering Z. How could I resolve this?"
I guess my rule is that you should never ask someone a question without first trying to answer it yourself.
Try chatgpt and the like, it's gonna give you same barely correct answers, at least it isn't gonna send you out, well... Most of the time
ChatGPT is give you general answer not the right ones from my experience
Sometimes you get the right answer if you fine tune your question...but sometimes don'tSame with stack overflow, in my experience at least) i just googled questions btw, not started them, so in my personal experience chatgpt is google++
Stack Overflow isn't a tutor site. It's a wiki. Its usefulness would plummet if duplicate questions are allowed, since that would scatter all the answers.
Then it should allow to connect duplicates as sub questions to main question which they keep as original, Wikipedia allow additions to articles after all, i mean if you comment your question under main question, who gonna look at that?
People do look at that eventually, but not as fast as some people want.
It's also weird to me that people seem to primarily use it to ask questions (and get butthurt about getting duplicates). It's really rare that I ever don't find an answer there (which often is buried in responses, but still). Like I've virtually never been motivated to post there.
If it's a question I know how to answer but believe it really it would take 30 seconds of searching for a regular person to find...
I'd give the answer but be a bit snarky about it.
Does the snark really make you feel better?
It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting the other person to understand that Google exists and that they can use it, too. Too many people refuse to put in any effort of their own and go ask someone instead.
IMHO in that situation answering isn’t even the right thing to do, since it encourages that behaviour and prevents the asker from learning to find out stuff for themselves. Something about fishing for hungry people or so…
When someone is genuinely stuck, doing research themselves allows the answerer not to go down the same dead ends, which saves time for both.
If it's on Stack Exchange, you can help us keep the community decent by assuming good faith and being patient with newcomers. Yes, it's frustrating. And yeah, sometimes, it's basically impossible to avoid sarcasm and scorn, just like how HN sometimes needs to be sneered at, but we can still strive for a maximum of civility.
If all else fails, just remember: you're not on Philosophy SE or any of the religious communities, it's just a computer question, and it can be answered without devolving into an opinion war. Pat yourself on the back for being a "schmott guy!" and write a polite answer that hopefully the newbies will grok. Be respectful of plural perspectives; it's a feature that a question may have multiple well-liked answers.
I love it when the top Google result for a problem is a thread saying to Google it. Exactly what I needed, thanks asshole.
As someone who works in IT, and specifically networking and security, the "trade subs" are honestly what I miss.most from reddit. Places like sysadmin, Cisco, Fortinet, talesfromtechsupport, etc.
Or, anywhere: "But why do you want that?"
Context is always useful, though. Because sometimes the person asking has gone down the wrong path and you could help them see the problem from a completely different angle.
Or maybe that context will let you know that yes, they have to use that ancient tech because that's what they have to use at work and no they can't install the latest fancy tech that does it so easily...
"Here is the answer, but why do you want that?" is a tolerable invocation of the X-Y problem.
"But why do you want that?" is derailing. It's an effortless, all-purpose, I'm-so-clever bot post, and it drags a straightforward technical hurdle into some MacGuyver-ass lateral thinking puzzle.
I was once trying to incorporate 2D characters into Blender, with normals. There was no higher goal. That was, itself, the point. But instead I got a bunch of useless advice about how to model my simple example object, and snippy bullshit about doing things properly in 3D. Nobody had a damn thing to say about the discrepancy between the scanline renderer and the path-tracing renderer.
Just use phind.com you will get the relevant references. Chat got but better as it gives the source.
Peple misunderstand “Closed as duplicate” as an insult, when it’s just the hint to look at the provided link. If you didn’t find the answer previously, this just means there are multiple ways to express the problem, which use different words and thus don’t all find the same google result.
It's annoying when it is not a duplicate tho
Which is quite often
That's fair, but if you edit the question to explain how it's different (without which, how could anyone even answer your question?), it can be (and often is) reopened.
They also changed the wording from "closed" to "on hold" years ago, and I don't think I've ever seen the people complaining about the site take any notice.
It's because they don't use the site and they don't have a problem to solve. They're just here to complain.
