The site should be made newbie-friendly
Or, rather, question-friendly.
I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides.
But please hear me out.
Pl...
There’s way too many new questions. And frankly, new users do ask questions that are answered already. But the other problem - it’s difficult to know how to ask the good questions. Because novices don’t know what they’re asking for. Which also means, they don’t know what to search for.
But worse there’s a gamified part to it. Badly written questions don’t get much points. So even if you help, you aren’t acknowledged unless the question asker is active. So you get weird ass questions like “How do I install Tailwind on Windows?” And you try your best to understand what they mean, spend half an hour on an answer, for them to reply “No” or worst, ghost you.
It makes it weird as a community because on one end, you want to help them. But on the other end, because of SO’s own set of rules, you are limited to how. There’s too many badly written questions, SO encourages new questions, experts feel like their time is being wasted because of the lack of feedback from new questions, and the bulk score chasers only go after extremely hot questions that have 20+ answers already.
Source: I’m apparently a top 10% contributor (?) because a few of my answers from 2011-2015 hit the top page and are highly upvoted. Also guessing it’s not hard to be in the top 10% because I’m not at all active, just been answering questions on SO for like a decade.
One of the key points nailed it.
There’s way too many new questions. And frankly, new users do ask questions that are answered already. But the other problem - it’s difficult to know how to ask the good questions. Because novices don’t know what they’re asking for. Which also means, they don’t know what to search for.
But worse there’s a gamified part to it. Badly written questions don’t get much points. So even if you help, you aren’t acknowledged unless the question asker is active. So you get weird ass questions like “How do I install Tailwind on Windows?” And you try your best to understand what they mean, spend half an hour on an answer, for them to reply “No” or worst, ghost you.
It makes it weird as a community because on one end, you want to help them. But on the other end, because of SO’s own set of rules, you are limited to how. There’s too many badly written questions, SO encourages new questions, experts feel like their time is being wasted because of the lack of feedback from new questions, and the bulk score chasers only go after extremely hot questions that have 20+ answers already.
Source: I’m apparently a top 10% contributor (?) because a few of my answers from 2011-2015 hit the top page and are highly upvoted. Also guessing it’s not hard to be in the top 10% because I’m not at all active, just been answering questions on SO for like a decade.