@KevinB I'm guessing that by the time OP asks a question on Stack Overflow, given the reception they're likely to recieve, they've exhausted their mental energy and patience, and any attempts to get them to think will be interpreted as provocations.
Also, if something is useful it probably should scale both ways
Its probably my small site bias, but... if you're going to adjust mechanics, what works on SO should work on say.... underwater basket weaving say SR or HR.se
> The attitude is not beginner friendly. Askers are expected to have done a lot of research before asking a question (re: both question format and content), even if they are completely new to the community or topic. Not everyone can understand or even know to look for documentation when they’re completely new to programming.
[screams internally]
Is there going to be a change where proper research is not required to ask questions?
I fear this will just reduce the number of people willing to answer.
In order to survive in this industry (or even with programming as a hobby), it's fundamentally necessary to learn the skill of RTFM, leaving places like SO for the better questions.
@Aibobot True, but there's a difference between helping them grow a thicker skin and realizing that the world doesn't want to spoonfeed them, and, well, spoonfeeding them.
@Aibobot Sometimes I have basic programming questions. I don't ask them on SO because I know I can find it out myself (or look for an existing duplicate). That is as thick a skin as you need.
If I asked how to hook __libc_start_main with dlsym, I should be told that I haven't done my research and that no one is going to answer my duplicate question for me.
Honestly, even lmgtfy is a good thing in my opinion. At the very least, it shows people what kinds of terms to use to find what they want. Though I personally dislike Google, but still...
And it's downright helpful. Not only does it often answer the question, but it teaches people the kinds of things they should search. There have been several times when I was writing a basic question, then I realized "hey, what if I just plug the question title into a search engine?". It works!
From the frame of reverence of the people who are noticing what is happening to SO.
It's certainly not only mine.
I wonder what will happen when staff finally realize that they are making the place unwelcoming to core users. Maybe the issue is that core users don't click adverts? I dunno, but at least it's making many people, me included, not willing to answer questions on SO. I remember one starred comment on a smaller SE site in chat that said something like "coming back from SO feels like returning from the battle zone", with others agreeing at how horrible the questions are.
The very questions that are now being considered Good Questions(tm).
Well maybe with animated and intrusive ads and all that, the CEO will be rich enough that he doesn't need to keep pushing for his little pet money-making projects like Teams or whatever it was.
And then SO can get back to answering good questions and the welcoming thing can be left.
If staff are ignoring meta and the like because it's too negative, maybe they should step back and reflect on exactly why it's getting so negative in the first place.
I'm assuming no one with influence over the company cares.
I'm sure there are individual staff members who do care, but who can't do much about it.
IRC behaves in a very fun way if a server goes down. You get a netsplit, which means the network actually splits into multiple networks. Sometimes you're the really, really unlucky one and you're one of like three people stuck on the smallest server until the split resolves itself. :P
Does it support r͕̣͇̻̕e̼͉͖̕a̭͓͇̺l̷̟̮͖̦l̗̲̕y̞̭ ͓̻͎̭̀ͅa̞̰̲̠͠n̮̮̳̘̼̦̲͢n̡̖̮̣͙̺̳o͈ͅy̤͙͚̹͝ḭn̟̞̜̻̜̫͡g̛͕̣͖̪ ̴̥̹ͅun͖̺͉i͏̲̰̲͚͇̥̳c̞͚̤̗o̤̯͔͟d̻̼̩̜̼̕e?̥̜̱̘̗̝͟ :P
(or unicode at all, for that matter)
Or is it entirely client-dependent?
That's the one good thing about a monoculture client ecosystem is that you never need to worry about feature support breaking on some clients. Though the downside is that you can never find a client that's just right for you (all the plugins you want, or really stable, or whatever).
@Aibobot Eight 30 minute episodes that were basically identical copies. The theme was time resetting over and over, but instead of putting it in 2, maybe 3 episodes, they made it 8.