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Discussion on: An Answer a Day on StackOverflow

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_garybell profile image
Gary Bell

I can't remember the last time I answered on StackOverflow, but it is hard to get a solid answer quickly unless you really know the topic well (or it's a slightly obscure topic).
That being said, I still get points for questions I answered years ago. They just tick up my reputation from time to time. Well done on helping out.

If you've found a lot of the same questions being asked over and over, you've got to sit back and ask "why?" It's usually either because the documentation is lacking, or because people are too lazy to search.

If it's the former of those, then there's two good options to work with:

  1. Update the documentation (if it accepts community contributions)
  2. Write a blog post covering the issue in a bit more depth

Either one of those options is good for building your knowledge and helping others.

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touch_marine profile image
Touch Marine

Just yesterday I encountered a question (What is the difference between 'typedef' and 'using' in C++11?) that was asked 8 years ago with an accepted answer from 5 months ago. So definitely, points and answers are being given even after long periods of time. And very often it takes some time to get a solid answer.

I think that lacking documentation is rarely the reason for duplicate questions. The way I see it, most of these askers either do not know how to find the solution or just do not bother. As you mentioned, some are just too lazy to search. But I think there are some that are so new to the topic they do not even know what to search for. Because of those who are too lazy to search, the answerers often get frustrated with the number of duplicates. And because they are frustrated, they sometimes downvote or leave rude comments to newcomers as they think they are too just too lazy to search.

I believe this is a problem thanks to vastly varying levels of knowledge on StackOverflow. And it is a hard problem to solve as you cannot just stifle one group, whether that be newcomers or more experienced users.

Although I do not think lacking documentation is a primary reason for duplicate questions, there is a lot of lacking documentation out there. And it causes unnecessary issues. I will try to contribute to that in the future. For quite some time I have been wanting to contribute to open-source and this may be a good way to do it.

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_garybell profile image
Gary Bell

I have to admit, I do like finding things with poor documentation. Mainly because I have to figure stuff out, and then I can write a blog post about it. My best blog post is one I wrote a year ago (published a year ago tomorrow), and it only exists because documentation was lacking. I use it whenever I need to remind myself how that bit of code works, because I know it's right.

But with StackOverflow, yes, there's a lot of very experienced people on there who forget that they too needed to learn, and that not everyone knows what to search for. Though I understand why they down-vote for things with a near exact title match.