I asked my first question on StackOverflow today and within minutes, I got answers to my question. Unlike what I read online about difficulties in ...
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I recall things going pretty well besides a bunch of corrections. I remember someone complaining that I wrote “thanks in advance”, and then it was removed.
It was, like, fine, but bizarre.
Some people on SO are weird...
FWIW, this is not an individual behavior, it is a Stack Overflow standard:
stackoverflow.com/help/someone-ans...
Apparently this was my first question, which nobody answered, and I found out shortly that it was a bug in MySQL.
How do I convert a mysql function result to tinyint
Most of my questions on SO proper are about solving specific technical problems that I already tried solving at length, so I haven't had a lot of issue there. I've started many questions and then answered them myself in the process of writing the question, so I didn't post. Most of my answers on SO are because I had the same question and ran across the unanswered (or not thoroughly answered) question on SO. After I found the answer I needed elsewhere, I went back and added mine to the SO question for posterity. Most of the bad treatment on SO I've seen is from other users, not necessarily from mods. As far as the mods go, it does really hurt the ego to ask a question and get bopped on the head for it. However, I have often observed that people don't bother to think through their questions or even do a quick search for answers before posting.
The main negative experiences have been from the Software Engineering site:
I have actually never asked a question on the software engineering site... or if I did I deleted it. But I have observed all of these on other questions/answers. Although I shouldn't, sometimes I have participated in comment arguments. Disagreement on a logical basis is usually fine, but because of the nature of the site, comments like that are rarely productive. The culture/rules on the Software Engineering site is just a really broken for its stated purpose. And some of the active mods I see on there are toxic.
If you really want to see how people are treated on the site, watch the newest unanswered questions. This is where you can see how mods and other users treat question askers before they disappear from being downvoted and closed.
Yea stack overflow has a really really bad Iam better than you mind set. I personally feel like they are horrible when it comes to new people. In all honesty if I have questions I come to places like this or slack chat. At least then I actually get help and not down voted. Because people don’t like my question. I have posted things on there in the past and have gained rep ect from it but I get better explanations on other sites and slack chat community’s.
I think its encouraged to post your question, that you also found an answer to.
Hugely depends where exactly on SO (like "subreddit") you've asked the question, and the complexity of the question, and the time you did that, and how you did that (proper formatting etc). All that HUGELY affect the response by others and the timing you get at least something.
I asked 1 or 2 times, never got an answer.
Although replied to others and got enough "karma" points to be able to review and edit other questions.
🥇 My First Question
I first posted a question when SO was still in beta.
So many questions were answered (whether they were duplicate or not) without getting downvoted.
At the time, people were learning how to create a great community.
⏳ Until A few years back
I stopped posting and answering on SO for years as my questions were downvoted/deleted.
😁 Present
But now I see why. It was because I was stuck in the old mindset posting questions without putting myself in other people's shoes according to John Skeet's Golden Rule.
I stopped posting and answering on SO for years as my questions were downvoted/deleted.
I did the same, I think the community has lost their sense. Nowadays I prefer this site instead of SO.
When I posted my first question on StackOverFlow I got 3 down votes. 😂
I had exactly the same experience. In fact it was 1 minute after I posted that a model answer appeared. Amazing. I had to wait 15 minutes before I could select it as my preferred answer, in which time there was another answer, several comments on the answers, and a comment on the question that helped me to clarify it. Great experience. It is not in my nature to not thank people, though.
Well, I think they recommend you don't actually say thank you XD
Indeed, that's my point. I'd rather be able to thank people, and I don't see why it isn't allowed. I do "thank them by voting up" though.
Once you reach a certain level on Stack Overflow you get points for reviewing the posts of newcomers - there's a dedicated section on the site for it. The result is that people come across as overly critical and nit-picky. In fact, they just want the extra points
You do not get SO points for reviewing. You may get badges though but it takes a lot of work to earn badges for edits and usually two or more reviews are needed for an edit to go through.
My first question never got an answer. But the ones after it did. My questions were also never voted down. But I try to make answering them as easy as possible, by giving as much information as possible of which I can imagine being helpful to understanding the problem.
It is a bit like when you get feedback for something you coded, that does not work. You need as much info as you can get to locate the problem.
After that it is usually just some kind of intellectual challenge. And there you have those guys. They love those kind of challenges.
I'm looking back at the questions I asked, and they're all over six years ago. Mostly, I have advanced enough and SO's body of questions has advanced enough that I rarely find a question I have that isn't already answered.
I recall that asking questions can be fairly painless, unless it doesn't quite fit under the right domain. Asking a question about the right way to wrangle a project in Git, as an example, might be pushed to the Software Engineering SO as "off-topic", then pushed back, while 'How do I install git in Ubuntu' would stay in Ask Ubuntu.
(Speaking of Ask Ubuntu, I have a question about telling if the screen is locked or not that I asked twice, because one was pre-14.04 and Gnome, while the other was post-14.04 and Unity, with significantly different answers.)
Fantastic!!! You people carry a pretty clear/impressive track record on the first impression.
Answers/Comments to my first SO question(Here we go):
Question(somewhere around 2009):
How can I pass data from one page to another in JSP?
Reasons for asking this question:
It was the only second day I had heard of the word "JSP" and I was learning JSP.
No, I was not expecting em to do my homework. I was extremely passionate to learn JSP/Servlet and other technologies which my classmates were not even aware of.
PS: I created a fresh account thereafter and still continuing with the same.
I don't remember now the very first one because I think it was removed because it was either "duplicate" or "off-topic", but the very first in my history on the site was not answered until now. It was September 2017. I refrain from asking question because of the bad reputation it has. Generally, I find answers to my problems in other questions, many of them are marked as duplicate and when I take a look at it, it is not actually duplicate, it is a completely different context and sometimes the solution don't apply.
I'm naturally averse to asking questions, it is possible to count in one hand how many times I asked questions during my school years and for that reason, when I do have a question, it is a real struggle and I don't like the feeling that SO users are always belittling people's questions. =/
My question was terrible. But as far as I remember, the answers I got didn't solve my problem because I didn't give enough data. After a month, I figured it out myself. It was my fault for not giving enough data about the problem.
The question. There was a problem with the margin/padding of the body element.
The first time I posted on SO I specifically asked for a way to do something in vanilla javascript, NOT jQuery.
I immediately received a bunch of downvotes, edits to my original question, and a bunch of replies with how to do it in jQuery. 😩
Never posted again... lol
My first question was three years ago. I was transitioning from Java to C++. And tried to rewrite my learning project, a toy game engine. It worked well until I was trying to load libraries at run time. Turns out the error message was just bad and my error had nothing to do with the loading, but with my project setup (stackoverflow.com/questions/297098...).
After that 5 of my 10 questions were Haskell ones. The people in that community tend to be very nice to newcomers.
I found my first question on SO:
stackoverflow.com/questions/170303...
I really liked it (then) and stayed. At programmers.stackexchange I feel the most at home in the Stackexchange universe.
Experienced developers literally worship that site and stupidity strictly not allowed.
Learned through hard way though
I asked only two questions and noone could answer it. In the end I found my own answer then answered my own question. After that I stopped asking question on StackOverflow.
It's great, but don't do any mistakes on your questions or you'll be burned by the community... My first question was a duplicate (but I didn't know), the response was not very kind.
"SO" is easy to use, and under-used. Some editors might seem like sticklers if you're a noob, but mostly it's a relaxed place by anonymous internet standards.
The first time I asked a question. I was told to be more clear about the question.
Other time I asked, got the answer, but a guy told me to learn regular expressions.