@tonyf we have something called meteor-mentor. It is a mentor based learning solution. There are couple of us who have been helped greatly by attending this once a week live hangout sessions. They are held on Friday normally. You can come and ask us questions.
@serkandurusoy is the mentor there. So is @robfallows. @joshowens drops in time to time and holds an event. programmers of all levels come there and benefits form it. We have been doing it for more than 2 months now and going strong ! I at least was able to get my tiny startup app off the ground with @serkandurusoyâs help.
and I have had tremendous help from this forum and gitter, @brajt is always there. If anything urgent, someone is always there to help immediately. Gotta mention slack channels and this forum too.
The problem is that a lot of us (myself included) just donât have the energy for that. We go to stack overflow hoping to answer one or two good questions, and after reading through 3-5 bad ones, we give up and walk away. I tried to last night go and answer questions on there to reduce the unread count, and after an hour of sifting through bad questions and questions with such specific domain knowledge that it would have taken a significant chunk of time to comprehend the question, much less the answer, I gave up.
That is why more active members moderate the hell out of questions, because theyâre sick of terrible unanswered questions mucking things up.
This forum is very helpful, but I donât even know where to begin guiding the askers on stack overflow to the answers they seek.
stackoverflow has become a frustration reliever for some people, who think that they can judge what is relevant and what is not.
Too much focus is given to policing, too little to create content. I think itâs because itâs easier to say âyou are wrongâ than helping people, and provides more satisfaction.
Plus the more you close, the more power you get, and this has created an averse mood, which has driven off peopleâŚ
If you normalize traffic data of SO over Node.js for example, you see that SO is quickly sinking into oblivion
Iâm not sure how your two examples go together. âBadâ questions, okay, I can understand that though I donât really agree with you there. After all, there are no bad questions. Only bad answers.
How in the hell do you people expect someone else to learn when theyâre not allowed to ask questions? Yes. Itâs annoying. But thatâs the only real way to learn.
Secondly, I donât get why domain-specific questions are lumped in with your âbadâ questions. Yes, they are specific. So what? Sometimes you do have a very specific and unique condition and you are hoping that someone else has run into this before and actually solved it.
@rhywden SO has this sad rule excluding questions that have too narrow scope. With moderators deciding what scope is too narrow, so in fact they can close any question based on this rule.
But if you want an answer thatâs simply not true: If I ask âmy code doesnât work, why?â and give you no code to look at thatâs a terrible question as itâs unanswerable. Likewise if I give you a massive dump of badly written code and say âmy code doesnât work, why?â thatâs also a pretty bad question as few people are going to get all that code up and running in order to try and solve my problem.
From the point of view of getting an answer, good questions ask specific things and contain the minimum amount of code to reproduce an issue (in many ways like good bug reports). [quote=ârhywden, post:29, topic:20158â]
How in the hell do you people expect someone else to learn when theyâre not allowed to ask questions?
[/quote]
People are allowed to ask any question they like, the point for me is that as I want an answer and also want to be respectful of the limited amount of time that the people answering the questions have, Iâm happy to follow some basic guidance about formatting questions as it benefits both me and the answerer.
Generally though, I definitely railed against SOâs tight question asking requirements at the start, but the more I used it the more I understood why they existed, especially when I did some reviewing.
But if you want an answer thatâs simply not true: If I ask âmy code doesnât work, why?â and give you no code to look at thatâs a terrible question as itâs unanswerable. Likewise if I give you a massive dump of badly written code and say âmy code doesnât work, why?â thatâs also a pretty bad question as few people are going to get all that code up and running in order to try and solve my problem.[/quote]
So? Sometimes people simply donât know how to ask proper questions. In education, we have this concept of âskillsâ:
The skill to calculate a result based on a formula. The skill to write down your observations in a proper way.
And the skill to ask a question so that youâll receive an answer. (Related: Dunning-Kruger - people overestimate their skill-level because properly estimating their skill level is also a skill.)
Iâm not convinced that the practice of simply locking down those questions is constructive. Particularly as it can be abused easily.
So in which case it seems like you agree there are âbadâ questions and that gaining a skill will allow you to ask âbetterâ ones. I accept thatâs not great terminology, I think âeffectiveâ questions is probably better.
It seems like Stack Overflow actually tries pretty hard to teach that skill? It gives automated guidance on how to ask an effective question (effective in the confines of SO anyway) when you first post questions, it has in built algorithms that post up a message while asking a question that say things like âthe answer to this is likely to be opinion based so is not a good fit for the SO formatâ and it has well documented guidance on how to post questions that are likely to be answerable.
And, if none of that works, the reviewers and users of SO will educate people on how their questions can be improved in order to get a response.
Sure, if itâs your first time of asking a question and you need an answer in the next two minutes then thatâs a lot of learning to go through to ask the question, but if you donât do it your question may well not be answerable anyway and as you say asking questions is a skill that needs to be learned.
If you really believe that, then I canât help you. There are bad questions. There are some questions that either are out of scope or so poorly written as to be incomprehensible. The teachers who used to say âthere are no stupid questionsâ just enabled people to ask stupid questions without admitting they have a problem.
Oh, I have no problem with people asking questions. But I much prefer to answer questions that are well thought out as a result of a process not unlike this one: Unusually Effective Debugging
There are two types of domain specific questions. There are domain specific questions for which an expert exists, and if it was properly tagged, that expert would come in and answer it. There are also domain specific questions which are either something new, or some integration challenge, or something else of that nature. Those are the kind that show up on SO a lot. Thing is, there is no expert yet, but novices are trying to get experience in that domain, and then the experts out there with other intersecting domains are being blasted with questions which are outside their experience area.
Novices have no business entering unknown territory like that, and when they do, and then ask on Stack Overflow, then I, as a person answering, have to weigh the time it would take me to gain enough domain experience to answer the question, often for no reward as you are not likely to upvote or accept my answer, and when a real expert in that domain finally shows up (sometimes multiple years later) they will downvote my answer and add their own before voting to close.
As I said before, as a professional, my time to answer questions on stack overflow is limited. That is time I could better use elsewhere most of the time. My original post that you responded to was my description of what I ran into in the hour I had to spare last night to answer questions. I found only questions in three categories:
poorly worded - couldnât easily comprehend (or at all in some cases)
already answered, I had nothing to add
Specific to some domain (in this case package) that I donât have personal experience with, and would have taken me a half hour or more to get enough knowledge to answer the question.
So I didnât answer. Which is an answer to the OP asking why noone answers questions on stack overflow for meteor.
While I agree that this is a sad rule, it has itâs place, but it requires moderators to exercise discretion, something that is sadly often lacking on Stack Overflow.
The correct response according to Stack Overflow docs is not to close poor questions, but to downvote and leave constructive criticism. Questions that are closed are either âfailure to use search to find matching questionâ or ânot actually relevant to this site,â at least in theory. However, that of course is widely abused, and not effective. But that is the goal.
Stack Overflow as a site tries hard, but if that doesnât work (and it often doesnât) then the community generally fails at the next step which is to constructively rebuild this. As others have said, and I agree, closing is way too frequently used on Stack Overflow.
All of that said, I think the reason we arenât getting answers is explained very clearly right here:
You pretty much answered your own question here: from the producer (MDG) perspective, SO is useful for prospects at the mouth of the funnel. This forum is for those who are already converted (if we think of frameworks and platforms as being like currencies, competing for usageâŚ)
Where MDG is, theres many more dollars securing a base of converted quality leadsâŚpaying and supported Galaxy users. The forum is the community supported tier of any hosting and works great for that I think.
I only close questions which can not be reasonably improved or are obvious duplicates. I am describing my situation as an answerer, in response to the original post.
And you are clearly not reading anything I actually said! I am describing my experience trying to answer questions as asked for on here, while also commenting on the side why some people would close those questions.[quote=ârhywden, post:35, topic:20158â]
How in the seven hells do you think that locking questions after they have been already asked will reduce the number of questions asked? Youâd need to ban people in order to achieve that.
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How in the âseven hellsâ is that even related to my quote? Like seriously dude, WTF? You are really just trolling at this point. I was again (read the freaking post) stating my experience trying to answer questions. At no point in that quote do I say I closed any questions (because I didnât). You are literally trying to blame all of Stack Overflow problems on me and Iâm just being helpful and offering real insight into the mindset of the people who are trying but failing to answer questions on there.
Again, the only questions I would close or âlockâ are obvious duplicates or questions beyond saving. I will downvote others, and leave constructive criticism. That downvote may be painful to you as the recipient, but I didnât close your question in âretributionâ or ârageâ or anything like that. Instead, I did a normal human thing of âreactingâ to my feelings on the question (the downvote) and then offering constructive criticism so that you may improve and I can remove the downvote.
Now, if you feel the need to further attack me personally or directly, at least do me the courtesy of attacking what I actually freaking said instead of acting like I am the âneckbeard with 7000 repâ mentioned earlier closing all of the questions, because Iâm not!
This tone is really unnecessary. I donât really understand why people are so angry with Stack Overflow, but itâs certainly off-topic for this thread and these forums, and your aggressive attitude is way out of bounds. Please tone it down.
If we answer or close some of these questions, weâll reduce the number of unanswered questions and hopefully increase the chance that if someone has a question, they find one that has been answered satisfactorily, or if they arrive on SO from Google, they find a useful answer rather than an unanswered question.
I think thatâs a really admirable goal, but Iâm not sure thereâs a great deal of benefit in doing that in the long-run if itâs a one off hit. I think the only way to deal with it long-term is to stop actually answering technical questions anywhere other than on SO, so that askers and answerers are all using one place.
I know a lot of stuff happens on git/slack/IRC at present, but all of that content is then in unsearchable silos which isnât helping the wider community and the silent-majority of Meteor devâs who probably donât hang around on the git/slack/IRC channels. I guess the middle ground could be to adopt the approach of asking questions on SO and then linking to the questions on git/slack/IRC.
This all sounds like I have a great desire to see everything happen on SO, which isnât true, Iâm just curious as why a community Iâm new to (the Meteor community) is taking a different approach to a lot of the other communities and to explore whether SO offers benefits.
When discussing on chats, we donât stop at talking about solving particular problem - we exchange our experiences, suggest alternative ways to deal with something, talk about our recent projects and whatâs very important - we form interpersonal relations. This wonât happen on SO, which is dead stuck on solving particular problem and only that.
Downgrading chat communication to linking SO questions would be an unwelcome change.
Stack Overflow â like most online communities Iâve studied â naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. Itâs primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isnât always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive.
At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. Thatâs why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, thatâs why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.
After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder â what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that Iâd spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?
I really think Jeff nailed it in that last paragraph. I love the direction discussions head in these forums, a lot of which get started as simple technical questions. Time and again we see technical questions blossom into awesome back and forth discussions, that sometimes even lead into steering the direction of Meteor development.
