StackOverFlow and the Downvote Paranoia

I've been more active than my usual in SO for sometime now and I noticed this behavioral pattern between new questions and badge thirsty flaggers/downvoters, back in the early 2010s the fastest gun in the west used to reply with a correct answer, now the early replies are mostly complaints about formatting or how it's a duplicate of a totally different question. This is a result of wanting to keep the quality high, understood. But you can always edit questions with poor grammar and/or formatting. But I think it gets too spoopy for new users to post an innocent question, or an answer for that matter. It discourages them to learn.

@DLMousey I don't mean the clusterfuck of posts that are hardly comprehensible, but the innocent "sorry for bad english" ones. Albeit, complaints about formatting was just an example.

@DLMousey there are also many good souls around that even go ahead and fix whatever you fabricated for you

@DLMousey I get that people want things to be formatted properly, but I've had a question downvoted because of that.

Actually, downvoting questions in general. Answers are fine, if you don't think it's right just go ahead and downvote, but a question?! That's just stupid. It doesn't matter if you think a question is "too easy" or anything like that, if the other person is asking is because they don't know and need help, just help them or ignore.

@DLMousey I hear you...but really....SO is full of a lot of shit that overshadows anything decent about it.

Constantly, I see well formed questions, with clear points about what they've done just for the first set of answers to recommend they do the shit they've tried or do something to fix a problem that is not even related.

Yeah, the person might get the answer that is helpful but in the middle, why so much bullshit from these SO Warriors? It feels like the few good people are rare and the majority of SO is people whoring for upvotes rather than trying to help.

I've said before, SO is the only place that can both give me an answer and piss me off at the same time.

#My2Cents

I hate when people downvote and don't tell why, then I keep getting more downvotes and I don't know why.

@cantthinkofone I totally agree that some SO users are a bit radical with their downvotes. However, downvoting questions is not such a bad idea. Too often I have seen questions without a clear question or with a far-from-minimal example or that could be solved by simply googling or even a question that contained a recruitment offer.

@TempestasLudi if a question is not clear enough, either tell the person it's not clear and ask them to edit it, or ignore it completely.

So many times I've seen people saying "just google it" but google doesn't have an answer, or it has one but didn't work. If I see a question like that I'd just ask "did you google it and what did you find", no need to be rude about it like most people there. I still don't think any of this is a reason to downvote a question.

That recruitment offer is not a question tho, downvote that shit.

I already mentioned it in another rant, but a lot of the smaller communities on SO are a lot more friendly and a lot less toxic...

With what i have seen SO is not very forgiving in general ofcourse there are good guys there but some vote diggers scare the shit out of newbs.

@cantthinkofone https://stackoverflow.com/q/...

I just ran into this question. Sure, it is a newbie, but that doesn't mean that the post is quite unreadable and far from minimal in its current state.
Therefore, someone who seeks to help this person will need to do far more work than if [he who asked the question] had taken a little time to familiarize themselves with the editor and the usual SO question formatting.
If people ask questions like these, they needlessly extract time and energy from the community that could have been spent creating good answers to interesting questions.

@TempestasLudi doesn't take long to ask someone to edit their question

@cantthinkofone True, but it becomes tiring to have to ask that every time while people could have thought of that themselves.

@TempestasLudi That's true, but I still don't think we should downvote a question because someone else also made a mistake and we're tired. If you're tired of asking people to edit, just ignore the question. Eventually they'll get it and start asking questions the right way

@cantthinkofone I guess you are right :-)