by zahlman | 2025-05-18 04:57:11+00:00
> I have a deadline and a problem.

Stack Overflow is by design not there to help you with this:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569

If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.

If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.

We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.

> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.

Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.

The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.

It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.

> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.

Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.

> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?

We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.

> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?

It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.

It is not about you.

> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.

A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.

> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?

No, in fact. It is not social media, either.

Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)

All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.

Stack Overflow does not. By design.

Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).

By design.

> Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.

You don't realistically get "dinged" for this. Whatever question of yours was downvoted to -4 (since your "reputation decreased by 8 points") certainly had other things wrong with it.

Sure, these things were edited out of your question; the post does not belong to you (in the terms of service, you license it to the community).

> Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.

The site is what it is. Sites on the Internet are allowed to be what they want to be. You are not entitled to them changing to suit you.