Comment on Stack overflow is almost dead
immutable@lemm.ee 2 weeks agoI’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.
- Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
- See if this is an XY problem.
I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.
The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I very rarely ask questions on stack overflow but I appreciate much more as a sanity check on what I’m attempting to do.
In my experience, the majority of people have a flawed initial approach to what they’re trying to do, and if they all follow it they’ll produce a lot of really shitty software and learn very little in the process.
But they’re likely gonna anyway and didn’t even appreciate the sanity checks, so I fully expect software quality will continue to go down.
immutable@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.
I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.
Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.
I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.
I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.
I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah I mean that all sounds reasonable. I’m rooting for stack overflow to continue because it’s frequently helpful. I’ve basically never found chatgpt to be helpful.