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This general topic seems to come up constantly on Meta Stack Overflow as a major point of contention, yet there never seems to be a really proper reference to direct people towards. Existing Q&A doesn't quite hit the mark, and many OPs even seem to find it contradictory.

The reasons we close questions are well documented, but for many, there seems to be a ton of inferential distance between those reasons and the wording in the tour:

With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.

It comes across that the goal of the site is to a) be comprehensive and b) connect people with questions to people who can answer them. It seems as though anything that's on topic should be fair game. But of course, in practice we tend to expect quite a bit of research - even though the most successful questions are often simple how-tos expressed in a single sentence (that don't inherently demonstrate any attempt to find the information somewhere else), or clarifications of fundamental concepts, or examinations of common gotchas, or even basic language syntax issues.

This disconnect causes a ton of strife. Many new users walk away speculating that their questions were poorly received because they're "too easy". A few, on the other hand, imagine that the problem was a question that's too difficult - they'll complain about the question being reviewed by people who "don't understand" it. Long-time users who aren't active on Meta will sometimes ask terrible questions themselves; more often, they'll serially answer terrible questions (that's how they got their rep points, after all!) and then complain on meta about the questions getting closed, their answers occasionally being deleted, or other such "interference".

And periodically as a result we'll get a rant about how we're treating newcomers, sometimes even leading to the company scolding the meta community (which may have unfortunate implications) or trying to change things. Meta regulars, meanwhile, often seem to reject the idea that newcomers might actually respond to feedback, and argue that we need to be more negative in the feedback we do offer.

Against this backdrop, I feel there's a long-overdue need to address the topic, once and for all, in one place. This is how I formulate it -

For new users (or others who aren't "getting it"):

  • Why do we have and enforce the question standards that we do; and how do we reconcile that enforcement with our understanding of the site's goal? In particular: what sorts of questions actually require a minimal reproducible example? Why do we expect them in such questions, and what are the practical consequences of expecting the OP to create one?

  • How do we actually distinguish a useful, beginner-level question from a personalized request for help?

For the meta community:

  • How can we effectively reassure people that their questions are not being closed for being "too easy"? (Or if they are, then why isn't that an official close reason, retroactively applied to a bunch of popular questions?)

  • Fundamentally, why isn't the readily available feedback enough (apparently) for new users to figure out our standards and act on them? Is personalized guidance necessary? Or else how can we more effectively point them at the "real" requirements for questions, as opposed to the impression they get from the tour etc.?

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    I've been trying to write this question for years now, probably. I finally decided to just go for it. It probably could use a lot of work, but I really think we need a Q&A with this basic shape - and that tons of new Meta questions would end up duped to it in the long run. Commented Feb 2, 2025 at 18:05
  • Agreed, but the job is working this up so we don't just wind up with a Stack Overflow for Stack Overflow's Stack Overflow. We need to keep this to one layer of abstraction. Commented Feb 2, 2025 at 19:18
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    second bullet question seems rather broad as an expansion of the first... enough to be its own, separate question I think. why not ask about the "you were too lazy to understand my difficult question" part? Commented Feb 2, 2025 at 19:18
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    This question seemed like an elephant in the room. I'm glad you bring it up. To me, one of the main reason for "getting it" being hard, is the amount of questions that are useful and popular, while being very short and/or low-quality. Most SO questions I saw before signing up were like How do I exit vim. That one wouldn't even pass by today's standards. Even if filtering for the most upvoted quesitons of 2024, many are very short, maybe low-quality. Though not impossible, I think it's way too hard, to find quality questions to learn from. Commented Feb 2, 2025 at 22:20
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    One concept that I've run into a few times is: Sufficiently Generic vs lacking focus. Its a bit of a game of jeopardy. Exactly what is relevant and what is noise is something that is very hard from a question askers point of view, whilst relatively simple from the answers point of view. You kind of need to know the answer in order to know what is relevant information to a basic question, and what is specific to this individual case of it. Commented Feb 2, 2025 at 22:41
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    I think most of the new user stuff is covered by Why is "Can someone help me?" not a useful question? (which you linked). Excerpts: "The purpose of Stack Overflow is to create a knowledge repository [...] a good question [is] likely to be searched by someone else." ... "asking a good question will nearly always require you to know enough to know what you don't know. [...] do your own research." ... "If you are trying to figure out how to do something, [work through it and ask if you get stuck]. If you are trying to fix a problem in code, [MRE]." Commented Feb 3, 2025 at 3:27
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    @wjandrea Perhaps, but it's not a good fit to the way that people actually pose the sort of question I want to be able to hammer on meta. Commented Feb 3, 2025 at 3:33
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    Good questions, but which of the questions are answers to this meta question supposed to answer? If it's "all of them" I fear the answers may quickly hit the "way too long" metric... For instance, the topic of an MRE is long enough to warrant an entire help article. Commented Feb 3, 2025 at 21:42
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    @RyanM meta is effectively Stack Overflow for Stack Overflow. A Q&A for using a Q&A. The last thing we want is for meta to get convoluted enough to need it's own Q&A to instruct users of meta in how to best use meta to discuss Stack Overflow. Avoiding that sad state of affairs requires better organization than what we have now. How do new meta users find stuff on meta without asking? Karl describes a problem that needs a good, serious answer. How do people other than Karl and the current Meta-denizens who see the post know that it exists? Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 1:25
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    o7 to your attempt at this. This is a massive topic to put an answer to though, so also o7 to the people who write an answer below. I can't. One thing that has struck me as inefficient though is that duplicate closures are lumped together with any other kind of closure where most closures are the result of a wrongdoing, but a dupe isn't really. It is the odd one out. "Simple" questions likely are a duplicate so should be, for the lack of a better word, "closed". Practically in the way it is implemented on the site, it's what Wikipedia calls a "redirect". Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 10:35
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    Why do we have and enforce ....t enforcement with our understanding of the site's goal? As someone "not getting it", I have to say, this is highly subjective - as you put it, your understanding of the site's goal. At that point, you're trying to enforce a imaginary rule using close votes - using made up reasons, rather than the agreed close reasons. Quality is subjective, until you can quantify it objectively. I'm sure you'd want close reasons like lacks "research/minimal understanding" back. But they were removed for a reason, which you don't seem to agree with fully or partially. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 13:09
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    I count a total of 9 questions in the 4 bullet points. That's awfully far from the classic Q&A format with one question per Q&A. If people need a comprehensive manual for how to use StackOverflow, this is not the place for it. That's what the SO UI is for, especially the help page. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 15:31
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    @Joooeey Meta is very much for documenting how SO works and what the policies are. It has FAQ Index for Stack Overflow and the [faq] to build up that. And this post is tagged [faq-proposed] thus a candidate to become part of that FAQ. Your assertion is simply false. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 15:36
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    @VLAZ I see. What I don't see is how all the questions asked in the rant above form a single common theme. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 15:43
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    For a FAQ entry this is way too unfocused. At very least the 4 bullet points should be split up into separate entries... Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 22:30

4 Answers 4

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First of all thanks for the question. I admit I always also wondered about this but never made it into a question.

How can we effectively reassure people that their questions are not being closed for being "too easy"? (Or if they are, then why isn't that an official close reason, retroactively applied to a bunch of popular questions?)

If I remember correctly there was such a close reason ("lacks minimal understanding") but that was dropped because it was too easy to misuse and simply close everything one doesn't like. While this close reason still existed (until ~2015/16 I think) it was indeed applied with a double standard: popular (highly visited and voted) questions that lacked minimal understanding weren't closed. However, since this close reason was dropped, it's all consistent again.

I agree with dropping it. We can still downvote these questions, more to that later.

What remains is that duplicates get closed. And who can complain that his/her question gets closed if at the same time the solution is presented just somewhere else. Unless we make mistakes (we probably do sometimes, human friction) that should be as good as getting an answer.

And now to answer: how can we reassure people that we really mean it and that we do not close questions as being too easy? Well, by taking them serious if they complain, and by requiring consensus for the decisions (we used to require 5 close votes, we went down to 3).

Now, what to do with the easy questions that were asked in the past or will be asked in the future. In principle our guidance is to take this into account when voting on them. Are these easy questions helpful? Do they show research? If yes, vote up, if no, vote down. Some easy questions will not show research but are helpful, they end up with a positive score, others with a negative one. That's life, but the score isn't the most important thing anyway (except if you don't have much rep).

I'm still not satisfied: we tend to replicate documentation from elsewhere. Sometimes it's really silly. Some years ago I had the idea of improving popular questions by adding research (that surely makes the questions better, but it also turned out to make the answers obsolete). So I googled the question and added links to the official documentation, exactly what should have been done when asked. In the end, the questions answered themselves better than the answers. I quickly stopped, it didn't look good.

... why isn't the readily available feedback enough (apparently) for new users to figure out our standards and act on them? Is personalized guidance necessary? Or else how can we more effectively point them at the "real" requirements for questions, as opposed to the impression they get from the tour etc.?

The real requirements (closing for duplicates doesn't count because it in principle gives you an answer) are for questions to be about programming and be answerable. That's all. There aren't any more requirements. Since the "lacks minimal understanding" close reason was dropped, the advice in How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? regarding the searching part is outdated.

Every question about programming that hasn't already asked on StackOverflow and is understandable, clear, focused and in case of debugging shows a minimal example, should be able to get an answer here. I thought that is common idea. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would actually subscribe to the mission as being stated

...working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming

Maybe every question can be qualified according to the last paragraph and working together could be explained more. Maybe we could define this "working together" part more. It's definitely not "demanding an answer to a question" but it's also not "having to be glad to be deemed worthy". In the ideal case it would be a meeting at eye level were people meet to collaborate and the expectations and respective shortcomings are clear.

Of course, if we would have the capacities for personalized guidance that may actually help, but I think we might be limited there?

I think the staging ground is a big leap forward and I wished it would have come sooner. We should concentrate on extending it in the future. Only questions that are answerable should be seen by the experts and voted upon.

Regarding difficult questions: it can also be that difficult questions get mistaken as low quality questions. The way out would be to not vote if you do not understand what actually goes wrong. Maybe not everyone follows this advice. Maybe the staging ground could help there too in that people can actually improve questions first and polish them and maybe difficult questions profit more from this.

I remember a related problem, when thinking about how to best self-answer questions. Should I put most of the research in the question showing what a well researched-question it is but then the answer becomes rather simple or should I put all the research in the answer risking that the question is perceived as lacking? The conclusion was at that time, that separating Q and A too much is bad and integrating them more might be better if only someone knew how to do that.

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  • I'd say "understandable, clear and focused" is a core part of this question. What makes (or doesn't) make a question "understandable, clear and focused" when it's about a subject where the asker does not have the conceptual tools and language to understand what is relevant, or how to present it. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 14:21
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    A lot of questions are about misunderstands of the underlying concepts at heart, where if you had a clear idea of what the concepts were, and could focus on where the misunderstanding is, them the answer becomes obvious. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 14:24
  • @user1937198 Maybe these questions are then more open ended and more for a discussions like feature. If you don't know what you want (at least) then how can anyone else know. But I see what you mean. Let me think more about it. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 14:38
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    My instinct is its something that staging ground could be evolved to address if the company was interested. The challenge is not in answering the question, but in figuring out what the question is, which then as likely as not will turn out to be a duplicate, but will occasionally be a pearl. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 16:34
  • @user1937198 Definitely. Staging ground is all about taking user input and making answerable questions out of it. I would see staging ground reviewers actually as a third group of people. There are people with questions or ideas about questions, there are people with answers and there are people for in between. Those that help distilling questions, finding duplicates. And the staging ground would be a really good place for them. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 17:18
  • I think this misunderstands the intent of "lacks minimal understanding". It was supposed to mean that the user lacks a minimal understanding of what their problem is. If I don't know how to compile a Java source file (or how to write text to the console), I may lack a minimal understanding of Java development generally, but I can precisely and coherently describe my problem. The close reason should not apply there; these questions would be perfectly fine (though if asked today, they would be duplicates). [cont'd...1/2] Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 22:28
  • [...cont'd 2/2] Contrast that with "my program gives the wrong output and I have no idea why", requests to develop an entire program with "I have no idea how to even get started", or anything that might be described as "so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not". These lack the minimal understanding of the problem required to document usefully what the problem is. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 22:28
  • @RyanM We have all the other close reasons like unclear, not focused and even XY problems. Is there really anything left for lacks minimal understanding of the problem but is otherwise clear, focused or with a minimal example? Are you concerned that we cannot close these questions or are you concerned that these people won't be able to ask an answerable question ever? Anyway you might be right. I remember that close reason as a means to kill questions deemed too simple but if you say so it was different. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 22:40
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How can we effectively reassure people that their questions are not being closed for being "too easy"? (Or if they are, then why isn't that an official close reason, retroactively applied to a bunch of popular questions?)

We should ideally be able to assure people that questions are neither being closed nor downvoted for being "too easy" (as long as they're high quality). That said...I'm not sure that's true, at least for downvotes.

Let's take my question How to write/print text to the console (stdout) in Java, which I think everyone can agree is a very easy question. Though its net score is positive, it currently has 9 downvotes, which I strongly suspect are because the question is perceived to be too easy, as suggested by the comments that were originally on the question (link requires 10k reputation due to the room being automatically deleted).

Is this a high-quality question? Well, that's hard to evaluate objectively (especially as its author). At least, it follows all the rules: it clearly describes a single, specific problem that is not a duplicate. Is it a useful contribution to the knowledge base? I have no idea; it has a decent number of views, which suggests people are finding it, but it's hard to know whether it is solving their problem, as users with a problem this easy are unlikely to be able to vote. I've certainly done web searches for how to do this in other languages when trying to do something quickly, such as debugging an issue in a script written in a language I don't know well (but can read) and needing to figure out what they call their version of println. It's always nice to find a straightforward Stack Overflow question, rather than finding someone's rambling, ad-laden blog tutorial or having to sift through official tutorials that are much broader than the thing I was trying to do.

It would be good if everyone curating questions (i.e., voting and close-voting) were aligned on the distinction between question quality and question difficulty, and voted accordingly. Alas, I'm unsure how we can get to that state.

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    At some point, the fiction did develop, and has been relatively effectively conveyed via Meta, that Q&A retreading ground already answered elsewhere (e.g., via Google, the official docs, or whatever) were not welcome and therefore considered low-quality questions on SO. In case it wasn't clear enough, this is absolute fiction and has never been part of the site's design or ruleset. But, multiple times, when I've corrected veteran users that they should not be closing questions whose answers can be found easily by research, they've acted like it was a policy change. It's not. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 0:51
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    Some people point to the old "lacks minimal understanding" close reason as the basis for their lack of minimal understanding of SO's scope, but that's not what that close reason ever meant. I suspect it may have something to do with the proliferation of SE sites other than SO, such as English, that actually did have rules saying "general reference" questions (i.e., anything you could look up in a dictionary) were off-topic/unsuitable. That was never a rule on SO. Anyway, the only potentially good news here is, if a fiction can spread to established users via Meta, perhaps so can the truth. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 0:53
  • @CodyG I don't think it will, but does it matter if the truth spreads to established users? They are still going to act the same way, willfully blind. The reason that they act such way, is simply because it's an inconvenience to answer basic questions and it's not as exciting - not because they don't know the truth. Combine that with the power to enforce what they want with 0 repercussions. OP's question is loaded with huge assumptions - and personally, I believe a blatant public admission of multiple crimes - major one being, that they willfully close questions without "official close reason" Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 2:01
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    I don't buy that logic. If someone finds easy questions boring and uninspiring to spend their time answering (and I can totally understand that position!), then they can just skip them and go answer something else more interesting. In fact, I kinda wish that the people capable of answering the hardest questions and enjoy that challenge would spend their limited time doing so. Leave the drudgery of answering the "easy" questions for others, such as those for whom they're not as easy. Or those who are brand-new to the site and maybe need some rep. None of this is a reason to close them. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 10:27
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    Regarding your accusation, I've often found myself at odds with the views of this question's author, but I don't think this question is an unfair treatment. Inevitably, Meta questions are loaded with opinions & assumptions. Refuting those is the job of the answerers. I see nothing here admitting to any misbehavior. Nowhere does Karl say that he willfully closes Qs without an official close reason. He asks if questions can be closed because they are too easy, then why isn't that an official close reason. Which is a fair question. (Hint: It's because that's not a valid close reason.) Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 10:32
  • The example Java question here may not be a good example to the question because it was never closed. If anything the downvoters hoped for Roomba to kill the question but because of the highly scored answer that would not happen anyway. Voters seem to have downvoted the question but not the answer, maybe because the question didn't show any research but the answer did. It's like in my last paragraph of my answer here, separating Q&A isn't always a good idea, especially not when teaching. Maybe we should rethink up/downvotes on questions. Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 16:47
  • @CodyGray, A question that re-treads well-documented ground might not advance our mission (to build an archive of knowledge that will be useful to others) very much, and so it would be understandable if it got downvoted. Questions are most useful for this mission when they add new knowledge to the Internet that is hard for others to find via standard methods (e.g., search). They are least useful when they duplicate material that is easy to find via other sources. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 9:56
  • So when you hear someone say "I down-vote low-quality questions" a more charitable interpretation might be to pretend they said "I down-vote questions that don't add much to our mission / don't add much to the sum of knowledge on the Internet". Note that the example linked in this answer was down-voted but is not closed; I think it's important to avoid conflating down-voting with closure. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 9:56
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    Multiple comments note that the linked question was downvoted, but not closed. While this meta question does not directly address downvotes, this answer specifically calls out that the related point that high-quality questions should be "neither being closed nor downvoted" (emphasis in original). This is relevant to the titular topic of understanding question quality, as up and down votes are the site's mechanism for rating content quality. Additionally, the question discusses some users' expectation of research effort, which is a downvote reason (as noted in the downvote tooltip). Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 10:38
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How can we effectively reassure people that their questions are not being closed for being "too easy"?

This question is predicated on a false assumption shared by far too many users on Meta, to wit: askers actually care why their questions are closed. When in fact the behaviour of the majority of askers can be broken down into a simple conditional statement:

Did I get the desired answer to my question?
Yes: continue with life
No: internet people have been mean to me, throw a tantrum

Closing their question falls into the second branch of the conditional. Note that there is no self-reflection there, no desire to make their question answerable if it's not: either an answer, or nothing. As such, for that vast majority of askers, closure reasons are useless: we could tell them that we'd closed their questions for not being written in iambic pentameter, or that we simply don't like them, and the amount of complaining would be the same. "Too easy" is simply them justifying to themselves and others why the question was closed, because they aren't interested in the actual why; they have made up their own facts to suit their reality.

(If you believe the above is unfair/unrealistic/whatever, you do not understand the fundamentals of human psychology. Instead of trying to argue with me, please rather use that time to educate yourself on those fundamentals. After you have done so, you will no longer wish to argue.)

So please, can all my fellow Meta denizens stop agonising about why askers hate us, accept that it's something we as programmers can't fix because it requires fixing other people, and move on with our lives and cease asking this question ad infinitum? Something something definition of insanity, something something different results.

Or if they are, then why isn't that an official close reason, retroactively applied to a bunch of popular questions?

"Popularity" never has been, and nor should it become, a sufficient reason to keep an off-topic question open. Indeed a huge number of highly-upvoted questions from the early days of the site, which I'd consider "popular", have been closed and even deleted retroactively, as the rules on what may be asked have tightened up over the years. The fact that some remain open is not an indication that popularity is relevant, but - as it always comes back to - that there aren't enough curators.

Fundamentally, why isn't the readily available feedback enough (apparently) for new users to figure out our standards and act on them?

Again, predicated on the false assumption that askers actually care about feedback.

Is personalized guidance necessary?

Neither necessary nor feasible. You, I, and most other "successful Stack Overflow users" have been able to figure out how to get our questions answered without hand-holding, and I don't think any of us would consider ourselves geniuses. The attributes I believe you would, however, find consistently among us are the ability and willingness to read, think, comply with rules, make an effort, and be patient - none of which are something we can reasonably teach over the internet.

Or else how can we more effectively point them at the "real" requirements for questions, as opposed to the impression they get from the tour etc.?

Again predicated on a false assumption: that most askers retain any of the information imparted to them on the tour. That information is not relevant to them getting an answer to their question, so why would they care about it? To them it's just another barrier to their objective.

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    I find it somewhat ironic that one of the attributes you ascribe yourself is "patience", while at the same time suggesting that we should stop wasting time and be less patient with new users :) Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 16:46
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    @cigien in this case it will probably blow your mind to learn that people can have different amounts of patience in different scenarios. Commented Feb 4, 2025 at 19:27
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    The tantrums come from feeling unfairly treated, not from not getting an answer. If a user tries a reasonable amount, asks the best question they've ever asked, and then the question is closed anyway, it's frustrating. I see a tricky tradeoff here between "not enough info/effort, bad question!" and "too much info/effort, this is an XY question, don't do this at all!" Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 9:24
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    Tis true, but it can't be ignored that things have changed in this area, for the worse. There used to be a time where people were kind of forced to make an effort and perform research; there was no convenience. The internet made people lazy, mobile phones one upped it - now "AI" is going to pretty much obliterate it. Stack Overflow as designed still kind of caters to a crowd that used to have an encyclopaedia set in their bookcase, while it now has to cater to a growing crowd which does not know how to spell encyclopaedia, nor has a bookcase. It is not about communication... change is needed. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:27
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    @lucidbrot Stack Overflow's rules for asking questions don't care one iota about what an arbitrary person considers "reasonable amount of effort", so I don't understand why you're even bringing that up. It's like going to a shop without any money on you, walking past the sign that says "all items must be paid for", grabbing a bunch of items, then getting mad that they won't allow you to leave without paying. Not the shop's problem - not Stack Overflow's problem. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:37
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    I am bringing it up because I think your premise is wrong(-ish). Communicating why it was closed does matter in terms of whether the user is upset or not. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:41
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    @Gimby This is exactly the crux of the problem: there is an unassailable impedance mismatch between the way SO is intended to work and the way the vast majority of its askers want it to work, this mismatch is growing every year, and there is ultimately nothing that can be done to resolve it without fundamentally breaking the SO model. Endless wringing of hands and hamfisted attempts to address the mismatch are not productive efforts because they are doomed before they start. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:42
  • @lucidbrot are you speaking from a general human psychology viewpoint, or your own personal experience? Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:46
  • @IanKemp Of course my personal experience is included, but it is also the impression I get from several programmers I know. You're free to dismiss my input, I just wanted to give it. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 10:48
  • @lucidbrot I'm not trying to dismiss anything, I'm just trying to make it clear that your experience, or the experiences of others you're familiar with, is not necessarily representative of the majority of users'. Can you provide specifics as to why those dev acquaintances of yours felt their question closure was unfair, and what they felt was lacking to make them not feel hard done by? Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 13:10
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    My impression is that when a question is closed but the way to make it a good question (i.e. the way to get an answer, eventually) is clear, there is a lot less frustration. The most extreme example I witnessed (a friend asked a single question that imo was bad indeed and then got so upset by the closure that she never asked a question on SO again) was a question that was closed for lack of detail, but she wouldn't know what additional details would help answering the question. In that particular case, a comment would have made a differnce. But no, I do not have a general answer. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 13:47
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    And of course, there are probably too many users who would ignore any better feedback anyway. I'm not really arguing toward any specific action. If we want to minimize users being upset, communication would imho help. If we don't want to do that so much, because of the sheer amount of such users, that is understandable. But we can be aware that the communication does set the tone. E.g. if a first-time user's question gets closed, that feels like "get punished!", not like "please edit your question, it's on pause", even though that is the same thing. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 13:52
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    @lucidbrot that is valuable feedback that SE Inc. has never bothered collecting. And indeed, improving how things are signalled to users (both regarding the rules of the site, and why a question broke those rules and was closed) is something that the Meta community has requested since the founding days of the site. But it was never implemented and considering the company's intent to destroy the network with AI slop, never will be. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 13:54
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    I don't really care what you wrote in your first part of the answer there, but I think its a cheap tactic to say anyone who disagrees is not educated enough. The stuff in parenthesis. Commented Feb 5, 2025 at 20:11
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I am relatively new to this, and the few questions I have tried a shot at seemed properly done to me. I had no real input and even now I don't have a lot. But I have learned a lot from this site and even was able to finish a website that is hugely successful for an organization that couldn't afford to build a proper one.

I am a CIS student with University of Maine. I just switched over from a music path and I love it. I don't know if I am the norm on this site, but I get why some questions are closed. The only thing I see as a common downfall of the other new users is that they do not research the site before they ask a question. More than likely it has already been answered or at least from what my experience has been on here.

I have found that the more I learn on here, the more questions I have and thus learn more. I may be a noob but I enjoy Stack and encourage others to explore some more of the site before they ask or try to answer.

Thank you all for taking the time you do to help others like me.

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