It overlooks that Stackoverflow has its amount of trolls and people who are too lazy to do their homework on their own.
Rating, closing, deleting, etc. is a way to deal with those. I'll try always to leave a message why I downvoted or voted to close a question. That way the person gets some feedback what to do better. It's absolute essential that programmers learn to deal with such feedback.
There are also a lot of XY problems. To get those problems addressed may create some frustration (why is my question not answered directly). Be prepared that sometimes the answer is not what one expects.
Also essential: There needs to be a way to keep signal/noise ratio to a certain level.
It may sound mean, but when you can't format code, can't read a manual, can't formulate a question, can't provide examples, can't provide an error message, or even can't code at all, then you should not participate in a forum for programmers. Better learn quick - this helps also in the job as a programmer.
If I see that somebody has put ZERO effort into the question, then I'm really not motivated to help that person.
There are many people on Stackoverflow who post great questions and many who post real programming problems. Let's support those and let's help people reach the level of a competent programmer.
The problem isn't asking questions, it's that many beginners just want the answer..they don't want to actually put the time into learning how or why.
Another common problem I see is asking questions without doing simple things like a Google search.
I've always been a self-learner. Bothering someone else with questions is usually the last resort for me, unless I'm on a tight deadline or I really can't figure something out (or it has to do with some undocumented feature/api/etc that I can't guess).
The problem with comp.lang.lisp (and similar forums): it has very weak ways to deal with the garbage.
I'm not motivated to participate in a forum, where people interact with racist abusers like WJ William James (or whatever his name is). Minimum would be a filter which gets rid of all his posts, answers to it and discussions about that. Well, than I prefer to use a forum which bans him or has other ways to get rid of that garbage. Free speech is fine, but I really don't want to see Ruby code in a Lisp forum mixed with White Race Supremacy signatures...
That's why I prefer to use Stackoverflow: Metadata, rating, detection of duplicates, etc etc.
Rating, closing, deleting, etc. is a way to deal with those. I'll try always to leave a message why I downvoted or voted to close a question. That way the person gets some feedback what to do better. It's absolute essential that programmers learn to deal with such feedback.
There are also a lot of XY problems. To get those problems addressed may create some frustration (why is my question not answered directly). Be prepared that sometimes the answer is not what one expects.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy...
Also essential: There needs to be a way to keep signal/noise ratio to a certain level.
It may sound mean, but when you can't format code, can't read a manual, can't formulate a question, can't provide examples, can't provide an error message, or even can't code at all, then you should not participate in a forum for programmers. Better learn quick - this helps also in the job as a programmer.
If I see that somebody has put ZERO effort into the question, then I'm really not motivated to help that person.
There are many people on Stackoverflow who post great questions and many who post real programming problems. Let's support those and let's help people reach the level of a competent programmer.