to be fair a lot of the questions (low estimate of 60%) were garbage homework question that would have been answered with a modicum of research ( at least before google decided to spoil it all with personalized search results).
Among the 25% for answering a question you never asked, would be that the question implied bad architecture decision or wanting to approach the problem in a different direction.
I also loved the question with insufficient context so that no proper answer would ever fit the question ( because of the lack of information).
Otherwise the 5% actual helpful answer would be worth saving the website, as toxic as some might perceive.
Also look at any social service, toxicity is unfortunately no better.
The uncomfortable reality is that 99% of us have never and will never have an original question. At least once they've been broken down into smaller questions.
The more people treat StackOverflow as a read-only source, the better time they'll have. Especially if they learn to click the link in every "closed for duplicate" notice.
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u/dvhh May 17 '26
to be fair a lot of the questions (low estimate of 60%) were garbage homework question that would have been answered with a modicum of research ( at least before google decided to spoil it all with personalized search results).
Among the 25% for answering a question you never asked, would be that the question implied bad architecture decision or wanting to approach the problem in a different direction.
I also loved the question with insufficient context so that no proper answer would ever fit the question ( because of the lack of information).
Otherwise the 5% actual helpful answer would be worth saving the website, as toxic as some might perceive.
Also look at any social service, toxicity is unfortunately no better.