41

Consider this question:

Members of a class in C++

In object oriented programming is objects are member of a class in C++? If not classes member of what?

class Name{
    public:
   
    private:
     
}

int main(){
  Name item;
}

This question was extremely difficult to understand. At least, it was for me. And I mean that on the linguistic level: I can't figure out the English in there.

And yet, somehow, two users have deigned to answer it (before it was closed). One of them even said they didn't understand the question. Both answer posters did not have very high reputation, and one of them was a rep-1 newbie.

Why is it that people, who are not very experienced on the site, find it a good idea to answer such questions rather than ask for clarification, make a comment, or flag? Is this a sign of "lack of appropriate/sufficient education", so to speak, on the community's part on how to approach problematic questions?

39
  • 67
    It is, perhaps, a sign of not enough downvoting, both of unclear questions and also of unclear answers.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:05
  • 25
    @CodyGray: I find it difficult to downvote such an answer, since I can't discount the possibility that its poster did figure out the crooked grammar somehow. Also, and especially for new users, I try to engage with comments before downvoting.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:12
  • 13
    @einpoklum don't judge the answer on if it might answer the question, answer on if you, personally think it's helpful or useful. If it isn't downvote, if it is, upvote. Like Cody Gray implies, not enough people downvote, and it seems you do think that the answers aren't helpful here, and so you should be downvoting.
    – Thom A
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:24
  • 89
    Well, 1-rep users can't even ask for clarification, make a comment, or flag... they can only post an answer and hope it's getting upvoted...
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:32
  • 60
    As a fairly new user myself, I can maybe give an idea as to why new users would do that - The site's whole ecosystem is running on reputation, and in order to boost the reputation, a fairly new user needs to search through newest questions to find some he might be able to answer. As mentioned - new users can't even comment. They really need to hope an answer they give will be accepted, so they can actually have more options. I think that, on top of a downvote, commenting with a link to an eloquent explanation about this in meta would also give the new user a chance to learn and improve
    – tola
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:50
  • 10
    It could be worse, I've recently seen high-rep C++ (and other tags too) users engaging in low-quality questions...
    – Cristik
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:51
  • 38
    This isn't that big a problem though, compared to veteran users repeatedly answering newbie FAQ questions instead of closing them. That is a big problem, always the same users. And they do so only to grind rep, so down votes is usually very effective.
    – Lundin
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:51
  • 22
    @Lundin: Not effective, since they need 5 downvotes to counteract a single upvote. But, TBH, it's not always easy to find just the right dupe for a newbie question. Sometimes it's more effort than answering :-(
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 10:55
  • 7
    @einpoklum Indeed, it's a common and old problem that it's easier to answer the full question than finding a duplicate. SO had this problem forever and nothing is being done about it by the company. So it's up to the regular users of a specific tag to create a FAQ/list of canonical duplicates, then spread the word about it to other regular users.
    – Lundin
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 12:44
  • 4
    I don't understand the downvotes on that question (18!! currently). Understanding terminology is important, and for once someone recognizes their own lack of understanding of terms, rather than trying to use them incorrectly.
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 13:39
  • 8
    @HolyBlackCat In its original form, the question is unanswerable and the OP wouldn't clarify. That's enough reason for downvoting. I'm not even certain TylerH's edit is what the OP meant.
    – Passer By
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 13:45
  • 10
    An anecdotal example: I asked a user to clarify a vague question. An answer was posted by another account minutes later, and the OP insulted me because clearly there was an answer to this question do there's no way it could be unclear. A bit more poking and it was clear that the accounts were sockpuppets and one account was suspended after a flag and mod investigation. I don't claim that this happened in the example post you linked, but it definitely fits into the category of questions you're asking about.
    – nanofarad
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 13:48
  • 4
    @Trilarion: Yes, or I would have not posted here. Of course, not understanding the questions, I did not stand much chance of understanding the answers.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 14:59
  • 8
    I honestly feel like if downvotes reduced a users reputation by more than 2 they might reconsider posting potentially lower quality answers to low quality questions. It's much harder to "game' the system for net positive reputation if 1 downvote negated 1 upvote. Otherwise, as has been noted it takes 5 downvotes to negate a single upvotre and far tooany people (in my experience) are willing to use those downvotes.
    – Thom A
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:07
  • 5
    I'm not necessarily saying that a downvote should be -10 reputation (I'd be happy with -5), @einpoklum , just that in Stack Overflows eyes, downvotes are second class citizens, yet they are actually an incredibly vital part of the content rating system but not enough people use them and far too many interpret them incorrectly and complain about them (but oddly don't complain about their incorrect understanding of upvotes).
    – Thom A
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:13

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
138

Because the SE reputation and privilege system perversely incentivizes new users to do so

This is fundamentally a UX problem. The new user experience on SE sites actively nudges users to use the site in a non-curator way until they get enough rep. New users are just following the perverse incentives the site has given them.

(Disclaimer: this is a new account, but I have an account with more reputation not linked to my professional identity. These are observations based on being thrust into the UX of a new user)

Reputation is required to do anything except ask questions and answer them. The short answer to this part of your question:

Why is it that people, who are not very experienced on the site, find it a good idea to answer such questions rather than ask for clarification, make a comment, or flag?

is that new users can't comment to ask for clarification, or flag duplicates. They can only answer. And they need to either answer or ask questions in order to get reputation.

Now you might be someone with thousands of reputation who cares about the well-being of the site, and think that reputation-chasing is against the purpose of the site. Every part of the new-user experience, however, tells users of the opposite.

Put yourself in the shoes of a new user, who just wants to, say, upvote answers they found helpful.

You try to upvote, you're told to make an account. Okay, fair enough. But once you do, you're also told you need reputation. You have a some experience programming, so you try to answer questions*.

Most easy-to-answer and well-asked questions get answered quickly. Many that are well-asked are specific to a very particular framework, or are otherwise difficult for you to answer. Also, a large portion of the questions in the new question list are what the OP's question might call "inscrutable" (though not all to that degree). This leaves a new user with mostly low-quality questions to answer.

After getting frustrated with not being able to find one you can help with, you decide to try one of the less-well-asked questions. You go to answer one and ask for clarification...

...and the message below the answer box explicitly tells you not to ask for clarification.

Okay, maybe you know that comments are where you ask for clarification. You try to leave a comment on the question...

...and you are told by the UI that you need more reputation. Downvote a question? Need more reputation. Flag a question? More reputation. Flag as duplicate? More reputation, if new users can even figure out how.

How do you get more reputation? Well, answering questions, of course!

This process results in a selection bias towards two broad groups of new users:

  1. Ones who are interested in curating the site, but are gatekept by reputation requirements.
  2. Those who just want to chase reputation, and are willing to try to answer whatever they think might possibly get them points.

And the former group is incentivized by the design of the site to either contribute less than they otherwise would, or join the latter group. So you end up seeing far more of the latter group than you "should".

You see enough of group 2, and eventually a subset of them will just try giving answers to even "inscrutable" answers, hoping that it helps, like the one in the OP.

* This answer specifically talks about answering questions. Asking (good) questions also gets you rep, but is arguably harder, since the overwhelming majority of good questions have already been asked and answered, or are for whatever reason a bad fit for SO's Q&A format. Someone experienced in programming and acting in good faith would know this, and be drawn to trying to answer questions instead rather than litter the new question feed with something that can be found with a google search.

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  • 2
    Maybe I missed it, but I don't see where or how this explains why new users would choose specifically to answer low-quality questions, as opposed to answering high-quality questions. The fact that a new user is incentivized by the reputation system to post answers is a valid criticism, and one that I agree with, but it doesn't explain why they'd choose to spend their time on low-quality questions as opposed to higher quality questions that are more deserving of their attention.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 17:59
  • 36
    @CodyGray I did point it out, but perhaps I wasn't clear enough. The short answer is the high-quality questions tend to be answered quickly, or are very difficult to answer, making them difficult to gain reputation off of. I'll edit my answer to be more explicit and bold the relevant answer. It's sort of a combination of everything I discussed, though - a combination of factors that lead to a selection bias for users that answer bad questions.
    – Sean Sutherland
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:06
  • 18
    why new users would choose specifically to answer low-quality questions, as opposed to answering high-quality questions - numbers game, probably. Large number of low rep users and small number of well asked questions; something has to give
    – Caius Jard
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:55
  • 18
    "Ones who are interested in curating the site, but are gatekept by reputation requirements." -- yes, definitely a thing. I kinda gave up trying to collect rep. After years of experience doing customer support my crystal ball is pretty good at discerning hidden meanings behind even super well obfuscated / poorly presented questions, but I don't use it ("no turd polishing"). Every few years or so I find a question naturally that has inadequate answers and post a better one. Most posts on the front page are duplicates, low quality, or answered in seconds.
    – jrh
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 0:00
  • 1
    Also answering high-quality questions is hard since all the good answers were already given, so you will likely end up writing an answer that will be either downvoted or ignored, none of these helping you with the reputation.
    – Cristik
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 4:50
  • 8
    I very much agree with this answer. This is why I think we should push inexperienced and untrusted users away from answering the freshest questions until more experienced/trusted members have had time to deem the questions "good enough".
    – mickmackusa
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 4:51
  • 4
    Side note: new users can also get +2 for each edit they make, thus requiring 8 approved edits for flagging and 25 to comment. Not very likely, but possible.
    – Adriaan
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 8:34
  • 6
    I agree with this so much. So many people defend this upvoting/downvoting system and I still find it so... faulty. Moreover, rep is everywhere on the page. If you hover over someone's nickname, what do you get? It's rep. It implies the site is completely based on rep and the objective of a user in it should be rush for rep.
    – S. Dre
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 10:15
  • 4
    Re "Reputation is required to do anything except ask questions and answer them": You can submit edit suggestions and get to 1,001 reputation points without answering a single question or posting a single question. It has been like this since about 2011 (possibly 2011-02-02). (On Stack Overflow, the load on the edit queue is high and thus it may take some time. But with patience it is a sure way, especially if the suggestions fix everything (to the best of your abilities)).
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 14:54
  • 11
    @PeterMortensen it's very hard to make a suggested edit of any real substance. Editing formatting/grammar has got me "no improvement whatsoever", making more "important" edits got me "deviates from intent". Where the "middle" is between those extremes depends on luck and which reviewers you get.
    – jrh
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 21:06
  • 1
    @jrh: Select the questions where "i" is not capitalised. They very likely will have loads of other problems as well. Also be careful about formatting changes—they can make it look like too much is changed (be very clear about it in the edit summary).
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 12:43
  • 1
    @PeterMortensen The official guideline is "fix all the problems to make the best use of reviewer time", and I know formatting changes can make it look like "too much has changed", reviewers can't seem to handle that nuance. Right now we're in a "have your reviewer cake and eat it too" situation where some will reject because "edit looks scary" and some will reject because "you didn't fix everything" or, (my speculation) "post is too old" (which isn't a valid reject reason). We can only really guess as to why but there's a pile of meta posts with edits that shouldn't have got rejected.
    – jrh
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 14:29
34

I mean, it's already known that people on this platform are here for different reasons. While curators are here because they understand the value of a quality repository of programming questions and answers, this sentiment isn't shared by all participants. We will always have:

  • Carebears always looking for askers in trouble to get them unstuck. Even if the question is unclear, they will generally have no issue in doing a lot of back-and-forth in the comments until the question is clear enough.
  • Folks who are in for the challenge. Any sufficiently reasonable interpretation of the question is OK for them, so long as they can solve what they perceive as an interesting problem.
  • Those who are just getting started, who will be more inclined to answering any question, even if just for gathering the minimum amount of reputation to attain useful privileges.
  • People wishing to gain reputation, for the sake of accumulating virtual points as a kind of merit trophy.

We will always have these, and we will continue to have them on the platform, especially so long as the platform sets expectations poorly.

Why is it that people [...] find it a good idea to answer such questions rather than ask for clarification, make a comment, or flag?

Whether they choose to answer straight away instead of seeking to clarify the question through comments becomes a matter of whether they themselves understood the question enough, and not just whether most people who stumble upon it will. And as for the other actions, flagging or voting to close a question:

  • Is not in everyone's grasp due to not having that privilege;
  • Will just work against their own goals;
  • Not to mention that flagging can be confusing for some.

... which is why it doesn't generally happen.

Why is it that people, who are not very experienced on the site, [...]

To bust some ideas here: regardless of what drives them, this pattern can be seen in new and old users alike.

  • Those with low reputation are less likely to know the primary goal of the site, hence be more willing to participate without being aware of the fact that they may be producing a negative contribution. After all, posts are generally not as scrutinized in discussion boards around the Web.
  • Carebears and reputation farmers, on the other hand, will seek to fulfill their personal goals in ways which gives them a lot of reputation, but not always in a way which scales with the platform and contributes to well organized quality content.

In any case, it's important and fundamental to measure the overall usefulness of the answers they make. And the way to signal that posting them is not useful is to downvote.

This is all orthogonal to preventing answers to completely unclear questions, of course. Use your votes, folks.

See also:

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  • I focused on this kind of users, because the question I linked to did not have answers from high-rep users. Also, "less likely to know the primary goal of the site" should be emphasized IMO.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 13:42
  • 16
    You missed one type of user: users who simply wish to unlock some functionality like the ability to comment, and find themselves having to grind, posting answers, which don't get upvoted fast enough to satisfy the desire to unlock functionality. I symathise with these users.
    – Flimm
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 15:37
  • 3
    @Flimm Allowing users to answer before allowing them to comment is a very backwards system.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 16:41
  • 3
    Let's swap it over then; they can comment from the get-go but they have to have rep to answer! Oh..
    – Caius Jard
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 16:58
  • 2
    @CaiusJard Well, they've certainly built the entire system around the idea of being allowed to answer before you can comment, even if that wasn't a good idea to begin with. Rather than changing the entire reputation system to allow it to work the other way around, I'd probably just propose allowing users to comment from the start, and then improving the functionality to moderate comments appropriately (this would also help deal with users who post excessive comments that were "no longer needed" from the moment they were posted).
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:14
  • True that; we do have a relative paucity of methods for dealing with comment noise compared to answer noise..
    – Caius Jard
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:52
  • I think your top three bullet points hit the nail on the head! Most people are not here on this site as curators of the site. Instead, they have one of those three bullet points as their underlying motivation (whether they consciously realize it or not). The longer you've been on this site, the more you may become aware of the benefits of curation, but certainly new users won't have really grasped the long term benefits of it and how it should affect their behavior.
    – jfriend00
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 3:57
  • 1
    Hmmm, makes me wonder if the site should have a helping section and an encyclopedia section where good questions well answered end up and community wiki postings too, while the other being the perfect place for carebears, who are not doing something bad per se but end up hurting the site on the process.
    – S. Dre
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 10:21
  • 3
    @S.Dre That's been discussed more than once: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390983/… meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252781/…
    – E_net4
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 10:32
  • Thanks for the input @E_net4, I'll check them out. I actually think that separation could be useful. Although my proposition is slightly different. More than separating them in tiers, is more to have a section to have more encyclopedic information that has been contrasted and answered.
    – S. Dre
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 10:51
  • 1
    @NotThatGuy "Allowing users to answer before allowing them to comment is a very backwards system." - not really. Comments are a really big lure for being abused, answers not so much because they go into review queues and such. The whole idea of the staged unlock is to give you time to learn how and when to use the easier abused site features. And it also mitigates spam accounts, I assume that is the reason why you also need rep to access chat (which I have a bigger problem with than comments...).
    – Gimby
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 12:43
  • 1
    @Gimby "Comments are a really big lure for being abused, answers not so much because they go into review queues and such" - seems like you picked out the one obvious solution to that, that's already how things work, while ignoring the other obvious solution (send comments to "review queues and such"). You do realise I was saying it's conceptually a backwards system, right? That doesn't mean we can remove all restrictions with no other changes and expect that to work as is. In fact, I specifically said we should also improve the functionality to moderate comments appropriately.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 17:21
16

In addition to the side-effects of the gamification system that others have described in detail, there may be another issue at play for some of these types of situations.

I wondered the same sort of thing several years ago. I'd constantly stumble across questions whose wording was ambiguous or unintelligible, yet would have a reasonably-detailed answer provided. One pattern I noticed was that on such questions when the asker and answerer had both filled out their account profile, it was quite common for both to be located in countries that spoke the same non-English language as each other.

I have a suspicion that some of these poorly-worded questions are the output of poorly-built online translators. People who frequently use that particular translator can grow accustomed to its quirks over time and learn to recognize what native-language input would have produced that wonky syntax as output. It's sort of like how once you program C long enough, you can start to visualize the generated assembly code before you compile it (and if you use the same compiler long enough, you can start to go the other way around). To those people, the question would be understandable enough to answer. It would be better if they would edit it to be more clear but if they're relying on online translation engines, then they likely don't have the language skills to do that.

I'm not suggesting that this is responsible for all or even most of these types of questions (the gamification aspect is likely responsible for the bulk of them). It's just something else to consider.

4
  • 16
    I think this isn't limited to online translators. We might be (often subconsciously) reusing patters from our native languages when translating to/from English.
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 6:37
  • 4
    This. Also, if you are teaching, mentoring or otherwise communicating to new programmers you are in a good position to have better understanding of some common misconceptions and problems they face, even though some of them might be complete nonsense to experienced developers. Once you can switch to "newbie" mode you can understand and answer such poorly worded conceptual questions. But this still involves plenty of guessing and you don't know for sure whether you have hit the point until you answer the question. If you have, then you are in position to edit the question and improve it.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:47
  • 3
    Main problem with answering such questions is coming from answerers that are not experts and give misguided or incomplete answers because of their own lack of knowledge.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:48
  • 2
    Yes, machine translation often makes it incomprehensible. But it is not common, I think. Most common is the result of the minimum effort attitude.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 15:02
7

Because they can.

As others have written: they either hope to actually help the person asking the question, or they hope to gather upvotes.

It is that simple: gaining reputation comes with real advantages. You quickly collect various privileges that can have real value to some people. As long as you get a few upvotes, you also don't care much about downvotes.

In other words: this is an expected outcome of the overall system; and I do not see any way to improve the situation without doing open heart surgery regarding the mechanisms that make up this place.

And guess what, I started here when I had to ask plenty of questions. And then I figured: some privilege X would be extremely helpful (I think some level makes things easier when you are sharing your IP with thousands of coworkers who might also turn to stackoverflow). And my efforts to get there, lead to: me staying here, and writing answers. Which, I think, is a good thing.

5

I disagree with the premise. At least for me, the question was clear enough to understand and attempt a basic explanation (as a comment; I felt it didn't deserve a full answer).

I'm not the only one: @TylerH edited the question into a better shape, and his interpretation of the question is consistent with mine.

I even think it's a decent question (especially after the grammar was fixed).

Yes, it's somewhat basic, but the definitions of programming terms can be hard to grasp for a newbie (especially for a non-native speaker), and OP was able to clearly (grammar aside) explain what term they don't understand, and what they assume it could mean.

The question looks basic on the first glance, which is why (I assume) two low-rep users considered it to be a low-hanging fruit and tried to answer it.

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  • 6
    I actually somewhat regret having linked to the question, since now that poor Japanese user who was writing their third ever SO question got drenched in excessive downvotes. About the premise, though - 0xDEADBEEF said s/he answered despite not having understood the question either.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 17:54
  • 3
    So... if it was clear to you, why didn't you edit it like TylerH did? (Incidentally, there is no such concept as "excessive downvotes". Each and every user who casts a vote is entitled to their opinion, and no one should attempt to suppress another user's freedom to express their opinion about a post's quality just because they came across it later.)
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 17:54
  • 1
    @CodyGray ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I assumed it would be clear enough for everyone else, like it was for me. It's also not that good of a question, I didn't feel it deserved to be polished and didn't feel it deserved a polished answer.
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 17:59
  • 5
    If it doesn't deserve to be polished, and it doesn't deserve a polished answer, then it should be deleted from the site, because it has no place here, given our mission.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:00
  • 2
    You, and others, have posted comments telling people that they should endeavor to suppress the expression of their opinion because it happens to be an opinion that other people have expressed earlier. I do not understand the logic of that; it is horribly inconsistent with how the site is designed and the type of behavior we encourage from users. Up/downvoting should be based solely on the individual's assessment of the quality of the post. It should never take into account the score, the user who posted it, or any other such metadata.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:07
  • 4
    The inherent design of the system is the proof, as is the fact that you yourself have to admit the consensus you perceive is unwritten. If users were expected to hold off from downvoting at a certain point, it wouldn't be merely unwritten. This is not a rule, nor is it expected behavior. Downvotes aren't a punishment for "offences"! They're a content-rating system, and they express only the individual voter's assessment of the quality of that particular content. If that consensus has emerged as you say, that's extremely harmful and needs to be stamped out.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:19
  • 12
    You have turned downvoting into something you do to a user, rather than something you do to a question. This is an extremely harmful step. The logic is dangerous. Votes should be exclusively cast on content, not on people.
    – Cody Gray - on strike Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:28
  • 2
    @HolyBlackCat for question, i agree, for a reason different from yours as something should surely be closed before it reaches 5 downvotes. answers on the other hand... several hundred people could come across it and find it not useful/low quality/wrong before enough 20k people come along to delete it.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:28
  • 2
    that a question can be edited into shape, doesn't mean it shouldn't be downvoted or even closed while it's still in it's low quality state.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:32
  • 4
    @CodyGray Like it or not, most newcomers will take votes personally. This whole system of votes and moderation serves to help us help people (as I said in the previous comments), it's not an end in itself. I hope you'll be able to understand my chain of thought here.
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:34
  • 5
    I think we're all well aware that people misinterpret what downvotes are (new users and veterans alike)
    – Kevin B
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 18:35
  • 5
    I would have closed even the edited question. If the asker is not experienced enough to know the proper vocabulary, there is no telling what they even expected ‘member of a class’ to mean. This is something they should have clarified with further explanation or by a clear example, for which no amount of copy-editing can substitute.
    – user3840170
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:01
  • 2
    All the more reason to explain things in detail then. Nothing unfair about having it be a baseline expectation.
    – user3840170
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:10
  • 3
    @CodyGray: Like it or not, questions come with people attached to them. HolyBlackCat: They mis-interpret less than we might like to believe... also, other SE sites have weaker "downvote cultures", and still manage to help people well enough.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:54
  • 7
    @CodyGray "You have turned downvoting into something you do to a user, rather than something you do to a question." While we do vote on content, there are still people behind that content. Downvoting some well intended post, no matter how poor, to oblivion no longer serves a purpose - it is no longer educational, and content is already rated. I certainly do have some threshold (not fixed) and I don't cast votes if I feel there is already enough down votes cast.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 7:59
-4

Why is it that people, who are not very experienced on the site, find it a good idea to answer such questions rather than ask for clarification, make a comment, or flag?

Well, let's take a look at why that might be.

Flagging

Moderation privilege awarded at 15 reputation

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/flag-posts

In order to flag a post, you need to get yourself some reputation, which you get by answering questions.

Also, it's not like flagging is simple and people just inherently know how to flag or what to flag. Within the above article, there's another five articles linked to explain what the reasons for flagging are. "Not an Answer" is straightforward enough, but two of those articles have at least a dozen links to other articles which likely have links to other articles, so how much of this should people really read before they flag something? I have quite a bit of experience in using the various Stack Exchange sites, in rep and years, yet I find the flag wording confusing and have had some of my flags rejected for various reasons. I used a custom flag in the past year because I couldn't find one that fit, yet it was declined and the moderator basically yelled at me for not using a standard flag.

So really, it's no wonder that a 1-point user wouldn't have flagged a post.

Comments

Communication privilege awarded at 50 reputation

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/comment

Again, you have to get reputation to make a comment, so how do you get that without answering questions?

A user can't ask for clarification without the ability to comment. I've seen people ask a comment type question in an answer, then get downvoted and deleted with comments about how comments shouldn't be in answers.

Gaining reputation points

To answer my own question above, editing can gain a user rep, but that has to go through a review queue and if the low rep user doesn't know this system well, then how can we expect them to improve questions by their edits? And in a review queue, changing a question with bad grammar can be tricky and the change denied due to the reviewer thinking it changed the OP's intent since the reviewer couldn't understand the OP's intent, just like you can't.

A user can also ask a question, but that's not exactly easy to do while getting upvotes. I've been on SE/SO for nearly a decade and I've only asked a handful of questions across all the 55 Stack Exchange sites I'm a member of. That's not because I know everything, it's because I try really {expletive} hard to find an answer before going through the third degree of asking a question. And some of the questions I've asked have gotten down votes, closed, and/or deleted because they didn't "meet criteria", including rules I'd never heard of even with my experience here.

People talk about "curated content" here and demand that only "good questions and answers" remain, while also complaining about why people can't get reputation to help do the curation is pretty hypocritical, IMO. To put it plainly, you can't downvote (removing rep from people) as well as not upvote (not giving people rep) then complain about how people don't have rep. I've definitely heard that people should just ask better questions and write better answers, yet the goalpost of what a good question and answer keeps moving, sometimes because someone else wrote a subjectively "better" answer. Or because there's another question that's similar, so one of them get becomes "the" duplicate, but an older question can become the duplicate if the newer one is subjectively "better" or had better answers. So yeah, the shifting sands of priorities and rules, and even rule enforcement, can make it really hard to get the reputation needed, as well as confusing as to how to follow "the rules" to get the rep.

The question

I'm not an English major or anything, but I can make a decent guess at what the question means by simply changing or adding a few words.

In object oriented programming are objects members of a class in C++? If not, classes are member of what?

OR

In object oriented programming are objects members of a class in C++? If not, what are classes members of?

Reading this can lead other users to answers, even if you can't get that far. We have a wide variety of users on this site that can make out better sense of questions than others. I've seen questions that made less sense and had well respected, high rep users answer it multiple times.

In fact, someone did edit the question to type to make it more clear.

In object oriented programming, are objects a member of a class in C++? If not classes, what are they a member of, if anything?

The answer

While the current answer isn't exactly perfect, it does give a decent explanation that a beginner could understand and can build off of. Of the three comments on that answer saying how bad the answer is, you don't see any of them actually giving their own answer, yet they are all high rep users that shouldn't have any problems giving a correct answer that would likely get them upvotes. Unfortunately, that's not the culture here.

The current idea is to not answer questions unless they are perfect and to complain about other people's answers that also aren't 100% perfect. This fits in perfectly with the original question complaining about why people aren't commenting or flagging when they don't have the rep to do so. It amazes me that people can see all that and wonder why people feel unwelcomed here, but that's a whole different (multiple) topic.

Introducing the Staging Ground, an attempt at improving the first-time asker experience - What was asking your first question like?

Problems with the Stack Overflow guidelines

Why do we reward users for answering bad questions and would it be a good idea to incentivize those who downvote or flag them instead?

Inscrutable

As a native English speaker with over 40 years experience, I had to look up the definition of that word.

not readily investigated, interpreted, or understood

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inscrutable

Or maybe:

  1. incapable of being investigated, analyzed, or scrutinized; impenetrable.
  2. not easily understood; mysterious; unfathomable: an inscrutable smile.
  3. incapable of being seen through physically; physically impenetrable: the inscrutable depths of the ocean.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/inscrutable

This makes me think the definition of inscrutable is itself inscrutable, since one definition says it's impossible to understand, yet another definitions says it's merely difficult to understand. If it's merely hard to do something, then it's clearly possible, so the definitions of this word aren't easy to understand when compared to each other. Also, what is "unfathomable" or "mysterious" to one person can be understood and commonplace to another. For example: my father thinks writing software is unfathomable, yet I have a fairly deep understanding of it.

You complain about the "cryptic title", yet you used a word that's not commonly used, IME, so that makes your title cryptic to me. Maybe you should rethink your own title to make it more clear to others.

Anyway, I guess you'd say that your question is inscrutable to me because you used a word I didn't understand until I looked up its definition, which still leaves me with questions. Should I have answered it based on your own metrics for answering questions? I guess not, but you wouldn't have learned anything if I hadn't. (Well, hopefully you are learning something from this answer.)

11
  • 4
    Perhaps you are more familiar with a different word that uses the same root: scrutiny. Something is inscrutable when it is not possible to scrutinize it and come away with any useful information. However, einpoklum's question is not inscrutable because you were able to discern what it meant just by looking up the definition of a word. Inscrutable means even if you know what the words mean individually, you can't tell what they mean when put together in the way they are put together (e.g. "I can't tell what you're asking here" even if you can define each individual word used in a question).
    – TylerH
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 19:56
  • @TylerH, I'm looking at literal dictionary definitions and they are contradictory to each other. While I'm pretty sure I know the meaning of the question and the context of the use of the word, one of the definitions of the word "inscrutable" means that it's difficult to understand, which because I'm guessing at it's meaning due to it being difficult to understand, therefore the question is inscrutable, by that definition.
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 1:18
  • 5
    Seriously, playing word games against the meta asker? And you're not even doing it correctly: if you managed to understand what this question means just by looking up one word in a dictionary, then it is not inscrutable, by the very definition you quoted. Your claim to irony falls on itself, appropriately enough.
    – user3840170
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 6:27
  • 1
    "the goalpost of what a good question and answer keeps moving" no it doesn't. If you ever googled something and landed on some SO page giving you an answer, that's a good Q&A. The post we're discussing is anything but that. Writing good posts is hard, but that doesn't excuse bad posts.
    – Passer By
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 10:31
  • 3
    @computercarguy I would recommend some better dictionaries then. Collins, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Wiktionary, and Cambridge all agree with the definition Google shows you when Googling the word.
    – TylerH
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 16:00
  • @TylerH, maybe you should take another look at the definitions I used, as they were from Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com, two of the "better dictionaries" you said I should have used.
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 15:26
  • @PasserBy, I've Googled plenty of things and landed on SO. Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are, and most of the time I have to keep looking because they say the keyword but don't actually have the same problem I'm looking for. That says nothing about whether or not it's a good Q&A site. And most definitely, yes, the goalposts of a good question move, otherwise we'd have the same bad quality of questions as this site did at the beginning. (cont)
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 15:31
  • I've even recently had one of my questions closed because of not enough research (even though my research was clearly posted and the commenter commented links I should look at that were already in my post), only for me to repost it and be told I had too much.
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 15:31
  • @user3840170, even though this answer has a -2 rating, it still has 8 upvotes, so evidently I'm not the only one that thinks this way, and not being able to understand something because of one word is very common. You don't have to look much further than FB memes about how stupid the English language is to realize that.
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 15:33
  • @computercarguy I'm looking at them, yet don't see anything contradictory like you claimed, as my previous comment stated.
    – TylerH
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 19:52
  • @TylerH, the Dictionary.com version says "incapable" while also saying "not easily" and the Merriam-Webster definition says "not readily". While "not readily" and "not easily" are equivalent, "incapable" is not equivalent to either term, so the Dictionary.com definition contradicts itself and M-W. "Not readily" means that something is possible (but difficult), while "incapable" means something is impossible, hence the contradiction.
    – computercarguy
    Commented Mar 31, 2022 at 20:39

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