@doppelgreener the flip side of the coin is newbs who think that they can get everything they need to know just by asking questions on a site like SO -- this can sort of work for a while, but has great potential to backfire on them when they find themselves not really knowing what to ask because they're missing big chunks of material. How do we make space for "please find a good book/tutorial on topic X, because you'll be better off reading it than trying to fill in the gaps?"...

...without coming off as elitist or privileged?

@Shalvenay well, on here we have no problem patiently explaining what's going on, and remove snark & jerkiness produced by people who lack the patience for such questions and the restraint to not voice it.

To me it comes across like this: people are on SO for different reasons. Some people are there for a professional-level experience, some a postdoctorate-level experience. Some are fine with trainees & teenagers who don't quite get programming yet, but they aren't either of the previous two crowds. SO has a lot of noise and garbage, and people in those first two crowds would identify "how do I get an element from an array?" as part of that garbage.

Much like someone would lose patience with a D&D 3.5e newbie, who has a question and doesn't know the answer is obvious if they would only look up chapter 3 in so-and-so book, crossreference it with chapter 5 section 3 table 5.8, which has a clear and obvious meaning defined in chapter 2 section 8. I mean, duh, how easy is that.

To the expert: trivial. To the newbie: they have no clue that's even what they're supposed to do in order to make sense of things, they're not at that level yet.

Much the same, a newbie doesn't know how to look up how to get an index from an array because learning how to find and use documentation is also part of the education of learning to program. And even if they have found the documentation, learning how to comprehend it and apply it is also part of the learning curve.

There's nothing stopping and SO user from calmly walking a user through the process of getting an element from an array, explaining the handful of basic concepts involved in easy-to-understand language, and pointing them to the documentation the user should look up and teaching them how to recognise what they just explained in that documentation.

... except many don't want to, because they're stuck in a mode of UGH THIS NEWBIE UGH GO READ A BOOK UGH THIS IS COMPLETELY OBVIOUS IF YOU JUST LOOK IT UP UGH.

Here we have the necessary culture and eyes on the ground and moderation availability so as to prevent that attitude from having the effect it most certainly would if we let it run wild & let people just get grouchy and angry at newbies for being newbies.

I already periodically delete comments and sometimes even answers from established users who are basically just grumbling at the user condescendingly & unhelpfully for not getting it, instead of answering the question. On a site like SO where there's things 100x more important for moderators to handle, that slips through the cracks and becomes rampant and drives people away.

yeah I would hate to run into that stuff while trying to learn some stuff on SO

I started learning a little coding a couple years ago at work,... but I didn't continue it for long so I don't know very much

if I ever got back into that and tried SO and got that kind of treatment it would be extremely discouraging

as it is the field is already a little daunting to me

bingo.

BTW, as I was expecting, today the twitter arguments were again referenced in some jokes on the Tavern meta.SE chat board.

Most calling names on the "evil SE haters"

Now, mind you, I can understand why some of those twitter messages can come across as mindless hate flamebait.

But I still find somehow "funny" how blatant problems that come up again and again are quickly dismissed as "help vampire kids that don't want to learn how to use the site"

Mmm. There's an insidious cultural concept that there are good people and bad people, and only bad people do bad things. If you're involved with, or like, or do, something which has bad qualities, then you must be a bad person--incapable of redemption and unworthy of sympathy.

Within that conceptual sphere, any criticism of actions or associations is also a personal attack on the moral fiber of anyone involved with whatever's being criticized. The only possible responses in that framework are to dismiss the claim or embrace being a villain.

So blaming the person who brings the problem to attention is a very common response.

(I've been seeing a lot of good discussions about this recently re: The Simpsons' response to Hari Kondabolu's documentary.)

@BESW And that's why in my country many of the political round-table broadcasts more closely resemble a meeting of two rivals football hooligans teams than an actual serious event.

Things get a lot calmer when people can let go of good guy/bad guy epistemologies.

@Derpy this makes a lot of sense out of even my own local politics...

@doppelgreener What I mean is that not only they strife for a "red team VS blue team" approach, they also make great use of child level insults that you would just expect from some elementary school students... or some of the worst sport hooligans.

stuff like "I heard my opponents smells bad" and the such.

.....

And thinking about it, I think the above comparison could be somehow offensive - for the average elementary school kid I mean.

at least, the elementary school kids are still young and immature - they will have time to learn.

Those are adults doing that on purpose to try to instill that same "our opponents are evil people" idea BESW was talking about before

No child is incorrigible.

Most adults can change, too, but the more we practice certain ways of thinking and acting the harder it is to change them--this is good for good habits! Not so great for others.

@BESW I meant that at least one can say that they often aren't rude on purpose, but simply still lack experience.

Some politicians instead do that intentionally, in order to trigger that "they are evil" image of their opponents in the mind of the watchers.

Aye.

lol

it is really weird how the youngest Doctor is,.... him

I like how he started out as a cranky, selfish brat who didn't think much about others... and over the course of the show's history they shifted that from being a grumpy old man to being a snotty teen.

lol

lol

@doppelgreener yeah -- what I'm saying is that there are some topics that can be handled within the Stack model insofar as targeted questions go, targeted questions may not be enough for a newbie to get the full picture. (on DIY.SE, household electrical is sometimes one of them)