I asked a question on a forum about why a command wasn’t working. They said I didn’t have an interpreter installed on my computer and were making fun of me. I showed them that I had one installed and that wasn’t the problem, but they continued to talk sarcastically to me without explaining anything. Only one of them suggested the cause of the problem, and he was right, so I thanked him. Then another guy said that if I couldn’t figure it out myself, I should do something else and that he was tired of people like me. After that, I deleted my question, and now I’m not sure. And I don’t think I want to ask for help ever again

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    151·
    8 hours ago

    Without seeing the entirety of the interaction, it’s hard to be sure.

    Some people are assholes, and because nobody wants to interact with assholes, they usually end up congregating on whatever forum doesn’t ban them. Moderation is hard and ban evasion is often easy, so there end up being a lot of places like that.

    The other side is that people in general ask a lot of bad questions, and a forum flooded with bad questions becomes useless because people who could answer good questions either get tired of it and leave, or spend so much time on the bad questions they don’t have time for the good ones. People get frustrated when they think that’s happening to a forum they enjoy, and programmers are famously better at communicating with machines than with people.

    Here’s are some tips to ask good questions about programming:

    • First, try to find the answer without asking other people. This is especially important when it comes to programming because the whole job is problem-solving. That means figuring out how a search result, LLM output, or published documentation relates to whatever it is you’re trying to do.
    • Once you’re sure you need help from other people, clearly articulate what it is you want to happen, what you tried in order to achieve it, and what actually happened. Use more detail than you think you need here, especially regarding your expectations. Sometimes the mere act of composing a question this way leads you to the answer, which is effective enough there’s a popular technique of explaining problems to inanimate objects.
    • Include the troubleshooting steps you tried from the first step above in your question. By typing it out, you may discover an error or omission in your process, but you also communicate to other people that you’re not just being lazy, wasting their time, and reducing the signal to noise ratio of their forum.
      • Zak@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 hours ago

        I had that in mind, but it’s been a while since I read it and skimming it today, it seems a little dated. The tone may also be a bit harsh to offer to OP in this thread.

        • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          A little bit dated, but it seems like it has been receiving updates. There is a whole section at the bottom now about how to answer questions (ie. don’t be an asshole). I really want to emphasize that idea. Lots of FOSS communities now have codes of conduct which I find useful in mitigating this behavior, too.

          As for the tone, it definitely has an ivory tower, individualism, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, slanted view but I don’t think it unduly burdens a newbie to learn how to teach themselves by ensuring they’ve exhausted all the typical avenues of stored knowledge before bothering someone with a well-crafted question. It is a self-sufficiency that has very positive returns in the future.

          Without more context, it is difficult to say how justified OP is in their read of the situation. Maybe the forum posters weren’t really out of line because the general topic was #random and OP asked in the wrong place?