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Why do people question every question?
I see so often now on stackoverflow that users tend to answer with their opinions instead of straight answers.
Shouldn't there be more strict rules about what is an acceptable answer? The way it is today is lowering the quality of the service for many people.
It pretty much adds up to a situation comparable to this:
Q "Hi, I want to cut a banana in 6 pieces, how do I do this effectively?"
A.1 "Huh? I fail to understand why you would ever want to cut it in 6 pieces, 4 is better"
A.2 "Cutting a banana in 6 pieces will use a lot of more time than if you cut it in less pieces why would you EVER want to do this???
Conclusion: People answer based upon their opinions without knowing all the facts and not knowing anything about the situation in whole. It's practically impossible to get a straight simple answer to the simplest of question, because it's more important for people to be smart and stand out than to actual help people asking.
The worst part is, that these guys who add completely irrelevant facts and answers without even answering the question asked, actually get their answers upvoted because yes they can be quite clever and right.. but they still don't answer the question.
Am I the only one who see this problem? Isn't there anything that can be done about it?
Edit: I've been reflecting upon this a bit, and yet I feel that there are generally two types of questions
- You ask for the best way or a suggested approach to solve a problem
- You ask how to perform a very specific task (such as: how do I get the contents of a div element with JavaScript)
The later example is one of those that deserves a straight answer without people questioning the question so to speak. All I want to know is how do I get the divs contents. I don't care if it is bad or not, to be honest people can't even know if it is bad or not without knowing every single detail about the project or problem the person is working on. And if they absolutely must point out that it is bad, they can first answer the question and then point it out as a sidenote.
Yes I am really tired of seeing the most abstract and/or irrelevant answers to the most specific and straight-forward questions. I understand that you sometimes must understand a bit more about the context to understand what is asked, but you should never argue with the person asking the question, it's not helpful because more often than not it ends up in the question never being answered in a meaningful way.
Instead, answer the question and optionally point out flaws, your opinions, best-practises, alternate solutions or whatever. Or simply don't answer. Some don't agree with me, but to me this sounds like the way it should work. You can't assume that your fellow programmer is stupid. There are often many reasons as to why people want to do things in a certain way, and very often they are already aware of the pitfalls and cons of their solutions, before they even ask the question to the problem they are having.