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Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try.

Alternatively, I find the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 rating a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment".

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.

Even though I fear a lot of fine humour will be unfairly removed this way because of a small number of stuck-up users, this suggeston might be worth a try. The average level of snark on SO (and, yeah, on Meta but that's a different story) is a considerable problem - and it doesn't matter that it's often just self-defense against dozens of crappy questions. Stack Overflow started as a friendly community, and it needs to stay that way. If you can't deal with the flood of bad questions without being rude, just abstain from looking at them. There's other things one can do in life.

I think an explicit "flag as snarky" option (with the usual 3-user requirement or maybe even higher) might be worth a try - with the limitation that if the feature becomes a tool of the bleeding heart "we need to help everyone" faction to root out any criticism of the question, we need to get rid of it again.

Alternatively, the possibility of downvoting comments and greying them out at say a -3 might also be a very attractive one. While nothing gets removed on account of a small group's activity, it clearly says "the community doesn't agree with this comment" and from experience, most users will adjust their behaviour to avoid downvotes.

Let me back this up with some anecdotal evidence. I used to be active in a forum that, due to everybody and their dog asking for free code-writing and debugging help, eventually started to get very snarky (myself included). I left (for other reasons - necessary maintenance work wasn't done by the owners, and SO came up.) and now I have an outsider's view. Whenever I check back there, I'm shocked by how rude and arrogant the users there sound when a newb asks a dumb question. It's pages and pages of "what have you tried" and "rtfm" and "we're not here to write your code for you". I can totally see why those veteran users do that, I did the same thing and sometimes still do! But it's the most terrible advertising for an online community that you can have. While bad questions are the problem, being rude is not the solution.