What happened to the "You're Just Lazy" close vote reason? [closed]

Question

...not literally, of course. But what happened to the previous menu of close-vote options?

I find the current set unsatisfactory. Take this question that boils down to a typical java.lang.NullPointerException for example. Obviously, the question is worthless, because it's an exception that even a n00b programmer should be able to debug on his own. There is nothing special about this bug, and it will help no one in the future.

What could I possibly select as a close reason?

• duplicate of... - Maybe. There's the classic What is a NullReferenceException, and how do I fix it? which has been linked to 527 times. While the debugging techniques are the same, that's for .NET. Besides, there are any number of other common exceptions / simple development bugs that wouldn't apply.

• off-topic because...

  • ...

  • This question was caused by a problem that can't be reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to help future readers. This can often be avoided by identifying and closely inspecting the shortest program necessary to reproduce the problem before posting.
    
    Notes below....

• unclear what you're asking - No, it's clear that the programmer just needs to debug his code.

• too broad - No, it's quite specific.

• primarily opinion-based - Nope.

When it was introduced, I was happy to see a "typo" reason, to rid out all the stupid indentation or bracket questions. But... we no longer have a "lacks minimal understanding" reason, which I think is incredibly important. After all, Stack Overflow is here to solve problems that "professional and enthusiast programmers" encounter... not teach users how to code or debug.

So.... what do I pick? Can we have another revision on the close vote reasons?

I did a cursory search, but couldn't find a Meta post to the intent behind this latest set of reasons. Edit: I believe this is it: Improving "demonstrate a minimal understanding" close reason

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Edit 1/20 Ah, how could I forget about the classic copy & paste homework assignment?

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21246673/converting-arrays-in-vba

Right or wrong, my close vote was cast with

off-topic because it shows zero desire to actually understand the problem.

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Here we see a moderator closing a question about an incorrect number of function parameters as lacks sufficient information to diagnose the problem. Of course, there probably is sufficient information, and the wording should really be changed to You're too lazy to RTFM.

Answer 1

A better question would have mentioned something about working backwards through the trace and trying to find the cause, but not seeing anything in the code that explains what they're seeing. Debugging is a programming skill that is learned, not just immediately acquired.

However, it's a perfectly answerable question, and is very likely to help other people given the answer that it received. Had we called the OP a lazy bastard and just shut the question down, that wouldn't have been possible.

If you don't feel that the author has put sufficient time and effort into the underlying problem despite presenting it in the form of a question that can be easily answered, then you have the option to simply not answer the question.

I am getting extremely tired of this mentality that helping beginner programmers with very simple problems is somehow enabling them to sail through the rest of their career without ever having to use a debugger for themselves.

Close questions that can't be answered. Ignore those you don't feel deserve to be answered. We're not going to close a question that can be answered from what has been provided within the question itself simply because folks feel that the person asking it is not deserving of our help.

If it's not a duplicate, answer it, or ignore it.

Answer 2

I agree with Jonathon Reinhart (and obviously already upvoted his post). Since we are in a discussion mode I would like to offer my observations and thoughts.

We no longer have two very useful reasons to close: "demonstrate effort" and "provide code sample/SSCCE". The remaining reasons do not match such situations well. I read the answers to this post as well as similar discussions here and it seems that we supposed either answer these "I was given a task but have no idea what's it about" or just ignore them.

There are a lot of posted questions that could be answered just by plugging its title into Google search. There are a ton of the same questions coming almost daily that would not be needed if OP just tried to search before posting or even look at the right side of the screen after posting. Yes, the latter could and should be closed as duplicates. I'm however amazed at the complete lack of effort on part of people asking them.

Programming is constant learning, constant research. These people are not "beginner programmers" as they are portrayed in these discussions. They are "I do not want to become a programmer and do not care how to solve the problem as long as I can pass somebody else's code as my own and be done with it".

It, however, seems that SO community finds some benefit in becoming "do my homework for me" kind of place. What such benefit might actually be is beyond my comprehension.

Answer 3

On Role Playing Games - a site focused on tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, as well as LARPs - we get super-newbie questions all the time with super-obvious (to us) answers.

We answer them without fuss, then move on. We don't push people to prove themselves, nor criticise them for not knowing this stuff.

We do it this way because we understand that these people are on a very different level to us. The rules of some RPGs can be very confusing at times, and almost incomprehensible to beginners. Some games, like D&D 3.5e, are especially guilty of this.

Those of us who've played RPGs long enough are very proficient with the rule books and they make obvious sense to us. When we're that experienced, it's easy to forget how impenetrable and incomprehensible the rule books were for us at the beginning, and wonder how on earth some people actually get confused with the very basics of the rules. They seem so simple to us now! Some of us do forget this at times, but generally the community understands that us experienced players are just on a totally different level to the relatively new players.

And that's just RPG books. Our profession of programming is far more confusing than any of that. (Except, possibly, the D&D 3.5e rule books.)

So when you say...

Obviously, the question is worthless, because it's an exception that even a n00b programmer should be able to debug on his own.

I say you've probably forgotten how it was at the beginning.

How many newbies know how to debug? Do you really think all of them can? Many of them won't even know debugging is a thing that exists yet.

A pretty experienced programmer should be able to debug it. Debugging is a skill people have to learn, and being able to debug well is even further down the track, but before any of that they have to actually learn the existence of debugging, and break points, and so on. Nobody is hit with a magical wand that teaches them these things.

There is nothing special about this bug, and it will help no one in the future.

If there's nothing special about it, that'll make it pretty easy to answer, probably very briefly. Then some of the newbie programmers who don't yet know how to deal with this situation will learn about all this stuff they can do, and weren't aware of or didn't know how to take advantage of, and they'll be better equipped to deal with this situation themselves.

At all times, remember how it was at the beginning.

Answer 4

Without some kind of "f$#k off, noob!" close-vote reason, SO is quickly going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is.

I think the focus here is being misplaced... Some of the best questions we have on Stack Overflow are effectively noob questions that a lot of people ask and need an answer to when they are first starting out with a new language:

What is the "-->" operator in C++?
How do I check if an element is hidden in jQuery?
How do JavaScript closures work?
How to disable text selection highlighting using CSS?
How to horizontally center a <div> in another <div>?

And so on...

The real problem, in my opinion, boils down to The Help Vampire Problem and the battle over the close reasons seems to have to do with these two parts specifically:

• Is he obviously just waiting for some poor, well-intentioned person to do all his thinking for him?
• Can you tell he really isn’t interested in having his question answered, so much as getting someone else to do his work?

The previous "minimal understanding" and "must include valid code to reproduce" close reasons were a way for users to hold back the invasion of help vampires by refusing to feed them and preventing others from feeding them as well.

Now we don't have these tools because many of us were overusing and misusing them. We're left with not answering and downvoting, which isn't quite as effective because while individually we can refuse to feed the vamps we can no longer prevent others from feeding them.

Personally I'm not too worried though... The system here seems to ebb and flow to try to balance the needs of the community. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the return of these close reasons, or similar ones, in the next few months to a year, in response to what I'm guessing will be a rather large surge of poor questions.

Answer 5

IMHO, Stack Overflow is not a debugging service.

If debugging questions are now fine on SO, many people would just post such a question here, because they "have other things to do" than to debug their stupid thing. (In fact, I hate it debugging my own code for several hours and find just one missing line at the end - why shouldn't I post it as question on SO?)

Such questions would attract help vampires and drain useful resources from other programmers.

Some people may argue that you can "just ignore the question", but that is not true.
We have limits on the topic for a reason. We are not yahoo answers.

Limits on the topic are necessary, and the community has already decided that they don't want "debug my code" questions. (and similar: "convert my code from perl to C#", "give me the code please" etc. We had a reason for that, "lack of minimal of understanding", but that is gone now)

So I propose a new off-topic reason that includes "RTFM, debug your code yourself, and learn to read stack traces" etc. The actual reason should read nicer.

Answer 6

Let's say I am approaching the work I do on SO with a desire to make the site better for everyone. When I encounter one of these lazy, no-effort-expanded questions, my first instinct is to convey to the asker that they should try to improve their question by adding more context and information to it: For obvious reasons, this will benefit people who might try and answer the question, but it will also benefit the asker who is likely to be fairly new to the site and might not be intimately familiar with its standards. With the corresponding close reason being removed, however, conveying this message became harder for a number of reasons:

• I can't simply add a short "What have you tried?" comment, because those aren't allowed anymore.
• If I vote the question down, the asker either (1) won't care because they haven't earned any reputation to lose because of it, or (2) might feel offended and/or unwelcome (a situation I would like to avoid because, again, I want everybody to have a great experience using SO, and I want to encourage new users to learn the ropes and become productive members of the community). In any case, the asker won't automatically know what is wrong with their question just because they got a downvote.
• I can't ignore the question because this runs contrary to my original goal of providing constructive feedback.
• If I choose to flag it using one of the remaining close reasons (like "Too broad" or "Unclear what you're asking") that don't really capture the actual problem I'll most likely end up confusing the asker instead of providing them with useful pointers on what to improve. For instance, if they're unfamiliar with the site's standard for questions, they won't know about any discussions leading up to the new "unclear what you know == unclear what you're asking" interpretation.

As far as I can tell, the only option I am left with is to post a long-winded comment explaining in more detail what I think is wrong with the question, every single time.

Answer 7

What could I possibly select as a close reason?

Nothing, because this type of question is no longer supposed to be closed. If you prefer not to answer "do my work for me" questions that show lack of effort or skill, then you do not need to answer them. Others will, and both the person asking and the people answering will benefit.

The only downside to this policy is that you may see a few more of these types of questions on your feed. Hopefully this doesn't bother you so much that you stop visiting Stack Overflow, but it appears the new policy will benefit new programmers more than the experts mentoring them. If it does turn out to be a problem, collect data on it and present your case as a feature request in a new question here.

Answer 8

Generally, if these questions should be closed at all, they should be closed as duplicates of the appropriate reference question.

For example, your example question (at least before it started morphing into something unrelated) could've been closed as a duplicate of What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it?. You can often find these reference question by searching either SO or Google; for example, the reference question above is one of the top results for nullpointerexception on Google.

When you vote to close a question as duplicate, the SE software automatically posts a comment linking to the target question. In cases like this, where the OP might not understand why their problem is equivalent to the more general one, it may be helpful to edit the comment and add a brief explanation, replacing the generic:

"possible duplicate of What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it?"

with e.g.:

"You're getting a NullPointerException because you're trying to call a method on a variable you haven't initialized. See What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it? for more information."

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Actually, the specific question you linked to could also almost qualify as a "simple typographical error" — accidentally deleting an entire line from the code snippet you're copying might not be the first thing you'd think of when you hear "typographical error", but IMO it qualifies (and, alas, is more common than you might think). Or you could always use a more specific custom close reason:

"This question is off topic because it was caused by a simple copy-paste error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a manner unlikely to help future readers."

(Of course, as with "simple typo", you should only use a close reason like this after pointing out the mistake to the OP.)