How does "proof of effort" make a question better?

Question

It seems like many questions by new users are downvoted immediately. Sometimes there is a comment to the tune of "lacks research", "we're not here to do your homework", or "show us some effort".

Now I wonder, what does it matter how much work someone has done before posting? If someone can ask a good question in 5 seconds, more power to them.

To illustrate this point, look at how you could "improve" a question to include proof of effort. You could put in 5 failed code snippets and their in- and output. This would make for very long questions with a high noise ratio.

Another suggestion is to add "research". By "research", I suppose most programmers mean "Google". So this is basically a suggestion to add a list of fruitless Google queries. That doesn't sound interesting either.

How can "proof of effort" turn a bad question into a good one?

Answer 1

It doesn't necessarily make the question better, though it can do so; in general it provides three things:

1. A solid indication of what the poster is attempting. This, hopefully, fills in the gaping holes in their explanation of their problem. You can look at the code in addition to the explanation to try to determine what's happening. In the same vein, if the OP has an error message that they're trying to get help with the code that generated the message is invaluable.

2. In more complicated cases it narrows down the options. If the OP is attempting to solve a problem that has two possible avenues to approach it; they then demonstrate they've tried one of those approaches then people answering can ignore that one and only have to concentrate on the other. Equally, by demonstrating the approach, potential answerers may be able to find an error with the manner in which the OP attempted to solve their problem, thus making the solution a lot easier.

3. It proves that the OP is actually worth helping. I know that some may disagree here but "gimme teh codez" is not the best way to introduce yourself to a community. A demonstration of effort proves that they're willing to take the time to help themselves first.

In short, it's polite to do so. It shows you're actually engaged and it helps others to help you quicker and better, which is the point of the entire site.

Lastly, if you show your code then you may get unexpected help. Someone may notice that you're using a deprecated function or that there's a more efficient method of doing something. It's a side effect but can help the OP to improve, should they wish to do so, and signposts to people coming to the question later that there may be a better method of doing something.

Answer 2

The goal of SO is to create a long-term repository of useful questions and answers. Research effort is to make sure the questioners are contributing to this as well as the answerers. A stereotype of SO is it's a bunch of answerers doing a bunch of free labor, but the great trick we've pulled on everyone is, the questioners are doing free labor as well. And we have upvotes and downvotes to put pressure on them to do so.

The point of research effort isn't to say "I deserve an answer", it's to say "this question deserves to be here." I think the heuristic by which to measure this is, "will this question's existence on SO make it easier for people to solve this problem faster?" So in many cases, googling for other answers is a big part of research effort. I'm about 9k currently and usually if I stumble with a new problem in a Java API or Node or something, and it's not apparent what to do, and I can't find it within five minutes of poking around or Googling, my next thought is, "Wait a minute, other people are going through these same stupid attempts, this should just be on SO somewhere." If I were less experienced those 5 minutes might take 30 (and I'm not claiming my judgment is perfect).

So my research effort very often consists of, "I tried the obvious APIs, looked for similar questions on SO and read the official doc and it didn't work." Sure, I could have fired up a debugger, stepped into library code, found a hidden feature, etc., and solved my own problem within an hour, but why would I do that when I have this lovely Q&A resource right here with people who have done this already? And heck, if no one can solve it, then when I do, I'll post my own answer and do both parts of the Q/A team.

As an answerer, I like to know this work has been done already. Don't make my first step to find your question on SO already by a highly similar title - that's a downvote. Don't make me link you the Javadoc for a standard library method and quote it and plug it in - that's a downvote. The downvote doesn't say "you don't deserve an answer," it says "you didn't do your part of creating a useful Q/A pair."

Conversely, if you can't really understand a stack trace for a NullPointerException in your Java code, then yet another "read my stack trace and tell me what it says" question isn't going to be useful, and we're going to tear you apart with comments saying, "Did you google NullPointerException? Did you read your stack trace? Did you look at the line the problem is on?" Or, if the answer requires a very dense long explanation (e.g. explaining the difference between pointers and arrays), then there isn't really any reason to assume the SO answer is going to be more useful than resources (like textbooks) already out there. As I've claimed, for me, 5 minutes of research is enough for a good SO question to be more useful to the next programmer, but on occasion really I need to go spend some time self-learning a new language (and I've recently had downvoted Node questions for this) before expecting SO to be particularly useful.

Answer 3

Among the many banes of any subdivision of the internet that get a reputation as a place to go for help are

1. Repetition of the same questions over and over again
2. People who are happy to suck up the sites resources of helpfulness without limit because they can't be bothered to think for themselves

The requirement to show some work isn't there is make a bad question a good one, it's there to keep you from asking a bad question at all by helping you to find the answer without asking it.

Further it is helpful with respect to #2 exactly because the laziest cases find it frustrating to have to work---even the least little bit---for what they get.

So, it's all upside as far as I can see.

Answer 4

Proof of effort is actually tremendously valuable. It shows:

1. Where is the questioner coming from.

   What assumptions are they working with. What existing constraints are they working within.

2. Where is the questioner going to.

   What are they actually trying to achieve. Sometimes people get very hung up on a small point when it is far better for them to back up a little and try a different route to their real goal.

3. Where the questioner is actually at. Not just where they think they're at.

   I have seen it quite often be the case that what is really going on is nothing at all to do with what the questioner thinks is happening.

It also shows that the questioner isn't some lazy-ass help vampire, but that's less of a problem than you might think since you are never answering questions just for them. Remember to try to make the answer to the question useful for others as well. (I tend to let help vampires just talk to themselves; they're a bit frustrating, but life is sometimes like that.)

Answer 5

• Proof of effort does not make a better question.
• Clear examples of what has been tried or researched makes a better question.

Clear examples are created by effort.

Effort does not always create clear examples.

Answer 6

Requiring effort makes it less likely the question will be asked in the first place.

I can't count the amount of times I have put effort into asking a good well researched question, and in the process worked out the answer. I think figuring out the answer yourself makes you a better developer than having somebody give you the answer, regardless of how good your question is or how good the answer is.

I would argue that one of the primary purposes for StackOverflow generally is to make us all better at what we do, which drives up standards and quality, and generally makes the industry a better place to work in.

If StackOverflow had a more lax attitude on this, I reckon I wouldn't bother. I would ask a lot more can I haz teh code plz questions and would advance slower as a developer. I might get code working faster, but would learn a lot less, and would struggle with the same problems again when I run into them in the future.

Having to work things out yourself, and to really explain yourself and what you are trying to do/what you have tried already when you do need help leaves a much clearer image in your memory, and makes it much more likely that you will learn something.

Answer 7

"Proof of effort" makes the QUESTIONER better.

Suppose there are two comparably "bad" questions. One of them is a one liner. The other is a multiparagraph effort from someone who has obviously "tried." Which person is more "correctable?"

To take an example from the "outside," I once had a "problem" in my co-op apartment. In discussing the matter with the President of the Co-op board, he said, "Our nightmare scenario is someone who has a problem, who won't admit he has a problem, who won't do anything about the problem, and who won't let us do anything about the problem. Those are the people we have to take to court to throw out.

"You've done two out of three. You admit that you have a problem, and you've done what you can about the problem. From those two facts, we infer that we will be able to work something out with you." (We did.)

A person who has "problems" but shows "research effort" has "done what he can about the problem," (and implicitly admits that he may have a problem). Those are the people that are more deserving of the site's helping them to fix their remaining problems.

Answer 8

"Proof of effort" doesn't necessarily make a question better. However, the main reason behind "show us some effort" comments might not be an attempt to make a particular question better. These comments may also be attempts to verify that the question is asked with the intent of learning.

SO questions (I don't have experience with any other SE networks) don't exist each in its own vacuum, they are together a medium in which the SO community lives. Questions asked without the apparent intent of learning poison the medium, because if they're answered, it looks like encouraging the "ask before you think" mentality.

For me personally, this is the breaking point. If my time spent creating an answer is to have some meaning, I need to see that it helps make the person asking the question better. I'd rather make one person a better programmer than save time of ten people who don't care about improving themselves.

In conclusion, suggesting that a poster shows an intent to learn by putting some effort into solving the problem before posting a question is useful in maintaining the "culture" of the community. As such, it may be helpful even if it in itself doesn't make a particular question better.

Answer 9

Proof of effort doesn't turn bad questions into good ones. It turns bad questions into questions that don't get asked to begin with, and it turns the person asking the question into someone who doesn't ask bad questions.

If the person asking the question doesn't at least reference effort they've gone to (e.g. "So, I googled this for about ten minutes and it got me zilch...") then it's safest to assume that they didn't bother to make an effort. In which case, their question is more likely to be a duplicate, or a piece of clutter that would only help the exact demographic who wouldn't bother to look for it to begin with.

In other words, if a question is so simple that anyone who did a couple seconds of research would find the answer, then people who have that problem fall into one of three (disjoint) camps:

• people who would be willing to do the two seconds of research to find the answer, and thus don't need / wouldn't benefit from an additional post on SO to help them out,

• people who wouldn't be willing to do the two seconds of research to find the answer, and thus wouldn't find the SO question even if one were to exist, and thus won't benefit from an additional post on SO to help them out, or

• people so completely clueless that they probably wouldn't understand the SO answer, anyway, and thus won't benefit from it.

Since these no-research questions wouldn't benefit any of the above groups, and those are (AFAIK) the only groups, there is no point to such questions.

Answer 10

It doesn't make the question better, it just indicates whether the poster is a person worth your time and effort.

Of course, if the question is really clear-cut there is no need for any proof of the sort, but most questions require a bit of back-and-forth to make the either the question or the answer clearer - or both. In that case it is really important to get an indication that the asker is able to grasp the information and also that he or she is not a help vampire that will suck you down a maelstrom of ever more tangential questions.

It is my theory that the working of SO (and the rest of the SE network) is based on an assumption that people who ask a question understand what they are asking. Explaining what you have done serves to verify that the asker satisfies this basic assumption. Coincidentally, I also believe that this is the point where the impedance mismatch between the sea of newbie posters and the more experienced users happens, but that is for another discussion.

You could say that view expressed here is somewhat derogatory - and you'd be right - so let me finish on a more constructive note:

Knowing what a person has already done helps understand where they are on the learning curve of the topic, and makes it easier for someone who wants to provide real help to target an answer to the asker's current level of knowledge of the domain.

Answer 11

I think that this "proof of effort" has damaged the community.

If you don't post proof, people auto-assume that you didn't try anything and just want your stuff done for you, regardless of how you tried to ask the question.

I tried more than once to post a clean question, objective, direct, but as I didn't pollute my question with my wrong attempts, assumptions, people auto-downvoted it without considering anything.

So "proof of effort" in my point of view is not required, it has nothing to do how good or bad the question is. What matters is if the question has enough information of what you are trying to do.

Our answers are not just to who asked, but to everyone who will find the question at some point and find it useful. It hurts the community to erase good questions just because the OP didn't proof something.

---

Questions with upvotes and answers without any kind of proof of effort

• Using LINQ to group numbers
• How can I get query string values in JavaScript?
• Sending email in .NET through Gmail

_{TODO: add more as I find new ones}

Answer 12

Here's another example of a downvote bonanza. The new user posts a question that is actually hard. Six out of nine answers are incorrect. Three are correct, and one of them (Strawberry's answer) is new and original even to me, and I've hung out in the SQL tag for years.

Despite being interesting, and a learning experience for many, the question was downvoted and closed. The question exhibits "foreignness": the title and formatting were bad, and the beef of the question is below the code snippets. The inside crew responds to that with downvotes and closes.

This allergic response is justified by requiring "proof of research". But adding research effort to a question like this doesn't help anyone. The proof would dilute the question with a personal, localized debug log. Stack Overflow was meant to produce generally useful Q&A artifacts. Requiring "proof of research" accomplishes the opposite: specific and overly long questions.

And there is no clear way to "proof of research". As illustrated by the 15+ comments, people disagree on what the threshold for "enough effort to be worthy of help" is. (The comment discussion was rightly removed by a moderator.)

The requirement for effort dilutes and localizes questions, and invites ad-hominem discussion. Questions should be judged on their objective quality, not on the subjective worth of the OP.