Discussing "What have you tried" [duplicate]

Question

Asking "what have you tried" is based on the assumption that the author did not make any effort. People don't want to make an effort if they assume someone else didn't. No matter how much they love coding, if someone else seems to lack motivation, their motivation is gone in an instant. The same is the case with remarks regarding "homework".

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20304495/find-peaks-in-list-with-custom-type

But having gotten some imperfect approach, people (usually different ones than the "what have you tried"-people) reply with a perfect solution they could have come up right from the start.

Also it could be that the people replying want to correct the author's approach to make it better. But then, if the author contributes his approach the solutions being given do not include the approach but go an entirely different route, which leads to the conclusion that you could have saved your effort of sharing your approach. Sometimes I see replies like "I asked my cat for an answer and she hates me now, so I ask here" and people reply.

Seems like you need to just get past the first person asking "what did you try" without giving something for others (who happen to have mod-rights more often than not to quickly close the topic) to work with like "idiot" (which fits perfectly whether you like it or not) or "a lot" or similar and you get your desired replies.

I suggest treating those "what have you tried"-phrases as what they are: spam and reconsider the "what have you tried"-phrase-author's mod rights.

Answer 1

This has all been covered before, though not with the same emphasis. As long as you're polite, the consensus was that this sort of comment is perfectly acceptable.

I don't think these are spam¹ and giving a question author permission to remove comments (that seems to be the implication of your last sentence) is taking matters far too far.

The actual comment was:

Have you tried anything? Have you read MSDN on Enumerable.Max for example?

It gave specific help to what you should be looking for. Yes, it maybe could have been a little more rounded and less blunt but you have to understand that there are thousands of people dumping questions on Stack Overflow each day. A significant proportion of these haven't made the faintest effort to solve the problem themselves first.

A significant amount of effort is expected from you, up front, before you ask a question. You never know, you might solve it yourself in the meantime. If you do, you can post both the question and the answer on Stack Overflow so everyone will be able to look at your solution for the future.

Someone's also asked how requesting proof of effort makes a question better; I'm not going to rehash that all here but I'll quote a small part of of my answer:

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.

I hope you don't see something to dislike in that.

_{1. The definition of spam being somewhat different.}

Answer 2

The problem here, when people are saying "What have you tried?", is not that you have not put sufficient effort into what you are coding, but rather your question itself.

In the given question, you didn't explain what wasn't working, so people couldn't effectively help you. At the beginning, you were essentially asking a plzsendtehocdez question, because no code was provided. The question was simply showing what you wanted and asking others to code it for you. Note that the comment was made when you had none of your previous code.

It's very hard to answer a question when we don't know what's not working. As for your request to strip mods of power for this and to report it as spam, that's kinda preposterous. I think you would also agree that your edit made the question better, because I certainly think that it did.

Spam is reserved for shameless self-plugging, and stuff like "Hey, look how you can turn money into Stack Overflow reputation at scammyscam.com!" Also, if you noticed, someone upvoted you because you had added code.