Is Stack Exchange a place to get help? Or a resource for answers?

Question

The more I use Stack Overflow the more I see people telling others to delete their questions afterwards for debugging help.

A (recent) example of this, and what caused me to ask this question on meta, was https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44689467/print-out-a-value-from-a-java-class/44689571#comment76362843_44689467. It's relatively low in terms of complexity, could probably have been asked better, but I've been attempting to answer questions on Stack Overflow that I have the skill level to answer authoritatively, which usually means these first-post debug level problems.

Yes, this question isn't necessarily helpful to others. But

1. It's hostile to new users.
2. It removes the reward for having an accepted answer, making it less likely that people receive help.
3. It may, just possibly, have been the key for someone googling something extremely similar to understand their own problem.

Why do people do this?

I realize this is sounding slightly Stack Overflow specific, but most other Stack Exchange communities, seem friendlier, and more likely to answer the question as asked.

Answer 1

Is Stack Exchange a place to get help? Or a resource for answers?

Well, as I see it, mix of both. It's a place to get help, and that help can then become a permanent resource.

That's the ideal situation. However, in reality things are never ideal.

Let's take two examples. (mockup language, just for sake of example!)

First example

I tried printing an integer like this, but it failed, showing wrong output:

Print("We have %b apples in our stock", _numOfApples);

What's going on?

Answer to this:

Change the %b to %d so it will be parsed as number:

Print("We have %d apples in our stock", _numOfApples);

Second example

I have this code to show number of apples, but it is showing 50 instead of 30:

Int GetAppleCount() {
    Int _dbCount = GetApplesFromDatabase();
    return _dbCount + 20;
}
Int _numOfApples = GetAppleCount();
Print("We have %d apples in our stock", _numOfApples);

What's going on?

Answer to this

Change the return _dbCount + 20; to return _dbCount;.

---

Both answers solve the actual problem. Both can be then accepted. However, only the answer to the first question has any real value for others, who might search for "printing integer wrong value". Second question and its answer are useless for others, as it's some typo/old code/basic mistake the OP did, which nobody else is likely to ever do, and if so it will be different.

So questions like the second here, are indeed better be removed.

Answer 2

Stack Exchange is a resource for answers.

That is the tagline you should remember. It contains sufficient information to guide us in creating questions that are:

• well researched
• well formatted
• well posed
• interesting
• reusable

… even though, obviously, the practical result of this entire enterprise is to help people! So, it's actually "a place to get help" too. But to call it that is to drop the important nuances of the alternative description. When you think of Stack Overflow as just "a place to get help", that's when the "debug my codez" starts leaking into your questions because you forget that there is a wider purpose to the whole thing.

That's why people are recommending question deletion: a post that will only ever help the OP is not appropriate here. The Stack Overflow model is designed to encourage broader appeal, because that's the best way to ensure the quality of individual posts. It's specifically why the site was founded, to set it apart from the common fora of the era.

Unfortunately, many popular tags on Stack Overflow have succumbed to both size and sloppiness, and look a lot more like those fora than like what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. Oh well. That ship has kind of sailed now; as long as many high rep users "just want to help" without considering the broader implications of the form that help takes, we are doomed. :)