Technical forums that are not dominated by pedantry?

Problem is all the pragmatic people you want answering your questions are too pragmatic to spend time reading and leaving comments on the internet

Never say never but I don't think it's very easy to build a broad and helpful community where the factors you listed aren't at play in people's motivations.

I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with. Discord servers are a great example

On the internet, it's really hard to know if the person knows that those parts are wrong and just wants to ask a question, or if they don't know what they're wrong and they're going to get tripped up by them.

I've also seen quite a few instances where the person needed fundamental corrections for their problems before their main problem could even be addressed, and they absolutely refused to accept those basic corrections first. It makes it impossible to help them with their real problem.

The tech support example of this is when the phone tech requires someone to reboot the device before they'll continue diagnosing the problem. I only worked phone tech support for a year, but in that time I had quite a few people who thought they knew better and refused to reboot the device when asked, but when I forced them to do it, the problem fixed itself. When it didn't fix it, I was able to get on with the rest of the diagnosis.

When I first took that job, I even let them refuse to reboot. After a handful of times that I couldn't figure out what was wrong because it made no sense, and finally rebooting fixed it, I followed the company line of requiring the reboot up front after all. OTOH, I did believe them when they said they rebooted it already. If they lied about that, it generally caused it to be a very long, frustrating call for them, and my call times were already too short, so I didn't worry about it. (Yes, too short. My call times were low enough that it looked like I might be just getting people off the phone without fixing things, though of course none of my recorded calls showed that happening. My boss literally told me to chat with the customers more.)

I think we have enough experience with crowd-sourced websites at this point (Wikipedia, Reddit, SO) that we can make a general statement that crowd-sourced websites attract just the sort of people you've described precisely because the "average" person that just needs an answer doesn't have the time/will to hang out on those sites providing content for free. I'm not sure there is an easy (or possibly any) answer to that problem.

Perhaps the problem is with your questions?

I didn't realize this is a problem I had, until my kids started emulating it.

  daughter: 'Dad what are we having for dinner?'
  dad: 'um, not sure'
  daughter: 'is it something baked?'
  dad: 'uh maybe, don't know, why'
  daughter: 'will you use the oven?'
  dad: 'ok, whats this about?'
  daughter: 'can I bake some cookies, and ask my friends to come for a baking sleepover?'
  dad: ffs

So, if you want people to help, tell them what your problem is, and the context, not just ask for the specific things you think will solve your problem. Of course you can guide them to that by telling them what your idea of a solution is, and why.

I give you the ole reddit pedant trap:

1. Ask your question

2. Create a new account and give your question a wrong answer (or point out mistakes or whatever)

3. Watch as 90% of pedantic idiots focus fire on that guy who clearly doesn't know things

4. Profit

I'm not sure you're going to find anything better. These websites are already pretty incredible at getting fairly competent people to write technical content for free. If you want something even better, still for free, that's a big ask.

Are you asking this question because you want to contribute hundreds of answers for free to this better forum?

I think this question is fundamentally misguided by being about pedants. If you look at the definition of pedant [0], it mentions people who are concerned with minor details but nitpicking [1], which you refer to in your first example, is more specifically about finding faults, so in reality you are looking for a forum _with_ pedants (who have enough knowledge about the minor details to answer your question), but _without_ the nitpickers, who focus too much on finding fault.

Hope that helps :)

/s, but like others said I think it does get to the heart of the problem where only people who get a kick out of pointing out flaws in small details in their free time hang around on technical forums.

[0] a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.

[1] fussy or pedantic fault-finding.

Don’t forget:

4. Enthusiastic X-Y-Problem solvers. You asked about X but the replier is an expert in Y, so he asks “what problem are you really trying to solve?” Hoping to steer you to Y so he can shine. No, sorry. I really do want to just solve X thankyouverymuch.

I'm sorry for being "that person", but I will push back on your assumptions. It seems to me that your issue arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of Stack Overflow's purpose as a platform. As I understand it, Stack Overflow (both the management and the community) generally don't care that much (nor should they) about an individual person asking a question, but rather they care about building a high-quality Q&A resource with questions and answers that should serve many thousands of people who would come to view that page in the future.

As such, answering a poor question (unclear explanation, bad code, unusual use of an idiom, etc.) as it is written, while helping the person who asked it, would likely confuse future readers and eventually cause more harm than good. The pedants/nitpickers are thus serving a crucial purpose in caring more about the long-term value of the Q&A resource than the individual question-asker; a question asker who is unwilling to implement feedback and improve the question (within the bounds of reason) is not a valuable community member, and their questions might be deleted for the benefit of others.

Every forum, no matter how its reputation/karma/power system works, is dominated by those who are willing and able to invest the most time into participating in the forum.

As you and many others have noticed, it appears that the type of people who can and do spend dozens of hours every month answering questions or writing instructions tends to overlap with "insufferable pedants" to a very large extent.

Thus I don't believe a forum that works the way you want can exist. The pattern you're observing is simply a reflection of the people that use the Internet today. By discouraging pedantry and by reducing opportunities to show off perceived intellectual superiority, you are effectively excluding the exact group of people who make tech forums work in the first place.

I think it's important to set a good example.

You could start trying to be less nit-picky about other peoples answers. As long as there is a good answer on Stack Overflow that gets up-voted, accept that and just ignore the rest.

You could start being less pedantic about people making suggestions to avoid the problem entirely by using a different tool/library. Those answers might not be useful to you, but to someone else reading the SO overflow post they might.

You could try being less of an evangelist for "the one and only right way to answer a question" - and accept that different people have different discussion styles. Again - as long as you get the answer you wanted, allow those other answers to exist next to that.

As for the voting/karma behavior... when you ask the question, you get to accept the answer you like the most. It's in your hand to "reward" the kind of answer you like the most.

You'd probably need to also remove / discourage a lot of behaviours on people asking the questions.

If a lot of people ask questions where there are significant problems with the premise or the context they assume, or people doing things in a fundamentally wrong way, or people asking about something which is not really the problem they have, then you'll end up with the "answerers" assuming most questions have those problems.

In any case, sorry I can't help you find such a place.

Welcome to the internet.

It's the main place - outside of politics - where reading the worst, most twisted and nonsensical interpretation of people's words is the norm.

The current example of "I like oranges" with the response of "what!? You think apples are bad!?" is the perfect example.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any large places that have more reasonable behaviors. The only places where I've found the good behavior persists are small, sculpted communities where most of the people know each other in the real world.

I dont think you can. And the reason is your problems all come from common human biases.

1) Observer expectancy bias, when they expect you to be wrong they work from there to prove their expectation

2) Anchoring bias, or prefering the solution you already know. Dogmatists will always exist, the upvote/downvote system helps them gain prominience and egg each other on.

3) Pro-innovation bias. People being exited by new shiny toys is another basic bias that is hard/impossible to overcome. same if the opposite of status quo bias and some people being terrified of changing anything.

I think the issues you find are made worse by the upvote downvote system. But the reality is that forums without that system still exist but have other problems. Such as discoevrability. Secondly by having no input from lurkers into the best solution, you will have to shift through the same haystack of domatics, evangelists and nitpickers (and hopefully those actively trying to help) without external validation.

You are arguing that the external validation (the unhelpful replies in stack overflow) is currently misaligned with helping your problems, and I agree. I have sometimes found the same problems in those websites. But they have some clever solutions, like the discussion below proposed solutions allows for a back and forth related to a specific proposed solution.

So if you ask about a performance issue and 3 guys mention MVC stuff and 1 guy brings up moving it to Electron and finally someone mentions a particular way to multithread your problem, you can comment below that guys comment and start a discussion there completely side stepping the ones you don't care for.

I think perhaps the person who asked could have a bigger sway on which answers rise to the top instead of people outside upvoting. But I believe there is a way to pin a reply as having worked so thats another way to dissuade the nitpickers and evangelists from showing up

Find small communities.

In my experience, everything you said is 100% true -- once groups get big enough. But each of those points is, equally, 100% false for small groups.

For example, the Raku community is fairly small, so the r/rakulang subreddit is friendly. For that matter, even the [raku] StackOverflow tag is friendly! Last I checked, the same was true of the corresponding Rust tags, though I know they've grown a lot since I was a regular there.

I think the three groups you list match the motivations why someone would systematically (not just a one-off) put in their time to answer large quantities of technical questions without getting paid for it - it's because you really want to evangelize something, or you want to push a dogma you care about, or you're the type of person who gets off on arguing intricate details.

Not to mention mods that come in and close your question without a word because it is "duplicate" or "unhelpful".

Hopefully they got the mods under control but I think #4 should be "out of control mods". I think all 4 can be applied on almost all public forums and #4 is the most killer because of how impactful it is.

Most of the good and niche communities are unfortunately burried in Slack and Discord nowadays, and Discouse being an overengineered platform isn't helping either.

Reddit is a mix of all of the ones you mentioned, but there are some amazing subreddits out there. At the same time, answer.microsoft.com is in the worst end, and have made me angry hundreds of times. For non-tech, Facebook groups (yeah yeah I know) can be pretty amazing, and often the only resource.

- I recently busted my laptop from a BIOS upgrade, and there was a very frequent thread on r/LenovoLegiin that one-shot fixed it.

- I'm having some driver issues that prevent me from updating Windows 11. Literally hundreds of search results on answer.microsoft.com are canned responses by the same guy named Sumit, and with hundreds of web sites that simply scrape that Microsoft site, fixing a Windows bug is quite painful.

- For non-tech, I prefer Facebook groups. I'm setting up my first DIY solar setup at the moment, and a few very active Facebook groups were the only resource to source certain stuff, and very elaborate guides especially on making LiFePo4 battery packs. Building a battery pack isn't as easy or straight forward, and having a bunch of people often in the same geographic location helps to borrow tools, pick some brains, and even to trade.

For expats, especially in Asia, Facebook groups are the mainstream. Everything from pub crawls to apartment rentals happen on Facebook group.

Chat-style environments are the only place I’ve seen this sort of “occur naturally”.

It requires a defined culture, a bit of shared value, and active enforcement, so it is more the domain of paid services or private niche communities.

Ancient anecdote: it was specifically this difference in responses to questions on the mailing lists that lead me to use MySQL over PostgreSQL.

It is a problem everywhere, particularly where the barrier to entry has been lowered or removed, and it’s mostly a signal:noise issue in the absence of a fitness (quality) function.

My unpopular opinion is that the popular “SO is full of pedants” claim isn’t even true.

A classic beginner mistake is to mistake legit a major misstatement as a trivial error. “Gosh, stop focusing on the minutiae and answer my question!”

“Gosh everyone is such a pedant that won’t just answer my well-thought-out questions” is a red flag. It’s like complaining that everyone around you is always an asshat.

I think this meme would be quickly dispelled if HNers were to start posting links to their own negative interactions on SO.

It's like product/service reviews, which are dominated by unhappy customers since few happy customers feel sufficiently motivated to take the time to review. The people most likely to answer technical questions are insufferable pedants, who relish the opportunity to demonstrate their vast technical knowledge.

That being said, it's worth looking around on Reddit's more focused subreddits for what you're asking about. No guarantees, though.

> I suspect that if the voting/karma behaviour of these forums could be changed, there would be less of this.

And less people answering your questions.

Frankly, few people are so selfless that they spend time answering other people's questions simply to help them. Many of them do so precisely because they can judge other people and feel superior. You take that away, and you'd have to pay people to waste their time doing your work instead of theirs.

I remember getting flamed for making some comment about C on FidoNet at 2400 baud. It's an old problem.

There are things that would have to be done to produce a solution:

- understand the behavior: what drives people to post answers in the first place?

- define moderation rules that would shape the desired behavior

- build a community that focuses on this

- reward the best answers by the new metric

Community building is hard. We should remember to thank dang for doing a tremendous job of it here.

Am I the only one who finds that a tiny minority of SO answers are like that, and the vast majority are highly informative, reasonable, and respectful?

I searched my browser history for “stackoverflow” and randomly picked out a few SO answers I recently searched for:

"in C++, why do I need to use `this->` when a template derived class accesses members of its template base class?" [0] All of the answers to this question are extremely informative and to-the-point.

"in bash, how do I sleep infinitely?" [1] Again, super informative answers that both answer the question concisely, and then delve into the intricacies of why it's a more complex task than meets the eye.

"why are Python hashes different between sessions?" [2] Highly informative answer that highlights something not easily found in the docs

"apparmor is hanging mysql service on Ubuntu" [3] top answer gives a one-line solution to fix this problem, and explains why it arose in the first place.

Even fairly high-level questons ("what is a Python metaclass?") have great SO answers. In fact, I have that one bookmarked to share with people who ask me, since it's the best description I've ever seen. [4]

I wonder if my experience is due to the sort of question I usually search for: very specific and technical, leaving little room for pedantry, dogmatism, or evangelism. For instance, "how do I flush the Linux disk cache," has exactly one right answer: `echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` [5]. One cannot be pedantic about this ("there are many definitions of disk cache, and it is meaningless to answer your question without clarifying further"), dogmatic ("the disk cache exists for a reason, and there is no reason to flush it"), or evangelistic ("why are you not running BSD?")

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1120833/derived-template...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2935183/bash-infinite-sl...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27522626/hash-function-i...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40997257/mysql-service-f...

[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100003/what-are-metaclas...

[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9551838/how-to-purge-dis...

You would surely love going through a code review @ Google :-)

Sounds like you want someone to handpick exactly what you want, there is no internet forum in existence like that where you will have a safe space from pedants and what I call "akchually trolls". You just have to live with it because everyone one has a different definition of what "akchually is". Hackernews has been one of the best I've found. Reddit is a useful dumpster fire where you can pluck out a kernel every now and then. Stackoverflow left a bad taste in my mouth a long time ago. Sometimes discord groups are a good place to go. I find the rust ones really good.

No such place exists. Let's make one. It will be you and I and nobody else.

StackOverflow's (and many other forums') solution to search noise is to avoid duplicates.

There are a few major issues with that approach:

1. The question asker probably doesn't know there clearest way to phrase the question, so they are ill-equipped to find duplicates before asking.

2. The question asker may ask a totally unique question that really ends up boiling down to a duplicated answer. Does that mean their question was simply an abstract duplicate? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, usually something in between.

3. The solution to a question asker's problem is often the answer to a totally different question. So their problems get answered, and their question goes into limbo. Now the next person dutifully searches the original question, and must waste time reading the answers to someone else's problems. Then they go ask the question again, and it gets marked as a duplicate!

---

So what can we do about it?

I think the answer is actually more pedantry, but with better paths. Give the pedants somewhere satisfying to go.

In situations where the asker's problems were answered, but the question is not, the question should be rephrased/edited.

In situations where a duplicate question is asked, just merge them.

In situations where a duplicate answer is given, have both questions clearly reference (link to) each other. Maybe even structure answers as separate objects that questions can point to.

That was never my experience with SO. May be I'm pedant in some sense as well and I'm making sure that my questions are correct (which sometimes solves my question without even asking it, LoL).

Right now my go-to resource for answers is SO and my go-to resource for opinions are reddit and HN.

Also recently I tried to embrace telegram chats. I think that it could be the feature of communication, so you might want to check it out. That said, so far they were of very little use for me.

Stack Overflow was supposed to fix this kind of behavior by giving points to the accepted answer, but in practice people just spam out answers to questions they didn't take the time to understand, in hopes that they'll get some points from other clueless people upvoting them.

Anyway, the real solution here is to get better at speed reading the answers. Usually on any SO question there are lots of answers, and a few good ones, but the votes do not indicate which ones are good. You just have to quickly scan the entire list of answers and come to your own conclusions based on that information.

I changed my career 18 months ago and became a sysadmin. And forums like stack overflow are really important too me. But it took some time teaching myself to scan these forum topics and identify whether; - The problem is really comparable to my problem. - The answers are 'universal' or bound to the commenters workflow. - The commenters explain their answer so I can actually expand my knowledge. - The commenters interpretation of the problem is right or wrong.

Most of the time I open 8 'simular' topics, close 6 of them after scanning and then dive into the two I find most suitable.

About the scenarios you describe. Maybe different types of commenters are needed for a forum ecosystem. I can imagine someone spending more time writing a helpful comment after noticing the scenario's you describe. Maybe we need bad topics/comments so people with (writing/educational) experience step up to save the day.

Forums can be confusing in situations you describe but compared to closed communities like Discord it's something I cherish most on the internet.

You get what you pay for. To find the useful information among the pile of what you call pedantry and nitpicking you have to not take any of it personally and not assume motivations of the people who post answers. Skip over the non-responsive and off-topic replies, and remember that someone took the time to respond at all, for free, and may have simply misunderstood the question or answered it from a different frame of reference than yours.

Consider that many questions posted in online help forums don't seem to have much clarity or effort to express the problem. Many questions already have answers, which makes those who do try to answer wonder why the questioner didn't search first.

When asking strangers for free help online you don't have the right to demand anyone conform to your definition of useful. You don't get to set the terms. If you want to set the terms and get only helpful answers you will have to pay experts.

> “But are there better forums where this sort of behaviour is discouraged?”

Have you experienced good interactions on SO as well?

I have and I’ve experienced difficulties. So I use the site for what it’s good for and take my troubled questions to other places. This includes other forums, google groups, discord and meetups.

Some problems just take longer to sort out.

What I don’t know I don’t know.

How to write the question in a way readers are not triggered and recall a distracting association in the problem space. Some details I think relevant are not relevant, or show my ignorance about something—even if it seems unrelated to the question.

And some communities on SO have very strong biases and protect their sandbox.

I personally appreciate strong opinions from volunteers. I appreciate a strongly held belief.

Then again, some people are just awful people and behave badly to others. It’s good to recognize when you’re in this kind of situation, deal with the emotions and move on. It makes you a better person :)

I do not think I have ever received a useless pedantic criticism instead of an answer on StackOverflow. Not that I've asked that many questions — only about a hundred — but I haven't encountered the useless criticism you are talking about. Worst thing that happened was that the question went unanswered.

1. Learn to deal with criticism. 2. Ask yourself if your architectural pattern is, in fact, the right one; once confirmed, ignore the haters. Or embrace them. 3. See 2 above. 4. See if Y does solve your problem while meeting your overall criteria. If it does, ask yourself if you are bound to X.

I don’t know, geeks universally like to nitpick, and somehow have this idea that the internet is the place where that nitpicking actually is good and valued and adds inches to their geek weewee. Or they build a temple to dogmas they believe. Who knows.

Maybe you should create a forum where this kind of behavior is not tolerated.

But then again, once your community grows large enough, you’re bound to get obnoxious pedants who will make a flamestorm about whether X or saying X or doing Y constitutes nitpicking or not and will beat the issue to death abd beyond. Somehow your moderators will get caught in these and take sides. Or you will find that the moderators are the worst offenders.

No, I don’t know how to fight it, it’s bad enough in the workplace already.

Suffice to say I keep fighting the tendencies in myself, and sometimes I lose.

https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip

I don't have personal experience with the Recurse Center community, but I imagine it's pretty close to what you're looking for. The Recurse Center is a community of 2000+ technically inclined people. They have a very active Zulip forum. They rigorously protect [social rules] that discourage the behaviors you listed.

It's free, but very difficult to get in. You have to first apply and then dedicate at least 6 weeks of your life to learning.

[social rules]: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules

I wouldn't hold my breath. Internet gathers people that don't want human communication but technical and "optimized" (according to whomever biases that fits) which leads to what you describe.

That said, I'd try to join smaller groups where people are more into friendly-bunch-playing mode..

ps: Since it's free, you have to pay by bowing to whoever you're talking to because they don't enjoy talking, they want something else, a quest for perfect information, precise protocol converging toward a solution. They're not wrong but it often goes wild (just two days ago someone ended up shouting at me for not giving server details regarding a tiny unicode issue, it went up to "I am the one with the most answers here so obey me" full with caps lock as bonus)

I have found it easiest to be objective about what you want out of a question.

In other words, don't leave much room for interpretation or bike shedding.

There's no reason to not use Stack Overflow, it's still one of the biggest forums besides GitHub to get answers to questions. Why not focus on the good parts of it such as the visibility and instantaneous feedback rather than the bad parts of it? You can just ignore those.

There is no amount of reformation that would change these forums. I know many people believe that the toxicity of Stack Overflow could be changed with different incentives or algorithm changes, but that's just a silly thought. You'd have to significantly displace users to make that happen and it's easier to just build a new platform at that rate.

This is just how tech works unfortunately. You'll find that the more clever individuals simply don't engage with it. You don't see James Dean, or John Carmack yelling about dogmatism, or nitpicking (although their jobs demand some evangelism).

3. Is highly under-rated, and I would throw "shock jocks" in there as well. There's a certain devops CEO with lots of street-cred, who loves to make these definitive, insulting, patronizing statements. "Anybody who has to schedule releases is doing it wrong and I feel pity for them". "DevOps is Bullshit. If you're not writing code to develop the project then you shouldn't be employed", etc.

It's impossible to have a real discussion with the "evangelist" crowd anymore, or if anybody from the evangelist crowd is within earshot. Not just forums, but they've pretty much ruined meetups and conferences.

https://elixirforum.com is the best technical forum I’ve used in recent memory. Not because the underlying forum tech is amazing, but because all the most experienced people using the Elixir language/ecosystem are there and they are very welcoming. It’s open (no login required) and questions are never down-voted or closed arbitrarily. As a long time 10+ year member of SO in the top 1% I can say it’s a horrible experience as a n00b. Not so on Elixir Forum. It’s a joy.

Don’t know if this answers the OP question, but it’s an example of a great technical forum.

This type of behavior is everywhere right now. A lot of people are struggling emotionally due to the aftermath of the pandemic and other contemporary issues and the way they attempt to vent online is with this type of behavior.

I've been using StackOverflow for around 10 years and it hasn't always been as bad as it is now but there certainly have always been some ornery folks answering.

You could try to preface your question with something like "I'm not sure I'm asking correctly" or something like that and then if they persist ask them respectfully to not be pedantic as you just want a solution.

Eventually all forums go through Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I would love if indiehackers could help fill this niche. Since it is aimed at people trying to launch products, pragmatism should reign, but there are things about the presentation and site policy that would seem to hold it back for this use case.

As a new user of the site, im not allowed to post, very few of the posts inspire me to comment anything (mainly because I’m not that knowledgeable about founder problems, but if there were more tech conversations then i would comment more), and there is a low throughput of new discussions as well. I feel like it could be done better.

If you don't want those (SO) answers, you can always go looking at w3schools (or other pseudo tech sites) or indian/pakistani facebook groups. Good luck there. SO is, an always been the go to for devs that want answers to specific issue. Maybe you should ask better questions to get better answers.

But to answer your question. - if there are better forums or sources to get answers, than SO, we would know by now

And a followup for others. Have you as well seen a decline in the "questions" quality, rather than the answers? I'm worried, our industry is being polluted.

Other comment stated: > Internet gathers people that don't want human communication but technical and "optimized" (according to whomever biases that fits) which leads to what you describe.

I wonder what makes the HN community such a pleasure to interact with? Is it really only the fact that a few down votes make your comment more transparent? How did we all come to the agreement to have in fact civil discussion? Most communities have similar rules but the HN community seems to really strive for a healthy environment.

If you want someone to answer questions in an answering style of your choice, consider hiring a consultant. I'm not sure you'll find what you're looking for for free, in volume.

My opinion on this is that such an hypothetic forum need to display credentials (what makes you an expert) and ban people that lecture people full-time, with no credentials to back it up whatsoever. The most critical people on Internet forums are also the most anonymous and often there haven't achieved very much, if at all. They poison the water for pragmatic people, who leave first. EDIT: also, it seems to me forums that skew higher-class will prefer posturing and talk rather than work credentials.

I feel like you're asking an XY-problem [0]. You want to have better information answering your problems (for free) and they criticise the question you asked.

Pay them to be nice. This will also give value to their answers, since clearly an expert advice you paid for is more worth than free advice.

The next best thing to paying people is to actually thank them for their time and answers.

[0]: https://xyproblem.info/

The problem with SO is, that most people do not understand, why SO has been invented. The core SOs do not care about any individual persons and the specific problem, the persons might have. Instead SO is really selfish. They care only about their own agenda and this agenda is building a library. They are not interested in people. They are just interested in their own site. For SO most users are not people, who need help. Instead they are just supplier of "junk" content.

This is maybe just my own take but they're usually not dominated by pedants, it's just that you focus on that one reply from a pedant.

Choose to not focus on replies that don't contribute and you'll have a better time online.

The anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in people so after 25 years on the internet I've just honed my own internal filter to not let them upset me. I think that's the real solution because we won't change humanity, so start with yourself.

I have found the Rust reddit to be one of the best places for this (including also the mechanical keyboards, programming language design too).

I also part of http://www.clubdelphi.com, that is very old-school.

This places exists. But I think:

1- Are relatively small (even the Rust reddit). 2- ARE NOT GENERAL. Instead are more domain specific 3- REFUSE TO BE GENERAL. Not politics, social, music, fashion, sports, etc. Only the thing.

I stopped using Stack Overflow years ago. For me, it was when I asked about a UPS, it got moved to another SO site, and that new SO site then closed it as not relevant to the SO Site. Which is true, it wasn't, that's why I didn't post it there in the first place.

But yes, I also found that most of the time people would nit about the way you asked a question rather than just answering it.

The people who enjoy SO are just not the people you really want answering questions.

*dominated

(But to answer your question, not a clue.)

StackOverflow works but you need to narrow down your question tags correctly.

- Asking questions in more niche communities yields more positive response. Use tags like "timescaledb", "web3py", which are watched only by few people who understand and care about the topic

- Tagging questions with generic tags like "javascript" and "python" will attract toxic moderation, from people who do not understand the topic or generally are assholes

In the past I participated occasionally in small to medium-sized (couple of hundred participants) specialized mailing lists, which were very professional. On one occasion there was a public mailinglist, and after showing some expertice, I was invited to the private one, which was excellent. But all that was more than a decade ago. Perhaps it is still worthwhile not looking for a large community, but for several small specialized ones?

There are a lot of subreddits that discourage all of the things you mention. They are usually full of eternal september posts, repetitive and low value.

You are taking getting free technical answers for granted. The basic alternative to what you have here is no forum and no answers.

If someone is competent and straight to the point, what would they be doing answering someone else's question on a forum for free?

Cunningham's law is your greatest ally, rather than trying to find what can't exist by definition (except in small and specific communities that pop up here and there)

Dev.to is pretty good at promoting a constructive community, but you still have trolls who will double down that their opinion must become your opinion

I find GitHub issues pages really good, it’s almost like what SO could have been if it had real developers on it.

Whenever I feel proper stuck on something, I go search the relevant repo’s issues page and more often than not, it’s in a closed issue with 73 emoji heart reacts on it, and 9 times out of ten the repo author joins in to say “nice, I’ll add that to the readme” in response, an infinitely better experience

> 1. Nitpickers who interpreted something in your question as incorrect. They will focus on this minor point that they think you said.

This is the most aggravating one for me. A minor ambiguity will completely derail the conversation.

Often, it’s simple enough to say: ”it’s not clear whether you meant X or Y. If you meant X, the answer is Such and such. If you meant Y, the answer is blah blah blah.”

All of these are essentially forms of bike shedding, and it's become a massive problem here on HN too. I don't know if they do this because of the classic bike shed where they don't have any actual insight but feel like they need to say something for some reason, or something else. I don't know of any place that isn't so dominated by that anymore.

I don't think you are looking for a forum with real humans with thoughts and feelings who react as such. You are looking for an AI.

Try Github Copilot

I would add

4. stackoverflow is user hostile towards rookies/newbies.

People and mods forget s that it is not easy when you are new and everything is new, you dont know exactly how things works, what to search for because you dont know the exact words etc etc. For someone new that wants to learn programing it could be very complicated to grasp everything. Even if it is a simple question or maybe stupid question for someone that is experiensed, an anwser could still be very useful for someone new to understand something and could dayes and weeks to finally figure it out by theself. Now people just downvote and closes questions supereasy and that could be very demotive to learn programming.

Ok if "experts" dont want to read all newbie questions, but there should be a tag or something you could click so peolple now this and dont just downvote and close so easy and so people that dont want to read those question can skip them and people that want to be more helpful and understand its a newbie question still can help before everything gets closed or whatever.

>useless pedantic criticism

I don't see that on either Reddit or SO. I get accurate and thoughtful responses and answers to a range of technical topics on both platforms. My life is much improved as a result. Granted, I engage in very niche groups and ask very specific questions.

I spend quite a bit of time on a programming discord server helping people. I find that a ton of issues are in fact solved by "nitpicking" on "minor details" like variable names, plural vs singular, and asking "why did you ask that?"

Also I saw a good joke once about if you want a programming issue solved, don’t just post it to reddit; make another account in which you respond to your own question with some useless advice. Redditors will not idly stand by and leave someone else uncorrected.

Isn't finding and pointing out a fundamental flaw in how you want to accomplish X the opposite of pedantic? "You shouldn't be doing this in the first place" is quite often the best answer, even though it's not the one you want to hear.

Before voting karma existed we would just openly bully the pedants on other forums because their actions/language were tantamount to trolling. Voting karma on forums disincentivized this behavior, so now the pedants run everything.

1. If I comment to correct a minor detail in someone's question, and they don't bother either to respond or to fix it, then I know it's not going to be worth going to the effort of giving a full answer.

I think there's a kind of CAP theorem for that kind of forum. It's hard to combine:

- open and free

- well-known

- respected

- has knowledgeable people

- willing to understand and discuss the unique context of every post in good faith

- also able to identify when you truly DO have an XY problem (because they do exist)

- scalable

I think online communities grow out of the culture that starts, so the best bet would be to gather a lot of technical people who aren't insufferable pedants on a new platform and give them tools to moderate.

Ultimately you need strong moderation to ensure quality answers.

I stopped answering on this type of forums because the toxicity is incredible. I started getting attacked personally just for answering the question.

Usually the most practical programmers are too busy focusing on coding than internet arguments. They _occasionally_ appear and drop nuggets of gold.

Im trying to learn web programing (html/css/js). Does anyone have any tips on alternatives forum to stackoverflow?

Discord (preferably the official Discord) is surprisingly very helpful and positive for me.

Not IWETHEY or Kuro5hin I found out the hard way they turn into troll boards.

I heard Soylant News is good.

Trolls are everywhere :( I stopped contributing to SO. Started my own community.

You're asking that question in a place that's equally as guilty.

if you find that you are asking a lot of questions yourself and you are finding the answers to be unsatisfactory, maybe you should consider hiring a consultant to help you.

Some issues to consider:

1. StackOverflow's original goal was to be an open-sourced archive of technical information, as I understand it, not a free tutoring service for anyone with a question. This accounts for closing duplicate questions.

2. There's a reason remote IT help is a big online business - they hire people who are paid to be polite and helpful, clarify questions, and solve them efficiently while helping you implement them. It's unreasonable to expect members of any free open forum to behave in this manner, ever.

3. On SO, a major goal of many participants is to up their SO score, by providing popular answers or popular questions. This often conflicts with the archival repository goal (see 1) of the site. For example, I'd say 95% of the time I have a question that seems appropriate for SO, a diligent (time-consuming) SO search usually turns up an already existing answer, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to up my points by asking questions. Throwing out a question without doing any research is considered poor behavior (but see 2, time is money) although the actual motivation may be more about upping that SO score.

Finally, there's another reason people try to answer questions that has nothing to do with any of the OP's 1-3 points, and that's that there is really no better way to learn a subject, and to test your own understanding of a subject, than to try to explain it to someone else. However, this is not really 'altruistic motivation' - it's a way of rapidly grasping the fundamentals and issues and common edge cases in say, learning a new programming language. Also, a poor response to a question will bring out the correctors, a useful tactic other comments allude to, i.e.:

https://xkcd.com/386/

Thus, don't expect any member of a public forum to ever behave like a paid employee of an IT help company - which means, practically, the ability to ignore the nitpickers, evangelists, dogmatists, preeners, dismissive jerks and so on is a necessary skill.

r/learnprogramming has been good enough for me, but if you're asking this, you're probably looking for more mature pastures.

What would be the fun in that.

those 3 all sound like HN users to be fair.

At times I wonder whether this stuff is a sort of “I’ve been bullied by this tactic in the past so I’m going to bully with this tactic now” psychological pathology.

Society’s suffering from a lot of whataboutism, gaslighting, and authoritarianism. The internets made it so there aren’t many real islands of information isolation. Iran comes to mind. (Granted, North Korea kind of doesn’t.) The propaganda is clearly crossing national borders more easily than ever before now.

So maybe we can’t have nice forums because the internet is a reflection of the world.

I don't believe this is true about Stack Overflow. This is why it works, that's its entire model.

The insufferable pedants don't stop correct answers.

Except if you are asking questions that have no answers.

Which is most of Stack Exchange but not Stack Overflow unless the question is badly worded.

Do you have an example on Stack Overflow where this has happened?

I believe you meant "Technical fora that are not dominated by insufferable pedants"

If you ask a question, generally, you are soliciting willingness to receive inputs. You seem to be feeling salty that you're not getting the input from others you desired, yet could not previously articulate.

Half of your pedantic nitpickers (of which I suppose I may now be counted in the number of) are at least providing you a concrete example of what the answer isn't, and what may ultimately be direction/inspiration for where an answer may lie.

I guess I'm just saying, be thankful you even get lackluster answers in lieu of the alternative.

As far as how to divorce honests attempts to solicit input from the social mediafication of the programming space, (i.e. aggressive building of mindshare in terms of dogmatic adherence to the One True Way to Parse a Lolcat), or people arbitrarily rearchitecting your problem space (Your lolcats must be partitioned, sharded, highly available, with 9 9's uptime, with no greater than 300 ms from disk to eyes, when all you needed was a Lolcat that'd get there eventually when a friend came looking in the afternoon in less than 7kb total)...

I'm not sure. It's rather annoying. The latter I find less annoying than the former, but generally speaking, just be both polite and willing to patient game of code golf til a bored grey beard has some time to kill, or you figure it out.