this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I've found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying "look it up" is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that's discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who "don't get the site" to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it's valid. I wonder if that's why they're pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.
Stack Overflow does have chat rooms, though it takes a bit of rep to get access to them (though that can be rep from any instance of stack exchange - this is because when it didn't have a rep requirement they were spammed).
The next question would be "to what extent should Stack Overflow (the site) be redirecting people to other sites?" Consider the "if you don't like {system}, to what extent does {system} need to be responsible for directing you to somewhere else?" Should Reddit be redirecting all its malcontents to Lemmy? Should Lemmy (the org / devs) be sending people who don't like how its run to KBin or Mastodon?
Two things there - first, is it better to say "your question isn't a good fit here, try this other place that accepts that type of question" (note that even if neutral wording is used people will interpret it as "your question sucks, go ask over there where its marginally better than Yahoo Answers") and would the other place appreciate getting the poorly formed newbie questions at the rate that Stack Overflow gets them? Could any discord handle the hundreds of newbie questions that SO gets daily? How much of a disservice would Stack Overflow be doing by redirecting those questions to someone else?
I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It's the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it's less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn't need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don't bring value to SO's database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.
https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/6/python and https://sopython.com/chatroom for SO's python chat room.
Consider, however, "what if on every Python question on SO, someone left a comment to check out the python discord channel to ask their questions".
Would the python discord channel be able to handle that volume of beginner questions (about 1 question every 5 minutes all day, every day)? And if someone did post that and try to encourage people to ask there instead, and would a representative of python discord go and ask SO meta to dissuade that user from doing so?
Sites like Stack Overflow, if they even point/redirect a fraction of their traffic at some other place can overwhelm the capacity for both support and moderation of that other place easily.
Part of the problem is also that many people asking questions don't want help, they want copy and passable answers that involves them (the person asking the question) doing as little as possible. I realize that's a controversial stance in some circles, but if you spend time trying to help all the users with low rep on SO (and even some with higher rep), it feels like they represent a significant portion of the people asking questions. Sampling bias? Confirmation bias? Dunno... I'll admit to some bias somewhere... but I still know what it feels like.