I don’t agree

The thing is that most people seeking help are not able to form their question effectively. They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.

They _need_ help with people trying to parse out their actual problem. Stack Overflow actively tells you to fuck off if you can’t form your question to their standards, and unsurprisingly that’s not very helpful to people that are struggling.

You will need to repeat walking people through the same problems over and over. But… that’s what helping people is like. That’s how we teach people in schools. We don’t just point them to textbooks. Active discords tend to have people that are willing to do this.

> They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.

I wrote the original comment. I also went to therapy where my provider introduced me to a framework called Non-Violent Communication. It’s a four part process and the last is an explicit request. And a valid request is always “help me figure out how to ask a better question.”

Stack overflow culture sucks, but believe it or not it’s better than what came before.

I’m glad that you’re getting help on discord. To me the ultimate goal of writing questions is to never need to post them. In that: once you can craft the perfect question … then the answer becomes self evident. Usually the more effort I put into a question, the more help I get out of an answer. And I feel that’s a good thing.

I feel that you lose that introspection and self iteration when getting help via chat. When I give someone a debugging suggestion (I teach college, elementary school, and have worked in a support role for over a decade) I never want the person to simply tell me what happened. I.e. I don’t want to remote pair program where they run commands and tell me the results. I’m always aiming to teach them via a hypothesis. I want them to take the new evidence and give me their analysis. So I can possibly correct their misunderstandings and get a glimpse into their thought process. While that process can happen in chat. It’s more suited to people who respond quickly rather than those who are looking for maximum depth. You’re also limited to only the people online at that exact moment.

I think there is value in getting help from chat. Developers also need to learn how to deeply inspect and debug complicated issues. I developed those skills as a byproduct of async forum culture and years of self study. I feel we need to find a way to train devs for some of these accidental skills that old timers picked up accidentally.