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Who else has had a negative exepirence on these stack/overflow sites

4 points by teslacar ↗ HN
Who else has had a negative experience on these stock/overflow sites?

You get down-voted for asking questions and no one bothers to answer the question. Here is one example http://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/30148/what-is-the-big-deal-about-american-put-options?

There are many more of examples people asking good questions and getting downvoted

What is the deal with these communities that bring out the worst in people

2 comments

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viraptor
Don't take it personally. People spending lots of time on SE sites see people repeating the same questions or asking things that cannot really be answered all the time. At some point you either have a boilerplate comment, or a favourite "this is a duplicate" link, or a just downvote them.

I don't know anything about the quant site, but if people with 1k+ reputation say "I don't know what you're asking.", and "So basically you stated (at least) 2 falsehoods right there in your question.", then you should just try to rewrite the question.

For programming questions it's easier. You just point people at some known post, like https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/08/29/writing-the-perfect-... For other site it may be harder, but the process is probably similar. Separate your question from your assumptions. Ask a clear question that has a specific answer. If you're writing "so the Black Scholes model would be correct, no?", then your question should probably be titled "Is the Black Scholes model correct for american put options?" or something similar. (not "what's the deal with...")

chollida1
I visit the quant stack exchange site and they try their best to keep the questions to a level that a practicing quant would expect. The math overflow stack exchange is another example of where they try to keep the questions to a higher level.

If you keep this in mind then things start to make more sense.

As an example consider a stack exchange called Advanced C++. If someone comes in and asks, what does the "class" key mean, then I think it would be more than fair to close that question.

Now back to the question at hand.

IMHO the question you link to is not a good question. It's not clear what they user is asking.

I mean it contains a couple of incorrect statements that people point out in the comments.

I'm a practicing quant and I can't make much sense of what the question is asking.

If the user is asking in what situations would you do early exercise of an American option then you can easily aruge that this should be closed as its a basic question that isn't up to the standard that a practicing quant would ask.

But again, I can't really make sense as to what the user wants to ask. I'm guessing this is why it was closed.