Is there an alternative to Stack Overflow?

Take some time to elaborate on your question and flesh it out so that other people might benefit from it later.

Just don't forget about doing your homework first, amount of effort you put into a question directly influences answers you get. If you take time to do a research, share what you already learned/tried, build a good case with code example (e.g. minimal reproduction on jsFiddle or Codepen) and make it easy for people to help you, you will get help. Otherwise, everywhere you will experience what you did on SO.

The people who help you in these mediums don't do it for the points.

The bad thing about these mediums is that there is absolutely zero SEO, which would totally kill SO.

1 - Making your questions far to specific, so nobody else could ever benefit from seeing the answer to that question in the future. These tend to be down voted very aggressively. So you need to try and find a more generic way of asking the question so that others might be helped by the answer as well.

2 - Just plain dumb questions. Such as 'I needz site like Facebook. Hope to make? Helpz'. If you are doing that and do not understand why it is a bad question then I probably cannot explain it to you.

3 - Making you question so that it looks like you are lazy and getting others to do the work for you. For example, questions that look like someone's homework. No one wants to spend time answering if the questioner has obviously made no effort to solve it themselves. Stackoverflow should be the last resort after several hours of trying.

The site is basically made up of professionals and that often determines if the question is considered too simple or not.

Stack Overflow is here to help all the future people who see the question. This is why someone who posts a lot of highly-upvoted questions but no answers is still a valuable asset and receives a high "reputation". This is the great value in Stack Overflow, really. Answers you see there are generally not targeted specifically for the asker, but rather are helpful to broader uses and many more people. Questions used to be closed merely because they were too specific and unlikely to be helpful to future readers.

Stack Overflow is meant to create a library of question/answer combos that make (theoretically) all future programming questions redundant. If your question is unhelpful in that ambition either because it already exists, it lacks clarity or specificity, etc., it will be closed. Granted, SO has the nasty people that come with any community-run site, but there are also many, many helpful and friendly people who will take the time to explain things either about your question or why the question doesn't fit the guidelines of the site. Without seeing your posts, it is impossible for me to say what was wrong with them if anything. I can only speak from personal experience.

My first question was posted after weeks of research and headaches. I read the help pages that were linked for me. It took two bounties before I got an answer, but I got one. While waiting for that answer, I decided to see if there was some way I could pay back for the answer I expected to receive. I learned a lot about the site by seeing the responses to other people's questions. I also, incidentally, learned a lot about programming by how others responded to my answers. By the time I posted another question, I knew the site pretty well. I have now posted 11 questions, and my only downvote was on a post with 10 upvotes.

First, I want to tell you I know exactly what you mean.

When I learnt programming, SO was not around. I mostly learnt by reading source codes, their authors' blog posts, and asking them questions. I started to use SO mostly by answering questions, since the languages and tools I used were already well known for me, and I had my previous ways to learn new things.

And then, I started learning golang. At some point, I said to myself : "why not start asking questions instead of learning everything by myself the hard way, like I usually do?". I asked a question on SO and was immediately downvoted. This came to a surprise to me, because my question was concrete, detailed and was wondering about something that wasn't explained in any publication. Then I started looking at other questions, and it was alarming : most were downvoted. Actually, I computed an average of questions scores and realized it was negative. That's when I stopped contributing to SO : blaming people for asking questions is not OK. If the question is really bad, suffice not to answer it.

I've been looking for alternatives since then - that is, general programming discussion platform with specialized areas - mainly to contribute, because explaining to juniors how things work is a perfect way to learn to document things, know what they find complicated, and learn to address it before questions arise. I found none. The best I could find was to fall back on mailing lists.

There are two pieces of advice I could give you :

* don't hesitate to mail people you regard as the most experienced to ask for their advice. Worst case scenario, they won't reply

* Choose ways of communication that don't allow downvoting - like email, forums, google+, whatever - because downvoting features do encourage hive mind and condescendent attitude

Also, please keep this experience in mind next time you'll be the one to explain something to someone having less knowledge than you. And remember that downvoting == bullying.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

[Edit] There was a difference of opinion about StackOverflow between Spolsky and Atwood. The famous question (or infamous, depending on your perspective) is Spolsky's "How do I move the turtle in Logo." [1] Spolsky thought it was an example of a good question (that's why he wrote it). Atwood disagreed. Atwood's view won out and people were given license to decide basic questions were stupid. Some of StackOverflow's tribes use that license more than others. Partially it's a survival mechanism...I can only imagine maintaining PhP, Javascript, or Python. Partially, it's just people being bullies (bullying of people posting 'homework' questions being sanctioned, de facto).

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

You have google, you have docs on whatever you are working with. Figure out the solution for yourself. Worst case you can't, but you might learn something else while trying.Depending on what you rae doing you might find some mailing lists, forums, or other dedicated communities.

oh, and there is always the person sitting a few feet away.

We are all lazy, but when a newbie is lazy it looks rather heinous to the expert. I got a friend that I am helping to start programming. I see that he "gets" it, but guess what, he's fairly lazy (like me) and is constantly stuck on simple simple stuff. If he went to SO with that he would get obliviated for sure.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39001373/extracting-middl...

Imagine you walked in to my office and said "Hey, mentor, I wrote str.length() and the browser told me that "str.length is not a function". Help!"

I'd say "OK, so what did you try?"

And you'd say "I came here and asked you."

Can you see why that might not get you anywhere? Asking people is not the first thing you do. It's the thing you do after you've exhausted every other option.

You're not doing any research, not trying anything, not even googling the error messages you're seeing. You're just giving up and asking Stack Overflow to do your homework for you. In half your cases, you're just asking the homework question directly before even opening the editor.

So the thing to change is not the site you ask your questions. It's your approach to learning. Try things, experiment, look things up. It's OK to fail and ask for help. It's not OK to ask for help before you've even made an effort.