[dtrailin]

There some interesting writing from Joel Spolsky on these types of FAQs : https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-madden...

> When Jeff and I were talking about the initial design of Stack Overflow, I told him about this popular Usenet group for the C programming language in the 1980s. It was called comp.lang.c.

> C is a simple and limited programming language. You can get a C compiler that fits in 100K. So, when you make a discussion group about C, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

> Also. In the 1990s, C was a common language for undergraduates who were learning programming. And, in fact, said undergraduates would have very basic problems in C. And they might show up on comp.lang.c asking their questions.

> And the old-timers on comp.lang.c were bored. So bored. Bored of the undergraduates showing up every September wondering why they can’t return a local char array from a function et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Every damn September.

> The old timers invented the concept of FAQs. They used them to say “please don’t ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of Usenet” which honestly meant that the only questions they really wanted to see were so bizarre and so esoteric that they were really enormously boring to 99% of working C programmers. The newsgroup languished because it catered only to the few people that had been there for a decade.

The modern equivalent would probably be sorting StackOverflow questions by votes.

[eterm]

That blog post really hits hard how much Stackoverflow has become hostile to such users.

"please don't ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of stackoverflow" is the mantra the moderators now follow and it's maddening for the same reasons that Spolsky talks about in this post.

The modern equivalent is just stackoverflow itself. It has been very hostile to new users. Questions when allowed are incredibly esoteric and therefore hard to answer or over-specific and therefore not helpful to others.

In fact I'd say that now research by new users is punished. If they research and work on forming an abstraction for their problem and ask about that instead, there is a good chance the question will be closed as a duplicate or trip up some other issue.

If they just go ahead and "post their code" and focus on the very specific issue, there's a better chance it gets past moderation and gets answered.

Now part of that is deliberate on stackoverflow's part, they want people to post the actual problems they have and not post generic or general problems, but it does feel like an odd incentive at times.

[JdeBP]

There's a lot of blinkered and self-serving historical revisionism in that account. Two problems, just for starters: comp.lang.c didn't invent FAQ postings; it wasn't even Usenet that invented them. And frequently asked questions were and are not necessarily novice questions. So do not take it as gospel.