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up vote -14 down vote favorite

This question already has an answer here:

A similar question was asked around the same basic idea, but the proposed implementation was seemingly disliked: Would it be a terrible idea to split SO up into a tiered platform?. This is also a similar question, which was frustratingly closed as a duplicate of the former: Why don't we have an SE site for programming help vampires?.

My question is a bit different. Should we create another Stack Exchange site for beginning programmers?

Forking is not my preference, but it's seeming that the the "leadership" in our community has come to a consensus on a few items. Among the topics of discussion here in meta lately, it seems the item of the day is "We're getting too many bad questions." My interpretation, which may not be accurate, is that it boils down to:

  1. This community is mostly for us the experts.
  2. Top priority: give us interesting questions to answer.
  3. People asking trivial questions are obviously lazy, and we don't want them around here.
  4. People answering trivial questions are enabling the lazy, and goldarnit, though reputation points are meaningless, I'm really mad that they're getting reputation points.

This is not the community I'd wish upon beginners. They come to our site, not knowing community norms, not knowing enough to craft a good Internet search to find their answers, and sometimes not being familiar with the available tools on Stack Overflow. They ask their boring, trivial question, and a gang of summer-of-love-hating experts jumps on them, pelting them with downvotes and rapid closes.

Basically, a "%#*&$ you, get out of our community."

I want a community where I can go for help, and I can help others in need. It's for that feeling of philia-style love, that you're not alone in the universe, and we're there to help each other along. I'd rather not assume the worst of everyone asking a boring question.

I answer a lot of questions for this reason. And so I'm probably now labeled as a rep whore. Awesome. (Notice how in this diagram everyone but the caretakers gets a negative label. I don't have a problem with caretakers, but I'd label some of them as the snobs instead).

Yes, "help vampires" are a problem. But I see complaint after complaint from people that are clearly not vampires but are beginners with programming. I don't mind helping beginners. Everybody has needed help when they're getting started, whether they admit it or not.

Should we have a site where people that are helpful and beginners that are in need are not vilified?

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marked as duplicate by Frédéric Hamidi, devnull, Cupcake, ChrisF♦ May 11 at 17:42

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
3  
I think one of the best comments I read about this feature request amounted to the Internet will not benefit from the blind leading the blind. –  Frédéric Hamidi May 11 at 17:22
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smart cookies on Newbie Overflow would use google to paste answers from SO –  Plutonix May 11 at 17:37
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@Cupcake, and before that time there were people who could enter their bootloader's machine code by heart on their front panels. Yes, we may have lost a lot of expertise along the way, which is fortunately not necessary anymore. The whole process does make it easier for each new generation of programmers, but I believe that's by design :) –  Frédéric Hamidi May 11 at 17:39
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@Jacob, I'm afraid you missed Oded's point here... A site with beginners questioning will mechanically have beginners answering, because if experts did answer beginner-level, no-research questions, then these would already be answered on SO and your feature request would not have a purpose. –  Frédéric Hamidi May 11 at 18:06
    
This would likely have the effect of making StackOverflow less friendly to beginners, as experts could easily say "Go ask on the beginners site!" (even if the user's question were well written, and the beginner's site were a bad place to get answers). –  David Robinson May 11 at 20:41
    
Good points. I agree that fragmentation is a bad thing. I wish there was some solution to avoid the newbie shaming that some users delight in. –  Jacob May 11 at 21:32
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Just two things, this is absolutely not a duplicate, as experts can still access the beginners site and secondly, there is actually a SE community that has shown this works, the English learner vs English communities. –  David Mulder Jun 23 at 11:57
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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

To get better at something, the key ingredient, besides passion and a drive to improve, is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.

A site for beginners would be a stagnant place for non-experts to simply share non-expert answers and never grow or challenge themselves to move beyond the phase of being a beginner.

In an answer to a meta question from someone concerned about how they were treated on Stack Overflow, that person actually got an answer to a Stack Overflow question from the former C# design team member Eric Lippert.

Answered in-depth by Eric Lippert. protip: You wont get a better answer!

A beginners site wouldn't get answers from the actual authors of a language. To truly grow and become experts ourselves, we must get out of our comfort zones and go play with the big boys and girls. If we forever live and play where it's safe, we won't grow and excel.

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I note that I was a creator of C#, and that I worked on it from C# 3.0 to 5.0. C# was and continues to be the effort of a large and diverse team. If you want to use the definitive article then the creator of C# is Anders Hejlsberg. –  Eric Lippert May 13 at 18:37
    
Sorry for getting that wrong, @EricLippert, and thanks for the corrections. I should know better than to rely on hearsay. ;) –  jmort253 May 13 at 19:26
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up vote -2 down vote

Are not all people beginners. Lets say you've been programming for 50 years you know the ins and outs of c++ you are what may be considered an expert so with that logic your an expert in VHDL coding as well.

Your argument above states that only experts should be allowed in the main SO site but because you may not be an expert in say VHDL then your not an expert. I amend your above comment to say that so should be divided into all the tags currently in SO then there should be extensive testing for each member and anyone above the 90th percentile in anyone tag should be allowed to stay but they can only post/answer questions within that tag.

You know what, thats a world I dont want to live in...

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You are yet another person to equate quality with difficulty. The two are unrelated. There are hard questions that are really horribly written, and there are really easy beginner questions that are extremely well written. The site demands questions be of how quality; it in no way demands that they be hard. –  Servy May 13 at 18:42
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up vote 10 down vote

What this will accomplish is:

  • Only beginners will use this site. No experts
  • Resulting in... bad questions... bad answers... no expertise

And that is assuming that beginners even go there. Of course, once beginners do go there, they figure out that no help is coming aaaaand... they turn to the non-beginner site.

They ask their boring, trivial question, and a gang of summer-of-love-hating experts jumps on them, pelting them with downvotes and rapid closes.

Basically, a "%#*&$ you, get out of our community."

Actually, they ask their question that has been asked N times before, with some excellent answers, but did not bother to search - either on the site or using that newfangled invention, the search engine.

Or, they ask their question that is near incomprehensible and impossible to answer as it contains zero detail.

Those question get the downvotes. Those users (in particular if they will not learn) are the ones the community will reject.

A trivial question is welcome - so long as it is new, well written and is not something that would take 60 seconds on a compiler or the official documentation to answer.

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Could you bump that to 60 seconds? I'm tired of quoting MSDN. –  Frédéric Hamidi May 11 at 17:28
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@FrédéricHamidi - status-completed –  Oded♦ May 11 at 17:29
    
A site with beginners with bad questions, bad answers, and no expertise? That sounds amazing! I'll use the other site. –  djechlin May 11 at 17:42
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@djechlin - I keep forgetting it exists. Here you go –  Oded♦ May 11 at 17:47
    
@Cupcake - we also get really awful ones. The difference may be that we get rid of them. –  Oded♦ May 11 at 17:54
    
Not sure why you assumed only beginners would answer questions. I would love to help others in a non-hostile environment. –  Jacob May 11 at 18:02
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Possibly, @Jacob - but the large majority of those who would be answering would be those already on the site asking - the other beginners. –  Oded♦ May 11 at 18:12
    
I'm just saying, any solution that involves just throwing out all the "beginner" questions and leaving them on an island with a conch shell and some supplies from the plane, I'm okay with. A "migrate to Yahoo answers" button that anyone with 3k rep can click and move, I'd be down for. –  djechlin May 11 at 18:18
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