1. Go to stackoverflow's homepage
2. Read some of the fine selection of questions that are asked
3. WTF?????

I hope newbies will understand one day why they get banned or downvoted or get their questions closed

SO or some of its SEs may be toxic but the amount of pollution these people add to the website is too huge to deal with

@asgs Yeah, being friendly to lazy idiots won't make them better people - it will only attract more lazy idiots.

more questions = big number
big number make stakeholder pp big

i think that maybe, the "how to ask a good question"-article is too good. i mean - once you actually formulate a good question, chances are high that by doing so, you already found the solution - and never post the question.

what's left over are very few questions that actually _need_ some help answering, and a huge load of idiots too stupid to read a very short and simple manual. which are most likely to also be idiots too stupid to solve even the simplest of problems.

and then, sometimes, there are those butthurterinos complaining how toxic stackoverflow is (because their question was closed for being explicitely off-topic) and work them up to such an insulting rant, they get banned for a few weeks. (those are the most fun to watch)

@tosensei Beginners in particular have no business asking anything on SO because the things they can ask have already been answered anyway - what they need to learn is how to use a search engine.

I've been using SO from time to time, and I never even made an account there. That's the intended main use of SO in terms of numbers.

@Fast-Nop i wouldn't be that harsh. beginners are _very welcome_ to ask on SO - if they've read the rules and did some research/work themselves first.

though i'm still for a dedicated "noob"-area, with less strict rules. would go a long way in keeping the main page clean and usable.

@tosensei That's the point - there's just about nothing a beginner is even able to ask that doesn't already have an answer. If they follow the rules and do their homework, the question is solved.

There shouldn't be a noob area because SO isn't meant as helpdesk, forum, or community. It's not about the one person asking, it's about the dozens or hundreds persons finding that with a search engine later.

Noobs who can't follow the rules, don't do research, or are outright lazy shouldn't be pandered to, but get banned as quickly as possible. Their egocentrism is prone to destroy the whole project.

@Fast-Nop thing is: there's absolutely _nothing_ you can do about the unwilling noobs. except give them a place - separate from stackoverflow - that they can use for their questions.

accomodate them with their own stackexchange-site, with a big, impossible-to-miss info when trying to post to SO. that is, IMHO, the only way to keep them from the main page that has any significant chance of success.

the questions that are inherently terrible will still get downvoted and deleted, without cluttering SO's "latest"-feed, and those questions that are "willing-but-simply-unable" can get pointers in the right direction _as well_ as an introduction on how to use SO.

yes, SO isn't meant es forum for noobs, but it _will be used as such_ as long as there _isn't_ a forum for noobs that's even remotely in the same ballpark regarding popularity and "brain potential".

@tosensei That would be pointless. The whole idea of SO is not giving every single noob his own answer, but giving the answer once and in good form, and then relying on people using search engines.

Such a noob forum would have nothing to offer to those who give the skillful answers so that it would be noobs among themselves, which would not be helpful. On top of that, it would pollute the search results with garbage - except if everything were marked as "no follow" for search engines, thereby again defeating the whole purpose of SO.

The SO approach of banning dumb noobs is a lot more helpful - not for these noobs, but for what SO is trying to achieve. SO is not a forum, not a helpdesk, not a community. It should enforce that strictly instead of pandering to lazy idiots who don't contribute anything useful at all.

Also, if these lazy noobs don't get useful answers in their honeypot forum, as can be expected, they will instead try in the main section anyway. That brings us back to square one, only now in worse form. If you welcome lazy idiots in any way, shape, or form, they will fail to realise what's wrong with them and become even more demanding, plus that welcoming idiots attracts only more of them.

That continues to a point where the skilled members are fed up with providing free work for idiots and leave - thereby killing the project, which would then drown in a sea of incompetence.

The answers that are actually helpful have surprisingly low upvotes