StackExchange's differences in opinion across different communities on what constitutes as "adhering to the format"

Question

After happily coexisting with many others in the TeX and LaTeX StackExchange I caught myself in need of assistance for a different language than TeX.

Be that as it may, I very forwardly posed my question on StackOverflow, with intended result, my research effort and why the current available knowledge base on google as well as existing StackOverflow questions were inconclusive.

So far I've not had a single person willing to help - merely posing that my question did not adhere to the format and I should probably look elsewhere. After five questions I had the warning pop up that my questions were not of sufficient quality and that I should consider editing existing questions. I used the same format which although not praised until kingdom come on TeX.SE, were accepted as legitimate requests.

This deviates so wildly from the forthcoming atmosphere in TeX.SE that it got me wondering which of these formats was the intended one.

Furthermore, all things considered the format should at least be similar as they serve a similar general purpose - my interpretation of which would be an interactive and growing knowledge base on coding-related questions. (Obviously TeX.SE is slightly broader because it involves code for a very specific purpose, contrarily to the more general approach of StackOverflow.)

If I'm incorrect in these assertions I would also like to know how and where that discrepancy stems from and if its argument can be defended.

Answer 1

I think this depends on how you find TeX-SX. I don't know why but we get this holy format stuff once in a while from different users (not you of course) asking us to change our ways (yes all of us) because we don't comply with some half-baked (self conflicting) nerd-angered (first close then ask for clarification) socially-crippled(removing thanks) rules and believe me I'm trying to be nice here.

I came here without knowing what SO was. And I still don't know fully. Nobody told me any format and I didn't feel like obeying one. It was purely interaction based and people told me what the etiquette is and they even once in a while took my opinion seriously (not all of course I have too many hehe).

So long story short, we should be grateful to the initial and current mod team for taking things really considerate and not imposing any structure for sake of rigor though many of them were hard-core mathematicians. You can check questions from 2010 discussing how to proceed etc. I guess we were just lucky and avoided many of the nonsense that you see in other networks.

However, I have to mention that SO is a professional site contrary to their claims. They use their rep points and answers for creating a CV and a Career evidence. So you can expect the bitter taste one gets in there after asking a question. One of the leading problems I have been told or listened in the podcast is that some professional annoyed programmers try to get their job done via asking questions etc. Now that's some nasty behavior that maybe(!) needs that strict resistance. That is by no means the case here and many of those rules are utterly incompatible for our purpose.

After getting a bit better in Python I can appreciate more the core knowledge there however you have to really develop an über-filter for hostile behavior in the comments etc. simply because the competition is fierce there. I will probably never dare to ask a question but I still benefit from the knowledge scattered around here and there.

Disclaimer: I was active in Math.SE and Music.SE but stopped it. Because they follow SO rules and it is pretty dull and boring for my taste. It's amazing that they made music which is always fun to talk about, an academic theoretical obscurity (again for my taste).

Answer 2

Norms on SO are very different from those on TeX.SE. (So much so that I may be violating TeX.SE norms by answering this question. That's not a criticism, but I am not providing a definitive answer, which is a (useful) norm for TeX.Se.) In addition, I think there are slightly different norms in different programming-language communities within SO.

Without more detail, I can only guess about the source the difficulty you experienced with your SO question(s).

On SO, it's often felt that it's wrong to ask a question without providing a MWE and being very specific about the question you are asking about the MWE. That's often required for TeX.SE, too, but I think that the subject matter of TeX.SE also lends itself to questions that don't say more than "how do you do X", perhaps with evidence that you have tried to find the answer before asking, and providing your particular document/software context. That's sufficient less often with general-purpose programming languages, because there are so many different good ways to do something useful--but which is appropriate depends on the programming context.

[You wrote "(Obviously TeX.SE is slightly broader because it involves code for a very specific purpose, contrarily to the more general approach of StackOverflow.)" This makes me wonder whether you asked a question involving multiple programming languages--e.g. about which one to use for some purpose. If so, that would often be considered inappropriate for SO, though appropriate for Programmers.SE. SO is roughly a collection of language-specific programming question sites, but with cross-fertilization from different languages. For example, some answers to Clojure questions include Haskell code, and some Clojure questions are also questions about Java.]

(BTW I've spent a lot of time on SO, but don't feel I've experienced what @percusse mentions. I focus on languages other than Python. This difference in experience may be evidence of differences between language communities on SO.)