The 7 Types Of StackOverflow Answers

StackOverflow‘s one of the most-popular and widely-used resources for software developers. It dominates the search results when you’re looking for answers to techy questions. If you know how to read it, it can be invaluable.

But… I’m not sure what it is about the platform or the culture surrounding it that creates a certain… pattern to the answers that you can expect to receive on StackOverflow. To illustrate, let’s suppose we have a question:

SnackOverflow question: Let's say I'm camping and I need to make toast. I have a loaf of bread and a campfire. What's the best way to make toast?

Here are the answers you might see:

The Golden Hammer

The top answer is often somebody answering not the question you asked, but the question they’d like to think you asked.

Answer: Just plug a toaster in. You can do this with: npm install toaster

Never mind that you specifically said that you were using a campfire, the answer suggests that you use a toaster. Look back a few years and you’ll see countless examples of people asking for solutions using “vanilla” JavaScript and being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen sink jQuery plugin. Now we’re in a more enlightened time, those same people are being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink npm module. How far we’ve come.

The Belligerent

Far often than you might expect, a perfectly reasonable “how do I do this?” question is met with an aggressive response of “why would you want to do that?”

Answer: Why would you want to make toast on a campfire? When you're camping you should be eating beans, soup, and spit-roasted meats and fish. Every time I've tried to toast bread over a campfire I've ended up unsatisfied. Uneven toasting, burnt bits, even the whole slice catching fire. I can't imagine why anybody would ever want toast like that! If you want toast you should stay at home. It's still pretty pointless, though: toast isn't a very good meal. It's basically empty calories with no protein, no vitamins, no minerals. I mean, it'd be okay as a snack but that's clearly not what you're asking about. There's a reason that the Chef's Guide To Camping doesn't include a recipe for toast. Just don't do it!

These are particularly infuriating to read when you come to a closed thread and you know that you do want to be doing the “forbidden” thing. You’ve considered the other options, you’ve assessed the situation… and now some arrogant bugger’s telling you that you’re wrong!

This kind of response is among the most annoying, second only to…

The Kindred Spirit

You’re getting a strange and inexplicable error message. You search for it and get exactly one result. Reading the thread, after hours of tearing your hair out, you suddenly feel a sense of relief: you’ve found another soul in this crazy world that’s suffering in precisely the same way as you are. Every word you read reconfirms for you that you and they have the same issue. At last, a solution is in reach!

Answer: I'm having almost exactly the same issue. I've brought bagels to my campfire, though. If anybody knows how to toast either bread or bagels on a campfire please let me know how! Edit: NM, I've worked it out.Nope.

Not only have you not got a solution, but the saviour you thought you’d found? They do have a solution, but they were thinking only about themselves when they got it, so they didn’t share it.

I get it: when you’re deep in focus on a problem you forget that the forum you’re on will receive search traffic indefinitely. But “NM, I’ve worked it out” is the most infuriating sentence on the Internet. When you solve a tough problem that you’d talked about online, for the love of God put the solution online too.

The Expert

There’s always somebody who answers the question but in a way you’d need a PhD to comprehend.

Answer: What you're looking to do is increase the ratio of 6-Acetyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydropyridine on the surface of the bread, as described by Louis-Camille Maillard. Aim to maximise the surface area exposed to heat to accelerate the reaction of the carbonyls with the nucleophilic amino acids, without increasing the temperature enough to produce significant amounts of benzopyrene nor acrylamide.

StackOverflow is often used by beginners. Make your answer beginner-friendly if possible.

The Hero We Don’t Need

Like the Golden Hammer, the Hero We Don’t Need answers the question that they know the answer to rather than the question you actually asked. Unlike the Golden Hammer, the question they answer isn’t even remotely related to the question you asked.

Answer: Place the loaf down on a broad flat surface. Use a serrated blade in a moderately-rapid back-and-forth motion to cut through it. Now the bread will be sliced and ready to use. Don't cut any more than you need at once: sliced bread goes stale much faster.

Perhaps some future site visitor who chose their search terms badly might benefit from this out-of-the-box look at a completely different problem. But I wouldn’t count on it.

The Correct Answer

Eventually, if you’re lucky, somebody will provide the actual answer to the question. You’ll often have to scroll about this far down the page to find it.

Answer: There are two approaches. Both are equally valid - choose the one that's right for you. Method #1: place flat rocks near to your campfire and allow them to heat up. Slice your bread, and lay each slice on a hot rock, being careful not to touch the rock. Turn it over when it's done on one side. Method #2: use a long fork, skewer, or stick to impale a slice of bread lengthways (here's a diagram) and suspend it over the fire either by holding the utensil or by poking the other end into the ground. If holding it, be sure to keep your hand lower than the bread as heat will travel up metal implements. Happy camping!Still, at least there’s an answer. And it only took four hours between posting the question and it appearing. Sometimes that’s what it takes, and at least the answer will be there for the next person, assuming that they, too, scroll down far enough.

Unfortunately hundreds of novice developers will have no way to tell that this alone is the correct answer amongst the endless stream of bullshit in which it resides.

The Echo

And finally, there’s always some idiot who repeats one of the same (useless) answers from before. Just to keep the noise-to-signal ratio up, I guess.

Answer: Just install toaster from NPM. Comment 1: @KISS DRY already said this. This is the correct answer. Comment 2: Can toaster slice bread, too?

StackOverflow’s given me so many useful answers to so many questions, over the years. But it’s also been a great source of frustration for me at the hands of six of these seven archetypes. Did I miss any?

× × × × × × × ×

4 comments

  1. Ruth Ruth says:

    My personal “favourite” is when people get into an argument and don’t explain why. Example:

    Answerer: Just take a slice of the bread and stand in the fire.
    Disagreer: This is really dangerous and should not be attempted by a novice!
    Answerer: Sure, but I’m assuming that anyone who’s got a campfire knows how to use one safely.

  2. cleanthes cleanthes says:

    Brilliant!

    But I don’t understand. Can you talk me through doing this on Campfire 95? I’ve upgraded the BIOS and it’s now giving me an error message. Thx.

  3. Spencer Spencer says:

    Rofl, ‘snack overflow’! Your mockups are fabulous. The usernames cracked me up too.

    You missed The Linker, who answers with 5 words and a link. If you’re lucky, it contains the solution buried somewhere halfway down the page. If the question is more than 6 months old, the link likely doesn’t work anymore.

    1. Dan Q Dan Q says:

      Thanks for noticing the “snack overflow” image; I was worried it was too subtle.

      And yeah, I’ve seen The Linker out there too. The link’s always dead by the time I get there.

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