Although I've been programming for over 5 years now (c#, php), I'm still learning about js. More importantly, I want to learn how to ask a question properly on Stackoverflow.

Let's take two very similar questions (in my opinion) and analyse them: mine and hot question

  • We both are looking for explanation (why?) something works.
  • We both have provided the code in question.
  • The questions are very specific and very unlikely to have duplicates.
  • However, the underlying Javascript concepts definitely have been answered on SO before, but we are not familiar with these js terminologies hence we cannot find the answers.
  • If we would study javascript, we would find the answers (long route).
  • Instead, we asked help on SO (short route).

Yet, somehow there's a huge difference in votes.

My immediate thoughts are:

  1. Fix the title. Ask for explanation of concept instead of "why?".
  2. I should have written my own code instead of asking about particular library.

Can you advise please what did I miss in my question? Your feedback would help me to understand how to write better questions in the future.

As soon as a question goes hot it can't really be compared to anything. I wonder how many votes/views it had when it hit the hot list. –  OGHaza May 28 at 11:54
Sometime simply post a questione in the "right" timeslot change the reaction of SO a lot, but don't ask me what is the "right" timeslot 'cause I don't know it myself –  Serpiton May 28 at 11:59
I've noticed this tendency as well. Being in the right place at the right time. In this case, I was hoping it's more with the quality of the question though. –  Mark A May 28 at 12:12
@Mark, well the hot question is now closed as a duplicate so they may have won the battle but you won the war ;) –  OGHaza May 28 at 12:27

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I think there are two salient differences:

  1. dotslash's question was a bit clearer. Yours was kind of muddled with datumAnalyzers and so on and went on some tangent that I still don't understand about how it "shouldn't work unless it's nested," and then includes another code sample that does something different. These are all opportunities for readers to get lost.

    I don't think it's bad that your code included the whole original invocation, because you weren't sure which part was relevant, but it does make it a little harder to pick out the relevant bits at a glance.

    On the other hand, dotslash's question consisted of an introduction, a very minimal code sample, the expected result and the actual result and asked why it worked that way — a structure that is easy to follow and makes it very easy to formulate an answer to the question. If you aren't sure how to structure a question, that is a great standby: "Here's a minimal example of what I'm doing, here's what I think it will do, here's what it's actually doing. Please fill in the blank in my knowledge."

  2. dotslash's question had a less obvious answer and focused on more of a corner case (how does function hoisting interact with variable declarations?), so more people were probably interested in the answer.


You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .