After posting a question on main (the current revision, the original revision) that as far as I can tell is a clear and on-topic question, there followed 5 downvotes, 3 close votes, and some comments such as

With 150k rep you'd think there'll be some code shown


You have 11,720 reputation from python answers. Surprised you couldn’t knock some code up, or that you didn’t know you should.

However, it's well supported on meta that code attempts are not required. In response to the commenters, I edited to include code with example failing "attempt", admittedly contrived. After the edit there was some undownvotes and one close vote retracted, but most downvotes and close votes remain (currently 6 downvoters - by the way, is there anything else I can do to improve this question?). Note: "Meta effect" has added upvotes and downvotes in approx equal ratio since then.

Actually this Q was not from a "coder in distress", I posted it because I'd encountered the task in my work and found it interesting that a full-fledged parser was required to solve this problem correctly. There was apparently not any easy quick-fix solution, and that was surprising for a task which seemed like it should be trivial. I had actually already solved the problem at the time of posting the question, but thought such a question would still make a useful contribution on the site anyway.

I might, at a later date, post my parser in an answer. Or I might just delete the question.

Are self-answered Q&A still OK? Are high rep users discouraged from asking questions? If so, why? If not, what's wrong with this question?

Edit: This was recently marked as dupe of When is it justifiable to downvote a question?, a 2014 question which is not even vaguely related. Everybody has their own idea about when it's justifiable to downvote a question, and I'm not asking about that at all. I was hoping to open a discussion about why the commenters are demanding code to be shown here, and why the reputation of the OP has any relevance here. Should we be judging a question on the content alone, or should we take into account things such as the OP username, reputation, avatar, and whether they are new users to the site or they're SO veterans? Is Stack Overflow in 2018 intended primarily as a place to help programmers with their problems, or is it intended to be a curated resource of useful questions and answers?

Coincidentally, Jeff Atwood made a blog post a couple of days after this meta question, which discusses many of the same things I wanted to discuss here. See "What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? " if you're interested to read it.

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    High rep users are expected to follow the same rules for questions as low rep users. The original question showed no effort to solve the problem, just a statement of requirements. One of the reasons for downvoting is "[t]his question does not show any research effort". – Heretic Monkey Oct 19 '18 at 20:49
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    The real question is why so many people don't expect most users to follow the rules and ask good questions, not why they occasionally do. – Servy Oct 19 '18 at 20:49
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    I see the mission of this site as having a high quality resource for questions and answers, not just helping OPs. Doesn't the fact that the question contains some tricky edge-case examples show some "research effort"? If not, what would constitute "research effort"? – wim Oct 19 '18 at 20:54
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    @wim There are lots of "tricky" problems that have readily accessible solutions that can easily be found by researching the problem. That you think a problem is inherently hard doesn't mean you don't need to research it, or that it must have been researched if someone was asking about it. – Servy Oct 19 '18 at 20:57
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    Users routinely fail at writing the question when they intend to also post the answer. Hard to fake it. You should have mentioned the "there was apparently not any easy quick-fix" detail, that would have gotten it a lot closer to a question and what you really want to know. Right now it is a task. – Hans Passant Oct 19 '18 at 20:58
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    You need to show research effort in the question not just in your head. That's the #1 reason people ask for MCVEs; to see that the user has thought about the problem more than 5 minutes before asking. I don't know enough about Python to say precisely what that effort should be, but what you've shown is certainly not "an absurd amount"... – Heretic Monkey Oct 19 '18 at 21:01
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    How are we supposed to know you put that much thought into it? For all we know you typed a bunch of random characters. That's what I mean putting your thoughts in the question, not just in your head. – Heretic Monkey Oct 19 '18 at 21:27
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    IMO the question is more interesting than >95% of questions on the python tag and we should not be discouraging such questions! Also for all non-trivial problems I don't think a failed attempt is actually necessary to make a good question (and it can even district from the question) – Chris_Rands Oct 19 '18 at 21:28
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    @wim That's what many of the people commenting on your question are telling you. That's what you're telling us they're telling you. – Servy Oct 19 '18 at 21:29
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    @Servy Well, the meta post is not really about the linked question. It's more intended as a discussion about what stack overflow is supposed to be these days - is it a place to help programmers with their questions, or is it a curated resource of useful questions and answers. There's generally a lot of overlap here, but sometimes these are actually conflicting goals. Users are receiving mixed signals / being pulled in conflicting directions. So, let's talk about it! What's really the goal of stackoverflow and what constitutes research effort? – wim Oct 19 '18 at 21:55
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    @wim Or you could just read the help center, which covers that. That's the kind of thing people mean when they refer to you not doing your research. – Servy Oct 19 '18 at 22:11
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    @Servy The site is changing. What the community deems acceptable seems to change faster than what the content in the help center is able to keep up with (e.g. look at older questions to see what I mean). Which part of Help Center > Asking do you think was lacking in my question? – wim Oct 19 '18 at 22:30
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    A lot of people really don't like it when you ask how to do something, for some reason. I've seen a lot of comments literally telling people "we don't do that, we fix broken code." I really hope SO is not reduced to that, because personally, the most useful Q&A I've found here are ones where someone asked how to do a thing like the thing I was trying to figure out how to do and someone else just explained how to do it. If I'm looking for an answer, I don't care that much about what someone else did that didn't work, I'm going to scroll down to the thing that did work. – Don't Panic Oct 19 '18 at 23:28
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    On one hand, if we force OP to show some effort, a lot of how-to questions in the past would not exist. On the other hand, the site would be flooded with "help-me-to-do-<exercise>" question. They're definitely not off-topic, but after having seen 10⁵ "help-me-to-do-<exercise>" questions people would hate them. – user202729 Oct 20 '18 at 2:43
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High reputation users should not be a target for other users. That said, when you're asking a question, you're exposed to votes. And downvotes are cheap.

High-rep users won't get a pass on a question that doesn't strictly meet SO standards, when low-rep users may do (and get comments on how to improve their post)

Even if the question is very well formatted & documented, with links, data snippets as code, super-clear requirements, I think that what triggered downvotes was:

  • coding-challenge site-like question (super accurate question with a lot of teacher-like requirements, ironically)
  • no code provided at all (big no-no for a lot of readers)

Once you provided some code (even if it was impossible that it would solve most cases), you got reversed votes/upvotes. I supposed that you were slightly ashamed of your attempt and didn't show it, even if you obviously had tried something. Question has now a -3/+3 score, could be worse.

That said, it's somehow random. Some questions had absolutely no code attempts and got a lot of upvotes because they were adressing simpler problems (an old meta post of mine: What's better: a question with no attempt or with an unfixable/irrelevant attempt?), there's a controversy on that, specially on the python tag (Why would a question that's normally too broad in *any* other language be okay if it's in Python?)

My advice: I've got high rep, not as much as you, but still..., and most of my questions are well-received because I always provide some code, even buggy or sub-optimal. That sets a limit below which people won't go when answering, and avoids infuriating the ones that need to see some code, even beyond repair .

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    I think this is a particularly sad state of affairs and why some users resort to including bogus MCVEs (to their detriment anyway). Also see Shog9's answer to Is it always a good idea to demand the OP “post some code”? – BoltClock Oct 20 '18 at 3:17
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    So no code automatically triggers a downvote? How asinine. Not all questions require it, and if the question is clear enough without it, then it shouldn't merit that at all. Admittedly this particular question fits the pattern of Python questions already, so it is surprising to see it penalized so harshly. – Makoto Oct 20 '18 at 3:21
  • commenters above: yeah, I know (facepalm). Made me write the quoted question (meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/338755/…) some time ago. But better safe than sorry. And since OP probably attempted something, why not show it? – Jean-François Fabre Oct 20 '18 at 7:25
  • @BoltClock python controversy meta post: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/353940/… – Jean-François Fabre Oct 20 '18 at 9:10
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    SO doesn't have a problem with high rep users asking bad questions, in my experience it's extremely rare, and the high rep users have nothing to gain from it. The problem is some high rep users answering bad question questions instead of voting to close as duplicates or typographic error – Chris_Rands Oct 20 '18 at 11:22

I think the issues the users had is that you didn't, to their standards, ask a question like a 150k-rep would know how to. I won't personally address the quality of your question, but I think the users there expected that you met the expectations, and in their eyes, you didn't. Therefore, they think you should very well know how to ask a complete question. You will get publicly criticized and shamed if you don't.

It's just like ruling a nation; you are expected to have the experience and knowledge to rule and please the citizens with your ruling. It doesn't matter when a baby in that kingdom does something stupid and angers his parents, but you, as the ruler, doing just one little thing that doesn't please the citizens will cause wide criticism.

Sorry about the complicated analogy in there, but I hope you understood my point.

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