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The graph. We should've seen it coming. There's been a disconnect between the curators and the masses. Can adding the word "frequently" resolve this misunderstanding?

A computer science student finishes class and starts their homework. They are lost and have many questions. They Google and arrive at Stack Overflow. Most of their confusion is resolved and they're overjoyed. "Ask Question" stands out atop the page and they try clicking it for fun. Banner blindness sets in. After all, they have more questions, and "Ask Question"'s textareas seem like a blessing. After hitting Post, all hell breaks loose. "RTFM!", "Help-vampire!", "Add details about ### ### ###", "You can't ### ###" come the downvotes and comments. "###" is how jargon appears to them. All goes quiet when a "Closed as duplicate" door slams in their face. They retry and get question-banned. Frustrated, they rant on Reddit. Redditors comfort them with memes blaming Stack Overflow, and they never return.

"Why are people on Stack Overflow so rude and hostile?" Well, I'll share my experience. I briefly had a few downvoted throwaway accounts in middle school. The key is SO's UI is too deceptively simple, but social interactions set traps everywhere. Newbies think a "question" is something they can pester their TAs with on Brightspace/Piazza en masse, and mistake "answer" for a forum/Discord reply. "Q&A" means something different to professionals than laypeople, but everyone's on the same page with "FAQ".

It took months lurking to fear touching high school/undergraduate-level questions. I returned and stuck to answering highly-upvoted unanswered questions and after ~200 rep, expanded to long-tail/advanced. These two curator-loved areas will never die and like a wiki, tolerate days/months inactive, not hours. Speaking of wikis, main Stack Overflow's reality feels more like Wikipedia than like Quora, whose role is filled by the open-ended question feature.

The solution could be very simple. Replace "Question" with "FAQ" to not mislead newbies. Change "Ask question" to "Create new FAQ". The word "frequently" lets people know this site is about canonical questions generalizable to other people. The italicized word "new" invites them to search for duplicates.

Alternatives to "FAQ" are "topic", "knowledge base", or "category". Yes, the help center's FAQ'd need renaming. "Answer" could also become "solution".

Do you think replacing "question" with "FAQ" will make a difference?

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    I am personally not going to sweat the experience of users, who ask "throw away" questions, because if they are "throw away" questions they don't benefit the community. The thing is we are NOT a Frequently Ask Questions community, we are that single gem question community, but at a massive scale. Commented Jan 28 at 1:49
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    I get where you're coming from, but I don't think a simple relabel will solve our problems. Besides, only a small percentage of our question & answer database are truly at the canonical FAQ level. Commented Jan 28 at 2:21
  • We have many useful questions, and you can find a lot of good code here that you can simply copy & paste. But you often need to look at multiple answers, test them, and figure out how to apply the knowledge to your specific situation. And that's a good thing. You learn to be a good coder by thinking, not by being spoonfed code snippets, whether they're written by a veteran programmer, or some GenAI bot. Commented Jan 28 at 2:22
  • @SecurityHound Sorry, I meant throwaway accounts not questions. I used them before I turned 18 and switched to my real name Commented Jan 28 at 3:46
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    @DanielT - I also not sweating "not real users" if they are using "throwaway" accounts. Your not really suppose to have multiple accounts. You really are not suppose to have any account as a minor. Commented Jan 28 at 6:58
  • Are you aware of the documentation project? Commented Jan 28 at 7:58
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    "You really are not suppose[d] to have any account as a minor." - not sure where this comes from. This meta says minimum age is 13, 16 in the EU. Commented Jan 28 at 9:42
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    That duality of the site has been there for ages. On the front the site really wants to promote the idea of asking questions whereas everything in the back, namely the rules and regulations, the code of conduct, the thick layer of curation features, moderation - all of it is pretty hell-bent on you seeking answers and not asking questions. Conflicting, to say the least. It's all pretty moot now though, all that are problems for Stack Overflow of the past decade. Stack Overflow in 2026 has bigger problems. Commented Jan 28 at 12:56
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    Gimby nicely points out the duality of the site. My whole point was that it takes way too much time reading and quite a few interactions for new users to learn about this doublespeak Commented Jan 28 at 19:39
  • @DanielT Yes but if you also then not ignore the fact that I say it has been there for ages, you can draw a conclusion that the site owners don't really seem to care. You're pretty much preaching to the choir here. Commented 2 days ago

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I think this would be more confusing than helpful. This is a Q&A site, and it isn't an FAQ site. Most notably:

  • An FAQ is created and published by one person/organization. There's no room for community input.
  • An FAQ has one answer. Stack Overflow allows and encourages a multitude.
  • An FAQ has its question and answer added at the same time. This IMO would be the biggest pain point in my opinion; "Create new FAQ" makes it sound like users need to already know the answer to their question before posting.

Same goes for "topic", "knowledgebase"; they sound like users need to have finished products, which isn't what we're looking for.

That being said, I do agree that there's misalignment between what people think we do here and what we actually do. Better onboarding would make a huge difference.

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    I would add to your list that Frequently Asked in FAQ would also be a point of confusion: niche questions (if properly asked) are welcome, even if only few people ever ask/search for that same question. Commented Jan 28 at 8:21
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    There's also a misalignment between what we think we should do here and what the company wants to do here. It's a bit of a mess right now. Commented Jan 28 at 8:31
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    "Stack Overflow allows and encourages a multitude." And our experience is that this 1) encourages that a problem gets looked at from every angle (good) but also that 2) "canonical" Q&A ends up as a fragmented mess where the reader has to puzzle together the correct answer from multiple answer, while avoiding the plain bad but highly up-voted answers (very bad). What this means is that SO in its current format is pretty bad at being a knowledge base. Commented Jan 28 at 9:11
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    A much better format would be if a bunch of experts gave their individual solutions and then boiled those down into the perfect answer together. Like Wikipedia but without all the irrelevant distractions. Or like all those tutorial sites but without terrible quality. Like Documentation but without John Doe insisting to contributing when he picked up programming yesterday. Commented Jan 28 at 9:13

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