Hey everyone, I'm working on an article what makes a good question on Hashnode, and I need your help! Can you please share what you think makes a good Hashnode question?
By a good question I mean a question that gets a lot of meaningful and helpful responses.
If I quote you in the article, I'll make sure to give you credit :)
StackOverflow has a lot of restrictions when a developer asks a question. Questions which calls for opinion are closed, voted down, and sort of shamed. Hashnode allows questions that calls for opinions like - "What is better? - Next or Gatsby". Also, answers in Hashnode can be comments rather than genuine answers. So, any question that calls for a broad discussion is welcome here.
I won't rehash the style and form issues already so well covered but want to emphasize a few of points of personal interest.
Curing Genuine Ignorance - I enjoy alleviating genuine ignorance, a.k.a., teaching serious students. Even if it's merely polishing another's semi-ignorance into fuller understanding, I enjoy formulating answers.
Improving Personal Understanding - There's an old saw about the best way to learn: "see one, do one, teach one." Teaching usually improves one's own grasp of a topic. The need to cast an explanation into terms another finds comprehensible can require the attainment of deeper personal understanding. This is especially true when the first answer fails to educate the questioner...having to develop an alternative answer almost always demands rethinking that gains new perspective for the answerer.
Expanding Public Awareness - Some questions serve less to gain the asker a much enhanced grasp of the topic as to place the topic firmly into the public view. Even if the asker is not ignorant, raising public awareness and inviting alternative explanations is valuable. Robust discussions that arise in the context of competing and/or complementing answers can generate new insights for all, regardless of pre-existing expertise.
So, for me, good questions provide opportunities to cure genuine ignorance, improve (my own or others') personal understanding, or expand public awareness of a topic.
There are lot of ingredients that makes a good question. Some of them are
Framing the question is most important. Ask a clear question such a way that, just by reading it once the reader understands what you are talking about.
Explaining your issue with examples or with references.
Responses can be either meaningful or not depending on how well he or she frames the answer.
I'd say there are several important topics to cover when writing a guide on how to ask good questions.
The author of a question should always first search the web for an answer. I have seen too many situations on Hashnode where I could just quote the first google result as an answer, or link to a question which was asked just a few hours earlier. For me, as a person who mostly writes answers, these kind of questions are rather annoying and cause an internal conflict between wanting to help and just posting a lmgtfy link.
A good question should always start with a summary. In one short sentence. That should be the subject / heading. The question body should contain relevant information, but still be brief. I don't want to read an epic just to understand a problem. If there is a problem in code, the OP should create a minimum reproducible example. Bonus for embedding it in an online sandbox which we can run. If it's a discussion about techy stuff, links to relevant sites can make our life easier. If the OP needs help with a project, they should explain their situation, because most of the time, the answer depends™ on that.
In addition to that, imho the tone of the question and any further communication is very important. By helping people and writing answers, we donate our precious life-time to the OP. I am not paid to help anyone, so the least I want is a friendly tone. Of course, this should always be a mutual gesture.
In that sense, I feel like this very question is a positive example. It has a one-sentence summary as subject and a brief, friendly description of the situation and problem as the body. 👍
I sometimes see people write a question, but in the body ask for something else or even a few additional, unrelated things. For me, a good question is just one topic, sticking to the subject line, which is the summary. If the OP wants details on different parts, that's ok.
When asking a question, it's often not needed that there are >10 answers. Questions which require in-depth knowledge are welcome, and they might only receive one or two answers. However, imho, a good question which best fits the context of Hashnode, is a question which is simple, broad and asks for an opinion. Everyone has an opinion, and the simpler the question, the more replies it will get. Simple, personal questions usually yield many high-quality answers.
A good factor to get answers is also to gamify a question. Make it rewarding to answer.
After the question is released, the OP should be responsive. By replying to an answer, a discussion may spawn which piques the interest of more people and may lead to some good information exchange instead of just keeping all question-repliers to themselves. Also, writing just a sentence as a reply will be appreciated by the answer author and it's likely that they will answer more of the OP's questions.
I would say anything that comes to mind, its such a friendly place here. It does help if the questions already been asked, always good to do a quick search in the archives but almost anything.
I asked this question but i've come from a joint IT/Logistics background and I was unsure what to wear to wear for an interview as a developer and you know what it was an interesting one to read on the comments that were wrote back, some casual, others bootsuited, others comping from corp.
Well I think that's a tough one we have different actors
We have two groups the Q and the A. In both of them we have different levels and different expectations. Just take something like nomenclature / semantics - what does mean what to whom? Already we have different levels of expectations.
The explain it to me like I am 5 for example ... I actually rarely found something even remotely close to the level of 5 year old by using nomenclature and vocabulary that most kids don't have at that age.
Also the question of quantitative and quality is given since 'lot' and 'meaningful' are orthogonal correlations.
So is it about engagement or value? I assume you mean from a growth perspective. Because to me one answer that helps me is better than 10 answers that could help me.
So we have the 'babel problem' and we have the shannon-weaver-model where we should reduce the noise in the communication to the thing that matters.
But how are you supposed to ask a question where you are not sure what the nature of question is?
Sorry Gg I am rambling as always. The answer kinda boils down to
Really hard questions usually don't get a lot of answers because few understand them. Also there is the group mentality problem, trigger words, the 'problem solver' issue where people don't listen to the end but already solve their expectation of your problem before you can fully formulate it.
So besides all this problems ... I would go for:
these are some of my thought. I would need more time to process and read up on studies also I am not really qualified in this field of expertise ^^.
like this
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned but which is very important is asking a question which is narrow enough in scope. I see far too many broad questions on here and they simply either do not get many answers (or any at all) or the answers are off-base because the question itself is off-base. For example:
The problem with these questions is that none of them can actually be answered. Huh? Yes, that's right, it's not possible to actually answer those questions. Why? Because they are too broad. For example, Node.js would be "better for web development" when the backend needed to be tied to a frontend like React or Angular. Node.js would also likely be a better option to work with mongodb and json-based data. However, what if by "web dev," this asker is looking to work on basic CMS systems or write Wordpress plugins. Would Node.js be "best" for this? How does the asker define "best?" What does best mean? Does best mean fewest lines of code to production, does it mean more secure applications, does it mean easier to learn? Etc... We have no idea.
Likewise, "What language should I learn in 2019" depends entirely on which types of software the asker is trying to write. This question is literally unanswerable. If I answer the question with "You should totally learn Rust for 2019" and this asker is looking to write Chrome browser extensions or write some front-end browser code, my answer would be flat-out wrong. But there's no way for my answer to even be wrong without a properly-scoped question. Likewise, there's also no way for my answer to be right. This should not be understated. The question on a website like this must be viewed at face value. If an asker asks "Which language is better, C or Python?" But he/she actually in his/her head is thinking "Which language is most-used in the industry?" The question is still the former, not the latter. For a person to even answer the latter question, they may be satisfying the asker but they actually are not answering the question asked. Answerers can and should never be expected to read the minds of askers.
Again, define better. More welcoming? More active users? Most technically correct answers? Etc... We have no idea the way this question was asked. I see this on here quite often and I just cringe because it's dirtying up the database with pretty much useless information. More accurately completely inconsistent and non-indexible information.