Joel Spolsky gave a great talk a few years ago about the design of StackOverflow. Three groups of people are involved in every question on the site: the asker, the people who answer and the people who read the answer later. Which group do you think the site is optimised for?<p>The answer is the third group. The average SO question gets read 30 times per day. Any value captured by either of the other groups is massively dominated by the value captured by people who google the question and land on SO. Complaining about the site being harsh to question askers fundamentally misunderstands the value SO provides to the community.<p>I&#x27;m all for websites which help beginners learn programming, but if you need 1-on-1 help to figure out why your loop is invalid, SO is the wrong site. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackhands.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackhands.com</a> might be a better destination.<p>(I can&#x27;t find the video on my phone - if somebody could link it below that would be great. )