Antelope Love Fan

For those of you who don’t know, StackOverflow is a programming question-and-answer site and the first site in the League of Justice of sites running the StackOverflow Engine.

The premise is pretty simple. People go to the site and ask and/or answer questions about programming.

There’s also a reward system where good questions and answers get voted up and bad questions/answers get voted down. If something you wrote gets voted up, you earn reputation points. The more reputation you earn, the more privileges you get on the site. There are also XBox-Live-style Badges awarded for various, generally positive, behaviors.

The whole experience can be quite addicting and the quality of information on the site is pretty high.

Lately though, I’ve started noticing a lot more of a specific, unfortunate, behavior type. My favorite term for this type of person is a help vampire. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the basics. The endless questions with no sense of appreciation for those answering. The overbroad, do-all-the-work-for-me, attitude.

I believe that, in general, people want to help other people. There’s no way that StackOverflow could succeed if that wasn’t true.

When I’m answering questions on StackOverflow, there are a couple of things I look for (and that I try to do myself, when asking questions).

#1 That the person asking the question is putting in some effort.

That means asking a specific question that can actually be answered. That means no questions like “How do I write a chatroom in C#?”.

#2 Some small indication that the person asking the question appreciates that they are getting help.

In the case of StackOverflow, that means voting up answers you like and accepting your favorite answer.

I’m going to go ahead and pick on a specific user who is a fantastic example of all the negative behaviors I’ve been talking about.

I have some screenshots of the profile statistics from about a week ago.

461 questions asked and only 7 upvotes. That means, out of all the answers to all 461 questions, this guy only found 7 answers worth voting up.

Take a look at any question to see his “Accepted Answer” rate. Of those 461 questions, he’s only found the answer he was looking for 39% of the time.

I’m happy to see that, currently, his account has been suspended.

There’s nothing wrong with asking lots of questions but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way. And it doesn’t get more wrong than this schmoe.

I’ve always believed in writing as catharsis.

But my biggest fear is that I’m wrong. That writing it down makes it stronger instead of getting it out of my head.

Some of you may be shocked, others will nod knowingly, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that boys love fire.

I was no exception.

My little circle of friends started simply enough with magnifying glasses. This was 4th grade. We’d spend hours aiming our focused beams of light at sticks, leaves, & piles of dried moss (it was generally accepted that frying bugs was lame, though there were some budding sociopaths in our midst who disagreed). But sunlight proved dissatisfying. We’d occasionally see small puffs of smoke from our targets but more common was a hole or a small black scorch make. Actual flames were pretty much unheard of.

Middle school is when things got exciting. We were old enough to start riding off our street to various gas stations and strange little shopping centers nearby which meant that we now had easy access to lighters, hairspray, and Binaca&tm; breath spray. Binaca was perfect for making a mini-blowtorch by lighting your lighter and spraying the open flame. One enterprising individual discovered that it was possible to set a puddle of water on fire by spraying the surface of the puddle until a film had formed, then lighting it on fire.

In 7th grade, I was assigned a group project where we had to come up with a creative way to make toast. Our solution was to spray hairspray on a piece of bread, light the bread on fire, and continually spray the bread with more hairspray until it was nice and crisp. I’m pretty sure we failed since our toast was inedible but it made for a spectacular video presentation to our class.

8th grade marked the beginning of early morning bus stop fires. Most of these were small piles of leaves and sticks in the gutter where we all stood to wait for the bus. The small size of the fires and the clear vantage point made it easy to stomp out the fires when the roof of the bus first came into view.

Of course there is always escalation.

The pinnacle came when one kid brought a soda can full of gasoline, siphoned from his dad’s lawn mower. The bus stop was at the top of a hill so, when the gas was poured and lit, it quickly turned into a river of flame running down the street. With flames leaping several feet into the air, this fire was not quite so easy to stomp out. Like all good friends, we stood watching and laughing hysterically as this poor bastard danced through the flames trying to put out the fire as the bus rolled ominously down the street. There was a 10ft. black stain on the road for years after.

The bus stop fires ended on a day when I had the good fortune not to be there. I don’t know many details beyond the fact that it was another gasoline fire and they didn’t manage to put it out before the bus came. The bus driver was less than amused and I believe meetings with the principal and various parents that followed.

My pyromania waned in high school. The only major experiment during that period was an attempt to boil Sterno. This had the neat result of little beads of Sterno forming that whizzed around the pot in circles like ball bearings. The not-so-neat result was the vapor cloud which we promptly managed to ignite into a giant fireball that burned off most of the hair on the backs of my hands.

In all, I think we were damn lucky that no one got hurt over the years. We were at least marginally smarter than some kids, in that we never set fires out in the woods and thus avoided starting any thousand-acre brush fires.

I have mixed feelings now that I have boys of my own and they are already showing the signs. They always want to watch me light the grill and are enthralled when I spray cooking-spray onto the fire. I can remember what their joy feels like but I fear for their flammable little bodies.

I suppose I can only hope that they make out as well as I did.