The "Find Out Yourself" Atmosphere

News & General Discussion
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Hey guys.

First post on here. Long-time C# scripter and year-long indie Unity dev (I mainly script for other person’s projects, freelance).

This may seem like a poor way to start off my presence in the forums - but this discussion is precisely the reason I’m here within the forums at this moment.

I’ve had a few issues with the general atmosphere I see here that I don’t see in any other collaborative/Q&A format that StackOverflow, ITFreaks, and a few other websites have had:
And that is, simply, a lack of collaborative correction or any informative input from older users to newer users.

More often than not I’ve popped in a problem I’ve had with Unity-specific scripting to try to save time, and more often than not I’ve found the majority of the answers are “watch the tutorials” or the more Socratic method of pointing out the error and then suggesting that they look further into the manual or manuscripts.
I’m all for telling new people to review tutorials and other info;
When someone has clearly posted a long piece of code that they are having an issue with, I believe more than half the thread needs to be referencing some tutorial or some inquisitive question encouraging them to find the issue themselves - rather than a quick reminder or other quick-fixes that they were asking about, along with a one-to-two line explanation of where they went wrong.

UNITY is an engine with complexities that may even phase the tutorial guys, or with terminology that may make someone jumping in from a decent knowledge of working with C# may not understand the difference (despite tutorials and the infinite manual pages).

What was I hoping to achieve with this? I don’t know - maybe to subject the userbase here to what persons outside encounter when they, too, are looking for an answer. With or without any previous posting history, I shouldn’t feel more comfortable or insightful asking a question on StackOverflow regarding UNITY than the actual forums full of devs, coders, and armchair enthusiasts alike with decades of engine experience between them.

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How should I put it. You’re receiving responses from unpaid people who owe you nothing.

They are not required to answer your questions or help you in any way. The folks on the forum have their own projects and dealt with their own troubles in the past. You’re not in position to demand anything. Aside from politeness and civil behavior, that is.

They should either reduce it to minimum self-contained example that illustrates the problem they’re having ( http://sscce.org/ )
Or they should reach out for the wallet and hire someone on hourly basis to look into it.

The main issue is that looking through a lengthy code fragment is not INTERESTING.
Why should someone bother doing that when you can figure out solution on your own by reading documentation and in the long this will help you more?

Basically, a lengthy code fragment may require 30 to 60 minutes to make sense out of it and pinpoint an issue. That’s 30 to 60 minutes that could’ve been spent doing somethin else, and responder will receive nothing for assisting you. Not even a feeling of satisfaction.

Why should they bother?

A normal practice in computer programming is to solve problems yourself. By reading the documentation. Because when you rely on some sort of online community for help, the community will let you down when you hit a non-trivial problem.

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Basically, long story short.

The best thing you can do while dealing with an issue is to solve it yourself, because in doing so you’ll learn more and it will help you in the long term.

If your issue needs solution URGENLY then you need to hire someone to look into it, and pay them.

If it is not so urgent and you rely on help from unpaid volunteers it is yoru job to make it short so other people won’t need to spend inordinate amount of time to look into it (reduce it to the bare minimum as I said), and if your problem is interesting chances of getting help will be higher.

In general like I said, in case of problems in programming you’re usually on your own. Communities tend to stop being helpful once you’re no longer dealing with beginner questions.

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Just a reminder: I do work in the field and know that most programming questions asked are simple errors or terminology misuse… but that is exactly the point.

It’s this very climate that I’m talking about.

No, a person asking a question does not deserve to be answered; When people are answering their questions they are taking their time they dedicated to answering with “rewatch the tutorials” or - even then - attempting to GUIDE them to read the manual deeper. Which, in itself, is a separate skill all it’s own.
Or, worst: “Pay a Pro.”
Someone with the money to pay a pro for non-pro work wouldn’t be using free resources.

I have learned Unity entirely from chewing through the manual for hours on end in an attempt to add it to my repertoire. Some details contained within the manual itself are worded so precisely, or undifferentiated between other, similar functions, that even a literature aficionado may still find confusing.

But we revert back to the original problem - in a field where I specifically know almost everyone and their mother’s mother uses StackOverflow, it’s a bit hypocritical to emphasize “find out for yourself,” “RTFM,” and “pay a pro to look it over” with such a specialized engine.

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@MahaloAloha hi and welcome.

You see, stack overflow and alike, work a bit differently than forums.
Here we can not downvote questions for low qualit.
On stack overflow, it is not uncommon, to see closures to low quality questions, with messages alike

Here most beginner questions are not tend to be closed. And there are tons of duplicated asked, where many answers are in reach of simple search.

As already mentioned, most of users here are voluntarily. They value own time. Now if you consider sheer volume of posts every day and expecting all of them to be answered by devs, or answered them ASAP, as some may deamnd, this is wrong assumptions. However, better than leaving post empty, is even however it sounds, suggesting to go tutorials, docs, or other links. Or look for existing answers. Copy pasting code from somewhere, which person doesn’t understand and expecting someone to fix it for them, is also wrong.

People need to learn about problem solving. Give them fishing rod, rather a fish.
Even teaching about using search tools, or debugging methods, may be more valuable, than fixing one line for someone.

But in a contrast, please look into any section of stackoverflow as an example and check every post of first 100 pages.
That is only from few hours back. Most of them are not even responded yet. And many are downvoted.
Giving that, it is not that different from another forum.

Let me ask honestly. How long you are lurking here? From what you describe, it sounds for quite long time.
It would be worth to question, why don’t you come and participate in answering users posts, to improve general user experience? Answering this question, may also answer your initial concerns on the topic.

But since you are with us now, I hope you are to stay and to contribute to overall users forum experience.

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I’ve been here for a while and I decided to finally say something about the general atmosphere, and why it seemed that StackOverflow seemed to be the primary Q&A spot for this specific engine when there’s an entire forum full of people with this specific engine on-hand, on the main website of this specific engine.

I do hope to. But the idea is that the atmosphere dictates the expected interactions (see: 4chan). I answer questions on StackOverflow regarding C# and java (because having a dope-ass StackOverflow account is a good resume perk) …
AS SOON AS an admin gets back to me about fixing my damn user handle. It’s failing to update.

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Be aware that places like StackOverflow have very strict requirements for making questions. The kinds of questions you exemplified, and the ones which often get the “go watch some tutorials” replies here, are promptly deleted over there as they are considered low effort/quality questions.

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You should give examples of threads you think deserve specific answers rather than general suggestions.

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StackOverflow excels at answering very targeted and specific questions, which is what you seem to be asking the forums to do. The engine itself is a bit messier than that, often a problem is interrelated to code, hooking things up in the Editor or maybe even game mechanics or UI. Add in the various rendering pipelines and target devices, that makes discussions even more fragmented.

As such, I think the forum is a good place to deal with all that messiness and more or less get an answer to a not so simple question. Add in a bit of gossip and game design advice and this is very much NOT like StackOverflow.

I wouldn’t want or expect the forums here to be much like StackOverflow or Discord for that matter.

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If you haven’t mentioned that you watched tutorials, then the default assumption is that you haven’t watched them hence the suggestion.

Offering paid services, as far as I know, is forbidden on the forums, but, if you haven’t said anything about considering hiring someone to solve your problem, then default assumption is that such idea has not occurred to you.

It is the business as usual. If you haven’t mentioned something, then people have to assume the worst.

I would advise to stop using StackOverflow too. It is a bad habit.

SO used to be good around 2008. Then the community became hostile, and because of that it became useless.

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I mean, to get to the point of using UNITY enough to ask questions on a forum, one would assume that they clicked through adverts on the main site. Though, I am BEGINNING to see the trend between those who don’t know a single thing about Unity asking about how to use Unity, there’s still been a few instances where I’ve found that people were clearly asking questions with coding and were scrubbed to “check out the Tutorial”

I mean, it’s still one of the most useful resources for quickly referencing errors and getting feedback with other solutions in ways you probably couldn’t initially perceive. But that’s another thread.

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Basically…“if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day…but if you teach him to fish, He eats every day.”

Programming and game development are very much self-taught disciplines. I generally see perfectly acceptable answers to well written questions. Sure, some of those involve tutorials, and some involve looking in the manual. But a lot of the time someone comes that doesn’t know what they are looking for(like not knowing the technical name for something), so these are perfect answers for that. They let someone know what the search term should be, and then they can proceed to figure out the rest on their own with that missing link.

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Off Topic:
Since this is my first post, who do I talk to in order to change my Forum Name to match my Community/Account name?

So I can shoot them a PM.

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Nope.

People that fail to locate manual and script reference are incredibly common. Like I said, assume the worst. That they never foudn the manual, never found the script reference, successfully located the worst tutorial in existence, and copypasted the code from there without understanding, but only copied half of it, so now it doesn’t compile and they don’t understand why because it is the first time they opened programming environment in their life.

Or something like that.

On any learning resource/forum there’s always a legion of people that ask questions without doing any research in advance. If you’ve used the internet for a while, you should be familiar with that.

It is only useful when you hit it with a google search. Asking questions there is a bad idea, as you’ll waste inordinate time fighting rule lawyers and people who didn’t pay attention to your question, but are absolutely sure that they know what you meant and will keep trying to merge your question with completely unrelated ones.

The only exception is if you’re programming in something obscure on the level of Prolog or APL. In this case your target audience will consist of a single digit number of language enthusiasts who will be delighted to find that someone remembered that their language exists and might enthusiastically share knowledge on a good day.

Only in this case it retains limited use.

(Opinion) Overreliance on community resources is going to backfire at some point, as there will be a legion of incompetent programmers who are unable to do any work on their own the old way - with the manual and code - and will sink on non-trivial questions (because there’s a ton of stuff folks on SO can’t answer). That’s why I advise against using stack overflow.

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It is the first hit on google.
https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/205053589-How-do-I-change-my-username-

Sign to id.unity.com, and you’ll be able to edit the username.
https://id.unity.com/en/account/edit

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EDIT: It took 4 sign-outs but it worked.

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Now that’s the-opposite-of-ironic.

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This was exactly my thought…directly proves our point of trying to teach people to be self sufficient instead of just handing them answers.

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I think that both of you assumed that the issue wasn’t first Googled then tried.

Now this is the true irony: Both of you are leaning hard on an assumption of ignorance rather than the acceptance of an issue and proactive solutions.

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6707458--770611--upload_2021-1-10_1-30-9.png

You appear to be trying to “get back” at people who responded to your thread.
That’s not the way to do it and also discourages people from helping you in the future.

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