Mastodawn

I've settled into a pattern of

1. asking a question on maths.stackexchange

2. getting some useful replies maybe

3. getting lots of "don't post this question" replies - almost all of which are baseless

4. deleting the question once I have enough useful replies

The root cause of this particular phenomenon is the over enthusiastic "senior members" who police a site that wants to be useful as an AI dataset*, and not a site that is useful for users - the two are not the same.

The only way to post a question that doesn't receive flames is to be an expert on the topic already and also the history of similar question going back 10 years.

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* or some other objective that is not about normal users who on the site precisely because they are not experts who know the answer and context already

#maths #stackexchange

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💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱Jun 8

@rzeta0
"The only way to post a question that doesn't receive flames is to be an expert on the topic already" - that doesn't necessarily help either. Nobody there liked me pointing out that the order of operations rules are easily found in Maths textbooks, and kept downvoting me for daring to point out how wrong they all were, and when I posted proofs, in response to "is there a proof for order of operations?" the people who had all been saying "no there isn't" voted to delete my answer 🙄

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Fish Face Jun 8

@rzeta0 this level of strictness has been a feature of stackexchange sites since well before the current LLM craze. Sometimes it serves the sites well and keeps questions clear, well posed and unique. Other times it is people with a little power exercising it jealously over their little domain!

It remains a valuable resource and you can generally be sure that highly voted answers are correct.

I don't think you necessarily need to be an expert already, but you need to be as clear as possible, show partial work if you have a homework-like problem, and share what else you understand already