Amy Hoy

You held your friends' unwillingness to return a favor against him and destroyed a friendship?

I'm sorry, but that's just immature, and it's possible that by disconnecting from you your 'friend' made a wise move. It's just three hours of time; your friend is a human being. I interpret social debt as a proxy to good manners, and nothing more. I freely <strike>loan</strike>gift money, time, and stuff to my friends and relatives, and I make a point to forget about it ASAP. It's just stuff! It makes me sad when people let transient stuff like 3 hours, a broken borrowed tool, or a $20 IOU get in the way of your relationships. If your friend hesitates to call you because they expect that you'll ask about "when are you going to teach me that/return this/refund that" then there's something wrong. Life is about people, not time you've spent in the past, the stuff you own, or the money in your wallet. Do something kind today.

A system to correlate helpfulness should be implemented to prevent help vampires[1] from draining the site's users, but it shouldn't be featured too prominently. Perhaps anonymous exit surveys could be used to determine reputation, visible on a users' profile? Something like "User participated in X projects and received an average rating of Y/5 for contributions", and users with extremely low ratings could get "You've been warned" annotations.

The system probably doesn't even need to specify whether the user volunteered help or requested help for the…

> When I don’t want to do something I act like I’m stupid and I ask for help.

> Her recommendation was to actively look stupid to avoid learning about things you are not interested in.

The flip side of this strategy is that you become a "help vampire": Someone who preys on the kindness of others to do their work for them.

The "help vampire" phrase was coined in 2006 with this blog post: https://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

The blog describes an actively malicious person, but several of the points apply to the exact strategy described in this blog:

> Is he obviously just waiting for some poor, well-intentioned person to do all his thinking for him?

> Can you tell he really isn’t interested in having his question answered, so much as getting someone else to do his work?

This isn't so much "stupid by choice" as it is taking advantage of other people to offload tasks you don't want to do. The blog highlights positives such as "You have time to dedicate to other interesting things" which is another way of saying that someone else has lost some of their time in exchange.

The given example of going to a bank teller instead of the ATM is harmless enough because the bank employees are getting paid either way, but the example also doesn't really make sense: Standing in line and conversing with a bank teller is much more demanding and time-consuming than simply learning to use the ATM.

There's a lot about this blog post that either doesn't make sense or advocates for…

> god help you if you ask a question without showing that you've "done the work" up front

I think that's different. It's not about puritan work ethic or whatnot, it's about showing the minimum respect for the people you're asking to make an effort for you. Questions which don't show any effort [1] are shunned in tech circles, and this isn't something particular to StackOverflow. And there's a good reason for it: many are asked by "help vampires" [2], people who will burn honest answerers with pointless, ill-researched questions with no follow-up, no useful feedback or even a thank you. Extreme help vampires will even ask the same question repeatedly, apparently too lazy to even see it has been answered already. Some of them just want people to do their homework for them, free. Once or twice may not seem much, but if you don't cut them short, they'll overrun your community.

The mere act of thinking how to phrase a question well, showing you've made all the research you could before finding yourself at a dead end, is often enough to actually find the answer for yourself!

So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, but I completely understand why they'd be upset at people lazy enough to not even bother to formulate their questions clearly.

[1] "How to ask questions the smart way": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[2] "What is a help vampire": http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

Thomas Fuchs is a troll. He has posted before on the alleged complexities of React. Yet, he has never posted a coherent argument against the view framework. Even this attempt was thwarted by Blake Newman:

https://twitter.com/blakenewman/status/811142762368221184

However, Thomas had nothing to say in response. He only patted himself, and others, on the back both before and after that tweet as he continues to ignore any retort to his claims.

Oh. And if you're wondering why he's mad, consider that he's the author of Zepto.js. That jQuery compatible drop-in library that essentially no one uses as jQuery is hardly relevant anymore. But that's fine, he's busy with his own business: Slash7 LLC.

http://slash7.com/company/

Where the overwhelming majority of his client work links are dead and his biggest triumph seems to be an early 2000's era JavaScript animation library on par with Scriptaculous. In fact, the website is even a rip off:

http://scripty2.com/ vs. http://script.aculo.us/

Even his own site uses the same type of vanity domain:

http://mir.aculo.us/

Sad ...

Help vampires are people who suck the life out of those who answer questions. They ask questions without bothering to think about it themselves, often without enough information to actually answer the question well. These types of questions are frustrating to answer, and lead to people assuming the worst of new users who ask bad questions unintentionally.

It's a sliding scale. Most people just don't know how to ask a good question initially, but some just don't care. In general, I'd say the 'help vampire' problem is where the asker is looking for the answerer's time, not their help. They want someone to do free work for them, without putting in effort themselves.

I believe this is the origin: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

While i'm new to OS contributing, I've found dealing with communities (especially in IRC) in a way that discourages vampires (http://www.slash7.com/pages/vampires) and promotes friendly urges to "learn more" are generally appreciated if handled diplomatically.

I'm attempting to get more involved in the CakePHP community myself and am taking the tact of contributing to smaller supporting projects (their documentation) and lurking in the IRC chat to understand other people's problems, learn from them and get to know the core developers.

Edit: And never have the expectation that you'll ever get to work on core development. (Not that you can't, but this mantra will help to keep your motivations altruistic.)