Kindness from Nearly Ten Years Ago

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Recently I heard someone say Stack Overflow was dead, so I went back to look through my old questions.

I'd used Stack Overflow over the years and even posted another question six years ago. But it was only this time, with AI helping me untangle the old English replies and their context, that I really understood what the person who answered me had meant.

This question (opens in a new tab) was posted on August 7, 2017—nine years ago, almost ten. I was asking how to receive JSON in Spring Boot.

Before I started learning Java, I already knew Node.js well and had been using Express all along. Receiving JSON was straightforward in Express.

But I was a beginner in Java, and Spring Boot was new to me. I had carefully read the Spring MVC documentation, yet I still couldn't understand how to do this or find the answer in the documentation available then. Something so simple in Express had left me stuck, and searching hadn’t helped either.

I thought very highly of Stack Overflow. I only went there to ask when I’d run out of ways to solve the problem myself.

My English wasn't much better. I struggled to read it, my grammar was shaky, and I wasn't confident writing it. I kept running what I wanted to say through Google Translate, back and forth, checking that the meaning hadn't been lost.

I’d asked questions elsewhere and talked with friends from other countries before. In my experience, shaky grammar didn’t seem to matter that much. Someone can speak Chinese with the words in an odd order, and I can often still understand them.

What I finally posted was still just two JSON examples and a few awkward sentences.

Then a bunch of downvotes appeared. I’d never received that many all at once. I was scared and couldn’t quite take it. I went to a friend and said, ‘Did I ask a really stupid question? Why are there so many downvotes…?’

I didn’t know what had happened. Had I failed to explain myself, or was the question itself bad?

And what if I put my Stack Overflow profile on a résumé someday? Someone could click through and find this question covered in downvotes…

A user called xenteros (opens in a new tab) answered that day. The page shows my question at 13:10 and his answer at 13:15, just five minutes apart. He gave me an example using @RequestBody to receive the request content, along with a tool and a tutorial.

I commented that I'd realised it was a stupid question and thanked him for answering anyway. I even thanked the people who had downvoted it, saying their votes had made me realise it was a bad question. Right after that, I added that English wasn't my native language and I had trouble expressing myself.

He later replied:

the question just don't show the effort you did.

As I understand it now, he meant: you did the work, but you left it out of the question. How would anyone else know?

I really had read the documentation and run my words back and forth through translation. But I hadn’t explained what I’d tried or where I was stuck. Oh. That’s what he was getting at.

He also linked to How to Ask (opens in a new tab) and how to put together an example someone else could reproduce (opens in a new tab), explaining how to make the question clearer.

That was my first encounter with those guides. I remember seeing similar replies on Zhihu later; some didn’t feel very friendly.

I still haven’t read the guides all the way through, though. They’re too long. My ADHD goes way back, apparently. I’m joking, of course.

The edit history (opens in a new tab) shows that he also helped rewrite my post. After I'd explained my difficulty with English, he edited it at 13:56. He tidied up the wording, made the final request a direct question about receiving the JSON in a Spring Boot Controller, and added the rest tag.

He made the edit first, then left his advice at 13:57.

He was such a kind guy. An internet saint.

Looking at this old question, I also noticed that its score had become positive. I don't know what happened in between. Maybe some kind people helped bring it back up.

If you're learning something too, don't keep a question to yourself because you're afraid of looking foolish. Explain what you've tried, add anything you left unclear, and fix the English as you go. There are people willing to help.

Thank you, xenteros. You probably forgot about me long ago; I only found your name again while looking through Stack Overflow this time. But nine years later, I still want to say: thank you.