It's funny how my experience with SO is nowhere near as bad as what HN usually reports.

I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.

After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.

Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.