One of the biggest problems I see on SO is repliers tell the OP they are "doing it wrong" and not answering the OP's question. Typically you'll see some smartass reply with, "Why would you want to do that? You're doing it wrong. Do it this way, here's how."
These replies infuriate me. The OP knows what his problem is and he's asking for an answer. He doesn't need a new problem to solve. He doesn't need to know what your opinion is about solving the problem. He needs a solution.
One example: I was searching for how to solve a RVM and rails configuration problem on OS X. I typed the error message from the console into google, and found a SO question that was exactly the problem I was having. But instead of providing an answer, the most upvoted comment was to uninstall everything and use homebrew because "you're doing it wrong" without homebrew.
That's nice and all, but I've had a rails and rvm setup on my laptop for 2 years without homebrew, and, like the OP, I don't have time to set that up now. I just want to fix this one configuration error and get back to work. I quickly went back to Google and found the solution on another rails forum.
Granted, this is a problem with a lot of internet forums, not just SO. But it drives me nuts.
When I was active I would see many of the "doing it wrong" answers. It didn't seem like a big problem at the time. I always did my best to answer the question properly.
After a long hiatus, I made a new account a couple weeks ago because I didn't remember my old account. Minutes after I posted it, I receive 2 "doing it wrong" answers, someone edits my title and tags, and then another person closed in minutes for being a duplicate when it wasn't.
As one of the first people to reach 10k points on SO
(I wrote the first SO point guide discussed on Meta) no case could be made that I didn't ask a proper question. I think there are too many people with 10k points now.
Stack Overflow has become a very toxic environment.
I like those type of answers. If you are encountering an issue doing something, and there is a better way of doing it (as opposed to just solving the problem in your current method), I think it adds a lot of value to offer those suggestions.
In your example, perhaps you didn't know about homebrew and this was going to save you a lot of time, well that's great. There can still be other answers that help your specific issue, but someone has thought outside the box and offered a completely different way of doing it.
For me the value of SO would be greatly reduced if people didn't do that.
Explaining a "better" way is great as an addendum to an answer for the actual problem asked. As you said, it can be very helpful to provide an out of the box solution.
However, it is very annoying when I ask a question and the only answers are some variant of, "you are doing it wrong." Multiple times I have had to write an explanation that is longer than my actual question to convince people that I actually do want an answer to the question I asked.
If you really think you understand my problem better than I do, based on a simplified explanation, awesome. I would love to hear a better way to go about what I am doing. But please, try to answer the actual question first (or at least say you don't know the answer). There is a slim chance the "better" way is not actually workable in the real world scenario.
I get those sorts of answers most often because the real problem is too complex to give as the example, and I simplify the example down to what's essential to my question. Then, there's often a better way to solve that particular example, which wasn't the goal. I often even put something in like "I know you could solve the problem in this example with X, and I'm not looking for those." And people will still say "Why are you doing it that way just do X". That gets pretty infuriating.
This is so so true! The problem is that the person saying "you're doing it wrong" often has no clue what they're talking about. I daresay Rich Hickey, Bjarne Stroustrup, or Brendon Eich would get told they're "doing it wrong" too.
When people ask questions online, far too often the person answering assumes that whoever asked the question must be a complete idiot. There are plenty of topics in which I would consider myself an expert, but I still get treated as if I know nothing about the subject. (I've noticed the problem also manifests itself in academia -- the more prestigious the academic institution, the more everyone assumes everyone else is "incompetent by default").
I agree, I find there can be quite a lot of groupthink on SO in that kind of way. For example, the top answer to most questions about any kind of optimisation ends up being some patronising thing about "you should profile and only optimise once you know it's a problem". Well, I wouldn't be asking for advice on a web forum unless I knew it was a problem - just answer the question, please!
Hopefully those replies are relegated to the comments section, but still it's infuriating.
What irks me is when a google search lands me at SO only to have it marked as a duplicate with no links to the actual duplicate, or when the linked dup is dissimilar or unanswered.
These replies infuriate me. The OP knows what his problem is and he's asking for an answer. He doesn't need a new problem to solve. He doesn't need to know what your opinion is about solving the problem. He needs a solution.
One example: I was searching for how to solve a RVM and rails configuration problem on OS X. I typed the error message from the console into google, and found a SO question that was exactly the problem I was having. But instead of providing an answer, the most upvoted comment was to uninstall everything and use homebrew because "you're doing it wrong" without homebrew.
That's nice and all, but I've had a rails and rvm setup on my laptop for 2 years without homebrew, and, like the OP, I don't have time to set that up now. I just want to fix this one configuration error and get back to work. I quickly went back to Google and found the solution on another rails forum.
Granted, this is a problem with a lot of internet forums, not just SO. But it drives me nuts.