Cherry on top: you used to pay to have an MSDN membership and access this wonderful community.
To be fair though, the early MSDN was really good, and in a distant past MVP was a real achievement (say early 2000s). Now it's a weird mix real issues and "my printer blinks red, how to fix?"
I don't think anyone reads MSDN at Microsoft anymore, it's a deadland, but I guess they generate some metrics of user engagement and product feedback from there.
This was subsumed into answers.microsoft.com and it's turned into a few of those original "good with computers" retirees spending all day answering from within their own knowledge, now overwhelmed by countless individuals with names or flavors of English suggesting emerging economic zones "answering" everything with copy paste non-responsive responses.
If the asker persists through enough (5 - 8?) turns until the copy paster grasps that they don't understand the problem, then it turns into (paraphrasing) "no clue, I'm not real but was just trying to help, try Microsoft support".
This is so consistent, I wonder what is driving it. They seem to try to look official, but eventually say they are not actually Microsoft, and punt. What is this accomplishing? Why are they spending all this time? Is it some kind of training exercise or on-ramp to support jobs? Inquiring minds want to know!
Microsoft has a cert called "Most Valuable Professional" that gives out a ton of free stuff (free MSDN subscription, free admission to a conference that gives away hardware, etc). It also probably looks good on your resume to hiring managers who don't know any better. Renewing the cert involves doing "community work", and the easiest way to do community work is to post a lot on Microsoft's forums. Microsoft doesn't care about the quality of the posts, or whether they solve the problem, solely about the number. This is why whenever you look up a Windows issue and go to Microsoft's forums, you always see people posting the same copy-pasted "Hi, I'm a Microsoft community expert who has been providing independent Windows advice for the past 10 years. blah blah blah Have you tried running sfc /scannow?" response to every single problem.
Ah yeah, this is exactly what I was referring to!
> If the asker persists through enough (5 - 8?) turns until the copy paster grasps that they don't understand the problem, then it turns into (paraphrasing) "no clue, I'm not real but was just trying to help, try Microsoft support".
Yes! And if you are doing anything even slightly out of their grasp that requires doing something 'different', they assume you are doing something wrong or messing with stuff you shouldn't be, e.g. "You shouldn't be touching the registry" - ugh.
> This is so consistent, I wonder what is driving it. They seem to try to look official, but eventually say they are not actually Microsoft, and punt. What is this accomplishing? Why are they spending all this time? Is it some kind of training exercise or on-ramp to support jobs? Inquiring minds want to know!
I think it really is just older people who 'like' computers but never learned that much about them. They found a zone where they can mostly be helpful to people who know a little less then them, which is fine, but they don't understand maybe they should not try and solve every problem.
That kind of ridiculousness is way more common than you think. These people shouldn't be allowed to vote let alone try to assist in solving even remotely complex IT problems.
