based on the stackoverflow thread, and then the comments here, an interesting research paper topic would be 'why do people get so passionate about regex'

on stack overflow, the more friendly and 'treat other people like humans' esque a question is, the more off track it becomes. dry, cold questions tend to get the best answers. if the goal is to learn something, it's best to treat the site like an answer vending machine.

for example, a question treating other people like humans: "hi. I need to get the last two letters of a string in Javascript. can anyone help? thanks" is likely to attract a bunch of curious types of 'why do you need to get the last two letters of a string?' type answers, versus posting something deliberately robotic seeming: "javascript: get last 2 letters of string" immediately gets replied with no-nonsense answers from people wanting to drop their knowledge and get stack overflow green checkmark points for being the fastest answerer etc.