How to Ask a Great Question on Stack Overflow

If you are in tech, you know what Stack Overflow is. More than likely, you might have a love-hate relationship with the service -- while incredibly useful, users can be quite confrontational about a post they don't deem "worthy", asks a previously answered question or simply uses the word thanks. Nonetheless, finding the right SO post can be much faster than scraping through pages of documentation just to remember if you should be using a concat() or a merge(). So what is one to do? Brave the world of Stack Overflow, toxicity and all, or take a stand and try to live without it? And despite the barriers to entry to get one's post read/not downvoted into oblivion, there are a few guidelines that one can follow to increase the odds of being well received.