Ask HN: Has anyone else had a bad experience at Stack Overflow?

If you don't post details of your SO account so that other people can go evaluate your post/comment history for themselves, then this just comes across as evidence-free whingeing, which is the worst kind of whingeing. "I did nothing wrong, honest!" is very easy to say.

I was so close to flagging this post, but I figured I'd be generous and wait to see if you come back and give any information at all.

If I can be a representative of the majority of users, I'd say I have a positive experience just consuming it, logged out.

The organization is aware of and open about this complaint - see their blog post from earlier this year.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

I've never had complaints myself, but after reading the linked blog post I've started noticing the bullies (especially in the question comments) when I'm on the site.

Sure, and Wikipedia and Facebook. Community censorship will never work out.

May be just me, but the quality of the answers usually sends me back to google to try another site.

I tried to engage with SO when I first started programming about 8 years ago, but I think I said something someone didn't like or that wasn't technically allowed by their rules or something. I think they wanted me to ask a bunch of my own questions to get up my points. I didn't have any questions to ask. I gave up on it.

Over the last 8 years I've used answers on SO many times, as I've been directed there by Google. There have been MANY times I could have provided a much better answer or clarification than any others, but I don't because as far as I'm aware, SO still won't let me. I don't really care since it doesn't affect me, but I do like to help out others when I can. SO's loss really.

I've found it amusing that sometimes I'll be Googling around researching something, generally with respect to making an architectural decision (should I use library X or Y, what are the pros and cons) type stuff and on occasion I've found a really nice detailed question on Stack Overflow asking for opinions or experiences using X or Y and then there will even be a few thoughtful and really useful responses that were starting to lead into quite an excellent discussion of real wisdom coming from real world longer term experiences people have had and then the moderators helpfully show up and promptly close the question as "not constructive."

I don't think I've ever posted a question, nor really considered it to be honest.

Each board is its own Community. Making a blanket comment like this without naming the specific board is actually not that useful. I have seen some of the meta discussions by aggrieved users, and it usually comes down to something the user did without first looking up the answer themselves, trying to find the answer themselves, or even clicking on some of the suggested articles that will appear after they've simply typed a few words in the subject line.

People on this board are volunteers. Many of the boards expect you to try to solve the problem yourself before asking. When you asked, it is very useful if you spend time formulating the question correctly, so that others after you that have the same problem can understand the answers in context.

I was a very early stackoverflow user. I was excited and loved the idea. I still think it's a great idea, but I've come to abhor the police state moderation culture. To directly answer your question, yes, I completely agree that something has gone horribly wrong. I've forgotten more incidents than I can remember, but a few points I do remember: many good questions are closed; I've had questions hidden by people who (by their own admission) did not understand the tech being asked about but decided incorrectly the question was a duplicate; and I've seen some harmful cultural values widely supported on the meta pages.

My general impression is that some moderators seem to think of themselves as the gatekeepers to a promised land of knowledge, and the unwashed masses are just trying to ruin their pristine gardens, and must be aggressively pushed back. The truth is that stackoverflow can only exist because people like both receiving and giving help with their expertise. The site would be much better if it put this benevolence at its core rather than the guarded-perfect-garden model.

Like others here I use it as a read-only resource now despite having an account. It is tremendously useful for when I get stuck and there are enough questions that generally the answer you need is on there.

I no longer contribute because the community is toxic. Some of it is due to the condescending attitudes. Look at any beginner question and see the "Why didn't you just try XYZ?" comments from self-described experts. SO has also gamified the reporting system, so people abuse the feature to flag questions. Then there are the debates within the comments about the merits of solution ABC vs DEF.

I've wanted to ask questions or provide answers but the culture was too off-putting.

The userbase at SO is one of the most toxic I've ever encountered. I've answered questions for people, and other users on the site treat it like an extreme competition to have the accepted answer in order to accumulate fake internet points, I guess. Got really nasty messages from some of the users and will never interact on that site again after having this happen for a few weeks.

I’m reluctant to use SO to ask questions based on most of the responses here, and rarely have the opportunity to contribute, but I did have a surprisingly good interaction a couple years ago. I’d googles around for some esoteric solution, and eventually honed in on a 95% solution on SO. After figuring out the last piece I went to add a comment to the accepted answer with my details based on my setup, but didn’t have enough karma. So I added my solution and apologized about not having the karma and it belonged as a comment to the more complete answer, and forgot about it. Next time I’d checked back, I found someone had given me the karma to comment. I didn’t even know anyone could give karma, but it certainly wasn’t from upvotes. So that was maybe a rare nice event on SO.

Stack Overflow has always been good to me, if:

- I detail my previous attempts

- I talk about what I think is wrong, or admit that I have no idea

- Check out the documentation before, fix small syntax issues

- Provide minimal code, or additional code to provide context if its a specific problem-related issue

- Link to any other relevant issues, on GitHub or elsewhere

Basically, the more effort I put into my question, the more SO gives back.

Absolutely, it's toxic. Especially asking questions! This was very disturbing each of the 4 or 5 times I tried, on several SE sites. Only once got a helpful answer, but that was the question I cared least about. Having questions closed immediately is the norm. By people who don't understand the question. Once I was shunted between several different sites, as it was deemed to fit better somewhere else. I never bother any more. Similar to wikipedia (although toxic in a different way) - great to look at from the outside, but better not to get involved asking questions/editing - life's too short to wrangle with such people and the system they inhabit.

The best question/answer pages on there were almost universally closed for not fitting the site.

But they're a wonderful resource for googling quick answers to questions! The TeX/LaTeX one is particularly awesome - the most active people answering questions are the very same people who wrote the best books and packages.

FWIW I made a meta post about my experience which I realize now that I've seen it - sounds exactly like the 'Welcoming" blog linked below - word for word. It went over about as well as you'd expect.

At least someone is aware of the issue. SO is such a great resource. I'd hate to see it die. The community just needs to take themselves and the content a lot less seriously imo.

Not on stackoverflow, but on some other pages of the stackexchange networks my comments sometimed got deleted without any feedback by whom or why.