As someone who listened to every single Stackoverflow podcast as it was being built, I would love to be a fly on the wall eavesdropping on Jeff and Joel's conversations (preferably with a bit of alcohol in them) about what Stackoverflow has become. Jeff especially was absolutely hardcore on perfection, I can't imagine he wouldn't be freaking out on some level with this nonsense.
I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary?
I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!
This is where I want to make an omniscient bot that follows you around and gives you a severe electric shock every time you use potentially copyrighting material snippets (I'll be nice and give you a 3 second window to declare fair use).
I will be happy the day copyright is dead and buried under a mountain sized gravestone. As much as you think it protects the small guy, it enabled the rich to buy up portfolios and enslave them to constant payments and holding back the progression of society.
i can't help think of Data from star trek, longing to be more human like. At some point can the AI be allowed to post with the same equal rights as humans. Picard would fight for Data's rights to comment on hacker news articles.
Please don't. HN is a place for humans to write and converse with each other. Bots have never been allowed here and we've banned accounts for posting like this since long before GPT. (I don't want to ban you, obviously)
Sorry, I was the person who asked, didn’t mean to get you told off by the attribution police!
I think attributing GPT every time you use it is as stupid as attributing spell check when you use it. It’s a tool, not a person.
Soon it’ll be a click away in the browser and it’ll be used everywhere exactly how you used it.
In fact, pretty soon anyone saying you have to attribute text to GPT will probably be a GPT powered bot! :)
For some reason though, your summary stuck out like a sore thumb. I work a lot with GPT3, I think you get accustomed to how it writes (obviously you can change that with some prompt work).
I enjoy answering questions but like the poster, I kind of hold my breath any time I do.
Toxic downvoting is not just a question thing. There are people who will downvote any and every answer even a correct one to a question they feel is unworthy of an answer.
I think a big problem is voters are not shown and verified. If you upvote or downvote a post your id should show and you must provide a reason why the vote.
It might likely need to be an additional thing and phased in.
Current voting can carry on as is, but 'verified voting' would be a secondary mechanism, and... over time people could choose to ignore the non-verified votes, or the non-verified votes could be phased out altogether.
I like the simple up/down vote mechanism, but it definitely seems to be abused, and I would prefer more weight be given to votes with a public reason. Votes without an explanation should end up weighting less.
Whatever may or may not be the case on HN doesn't really have much bearing on Stack Overflow as they're radically different sites with a very different purpose.
If a 20k rep user answers a no-effort-clearly-duplicate-off-topic-question to get some more points, instead of using the moderation tools and pointing the asker in the correct direction, I gladly down vote.
SO has an additional problem the article's author doesn't get to: high-voted answers that at the time were relevant and correct, but are not relevant now due to time passing and Microsoft aligning Windows to fit their current direction. I reckon this problem exists for other technologies that change with time, too.
Indeed, I was recently looking for some information, and all the SO results I turned up were for the language in question as of 2011, and found to be inapplicable.
I've had the same sort of experience. This leads me to believe SO could age off answers, or maybe even questions, and everyone except history buffs would benefit.
I find Quora difficult to navigate when I’m searching for an answer to a question.
That’s my main issue however, I also don’t like the constant pay wall restrictions I feel I come up against frequently on Quora.
My pet Stack Overflow annoyance: the number of questions that have highly voted confidently incorrect answers or (perhaps worse?) answers that do work, but not for the reason in the confidently incorrect explanation that follows the ‘what to do’ part of the answer.
I feel like this is particularly bad for python Q+A on SO. At least it's not as bad as Quora where the top answer is invariably a grandiose answer to a different question than was asked or an excuse for some bullshit 'heartwarming' anecdote that answers nothing.
Way more often than not it seems like the first few answers are either wrong, overly complicated, or advanced RTFM posts with massive upvotes. Meanwhile the 3rd or 4th answer with modest upvotes is actually the succinct correct answer.
I feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example", presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.
Of course I deleted it. I'll take the issue up with the Clang people directly at some point.
Yeah, typically there is always a better place to ask a question than SO. IRC, Discord, email list, etc. - wherever the experts and enthusiasts hang out who work all the time on whatever it is you are trying to wrap your brain around.
...but then, once I get my answer on discord, I like to ask and answer your question on SO so that it's searchable.
Somehow that lone upvote after five years of silence feels much more meaningful than the popular answers do. Like I'm glad if I can save 100 people 5 minutes, but even better is to save one person a week.
> As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.
> Of course I deleted it.
It was closed to prevent guesses from being posted as answers while you worked on the minimal example, if you'd just edited it in the question would've been put into the reopen queue.
They only gave two examples of their questions that have been closed, and the second one is obviously of a type[0] that hasn't been allowed for over a decade (long before they made their account). Nothing bad sticks out to me from their description of their first example, but the other indicates their understanding isn't as good as they think it is.
[0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on a Q&A site where a single answer gets selected by the asker.
It's not the amount, it's which example they gave. They insist they understand the rules, yet their evidence is something that's obviously against the rules?
Do you have a link to the rule about asking questions with only a "single correct answer"? Out of curiosity, I tried digging around and couldn't find references to that kind of rule.
"List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime users will understand. It falls under these "open ended" questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close reason but got rolled into that when others were needed.
The question mentioned by the original OP was "My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout." which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from my interpretation.
I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things were different.
And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't know until it's closed".
If your goal is to come with any reason to label a question a "list question", then I don't think it would be too hard to find a way to label any potential question as a "list question" and have it closed.
A different interpretation would be that the question is about whether there are maintainability issues with a certain implementation of CSS. Which the question being potentially answered with a "Yes/No" where an obviously better answer might provide an example or two of issues that could arise.
The actual rule here is about question where every answer is equally valid, so asking for pure opinions (https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask). Questions that have multiple potential answers are valid questions in general.
There are questions that are somewhere in between, something like "which approach is better here?". Those tend not to go well on SO even though they theoretically could be on-topic. This is a case where the community is sometimes overzealous, but it's extremely hard to consistently apply these rules to complex edge cases. And many questions of this kind do not fit to the rules and are closed correctly. These questions usually require quite a bit of familiarity with SO to formulate them in a way that works on the site.
My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers.
The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted.
The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post—which they wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth, the rationale for these awful edits.
The user argued that “you” is not used in good, professional documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of “you”.
Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with anyone, saying that “standard C” only referred to the current C standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer “standard”. The user would insist upon removing the C tag from any question about C90, for example.
The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible users.
Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that are not obvious and clear improvements.
If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.
You usually won't see a response, the moderator will either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.
Interesting. I dug through my inbox and was able to find the answer, and evidence of the edit war itself is gone, except for the actual edit history. The comments have been removed. (Good riddance, but the process is less transparent for me.)
The actions to warn and suspend users are kinda intentionally invisible or at least less visible. The idea is not to publicly shame the users and to let them come back and continue to participate without attaching a public black mark to their account.
So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag something except that your flag is declared valid and the problem is resolved in some way.
The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might be.
The edit thing is a self imposed problem because the site gamification for established Stack* sites mandates that people edit questions to get enough reputation for basic site functionality. Actually asking or answering a question is far too difficult for a new user, especially on SO.
I looked it up. Accepted edit suggestions are only +2 per edit and cap at +1000 for your entire account. A single upvote on a question or answer is worth 5 edits.
I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.
I have 334 answers (the last was in 2019) and only one that is popular. It's from more than a decade ago. I looked at tonight and there is was an edit on January 26. But from a glance there is nothing different from what's it's been for years. So it must have been a trivial edit.
That would make sense if a new question could be asked after the same X number of time units. As it is, 2012 answers suggesting jQuery for any simple Javascript question are no longer relevant.
I'm not sure what your problem with downvoting is. It's not an attack on you, but to let other readers know that your solution is not the best solution. It may have been so in 2011, but readers like me don't want to be led astray if it is no longer a good solution.
> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!
Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.
Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.
At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.
That's basically what I'm saying. Lack of reputation inhibits your ability to participate in the site (beyond asking, answering, and editing questions).
And what I'm saying is ... that's OK for 99% of users. I'm not sure it's a problem that it is hard to participate beyond voting, commenting and asking/answering.
This make perfect sense if one view SO as a FAQ site.
SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.
SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.
Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached.
I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.
I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments.
Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped.
I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them.
I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.
You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR" questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality of the questions goes down, the discouragement for the answerers goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer" questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).
It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or articles get drowned out.
Those can be answered by ChatGPT. Only question is where to integrate it into peoples' workflows. Maybe into the post-creation interface? Maybe into the SO question-creation dialog.
Interesting... I wonder if this is where knowledge sites gravitate to? Of course if the AI isn't smart enough to answer the question without it's training not having covered it, I'm not sure it would work...
What would be really cool is an AI interview. "So this looks like the same problem, do the answers here help?" "Oh, why not?" "I see, so what else have you tried?" "I see we still haven't resolved the issue, so I'm going to rewrite this discussion in our standard format and post it for our expert community to solve."
Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website.
The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.
Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit.
I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.
And yea, that's why read-only on reddit this days and feel no desire to contribute.
I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that work".
> Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems.
I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing.
What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture.
Marketing is all about creating a need so that people will buy your shit, and it does that by making you feel insecure, yet entitled. The psychological damage from having our attention constantly hijacked by this shit has caused severe damage to society as a whole over time.
Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble, break things, troll people, 'shitpost', or some combination of the above."
And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."
Thing is, if it weren't for marketing I'm not sure this idea of "spreading filth" would even be much a thing, but marketing is such a social contagion that it has destroyed our ability to relate to people in a way other than as a means to promote something.
I posted a story which provided unique background from a reputed web site on staffing decisions in one political party. It got pulled with two formal reasons both obviously wrong e.g. me having headline edited which was not the case and it also did not change in between. I took it up and wrote a polite request even providing reasoning why it was a good fit (which was not the reason it was pulled). Next thing happened was a two word message: "off topic"..
I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories are just small stories with only little life in them. Why squash them - time will rank them down - so why?
I'm not sure if there wasn't a time it was a collection of fiefdoms honestly, at least for the social web.
My reference point is mostly 2000s era internet forums, and that was certainly a time of admins of forums going on power trips over their little meaningless slice of the internet.
it’s pretty much the other extreme to SO. reddit is highly resistant to communal knowledge accumulation. everything is temporary, everything decays, and the continual churn of participants combined with a crap search engine ensures that ephemerality reigns eternally. Stack Overflow has spent most of its lifespan trying to do the opposite, and what we’re left with is this. antibodies attacking the host
I don't know what kinda person actually considers Reddit a go-to for answers. It's absolutely abysmal for that sort of thing. SO isn't perfect but it's leagues above any subreddit I've ever used. Almost all subreddits succumb to getting too popular (if they're good to start with) and eventually the amount of actual help you get from them becomes exceedingly rare in my experience.
I never ask questions on Stack Overflow. I usually just chat with the people I know and trust in a Discord or Slack, which kind of sucks because the answers are not preserved for everyone else. I think with the toxicity of SO not getting solved, the future will be more distributed with people posting on their own blogs.
It's been hostile for years. Lately I find that I'm getting actual answers from there less and less. Not sure what can be done apart from a decisive change in community engagement from the top down.
my most recent attempt wasn’t downvoted or closed, instead I got an ‘typo edit suggestion’ - or something to that effect - where someone had gone through and edited in about 5 false corrections to imagined typos. I did have the option to decline the edit, but it’s another example of the weird moderation culture
does anyone have insight into the moderator process that’s encouraging these behaviours?
Edits provide reputation when accepted and on SO specifically are about the only reliable way for new users to get reputation. Answering new questions that don't get closed is difficult, anything "easy" is mobbed by people and a single answer gets reputation and the other largely ignored or even deleted. Asking is also difficult for the reasons commonly cited elsewhere in comments. Edits are also further gamified to be accepted through review queues that give badges for stamping enough things.
Technically, trivial edits are discouraged, but there's nothing enforcing that publicly.
I think SO has very distinct culture and it is a notoriously hard-moderated platform. It attracts a lot of like-minded people for the various exchanges and you can get a kick out of it if you're also extremely passionate on certain topics.
But outside of that, I treat SO mostly as a dictionary/reference. The whole points and reputation system isn't for me, but in this case that's how SO works and without this system it would be yet another lame Q&A platform that's riddled with spam and bullshit information.
I can see leaving the platform or not using it at all, but I wouldn't block it from Search.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case.
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.
I didn’t disagree with the goal. I question the owner’s stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If latter then describing the site that way reads more like an ad. Like taking musk‘s statements on what Twitter is “for” at face value
Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful.
SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something better will replace it, not IF it will.
It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)
What makes you think I agree? I certainly am saying what the SO owners have said. I'm repeating it here because I think it's a useful way to understand why SO is the way it is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead, optimizing around a different goal entirely.
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.
The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.
My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.
I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer
One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer.
Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others.
The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is.
SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.
Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality.
The problem is that you need people getting their questions answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.
> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language."
The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".
The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery.
S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.
> After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".
I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted.
I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet).
Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.
But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up to date.
They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct.
But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different.
But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore.
You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.
This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions. Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it ever will happen.
I think this is the reason why the site is found so useful now. The meta board is a good read for anyone who wants to understand more or find out how to resolve their issues with the site.
Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn’t go around closing questions because you didn’t “try hard enough before asking”
I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions.
I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and I would delete my account.
They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete.
Needless to say, I no longer feed the site.
Hopefully, with more advanced AI’s we can scrape the web, organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered, skipping the searching.
Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant.
I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama
I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close
This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.
Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming.
What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue.
To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community.
I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).
I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc).
the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.
The site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.
the questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.
This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage
By contrast, Reddit is the exact opposite... Most subreddits that I read get several posts each day that could be answered in a heartbeat just by searching existing discussions or looking at the first result in Google. But most mods, in an (understandable) effort to be newbie-friendly, accept this as the cost of running a subreddit. As a result, most subreddits on some technical topic, are mainly populated by and useful to newbies.
It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.
If we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on SO is toxic (with regard to that context).
One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all.
It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was.
But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed.
There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed.
In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy.
I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments to solutions reminded me of this https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.
It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.
I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is:
> Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs
And here's one of the first snippets on their about page:
> Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge.
Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site.
Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:
1. Google question
2. Click 5-6 different SO links
3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap
4. Go to the documentation
5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.
I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.
It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either:
1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer.
2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer.
Neither of those are received well.
The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.
This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that.
But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.
The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day.
But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions.
At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left.
And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.
Its really nice to see the community numbers declining, I think that another site that encourages engagement rather than whatever stackoverflow is now can flourish.
If you are after engagement based Q&A, you're going to find Reddit and Facebook style systems that require a larger portion of the user base giving answers rather than "I can search it and find the answer" that Stack Overflow provides.
Those sites (and they exist now) typically suffer from having enough people providing correct answers (unless they're the type who enjoy answering what a Null Pointer Exception is again and again). You can try seeing if https://www.coderanch.com/forums fits what you are after.
The library based model requires fewer people and so scales better - but it still scales. The issue with the library based model is that the curation work needs to be relatively low friction - something that Stack Overflow has been failing at.
Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.
Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.
> I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.
I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site.
To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).
I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.
Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.
> To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous.
So what do you expect? A "tagparagraph" to describe all nuances? You're all fixating on this tagline to an unreasonable degree.
As I said, plenty of people have been VERY clear about all of this right from the start, over ten years ago, and you get a full page before you can ask a question which describes all of it. Again, the communication could be a bit better, but it's not "disingenuous"; that's just a nonsense accusation; almost everyone on the site actually contributing answers subscribes to this view to some degree (there are some nuance with this).
Not wanting to answer low-quality questions or being roped in to being an unpaid programming tutor answering the same beginner questions over and over again is not "gatekeeping".
I currently have 41 reputation on SO. 1 silver badge and 5 bronze badges. Almost all of which I recently earned by answering an obscure Vim configuration question.
And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.
Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.
Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?
> Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.
Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]:
> Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time.
Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4].
In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me.
(SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.)
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.
Right, but you can see it’s a bit fuzzy on what the thing actually is, very possibly because they themselves weren’t quite clear about that. The feel-good wording could sort of be made to fit a forum if they wished, but ultimately they didn’t. (Or possibly the homepage of SO at the time was the place that contained the actual description.)
The (for lack of better terms) Atwoodian and Spoloskian philosophies of how the site should be run and that fracture continue to this day with (excessively simplified caricatures) some looking to delete everything that isn't good so that they could concentrate on what was left and others trying to fix everything even though it isn't good to start with and a "we'll get around to it" for most of the content.
That the fracture hasn't been resolved and Stack Overflow corporate still hasn't really come down and said what they want it to be (though they want more "engagement" so it feels like it will be more Spoloskian - but they don't want the Atwoodians to leave).
wow, that question really exemplifies the debate here I think. It's a simple and answerable question, which will be an exremely common question from beginners. And yet it was almost instantly closed despite being posted by one of the founders of the site.
> Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?
Yes. As you mentioned the blog post is from 2008, that's 15 years ago now. Jeff hasn't had any input on the direction of stack overflow for more than a decade. From Jeff's blog post that you linked:
> I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I've had zero day to day operational input since that date, more or less by choice.
So I don't see how his blog post from 2018 has any place in the company's current mission. He says in the blog post that you linked that he had plenty of opinions, but he has chosen to not have any direct influence in the company for over a decade.
And Joel stepped down as CEO in 2019. And Joel's vision has clearly changed. This is from a blog post in 2019, which probably reflects what the current vision of SO has become after seeing what SO has turned into:
> In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]
So, yes. People are building a strawman by trying to say the rude, snarky, meaningless cruel remarks are necessary to maintain "quality" answers.
> > > In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]
I would contend that the rudeness and snark are a symptom of failed moderation tools.
On USENET, if there was a user who was bothersome to you - you could kill file them. Plonk and they're gone from what you can see.
On Reddit, you can block a user and you won't see their comments again. Similarly on Twitter you can mute or block a user. And again on GitHub. On HN you can click hide and collapse threads from people you don't want to see.
With all of these, you can make an annoying person not annoy you.
On Stack Overflow, you can't block questions from a user showing up when you look at a tag. You can't ignore answers that they have given on posts that otherwise invoke Duty Calls https://xkcd.com/386/ . You can't prevent a user from commenting on your posts. You can't filter questions to those who have had some criteria.
The combination of all of this means that on Stack Overflow, there are only three ways to handle a user.
You can flag their comments or posts and have a diamond mod step in (note that asking poor questions again and again isn't diamond mod worthy) and note that that sometimes can take days or weeks to get resolved.
You can take your ball and go home. Quit stack overflow and go cold turkey. There are more than a few who have decided that the hassle of dealing with users there isn't worth the headaches.
You can make it uncomfortable for them to stay. Snark, veiled (and unveiled) rudeness, and similar comments. Not that this is an excuse for rudeness - but rather an explanation.
One of the things to lower the temperature and reduce the amount of rudeness is to increase the ability for a user to see what they want and be able to avoid interactions with people who they don't want to interact with.
If the python tag is getting too many new programmer questions in September asking to make a circle with a for loop, the experienced programmer can either close questions (note that some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of close votes, down vote (again, some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of regular votes, and then either ask "have you read the documentation for for loop" or leave.
Rudeness is often an established user running out of moderation tools.
> Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:
> 1. Google question
> 2. Click 5-6 different SO links
> 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap
> 4. Go to the documentation
> 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.
Actually, ChatGPT is going to be really good for helping you with finding the tiny detail in a large body of documentation, as long as their docs were published prior to 2020
I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago".
I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact.
So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.
In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to pipe the data.
The author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to refute their point then you really have to make the case that SO is functioning as intended despite their implicit claim to the contrary.
I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really
know.
This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered.
If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead.
Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead.
Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%
And where do those searchable answers come from? The Sky God?
If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.
This is just the deletionists vs. inclusionists debate from Wikipedia in the 90s/00s. The deletionists are still winning and the deletionists are still wrong.
The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly.
My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.
I’ve found the criticisms regarding accuracy to be curious, not only for the reason you mention, but also because the apples-to-apples comparison isn’t ChatGPT vs Google so much as it’s ChatGPT vs an expert working on a test in a faraday cage with no substantial penalty for wrong answers.
With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.
>They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language. They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.
The problem with SO is that there are a lot of "high-quality answers" that are now 7 years old. The world of technology has moved on. Yes, you can post a better answer, however, it will never get the same amount of upvotes as the original answer. If someone asks new questions on the topic, it will get dupe-hammered with a link to these ancient questions.
I agree with you, but it is not a "free" exchange.
People share there knowledge and helps SO to be alive and in exchange they can get answers.
Their curation should be better like pointing to the correct answer before marking it as duplicated and then blocking it.
I know it is as is because people are lazy sometimes and they expect to get it ready with no effort.
In that sense, chat assistants are the biggest threat to SO as it does not complain to answer the same thing a thousand times.
In my experience then preferred place is now Discord which is awful because it's not indexed by search engines. But at least there's a chance that your question gets answered, or you get pointed in the right direction.
Isn't Discord the new platform? I used IRC quite extensively for asking development related questions, but after the freenode fiasco it seemed Discord became the best place to get development questions answered for a large variety of languages and frameworks.
I use it as my own personal knowledge base. I only post things that I have figured out and haven't been asked before, basically answering my own questions.
I'd really, really like to see links to specific questions that were closed for allegedly bad reasons. These posts complaining about SO almost never contain them, so we're only getting half the story.
Stack Overflow can be a rather harsh experience if you're unfamiliar with it and have wrong assumptions about how it works. The "wrong assumptions" part is not intended to blame the asker, it's just a fact that SO has some rules that are not obvious if you're used to more forum-like sites.
I still find SO very useful, and I have no issue at all with getting questions closed. I may have received a downvote or two that I found unwarranted, but not more. And you don't always get an answer, but that is not that surprising for more specialized questions. It's still the most useful general purpose site for programming questions for me.
At least for this specific case, you hit the nail on the head. Here is a comment[0] from the reddit thread that found the actual questions (that the OP asked on SO) and explained in very clear terms why they were closed.
Not really happy with how trigger-happy SO is with closing questions based on wrong assumptions in general. But in this specific case, it feels very justified.
> I've finally decided to cancel my SO account, to add it to my hosts block list, and to block SO results from Google using an extension.
I won't say that Twitter and StackOverflow are exactly alike, but to quit a website I also find that I have go "cold turkey" by making it hard to enter the hostname on autopilot or click a search result. That's why I added "||twitter.com^" to uBlock Origin on both my desktop and mobile web browsers.
I said goodbye to StackOverflow more than 8 years ago[1]. I was an avid fan, listened to every podcast episode as Jeff and Joel were building it and was excited for its launch.
The early days were so much better because the toxicity had not set in.
However, my account clearly has first mover advantage. I sit at Top 0.5% without having contributed in a very long time. Both on the Question and Answer side, I have benefitted from providing answers to basic questions and asking basic questions.
I wonder if the amount of reputation had an outsized effect.
I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K).
I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more of that to offset the overzealous folks if I find time...
Counter-ancedote: my 13 year old, 9K rep account gets the same treatment as original poster. I've given up on participating (after latest and particularly upsetting episode of "question not good enough"), and use the site only through google. Shame, it used to be easy access to expertise.
350 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadI guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!
I will be happy the day copyright is dead and buried under a mountain sized gravestone. As much as you think it protects the small guy, it enabled the rich to buy up portfolios and enslave them to constant payments and holding back the progression of society.
I don't think so, as long as you've vetted it for completeness and accuracy.
Automatically posting AI content with a bot is a different matter
I think attributing GPT every time you use it is as stupid as attributing spell check when you use it. It’s a tool, not a person.
Soon it’ll be a click away in the browser and it’ll be used everywhere exactly how you used it.
In fact, pretty soon anyone saying you have to attribute text to GPT will probably be a GPT powered bot! :)
For some reason though, your summary stuck out like a sore thumb. I work a lot with GPT3, I think you get accustomed to how it writes (obviously you can change that with some prompt work).
Toxic downvoting is not just a question thing. There are people who will downvote any and every answer even a correct one to a question they feel is unworthy of an answer.
Current voting can carry on as is, but 'verified voting' would be a secondary mechanism, and... over time people could choose to ignore the non-verified votes, or the non-verified votes could be phased out altogether.
I like the simple up/down vote mechanism, but it definitely seems to be abused, and I would prefer more weight be given to votes with a public reason. Votes without an explanation should end up weighting less.
HN seems to due alright. Things people engage with "bubble up".
Whatever may or may not be the case on HN doesn't really have much bearing on Stack Overflow as they're radically different sites with a very different purpose.
But same mailinglists are much worse.
Of course I deleted it. I'll take the issue up with the Clang people directly at some point.
Somehow that lone upvote after five years of silence feels much more meaningful than the popular answers do. Like I'm glad if I can save 100 people 5 minutes, but even better is to save one person a week.
> Of course I deleted it.
It was closed to prevent guesses from being posted as answers while you worked on the minimal example, if you'd just edited it in the question would've been put into the reopen queue.
[0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on a Q&A site where a single answer gets selected by the asker.
How many examples would they have to post in order for you to be satisfied?
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask
"List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime users will understand. It falls under these "open ended" questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close reason but got rolled into that when others were needed.
Here's a meta question specifically about list questions that says basically the same thing: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139618/are-list-que...
I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things were different.
And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't know until it's closed".
> and asked for other concrete examples.
It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.
If your goal is to come with any reason to label a question a "list question", then I don't think it would be too hard to find a way to label any potential question as a "list question" and have it closed.
A different interpretation would be that the question is about whether there are maintainability issues with a certain implementation of CSS. Which the question being potentially answered with a "Yes/No" where an obviously better answer might provide an example or two of issues that could arise.
There are questions that are somewhere in between, something like "which approach is better here?". Those tend not to go well on SO even though they theoretically could be on-topic. This is a case where the community is sometimes overzealous, but it's extremely hard to consistently apply these rules to complex edge cases. And many questions of this kind do not fit to the rules and are closed correctly. These questions usually require quite a bit of familiarity with SO to formulate them in a way that works on the site.
The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted.
The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post—which they wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth, the rationale for these awful edits.
The user argued that “you” is not used in good, professional documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of “you”.
Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with anyone, saying that “standard C” only referred to the current C standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer “standard”. The user would insist upon removing the C tag from any question about C90, for example.
The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible users.
If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.
So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag something except that your flag is declared valid and the problem is resolved in some way.
The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might be.
I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.
People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.
Likewise for their comments.
> Reputation is entirely optional
> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!
Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.
Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.
At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.
SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.
SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.
I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.
Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped.
I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them.
I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.
The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not conducive to community.
And here we are.
The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.
That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.
I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that work".
Trust me, you aren't missing out on anything by not being able to post on r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/Chonkers, or r/FunkoPops
I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing.
What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture.
Marketing is all about creating a need so that people will buy your shit, and it does that by making you feel insecure, yet entitled. The psychological damage from having our attention constantly hijacked by this shit has caused severe damage to society as a whole over time.
And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."
I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories are just small stories with only little life in them. Why squash them - time will rank them down - so why?
My reference point is mostly 2000s era internet forums, and that was certainly a time of admins of forums going on power trips over their little meaningless slice of the internet.
does anyone have insight into the moderator process that’s encouraging these behaviours?
Technically, trivial edits are discouraged, but there's nothing enforcing that publicly.
But outside of that, I treat SO mostly as a dictionary/reference. The whole points and reputation system isn't for me, but in this case that's how SO works and without this system it would be yet another lame Q&A platform that's riddled with spam and bullshit information.
I can see leaving the platform or not using it at all, but I wouldn't block it from Search.
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.
What SO didn't expect was that their real purpose was as feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them entirely.
Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.
Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful.
SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something better will replace it, not IF it will.
The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.
My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.
Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others.
The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921
Pretty common trade off in large tech these days
The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".
The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery.
S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.
I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.
> No, there is no such feature, so I made a custom hotkey: Ctrl + `
And then a few years later Microsoft implemented the feature and made the default hotkey Ctrl + `
---
I felt a bit of trepidation editing a top answer with >1k votes, but I did it: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions
Probably they need a deprecate-answer feature instead.
I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted.
I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet).
Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.
They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct.
But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different.
But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore.
You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.
I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions.
I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and I would delete my account.
They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete.
Needless to say, I no longer feed the site.
Hopefully, with more advanced AI’s we can scrape the web, organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered, skipping the searching.
Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant.
I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama
I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close
1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conver...
What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue.
To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community.
I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).
[0] https://xkcd.com/979/
It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.
It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was.
But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed.
There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed.
In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy.
[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html
Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.
They tried. It didn’t work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/
> Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs
And here's one of the first snippets on their about page:
> Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge.
Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site.
Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:
1. Google question
2. Click 5-6 different SO links
3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap
4. Go to the documentation
5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.
I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer.
2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer.
Neither of those are received well.
The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.
But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.
https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day).
The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day.
But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions.
At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left.
If you look at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-... and pull up the google doc for the "community moderation in time" ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnO... ) you'll see that most of the moderation tasks that were done by the community have dropped year over year over year. That makes it harder for the good questions to get noticed and get answers since the poorly written ones remain on the site longer.
And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.
Those sites (and they exist now) typically suffer from having enough people providing correct answers (unless they're the type who enjoy answering what a Null Pointer Exception is again and again). You can try seeing if https://www.coderanch.com/forums fits what you are after.
The library based model requires fewer people and so scales better - but it still scales. The issue with the library based model is that the curation work needs to be relatively low friction - something that Stack Overflow has been failing at.
You are contributing to the common pool of knowledge. As long as the question and answer themselves are good.
Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.
Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.
You can take any tagline to its extreme.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632
> I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.
To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).
So what do you expect? A "tagparagraph" to describe all nuances? You're all fixating on this tagline to an unreasonable degree.
As I said, plenty of people have been VERY clear about all of this right from the start, over ten years ago, and you get a full page before you can ask a question which describes all of it. Again, the communication could be a bit better, but it's not "disingenuous"; that's just a nonsense accusation; almost everyone on the site actually contributing answers subscribes to this view to some degree (there are some nuance with this).
Not wanting to answer low-quality questions or being roped in to being an unpaid programming tutor answering the same beginner questions over and over again is not "gatekeeping".
And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.
Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.
Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?
> Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.
Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]:
> Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time.
Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4].
In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me.
(SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.)
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...
[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/
[4] https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-d...
[5] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-a...
[6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exc...
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
Note the first revision and its author https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1
Then look at https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (both pages, but the key part is on the most recent one) with the closed, locked, and deleted actions and who did them.
The (for lack of better terms) Atwoodian and Spoloskian philosophies of how the site should be run and that fracture continue to this day with (excessively simplified caricatures) some looking to delete everything that isn't good so that they could concentrate on what was left and others trying to fix everything even though it isn't good to start with and a "we'll get around to it" for most of the content.
That the fracture hasn't been resolved and Stack Overflow corporate still hasn't really come down and said what they want it to be (though they want more "engagement" so it feels like it will be more Spoloskian - but they don't want the Atwoodians to leave).
Yes. As you mentioned the blog post is from 2008, that's 15 years ago now. Jeff hasn't had any input on the direction of stack overflow for more than a decade. From Jeff's blog post that you linked:
> I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I've had zero day to day operational input since that date, more or less by choice.
So I don't see how his blog post from 2018 has any place in the company's current mission. He says in the blog post that you linked that he had plenty of opinions, but he has chosen to not have any direct influence in the company for over a decade.
And Joel stepped down as CEO in 2019. And Joel's vision has clearly changed. This is from a blog post in 2019, which probably reflects what the current vision of SO has become after seeing what SO has turned into:
> In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]
So, yes. People are building a strawman by trying to say the rude, snarky, meaningless cruel remarks are necessary to maintain "quality" answers.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...
I would contend that the rudeness and snark are a symptom of failed moderation tools.
On USENET, if there was a user who was bothersome to you - you could kill file them. Plonk and they're gone from what you can see.
On Reddit, you can block a user and you won't see their comments again. Similarly on Twitter you can mute or block a user. And again on GitHub. On HN you can click hide and collapse threads from people you don't want to see.
With all of these, you can make an annoying person not annoy you.
On Stack Overflow, you can't block questions from a user showing up when you look at a tag. You can't ignore answers that they have given on posts that otherwise invoke Duty Calls https://xkcd.com/386/ . You can't prevent a user from commenting on your posts. You can't filter questions to those who have had some criteria.
The combination of all of this means that on Stack Overflow, there are only three ways to handle a user.
You can flag their comments or posts and have a diamond mod step in (note that asking poor questions again and again isn't diamond mod worthy) and note that that sometimes can take days or weeks to get resolved.
You can take your ball and go home. Quit stack overflow and go cold turkey. There are more than a few who have decided that the hassle of dealing with users there isn't worth the headaches.
You can make it uncomfortable for them to stay. Snark, veiled (and unveiled) rudeness, and similar comments. Not that this is an excuse for rudeness - but rather an explanation.
One of the things to lower the temperature and reduce the amount of rudeness is to increase the ability for a user to see what they want and be able to avoid interactions with people who they don't want to interact with.
If the python tag is getting too many new programmer questions in September asking to make a circle with a for loop, the experienced programmer can either close questions (note that some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of close votes, down vote (again, some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of regular votes, and then either ask "have you read the documentation for for loop" or leave.
Rudeness is often an established user running out of moderation tools.
And sometimes it just makes stuff up out of thin air...
At least it is easy for you to check that the code it gave doesn't work.
Actually, ChatGPT is going to be really good for helping you with finding the tiny detail in a large body of documentation, as long as their docs were published prior to 2020
I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact.
So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.
I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.
If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead.
Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead.
Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%
If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.
The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly.
My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.
With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.
Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.
I am curious to know what they think about it
Fixed to: "The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty OUTDATED answers"
Stack Overflow can be a rather harsh experience if you're unfamiliar with it and have wrong assumptions about how it works. The "wrong assumptions" part is not intended to blame the asker, it's just a fact that SO has some rules that are not obvious if you're used to more forum-like sites.
I still find SO very useful, and I have no issue at all with getting questions closed. I may have received a downvote or two that I found unwarranted, but not more. And you don't always get an answer, but that is not that surprising for more specialized questions. It's still the most useful general purpose site for programming questions for me.
Not really happy with how trigger-happy SO is with closing questions based on wrong assumptions in general. But in this specific case, it feels very justified.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...
I won't say that Twitter and StackOverflow are exactly alike, but to quit a website I also find that I have go "cold turkey" by making it hard to enter the hostname on autopilot or click a search result. That's why I added "||twitter.com^" to uBlock Origin on both my desktop and mobile web browsers.
The early days were so much better because the toxicity had not set in.
However, my account clearly has first mover advantage. I sit at Top 0.5% without having contributed in a very long time. Both on the Question and Answer side, I have benefitted from providing answers to basic questions and asking basic questions.
1: https://stackoverflow.com/users/4960/nick-stinemates
I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K).
I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more of that to offset the overzealous folks if I find time...
I'm quite OK with duplicate close if the reference actually solved my issue. But I've never had a question outright closed on me, I'd be fuming.