Comment by kstrauser
13 days ago
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.
Now:
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.
[...]
Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"
You can just... ask it not to do that
No it isn’t.
Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.
In fact, duplicates with different approaches over time and different ways of being asked is REALLY good for LLMs
And they made it easy by linking duplicates together
Stack Overflow had two main value propositions for me. Either questions about standard way/community agreed way to accomplish something which has multiple aproaches, like "what is the most common way to take out the first element or null from a list".
I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.
The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.
What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".
It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.
OMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.