Comment by rdiddly
10 hours ago
I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.
As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
> As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question.
That's because you were intended to use the site like GP describes, and not by asking simply because you want to know something.
> They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter.
What you consider "minutia" were critically important, because the entire point was to optimize for GP's experience.
One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.
Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.
And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
> Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
Please show examples. People arguing that XYZ is not a duplicate made up a large fraction of volume on the meta site, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it was very clear that the question was indeed a duplicate per site policy. It absolutely was not something people would do "just because these two questions related to the same library". (If it were really like that, tags would never get more than one question each.)
The goal is not that you can copy and paste code from the answer and have it work as-is. Minimally, we don't know your variable names, constants etc. and any number of other trivial details like that which perhaps shape the problem you are facing but are completely irrelevant to the question.
Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.
Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts
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> They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.
Well said. It was just something I (and I'm guessing other software devs) put up with because that was the only option. The "ask a question" button was radioactive to me having seen the kind of dogpiling onto people who were asking clearly relevant questions but breaking imaginary rules.
Plus with how much "reputation" early users had amassed just for asking basic questions constituting low hanging fruit, there was no way for any new participant to get enough rep or whatever to begin contributing back to the community. IMO they pioneered the first K-shaped economy.
I felt a little bad when I saw the graph of their traffic fall precipitously, just to be replaced with schadenfreude with the insane takes of their community moderators blaming everything but the culture they'd cultivated ("less questions is actually good, because that's the goal of SO").
In short, I'm eagerly awaiting the death of that rotten place.