Comment by xeromal
1 day ago
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.
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.
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
> Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.
Meanwhile, I saw so many people come to the meta site apparently completely unable to understand that a question leading off with "what do you think is the best..." (almost literally, in many cases!) is asking for a subjective opinion, that I had to make an artificial meta-canonical for it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806).
That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess
> 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.
Christ, this is actually the SO problem in a nutshell.
I'm not going to go dig through SO to refind the examples of improperly "closed as duplicate" questions I stumbled on years ago while looking up a problem.
It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play. Feel free to completely ignore my comment in that case. You win.
SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere. I'm not on SO.
Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO. Trying to make that subjective feeling technically wrong does nothing to rehabilitate SO's reputation.
> 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.
and how did that work out? the site is dead now because of it
- industry pivots to AI - SO traffic tanks - "lol, they killed themselves with their shitty moderation"
2 replies →
So is wikipedia.
> 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.