Comment by dannyw
16 hours ago
In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment.
Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on.
I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules.
I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.
If you make a well meaning edit that was formatted wrong as a newbie, you’d most likely get a welcome note and guidance; not threats or whatnot.
It’s like “Go away until you follow all our rules and we like you” versus “Welcome, thanks for contributing to Wikipedia, here’s our rules, feel free to ask me questions or help”.
I’ve had the opposite experience with wikipedia and have stopped posting there forever.
My edits at wikipedia, for several different topics, were reverted, for bullshit reasons. One was ”the process here at wikipedia is for edits to be mindlessly reverted, then debated thoroughly, and maybe later rewritten as the mods wants it”. I.e. as a topic expert, just adding information as drive-by is apparently out of the question.
Another reason was adding anything about the future, like information about upcoming, scheduled events, was seen as advertising. It’s of course also not consistently applied across wikipedia but the mods couldn’t care less.
It’s far, far worse than SO. Complaints I’ve seen about SO’s moderation rules have always been to keep assholes away, thank god.
> I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.
I've lost count of the times that other editors insisted that I log into my account and stop posting anonymously, for committing the sin of actually understanding policy (after spending inordinate amounts of time reading back-room pages that most people wouldn't even know how to find). And I've seen countless others yelled at for not understanding it.
But imagine if 99% of people who came to Wikipedia sincerely believed that it was completely appropriate to go to the page for dogs, and edit the main-space page to ask whether Rover needs to see a vet. That's how it felt for me on the inside of Stack Overflow. I went out of my way to place the rulebook neatly in their hands and hardly anyone cared.
But the actual "culture, expectations and rules" of SO are not "if you want to know something, you can come and post as if you were using a traditional discussion forum and are not expected to consider anything or anyone outside of that".