Comment by 10111001
2 hours ago
> 1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
As someone who spent a lot of time answering and moderating (not full-on moderating, but editing, voting, reviewing first questions, etc) in the WordPress SE, it was jarring sometimes to see the attitudes that the real mods brought in.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
Almost feels like training an llm on that caused it to ignore certain constraints that make a problem hard and solve an easier version of you problem instead.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
>>Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.