Comment by somenameforme
2 hours ago
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.
A big part of the picture was that they'd gamified the heck out of it. Community moderation can work, somewhat, but I've never seen gamified moderation work. Gamification is the big killer of collaborative communities.
I think you got it in one.
The one thing that always struck me, was that most (not some) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.
Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on shipping software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.
I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.
Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.
I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also all profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.