Ask HN: Has anyone else had a bad experience at Stack Overflow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone else had a bad experience at Stack Overflow?

31 pointssuzzer9929 comments

I don't want to go into the gnarly details, just say I've found their treatment of me as a fairly new user to be pretty bad. The seemingly infinite list of rules are opaque. You can lose privileges with only a guess as to why. No feedback is given to a new user as to what they did wrong. And finally any inquiry into this is met with open hostility from the "meta" community.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a good/bad experience with SO.

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I've found it amusing that sometimes I'll be Googling around researching something, generally with respect to making an architectural decision (should I use library X or Y, what are the pros and cons) type stuff and on occasion I've found a really nice detailed question on Stack Overflow asking for opinions or experiences using X or Y and then there will even be a few thoughtful and really useful responses that were starting to lead into quite an excellent discussion of real wisdom coming from real world longer term experiences people have had and then the moderators helpfully show up and promptly close the question as "not constructive."

I don't think I've ever posted a question, nor really considered it to be honest.

Stack Overflow to me is a Read Only resource. Just like Wikipedia.

Trying to contribute is a waste of time as both have been taken over by power tripping mods who have zero interest in furthering the resource and instead gain some form of enjoyment from petty drama and treating users like little kids. The leadership of both seem to have no problem with this, so I search, scrape, and leave, with no account on either and no desire to contribute (despite being someone with endless spare time and a desire to contribute to resources where I can).

I personally created a stackoverflow account this year, and while not being an expert on any programming language or framework, I have still been able to contribute and answer many different people's questions along with asking a few questions myself that got some good responses.

All of this was fixed back in April (https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...).

(tongue firmly planted in cheek)

There's a big thread in the "meta" forum about this blog post: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373158/what-does-ou...

(but you need 50 rep points to leave a comment)

That almost reads as "we tried to be nicer to reach out to a wider audience, but in the process we alienated our existing community of elitest curmudgeons".

I was a very early stackoverflow user. I was excited and loved the idea. I still think it's a great idea, but I've come to abhor the police state moderation culture. To directly answer your question, yes, I completely agree that something has gone horribly wrong. I've forgotten more incidents than I can remember, but a few points I do remember: many good questions are closed; I've had questions hidden by people who (by their own admission) did not understand the tech being asked about but decided incorrectly the question was a duplicate; and I've seen some harmful cultural values widely supported on the meta pages.

My general impression is that some moderators seem to think of themselves as the gatekeepers to a promised land of knowledge, and the unwashed masses are just trying to ruin their pristine gardens, and must be aggressively pushed back. The truth is that stackoverflow can only exist because people like both receiving and giving help with their expertise. The site would be much better if it put this benevolence at its core rather than the guarded-perfect-garden model.

I tried to engage with SO when I first started programming about 8 years ago, but I think I said something someone didn't like or that wasn't technically allowed by their rules or something. I think they wanted me to ask a bunch of my own questions to get up my points. I didn't have any questions to ask. I gave up on it.

Over the last 8 years I've used answers on SO many times, as I've been directed there by Google. There have been MANY times I could have provided a much better answer or clarification than any others, but I don't because as far as I'm aware, SO still won't let me. I don't really care since it doesn't affect me, but I do like to help out others when I can. SO's loss really.

Anyone can post an answer.

Stack Overflow has always been good to me, if:

- I detail my previous attempts

- I talk about what I think is wrong, or admit that I have no idea

- Check out the documentation before, fix small syntax issues

- Provide minimal code, or additional code to provide context if its a specific problem-related issue

- Link to any other relevant issues, on GitHub or elsewhere

Basically, the more effort I put into my question, the more SO gives back.

Same here. I don't ask too many questions these days, but have always got help if I formed my questions as specific as possible, and provided relevant code.

I (try to) do some moderating each week on new user questions, and the biggest issues are: Posts don't have code in them, and are entirely too broad. Them number of times I've left the comment "please post some code" is in the hundreds.

Absolutely, it's toxic. Especially asking questions! This was very disturbing each of the 4 or 5 times I tried, on several SE sites. Only once got a helpful answer, but that was the question I cared least about. Having questions closed immediately is the norm. By people who don't understand the question. Once I was shunted between several different sites, as it was deemed to fit better somewhere else. I never bother any more. Similar to wikipedia (although toxic in a different way) - great to look at from the outside, but better not to get involved asking questions/editing - life's too short to wrangle with such people and the system they inhabit.

The best question/answer pages on there were almost universally closed for not fitting the site.

But they're a wonderful resource for googling quick answers to questions! The TeX/LaTeX one is particularly awesome - the most active people answering questions are the very same people who wrote the best books and packages.

If I can be a representative of the majority of users, I'd say I have a positive experience just consuming it, logged out.

The organization is aware of and open about this complaint - see their blog post from earlier this year.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

I've never had complaints myself, but after reading the linked blog post I've started noticing the bullies (especially in the question comments) when I'm on the site.

I’m reluctant to use SO to ask questions based on most of the responses here, and rarely have the opportunity to contribute, but I did have a surprisingly good interaction a couple years ago. I’d googles around for some esoteric solution, and eventually honed in on a 95% solution on SO. After figuring out the last piece I went to add a comment to the accepted answer with my details based on my setup, but didn’t have enough karma. So I added my solution and apologized about not having the karma and it belonged as a comment to the more complete answer, and forgot about it. Next time I’d checked back, I found someone had given me the karma to comment. I didn’t even know anyone could give karma, but it certainly wasn’t from upvotes. So that was maybe a rare nice event on SO.

Like others here I use it as a read-only resource now despite having an account. It is tremendously useful for when I get stuck and there are enough questions that generally the answer you need is on there.

I no longer contribute because the community is toxic. Some of it is due to the condescending attitudes. Look at any beginner question and see the "Why didn't you just try XYZ?" comments from self-described experts. SO has also gamified the reporting system, so people abuse the feature to flag questions. Then there are the debates within the comments about the merits of solution ABC vs DEF.

I've wanted to ask questions or provide answers but the culture was too off-putting.

Sure, and Wikipedia and Facebook. Community censorship will never work out.

Thinking about it, on the other hand Quora is excellent so far. Much higher quality, no jerks, no unneeded censorship. Maybe it's too young.

FWIW I made a meta post about my experience which I realize now that I've seen it - sounds exactly like the 'Welcoming" blog linked below - word for word. It went over about as well as you'd expect.

At least someone is aware of the issue. SO is such a great resource. I'd hate to see it die. The community just needs to take themselves and the content a lot less seriously imo.

The userbase at SO is one of the most toxic I've ever encountered. I've answered questions for people, and other users on the site treat it like an extreme competition to have the accepted answer in order to accumulate fake internet points, I guess. Got really nasty messages from some of the users and will never interact on that site again after having this happen for a few weeks.

Each board is its own Community. Making a blanket comment like this without naming the specific board is actually not that useful. I have seen some of the meta discussions by aggrieved users, and it usually comes down to something the user did without first looking up the answer themselves, trying to find the answer themselves, or even clicking on some of the suggested articles that will appear after they've simply typed a few words in the subject line.

People on this board are volunteers. Many of the boards expect you to try to solve the problem yourself before asking. When you asked, it is very useful if you spend time formulating the question correctly, so that others after you that have the same problem can understand the answers in context.

I think it's pretty safe to assume he means stackoverflow.com.

Not on stackoverflow, but on some other pages of the stackexchange networks my comments sometimed got deleted without any feedback by whom or why.

May be just me, but the quality of the answers usually sends me back to google to try another site.

If you don't post details of your SO account so that other people can go evaluate your post/comment history for themselves, then this just comes across as evidence-free whingeing, which is the worst kind of whingeing. "I did nothing wrong, honest!" is very easy to say.

I was so close to flagging this post, but I figured I'd be generous and wait to see if you come back and give any information at all.

This makes me think it is exactly the kind of attitude that makes StackOverflow unfriendly. Your concern is valid but your post feels accusatory and dismissive.

> I was so close to flagging this post, but I figured I'd be generous...

How generous, what is your SO account details?

I'm not the one who posted complaining about maltreatment.

I didn't post the details because I was more interested in hearing if others have had the same general experience vs. a big debate on the merits of my case. Seems like many have, and now that I've seen the blog post I know SO is at least aware of the problem.

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