Congrats. Despite all the complaints about the nastiness of their mods, they’ve generated billions of dollars of programmer productivity to the world.
I didn't downvote your comment but I think it would be better if we don't phrase it in a "us vs them" manner such as "their mods".
The mods are _us_. The mods are mostly unpaid fellow users that passed a points threshold[1] to do certain admin tasks. E.g. 3000 points to cast "close votes" isn't that high.
If we don't like what the "mods" are doing, maybe that old saying is relevant: "we've met the enemy and the enemy is us."
So many of the low-effort questions and answers belong in forums or IRC channels, or just ask your colleague, FFS. Or, you know, read official documentation? Get an understanding of the subject before you start making posts and just wait around for an answer. But I guess people could actually learn something, then.
Learning is not what many developers seem to use SO for, they just want a quick fix. Something to copy-paste. It leaves them with no understanding and increases the shittyness of code everywhere.
We need a higher bar for programming. If you can't get your work done without SO, you should be fired.
SO could have easily been both but people just overly fixated on the concept of building a perfect library of knowledge.
"Despite all the nastiness of their mods, they’ve generated billions of dollars of programmer productivity to the world, but who knows how much it could have been if the moderation was done better?"