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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it works anymore. I was very engaged in Stackverflow a few years ago (got ~55K reputation) but stopped using it (not sure why). Now, last week I opened a question in ServerFault (where I got ~100 reputation or so) and my "silly" question was just answered with "what are you asking? Please ask the question the right way".

I didn't even bother fixing my question. I deleted all my stack exchange accounts.

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Is there some reason why people are so extremely rude on StackOverflow?

I understand sometimes questions can be worded poorly or miss out important pieces of information, but moaning at people (often those new to the site) to do something the right-way seems like the wrong approach. Most people don't spend all day on StackOverflow and know the "correct" way to format a question.

They encourage it big you do the peer moderation you're told to check for that.

Right from the start the idea was not to have just a forum with questions and answers but a curated repository of knowledge. There would therefore be an active moderation. Duplicated questions would be closed, out of topic ones would be deleted, questions/answers could be edited,...

This ended up in a culture of active and sometimes heavy-handed moderation that 's now part of the DNA of the site.

The "goal" of StackOverflow is not to best serve the individual who posts a question. Their goal is to best serve the individuals who find the answer to their question without needing to post.

Once you look at it from that frame, it makes sense why they are harsh against poorly worded or duplicated questions. They aren't trying to aid any specific individual, just the collective.

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