Note the year. 2014 was a very different time on the internet.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
I’m 37, but I look back at the internet I don’t really remember anything feeling like an overnight paradigm shift. But, revisiting moments like this buttocks post are like relics frozen in time — and I definitely feel like things are different and more streamlined in the internet now.
The internet became a streamlined hate-filled echo chamber so slowly that I never saw it happening.
I'm not sure what happened to SO, I can imagine their intent was to improve quality and reduce duplication - both bad for e.g. Google ratings or returning users. But the funny posts made it a living community. Removing the fun parts of a site like that makes it sterile.
I mean there's still e.g. codegolf, worldbuilding or the D&D spaces that are kinda funny sometimes.
For starters, it's incomplete. Yes, "some" people think humor itself is offensive. I would wager that there have always been some people like that, since humor itself was invented. How does that relate to what happened to Stack Overflow?
To make your answer complete, you have to connect the remaining dots, and there are multiple ways to do that. Thing is, none of those ways are "obvious".
For example, you could posit that the majority of people find humor offensive today, as opposed to 2014, but I don't see any evidence that's even true, much less obvious.
More likely, you're implying that the majority of people who have influence over Stack Overflow's tone consider the humor itself offensive. If that's obvious to you, it sure isn't to me.
Are you expecting a link to a scientific study proving it, or what?
.. is what I said. Why can't you just leave it at that?
Most of this thread is humorous, or trying to be. I don't see you answering every other post in it.
Before, the Internet was mostly inhabited by people who wanted to do something specific, and were at least minimally invested - they had to actively use a computer to access things on-line. Nowadays, the Internet is inhabited mostly by people ready to judge you while sitting on a bus, because their phone buzzed them a notification that their friend retweeted a story about some stranger being outraged that some other stranger retweeted a link to your SE question.
I am tempted to think the amount I have used social media and my smartphone has actually declined since 2014, and in the case of facebook I suppose it considerably has, but I'm not sure I haven't just replaced it with other compulsive clicks. So in that sense I must agree things have probably escalated a bit, but I can't point to a single event over the past decade to create a turning point.
A main difference between {MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.} and {reddit, hn, chronological forums, etc.} is that the former heavily rely on following/friending (i.e, establishing your social network) while the latter do not. Thus, the latter are not "social media" in the sense of media existing in a social network.
Also, I find that when replying to something in the former I'm thinking about the person (I know them, in some sense) and what they said, while in the latter I'm thinking almost exclusively about what they said (I probably don't know the person). The latter lacks that social element.
What was once a bunch of individual sites, forums, chatrooms, etc., is now concentrated on a few companies (facebook, google, reddit,...), which are not that interested in content, but more into advertising and pleasing advertisers, and earning money, and advertisers, and ads and money, and less on their users.
This meant that everything had to be policitally correct (unless it was deemed acceptable to target a specific group), moderators got more powers, more thought bubbles and echo chambers... and now everything is going slowly downhill.