Everybody got what they wanted and it’s much “nicer” now (it won’t even let you comment “what have you tried?” anymore, for instance). Wouldn’t you know it, the front page is now full of low-quality, low-effort questions.
I don’t ask questions, because people take a very carefully explained, explicit question and post irrelevant stupid comments on it (“why are you doing this?”) instead of answering the question.
I don’t answer questions, because people upvote wrong answers and vindictively downvote answers to the actual question (which is why everyone posts comments instead of answering, because you can’t down vote them for it).
People care more about karma than actually helping.
The quality issues are real, but really?
I care not at all if 90k+ karma folk leave. Just leave. If you don’t like what it is, go hang out somewhere else. Why are you there if you’re not trying to help people?
What I care about is the people patiently answering questions in a way that is correct, not antagonistic, not ducking off because it took more than 5 minutes and they can get better karma somewhere else.
…almost like, a dedicated support community who care about a topic. That’s a nice idea. You could probably find one of those for your topic of interest and get help there from nice people. That’s what I do now. The folk there are generally quite lovely, because they actually care.
The people on stack overflow, by and large, are not nice, do not care and won’t help you if you have any really hard problems to solve.
An AI would be just as good, if it had decently accurate answers.
Well, this reminds me of "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle."
Failing to clean up bad questions is encouraging all the bad behavior you're talking about, since answering yet another question from someone who couldn't be bothered to write his own regex is an easy 25 points that nobody will ever look at again.
Or would those people be happier if they just had their questions answered?
The answerers with their karma; happy! The askers with their answers: happy.
The only “losers” are people who hoard their karma… because (I guess?) now other people are getting karma? …and I just do not care about those people.
The community has spoken, to the extent whether the majority of usage becomes the defacto standard, and basically filtered out all but the most basic coding issues that are just one peg above homework assignments.
> The people on stack overflow, by and large, are not nice
From your long rant, I'm not sure if you're coming off any better. To me it sounds like SO should be happy someone like you isn't contributing.
Is quite a harsh personal attack, and probably contributes to the author's feelings regarding hostility and gatekeeping.
But you're right, I should've avoided going personal.
They never said that. They said that stupid comments get posted.
I literally not do care remotely what you, or other folk like you on SO say. :)
You’re why I no longer go there.
Please see the comments under the OP. While the question is technically sound (I've needed this exact thing for a REPL I was writing), the comments are perfectly useless, self-entitled and discouraging drivel. Notable example:
> This is an incredibly odd thing to ask
(emphasis theirs). How is this even slightly odd. Are REPLs odd? Of course not.
They ask a question with some weird requirements, people ask why those requirements are in place as it makes it hard to solve, the asker explains why. Everything is good.
But that doesn't get you the sweet sweet ad money I guess. Quick Stack Overflow, make another blog post no one gives a shit about, and continue banning 90k rep users over rollback wars.
I'm kind of curious, because I've heard the line of reasoning about keeping it "clean" multiple times. Like its only purpose is to be a pristine knowledge base where every question is asked only once, and a perfect answer is selected and enshrined for all time. That's all wonderful and magical, but how does also serving it's purpose as a QA platform for new people on the struggle bus prevent that first goal?