Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow | Hacker News Reader

Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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315 pointsmooreds333 comments

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case.

The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."

When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.

I rarely respond to super recent comments, but you're 100% right.

What SO didn't expect was that their real purpose was as feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them entirely.

I look forward to the day that the LLM responds to a question like the users of SO do, duplicate, didn't do enough research before asking, etc.

You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?

How can you not agree that the SO goal is to achieve whatever the owners of SO want it to achieve?

I didn’t disagree with the goal. I question the owner’s stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If latter then describing the site that way reads more like an ad. Like taking musk‘s statements on what Twitter is “for” at face value

But the stated goal is consistent with actual behavior in case of SO.

Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.

Inconsistent with community behaviors. Same with musk in that the community’s behaviors can’t be entirely owned by management

Because it's a reasonable justification. Why don't you agree?

SO is stagnant directly due to this policy.

Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful.

SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something better will replace it, not IF it will.

It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)

Time travelers preparing to travel to the year 2009 certainly find it invaluable.

What makes you think I agree? I certainly am saying what the SO owners have said. I'm repeating it here because I think it's a useful way to understand why SO is the way it is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead, optimizing around a different goal entirely.

The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.

The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.

My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.

I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer

One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer.

Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others.

The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921

SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.

That is such a perfectly apt summation of modern SO. It actually made me lol.

Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality.

Pretty common trade off in large tech these days

The problem is that you need people getting their questions answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.

If that is true, wouldn’t it be more effective to use noindex so as not to curtail interaction with the site?

> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language."

The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".

The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery.

S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.

> no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".

I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.

Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.

Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.

My favorite was one where the top answer was:

> No, there is no such feature, so I made a custom hotkey: Ctrl + `

And then a few years later Microsoft implemented the feature and made the default hotkey Ctrl + `

---

I felt a bit of trepidation editing a top answer with >1k votes, but I did it: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions

Probably they need a deprecate-answer feature instead.

Where’s your preferred JS forum?

> After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".

I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted.

I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet).

Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.

There's no such feature on SO as "answers being marked as dupes" Only questions can be marked as dupes.

But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up to date.

They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct.

But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different.

But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore.

You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.

This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions. Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it ever will happen.

I think this is the reason why the site is found so useful now. The meta board is a good read for anyone who wants to understand more or find out how to resolve their issues with the site.

Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn’t go around closing questions because you didn’t “try hard enough before asking”

I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions.

I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and I would delete my account.

They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete.

Needless to say, I no longer feed the site.

Hopefully, with more advanced AI’s we can scrape the web, organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered, skipping the searching.

Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant.

> by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant

I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama

I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close

1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conver...

This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.

Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?

Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming.

What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue.

To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community.

I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).

I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc).

[0] https://xkcd.com/979/

the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.

The site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.

the questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.

This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage

By contrast, Reddit is the exact opposite... Most subreddits that I read get several posts each day that could be answered in a heartbeat just by searching existing discussions or looking at the first result in Google. But most mods, in an (understandable) effort to be newbie-friendly, accept this as the cost of running a subreddit. As a result, most subreddits on some technical topic, are mainly populated by and useful to newbies.

It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.

Please don't turn this into ageism. I'm 45 and stopped participating on SO years ago for the same type of reasons as other people.

If we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on SO is toxic (with regard to that context).

One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all.

It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was.

But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed.

There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed.

In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments to solutions reminded me of this https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.

It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.

> What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation

They tried. It didn’t work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is:

> Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs

And here's one of the first snippets on their about page:

> Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge.

Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site.

Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:

1. Google question

2. Click 5-6 different SO links

3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap

4. Go to the documentation

5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.

I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.

IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.

I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.

It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either:

1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer.

2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer.

Neither of those are received well.

The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.

This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that.

But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.

The issue of "hoping for an answer back" is because too many people have questions and it has scaled poorly over the years.

https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day).

The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day.

But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions.

At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left.

If you look at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-... and pull up the google doc for the "community moderation in time" ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnO... ) you'll see that most of the moderation tasks that were done by the community have dropped year over year over year. That makes it harder for the good questions to get noticed and get answers since the poorly written ones remain on the site longer.

And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.

Its really nice to see the community numbers declining, I think that another site that encourages engagement rather than whatever stackoverflow is now can flourish.

If you are after engagement based Q&A, you're going to find Reddit and Facebook style systems that require a larger portion of the user base giving answers rather than "I can search it and find the answer" that Stack Overflow provides.

Those sites (and they exist now) typically suffer from having enough people providing correct answers (unless they're the type who enjoy answering what a Null Pointer Exception is again and again). You can try seeing if https://www.coderanch.com/forums fits what you are after.

The library based model requires fewer people and so scales better - but it still scales. The issue with the library based model is that the curation work needs to be relatively low friction - something that Stack Overflow has been failing at.

Depending on your reputation, the rules keep changing and you may or may not be allowed today.

It’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged.

You are contributing to the common pool of knowledge. As long as the question and answer themselves are good.

Before you can ask your first question you're shown https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice

Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.

Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.

You can take any tagline to its extreme.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632

> I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.

Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.

I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site.

To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).

I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.

Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.

> To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous.

So what do you expect? A "tagparagraph" to describe all nuances? You're all fixating on this tagline to an unreasonable degree.

As I said, plenty of people have been VERY clear about all of this right from the start, over ten years ago, and you get a full page before you can ask a question which describes all of it. Again, the communication could be a bit better, but it's not "disingenuous"; that's just a nonsense accusation; almost everyone on the site actually contributing answers subscribes to this view to some degree (there are some nuance with this).

Not wanting to answer low-quality questions or being roped in to being an unpaid programming tutor answering the same beginner questions over and over again is not "gatekeeping".

I currently have 41 reputation on SO. 1 silver badge and 5 bronze badges. Almost all of which I recently earned by answering an obscure Vim configuration question.

And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.

Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.

> I hear this strawman all the time.

Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?

> Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]:

> Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time.

Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4].

In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me.

(SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.)

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...

[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/

[4] https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-d...

[5] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-a...

[6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exc...

Jeff's announcement can be seen at https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.

Right, but you can see it’s a bit fuzzy on what the thing actually is, very possibly because they themselves weren’t quite clear about that. The feel-good wording could sort of be made to fit a forum if they wished, but ultimately they didn’t. (Or possibly the homepage of SO at the time was the place that contained the actual description.)

Part of the difficulty is that Jeff and Joel weren't in agreement for what it should be.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

Note the first revision and its author https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1

Then look at https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (both pages, but the key part is on the most recent one) with the closed, locked, and deleted actions and who did them.

The (for lack of better terms) Atwoodian and Spoloskian philosophies of how the site should be run and that fracture continue to this day with (excessively simplified caricatures) some looking to delete everything that isn't good so that they could concentrate on what was left and others trying to fix everything even though it isn't good to start with and a "we'll get around to it" for most of the content.

That the fracture hasn't been resolved and Stack Overflow corporate still hasn't really come down and said what they want it to be (though they want more "engagement" so it feels like it will be more Spoloskian - but they don't want the Atwoodians to leave).

wow, that question really exemplifies the debate here I think. It's a simple and answerable question, which will be an exremely common question from beginners. And yet it was almost instantly closed despite being posted by one of the founders of the site.

> Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?

Yes. As you mentioned the blog post is from 2008, that's 15 years ago now. Jeff hasn't had any input on the direction of stack overflow for more than a decade. From Jeff's blog post that you linked:

> I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I've had zero day to day operational input since that date, more or less by choice.

So I don't see how his blog post from 2018 has any place in the company's current mission. He says in the blog post that you linked that he had plenty of opinions, but he has chosen to not have any direct influence in the company for over a decade.

And Joel stepped down as CEO in 2019. And Joel's vision has clearly changed. This is from a blog post in 2019, which probably reflects what the current vision of SO has become after seeing what SO has turned into:

> In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]

So, yes. People are building a strawman by trying to say the rude, snarky, meaningless cruel remarks are necessary to maintain "quality" answers.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...

> > > In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]

I would contend that the rudeness and snark are a symptom of failed moderation tools.

On USENET, if there was a user who was bothersome to you - you could kill file them. Plonk and they're gone from what you can see.

On Reddit, you can block a user and you won't see their comments again. Similarly on Twitter you can mute or block a user. And again on GitHub. On HN you can click hide and collapse threads from people you don't want to see.

With all of these, you can make an annoying person not annoy you.

On Stack Overflow, you can't block questions from a user showing up when you look at a tag. You can't ignore answers that they have given on posts that otherwise invoke Duty Calls https://xkcd.com/386/ . You can't prevent a user from commenting on your posts. You can't filter questions to those who have had some criteria.

The combination of all of this means that on Stack Overflow, there are only three ways to handle a user.

You can flag their comments or posts and have a diamond mod step in (note that asking poor questions again and again isn't diamond mod worthy) and note that that sometimes can take days or weeks to get resolved.

You can take your ball and go home. Quit stack overflow and go cold turkey. There are more than a few who have decided that the hassle of dealing with users there isn't worth the headaches.

You can make it uncomfortable for them to stay. Snark, veiled (and unveiled) rudeness, and similar comments. Not that this is an excuse for rudeness - but rather an explanation.

One of the things to lower the temperature and reduce the amount of rudeness is to increase the ability for a user to see what they want and be able to avoid interactions with people who they don't want to interact with.

If the python tag is getting too many new programmer questions in September asking to make a circle with a for loop, the experienced programmer can either close questions (note that some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of close votes, down vote (again, some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of regular votes, and then either ask "have you read the documentation for for loop" or leave.

Rudeness is often an established user running out of moderation tools.

You should add an "ask chatgpt" step. Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets you close enough to be able to Google the rest of the way.

And sometimes it just makes stuff up out of thin air...

At least it is easy for you to check that the code it gave doesn't work.

> Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: > 1. Google question > 2. Click 5-6 different SO links > 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap > 4. Go to the documentation > 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.

Actually, ChatGPT is going to be really good for helping you with finding the tiny detail in a large body of documentation, as long as their docs were published prior to 2020

I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago".

I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact.

So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.

I could never to stand to play the SO game to get enough karma to be able to fully play the SO game.

SO is mostly a mechanism for spreading unhappiness, secondarily it produces a searchable corpus of answers.

In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to pipe the data.

The author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to refute their point then you really have to make the case that SO is functioning as intended despite their implicit claim to the contrary.

I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.

This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered.

If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead.

Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead.

Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%

And where do those searchable answers come from? The Sky God?

If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.

This is just the deletionists vs. inclusionists debate from Wikipedia in the 90s/00s. The deletionists are still winning and the deletionists are still wrong.

The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly.

My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.

By quality they simply mean lack of 'conflicting information' not 'correct information'.

People like to point out how incorrect ChatGPT or Copilot are, but in recent memory, SO has just been plain wrong for certain questions.

I’ve found the criticisms regarding accuracy to be curious, not only for the reason you mention, but also because the apples-to-apples comparison isn’t ChatGPT vs Google so much as it’s ChatGPT vs an expert working on a test in a faraday cage with no substantial penalty for wrong answers.

With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.

>They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language. They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."

Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.

The problem with SO is that there are a lot of "high-quality answers" that are now 7 years old. The world of technology has moved on. Yes, you can post a better answer, however, it will never get the same amount of upvotes as the original answer. If someone asks new questions on the topic, it will get dupe-hammered with a link to these ancient questions.

I agree with you, but it is not a "free" exchange. People share there knowledge and helps SO to be alive and in exchange they can get answers. Their curation should be better like pointing to the correct answer before marking it as duplicated and then blocking it. I know it is as is because people are lazy sometimes and they expect to get it ready with no effort. In that sense, chat assistants are the biggest threat to SO as it does not complain to answer the same thing a thousand times.

I am curious to know what they think about it

"The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers"

Fixed to: "The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty OUTDATED answers"

Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...

> The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO.

> The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. This one I'd argue could be trimmed down further to a SCCEE for the bug and rephrased, but it doesn't matter now since the bug is auto-patched.

> The third question has a great question set-up (formatted and straight to the point with SCCEEs) but the answer is the same as the linked duplicate so it should be closed.

> The fourth question is another straight up duplicate asking for the meaning of certain Regex characters.

I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct).

But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.

I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is that their questions are always rejected. This is true, and it remains true even if technically their questions should be rejected for valid reasons.

That's a GREAT discussion to be had... SO purpose is to be a kind of encyclopedia, so it makes sense to try to categorize duplicates (eventually fading them into obscurity). But is that the best experience for the user? Is it supposed to serve only readers, or those who are actually asking questions?

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.

You are 100% correct. SO clearly has an issue as this comes up time and time again.

I wonder if a ChatGPT like front for it would serve everyone better?

Yeah, probably. Even doing the modding in real time would help, I think:

"Your question appears similar to these other questions, do they answer your question?"

"Your question appears to be a rant, and doesn't actually ask a question. Is this true?"

"Your question is easily solved: you have mis-spelled this configuration setting. Would you still like to post it?"

Yes to all.

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.

I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how rarely they provide links to the questions?

If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the primary evidence?

Ask, and ye shall receive:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968

The main post[0] you go on about in there is a badly formatted question: It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links. It doesn't surprise me it got close votes.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75361518/accessing-an-io...

> It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links.

The question does not rely on external links. The links just provide optional additional context (about how to use a custom URL scheme and what DRY is). The question has the ios, xcode and swift tags, so even without the links, it is pretty clear what the asker is looking for.

Hey, no big deal. It's all good.

SO has made it clear that they don't want "my kind" participating, so ... I won’t go, where I’m not wanted. Life’s too short.

That question was a bit of a "trial balloon." I'd pretty much written SO off.

* pop *

Problem solved.

Just S’s and G’s, might want to take a gander at some of the other (over 100) questions I’ve asked. They are not all perfect, so there’s plenty of ammo.

I don't see what's not to like about the interaction on that URL scheme question (apart from the close vote), it looks like you got a perfectly good answer in 10 minutes.

Am I just missing the condescension here? Maybe something that's been removed or I'm not looking in the right place?

SO definitely has issues but I just don't see it on this one.

It's a matter of tone, and how the question was answered.

I know it could be different. It has been different.

NBD. I won't be going to that drywell for water, anymore, so it's fine.

I was dealing with something, yesterday, that is exactly the type of thing that I would have gone to SO for, in the old days (customizing the Contacts Editor), but I don't really feel like dealing with the agita, for what would really be nothing more than a little vanity chrome on my app. I'll probably figure it out, if I really want to. I always do; it just takes time. What SO has done (in the past), was give me actionable and correct answers, very quickly.

It hasn't done that for me, for a while.

That may be true, but the problem is real. It's not their question (nor mine), but here's an example I came across a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21178182

Unfortunately, there's no way to vote against closing a question. All you can do is vote to reopen it after it's closed.

IMHO question closure should be a vote left to the community and not one angry moderator. Where people browsing questions can vote on whether it is a complete duplicate or still provides value to the reader.

That’s not really fair. The UX of the site is actually very persistent in reminding you how to post a good question and listing suggested duplicates. When posting questions with low reputation you can’t bypass these reminders without clicking accept several times.

Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted me!!". And people either refuse to give examples (because they know they're lying), or when responding it's quite obvious why they got the reaction they got.

Mind you, I believe SO could be more friendly. But if you've tried moderating and being active there, you quickly understand the bluntness. With hundreds of useless questions being posted an hour, you quickly get jaded. Like, I genuinely want to help people there, but when you spend literally no effort asking your question you're not getting much in return.

I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just an endless sea of low effort shit.

Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...

"Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.

They didn't answer my question, so I don't regard them as dupes. I had my question answered in Discord or IRC somewhere, I forget exactly where.

I would say based on the linked conversation that they linked answers do answer your question. Or at least, from an outsider perspective, they should have allowed you to reach a workable solution (though maybe without directly answering you actual question).

I've had similar questions where I'm told it's a duplicate or that the error message says exactly what the problem is, but I'm just so uncomfortable in the language that I can't recognize it. It feels really bad when people roll their eyes and link you (or tell you to go back to the documentation, which is the ultimate "fuck you" from someone you've asked for help) to something that you also don't quite understand. If I "got" it I wouldn't be here asking this question.

A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly, blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no answer to the new question.

Moderators like to close questions and link to questions/answers posted by them. (Possibly hoping for upvotes) I guess this could count as petty corruption.

There are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who struggle to tell if an existing answer is an answer to their question or not. They might copy something verbatim from an answer and have it not work because their shell is configured differently, there's a separate bug in their code, or even because they accidentally copied a PHP code snippet into a Javascript file, and whether through laziness or genuine confusion, they simply post the errors back to SO saying the answer doesn't work for them.

People these days are taught to always seek help as soon as they encounter difficulties, and I think they feel like as long as they're asking for help, then they're doing the right thing and deserve to have their problem solved. But when they need somebody to work through multiple issues with them, in multiple layers of their setup, and there's quite a lot they don't understand that's unrelated the concrete question they posed, then that crosses the line of relevancy to the question asked, as well as the line of what most SO contributors are willing to do. Most people who answer a Stack Overflow question do it because they're happy to take a few minutes out of their day to share their knowledge, not because they want to a second job as an unpaid private tutor. If someone needs that level of support, then they should ask another developer on their team, ask a teacher at their school, hire a tutor, etc.

Obviously there are a lot of circumstances where it's good to give back and give someone a little bit of extra help, but if you need someone to help you debug your Dockerfile, that discussion doesn't belong on a question about Python asyncio, and it doesn't justify posting the same question again and again because copy-pasting the original answers didn't solve your problem.

As someone who mostly just runs into SO through searches and rarely asks: I want to see these duplicates thrive, I want to see the ideas. It's so common that the first SO thread is useless but that a near duplicate does actually provide me with the answer I need. Unfortunately, near half the questions I land on which I feel might actually help me are shut down, which is not just a complete waste of an opportunity but also a waste of my time.

idk, I've often answered old questions with newer/better answers that get far more upvotes than the one OP chose back in the day as new people land on the question.

Trying to canonicalize dupe questions into one makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, good answers would be scattered across duplicate questions which is quite a large trade-off as well.

We have only these descriptions but not the answers them self, grain of salt is applicable, possibly not in small quantities.

Yes, the questions are now gone, but the person who replied went through the trouble of linking the questions in the first place so we didn't have to take their word for it.

You can even read the questions from the URLs: "/meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex" C'mon.

This is a common trope with people complaining about SO, so it's not surprising they had terrible questions. Nobody likes to admit when their questions are bad.

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered my stupid questions from years ago like "why does my program crash when I put a 1MB object on the stack" and "please make this CMake setup work for me," and if they didn't, they point me to a duplicate question that does. Just set aside your ego, fuck karma, and you'll be fine. I really don't see how people can find this site toxic.

It really REALLY depends on how you use SO and what "sub overflows?" you're using.

Some of them are quite active and fun to work with, others are brutal. And it also depends on how much effort you put into your questions, also.

But any complaining that goes beyond "googling my question doesn't get me my complete answer anymore" should include examples of when it failed, because often people complain who just wanted SO to do their legwork for them.

I kind of wondered about that, too - I've asked a few questions on SO and never had one removed. Not all of them ever got answers, but I don't think any were ever removed or even downvoted.

Me neither. But I think to ask a good question (on SO or to a more senior colleague at work) is a skill itself. Most people don't have it. Even most developers don't have it, which is somewhat surprising.

Also this skill is not taught actively, or at least not widely.

So people end up asking these poorly worded or poorly aimed questions. And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when using SO).

> And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when using SO).

I've never asked a question in order to know what the question guidance is like, but _undoubtedly_ there is a well written "how to ask" page <https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask> and (one that I cite in comments so often I have a bookmarklet for it) the "please rubber duck your way to the question before vomiting into SO" that used to be called MCVE <https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example>

Now, saying "ain't nobody got time to read all that text, I got bugs to write!" is a reasonable response, but saying "there's no guidance on how to write a question less likely to be closed" is untrue

25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians got out of control and it no longer was about helping people but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge where most users started to be categorised as problematic to that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at expressing themselves in English.

Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking (e.g. poor English).

Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had, that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.

I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.

I lucked in to some moderator powers by posting the answer to an extremely simple and common problem in Objective-C.

Sometimes I'll go through and undo lots of those trivial "improvements" that people make where they slightly change the wording of the questions and answers.

Using quirky metaphors and swearing can be problematic for people who aren't fluent in english though. I think the removal of all greeting lines and thank you comments is a bit over the top, but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.

quirky metaphors and swearing are about top answers I've crafted to existing questions that editors are slowly blandifying until its no longer my contribution anymore. The English is about people phrasing questions poorly and the mods immediately closing them, while muggins here has crafted a detailed three paragraph answer that now has nowhere to go.

> but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.

I mean you can argue that, but I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.

Point is the founders made a choice and it was a choice that pissed some people off, so I'm answering the "I don't have a problem with SO" comment to point out that I did because their choices made me dislike contributing.

I also think immediate closing is bad because it can waste your time like in your case. Maybe some grace period before closing would help, then closing also wouldn't be perceived as so bad

> I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.

Dictionaries can be difficult to read but I would compare SO more to Wikipedia in its writing style, which is very readable. Wikipedia is much more strict and without those style guidelines it would be way less useful.

> Point is the founders made a choice

Unless you mean recent choices, I would say the founders choices made SO so successful. There are a lot forums/platforms that are better suited for getting help, were discussions and expression of individual personalities are welcome and beneficial for community building. But at the same time those forums mostly help the people who are asking questions, but not people who google their issues, because long threads are less searchable and answers are harder to find. That's were SO shines, it scales because it prioritize people looking for answers instead of people looking for individual help. I too used to contribute in such forums, but knowing the limited reach of my answers there, I stopped helping individuals and choose to contribute to the much larger audience of SO (even if that means being subject to occasionally questionable mod actions or a few downvotes)

> librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking

By the way, if you don't want your answer go to waste in this situation and the question was on-topic, you could open your own question (reword the original question if it wasn't clear) and then immediately self-answer it.

About half of my questions are self-answered. Many because I found a solution before anyone else answered. Some because I found a solution while preparing a question but didn't submit it yet (this happens quite a lot to me). Some I even planned as self-answers from the beginning, when it took me a lot time to find a solution an issue that wasn't on SO yet. All of those questions were well received.

I agree. SO is great because it doesn't try to please everyone. It's for professionals not to build your whole app for you.

There seems to have been a swell in beginners learning to code perhaps due to economic motivations rather than curiosity. These people seem to want SO to do their homework for them without having done any leg work themselves. I can sympathise with people trying their best to find the answers but lacking the domain vocabulary to find the answers; Usually closed questions point them in to the right place anyway. However a lot of the questions are 1) duplicates or 2) high level questions for which there isn't a definite answer it's a matter of taste.

That's not what SO is for. It's your job to figure out the high level picture, learn the absolute basics of the tech stack you're working with and SO can fill gaps where information is too esoteric to find easily in docs. The questions are generally unique rather than duplicated and improve over time rather than a constant stream of crap that reddit is.

> Do I live in a different world than everyone here?

> The response time is like 10 minutes or less

I have to say, you do, and I want to live in it. I've asked detailed, well formatted, clear questions and they usually got like 10 views in a month.

I find those who bash SO to be either help vampires or generally using the site wrong (asking an opinion based question, asking newbie questions without searching or not knowing how to form the right search queries, ...)

Inevitably when their questions get moderated they'll feel personally slighted without dispassionate consideration of the situation (because why would they; they have a question and they want the answer NOW), thus to them SO is now "toxic".

Many just don't have the right mindset for SO, it's unfortunate.

Well, here is my question which was marked as a duplicate. I'll never make the mistake of posting a question to SO again. Total waste of my time.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...

By intentional design, Stack Overflow is a poor site to use if you need to work through multiple questions and answers to solve a problem. There are other sites that work to fill in that approach and do so better.

Stack Overflow works best when there is a well defined problem that can be reproduced and you are a specific answer rather than guidance for how to proceed or a tutorial.

If someone needs to come back to a question to answer comments and work through it, SO becomes more and more difficult to use in that format. AN important thing to remember is that it isn't the right site for every question (and trying to use it as such will run into those intentional design choices made at the very start to make it difficult to use for certain types of questions).

I don't understand your response. I asked a single very specific question. Everything else was context and to prove that I did some work on my end before asking for help.

I would have to look again, but I believe that SO explicitly asks you to post what you tried. And now you're saying that posting what I tried muddies up the value of my question. Can you see how this seems like a no-win situation?

Edit: Also, my question was marked as a duplicate. It doesn't seem to have been rejected for reasons related to asking too many questions or requiring a tutorial answer.

What you asked for was https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/60824493/1 which finished with:

> I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction.

And then in a comment:

> @Lukas, I had seen your solution, but you didn't actually explain the syntax, and I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I tried again today, and I think I have something which appears to be working, although I still don't understand the syntax.

This might have been something to work through in a more interactive form such as Stack Overflow Chat - https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/62927/2023/2/8

The Q&A part of SO doesn't work well with back and forth communication but rather "here is a question, assume this is the final form, try to answer it and move on." There is far too much material there for people to try to curate and cultivate the questions and answers too much.

> I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction.

This is standard polite phrasing indicating that I would be happy with any response, regardless of how minimal. I wasn't asking for a tutorial. I don't recall SO requesting me to strip out polite extraneous wording when I made my submission, but perhaps I missed it?

Lukas' solution didn't answer my question. So, yeah, there's going to be back-and-forth when the question wasn't answered. That's what this part was about: "...but you didn't actually explain the syntax..."

And again, my question was flagged as a dupe, not for wording or structure or back-and-forth.

You got a response - that the problem that you have is the same underlying problem as "Unwrap inner type when enum variant is known" (and two other options).

Your edit suggests that it did solve the problem, though it didn't answer the "I don't understand" aspect of the question.

If the solutions given in the linked duplicates didn't work, then specifically applying and showing how they didn't work would be the next step.

> Edit: Based on @Lukas solution, the following seems to compile, but I don't yet know whether it is doing what I want.

Stack Overflow itself is poorly suited for the "explain" type questions - especially if it is going to involve back and forth. The comments are intentionally poorly designed for that. The thing that SO comments are trying to avoid is the forum like "the real answer is buried deeply on page 10 of 15 of 30 comments per page on a phpforum". If the understanding is only uncovered after 50 back and forth comments, then the question and answer themselves are a poor fit for SO.

If you are after that type of interaction and a "here is the answer" isn't going to suffice then other formats may be better for your question. The corresponding difficulty is that Stack Overflow's framework can't be made to handle everything well. It handles Q&A well and doesn't try to handle conversations well.

Your question was marked as a dup because the solution that you are after is in those other Q&A sets.

If you need back and forth of explaining the syntax then /r/rust may be better. Alternatively, if you have something that works, get it reviewed on https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rust or if you are after a more real time back and forth conversation, https://discord.gg/rust-lang

You will note that if you are trying to find an existing match to your problem, /r/rust and discord are poorly searchable and you might have to scroll through a bunch of comments to try to get the context around the problem... and that is what SO tries to solve.

... that's because it is a duplicate. If you have a SocketAddr, and you want to access the SocketAddrV6 variant, remembering that you may also have a SocketAddrV4, you need an if let:

    if let V6(sock6) = addr {
         // use sock6: SocketAddrV6
    }

The first-linked duplicate answer will answer your question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9109872/how-do-you-acces...

Is SO really the best place for asking the most basic questions when it is covered in almost all basic documentation?

Searching "rust enum" gives me https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/custom_types/enum.... immediately.

Perhaps it is worth it to put it on SO, but it's akin to asking "how do I access the field of an object in JS".

> The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma.

For trivial questions/broad categories maybe. Ive asked a question 8 months ago for a very specific issue and it has nearly 50 views and no comments other than mine itself when i thought i found solution.

I feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example", presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.

Of course I deleted it. I'll take the issue up with the Clang people directly at some point.

Yeah, typically there is always a better place to ask a question than SO. IRC, Discord, email list, etc. - wherever the experts and enthusiasts hang out who work all the time on whatever it is you are trying to wrap your brain around.

...but then, once I get my answer on discord, I like to ask and answer your question on SO so that it's searchable.

Somehow that lone upvote after five years of silence feels much more meaningful than the popular answers do. Like I'm glad if I can save 100 people 5 minutes, but even better is to save one person a week.

> As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.

> Of course I deleted it.

It was closed to prevent guesses from being posted as answers while you worked on the minimal example, if you'd just edited it in the question would've been put into the reopen queue.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm not spending my time working on a closed question.

What I find off-putting about StackOverflow is their crowd-sourced moderation system (which I got access to at some point due to karma threshold). It’s based on pre-categorised moderation queues with flagged submissions that you can (have to) go through, and it’s designed in a way that you mostly choose from a set of pre-fabricated standard responses to “resolve” the issue. The eventual moderation decision is “democratic”, so when 2 or 3 moderators happen to come to the same result independently, then that’s what it is.

To me, that “moderation process” mostly felt like a robotic assembly line which isn’t designed to genuinely help people, but it’s primarily optimised for throughput. The frustration expressed by end-users is a direct consequence of this design that’s not really surprising.

What’s most bizarre is that the system intersperses phony test submissions every once in a while, just to verify whether you as moderator are “doing it right” (or, are still alive, for that matter).

Underrated reply. Do you have screenshots of what that looks like?

Sure:

- All moderation queues: https://files.jotaen.net/!nmezmQKFdH

- View for reviewing something: https://files.jotaen.net/!KwekXrbj36

- Popover when selecting “Share Feedback”: https://files.jotaen.net/!FgRNhhfAT8

- Resulting comment after selecting one of the canned responses: https://files.jotaen.net/!JUtTBMxApL

Last time I used this system was multiple years ago. As I just took the screenshots, it appears some things have changed compared to how I remember it from the past. Specifically: (take with a grain of salt, though!)

- the option whether to share feedback “as yourself”, I think that used to be the default back then, and the “Community Bot” seems new.

- the “custom comment” option didn’t used to be available in all queue categories.

By the way, there was no onboarding to this moderation system whatsoever, so when I reached the required karma threshold (2000 or so?), I just got access to it à la “there you go, please help yourself”.

Also, there is no way to communicate with other moderators on an issue, but everyone is just doing their own thing in isolation until there appears to be some “statistical consensus”.

It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or articles get drowned out.

Those can be answered by ChatGPT. Only question is where to integrate it into peoples' workflows. Maybe into the post-creation interface? Maybe into the SO question-creation dialog.

Interesting... I wonder if this is where knowledge sites gravitate to? Of course if the AI isn't smart enough to answer the question without it's training not having covered it, I'm not sure it would work...

What would be really cool is an AI interview. "So this looks like the same problem, do the answers here help?" "Oh, why not?" "I see, so what else have you tried?" "I see we still haven't resolved the issue, so I'm going to rewrite this discussion in our standard format and post it for our expert community to solve."

Something like that. Especially when the Chatbot then corrects the small usual mistakes it already knows by itself (as ChatGPT can).

Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website.

The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit.

That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.

more and more you have to treat "reddit" as if it were an "internet" and have a separate account for every subreddit or group thereof.

Careful. I did this more or less by accident, with a main account, a porn account, and a goof off account. I didn't maintain a list of which ones had been banned from where and there were subscription overlaps.

One morning all of them - including the one that was 9 years old and had awards from participating in the first ever reddit gifts - got banned for "ban evasion".

Now I just make a new one every few months and distrust any account that can survive for more than a few years without getting banned.

So they encourage throwaways, but also ban you for using them.

meanwhile, there are tons of people who are relentlessly ban evading, posting threats and harassing material where reddit won't do anything about about.

Worst of all worlds.

And yea, that's why read-only on reddit this days and feel no desire to contribute.

I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that work".

>I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits

Trust me, you aren't missing out on anything by not being able to post on r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/Chonkers, or r/FunkoPops

> Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems.

I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing.

What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture.

Marketing is all about creating a need so that people will buy your shit, and it does that by making you feel insecure, yet entitled. The psychological damage from having our attention constantly hijacked by this shit has caused severe damage to society as a whole over time.

Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble, break things, troll people, 'shitpost', or some combination of the above."

And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."

Thing is, if it weren't for marketing I'm not sure this idea of "spreading filth" would even be much a thing, but marketing is such a social contagion that it has destroyed our ability to relate to people in a way other than as a means to promote something.

I posted a story which provided unique background from a reputed web site on staffing decisions in one political party. It got pulled with two formal reasons both obviously wrong e.g. me having headline edited which was not the case and it also did not change in between. I took it up and wrote a polite request even providing reasoning why it was a good fit (which was not the reason it was pulled). Next thing happened was a two word message: "off topic"..

I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories are just small stories with only little life in them. Why squash them - time will rank them down - so why?

I'm not sure if there wasn't a time it was a collection of fiefdoms honestly, at least for the social web.

My reference point is mostly 2000s era internet forums, and that was certainly a time of admins of forums going on power trips over their little meaningless slice of the internet.

it’s pretty much the other extreme to SO. reddit is highly resistant to communal knowledge accumulation. everything is temporary, everything decays, and the continual churn of participants combined with a crap search engine ensures that ephemerality reigns eternally. Stack Overflow has spent most of its lifespan trying to do the opposite, and what we’re left with is this. antibodies attacking the host

Reddit is targeting late 2023 for an IPO. The end quality end is nigh for them as well.

People complain about those questions being off topic on SO, and also complain when they have to endure them other places. You can't win, heh.

I don't know what kinda person actually considers Reddit a go-to for answers. It's absolutely abysmal for that sort of thing. SO isn't perfect but it's leagues above any subreddit I've ever used. Almost all subreddits succumb to getting too popular (if they're good to start with) and eventually the amount of actual help you get from them becomes exceedingly rare in my experience.

I said goodbye to StackOverflow more than 8 years ago[1]. I was an avid fan, listened to every podcast episode as Jeff and Joel were building it and was excited for its launch.

The early days were so much better because the toxicity had not set in.

However, my account clearly has first mover advantage. I sit at Top 0.5% without having contributed in a very long time. Both on the Question and Answer side, I have benefitted from providing answers to basic questions and asking basic questions.

1: https://stackoverflow.com/users/4960/nick-stinemates

My pet Stack Overflow annoyance: the number of questions that have highly voted confidently incorrect answers or (perhaps worse?) answers that do work, but not for the reason in the confidently incorrect explanation that follows the ‘what to do’ part of the answer.

I feel like this is particularly bad for python Q+A on SO. At least it's not as bad as Quora where the top answer is invariably a grandiose answer to a different question than was asked or an excuse for some bullshit 'heartwarming' anecdote that answers nothing.

Way more often than not it seems like the first few answers are either wrong, overly complicated, or advanced RTFM posts with massive upvotes. Meanwhile the 3rd or 4th answer with modest upvotes is actually the succinct correct answer.

They only gave two examples of their questions that have been closed, and the second one is obviously of a type[0] that hasn't been allowed for over a decade (long before they made their account). Nothing bad sticks out to me from their description of their first example, but the other indicates their understanding isn't as good as they think it is.

[0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on a Q&A site where a single answer gets selected by the asker.

They only gave two examples of their questions

How many examples would they have to post in order for you to be satisfied?

It's not the amount, it's which example they gave. They insist they understand the rules, yet their evidence is something that's obviously against the rules?

Do you have a link to the rule about asking questions with only a "single correct answer"? Out of curiosity, I tried digging around and couldn't find references to that kind of rule.

> If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask

"List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime users will understand. It falls under these "open ended" questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close reason but got rolled into that when others were needed.

Here's a meta question specifically about list questions that says basically the same thing: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/139618/are-list-que...

The question mentioned by the original OP was "My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout." which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from my interpretation.

I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things were different.

And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't know until it's closed".

Keep reading:

> and asked for other concrete examples.

It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.

It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.

If your goal is to come with any reason to label a question a "list question", then I don't think it would be too hard to find a way to label any potential question as a "list question" and have it closed.

A different interpretation would be that the question is about whether there are maintainability issues with a certain implementation of CSS. Which the question being potentially answered with a "Yes/No" where an obviously better answer might provide an example or two of issues that could arise.

The actual rule here is about question where every answer is equally valid, so asking for pure opinions (https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask). Questions that have multiple potential answers are valid questions in general.

There are questions that are somewhere in between, something like "which approach is better here?". Those tend not to go well on SO even though they theoretically could be on-topic. This is a case where the community is sometimes overzealous, but it's extremely hard to consistently apply these rules to complex edge cases. And many questions of this kind do not fit to the rules and are closed correctly. These questions usually require quite a bit of familiarity with SO to formulate them in a way that works on the site.

I haven't exactly had "bad" experiences on SO - but I do feel like it's generally a waste of time to ask questions on it. Basically - SO is very good at general knowledge questions (kinda ChatGPT territory) but bad at corner cases. A good example was this fiddly CSS / font question I had that had some constraints from a static site generator where you could inject custom CSS[1]. People really wanted me to accept answers that would not work for my constraint set, and I think the implicit answer is that the combination of formatting tools does not support what I want to do, but the whole thing was frustrating.

I mostly think that, once you get to a certain level of proficiency, you're going to lose time on SO rather than gain it. You will spend a lot of time crafting a detailed and clear question that does have an answer - but on balance if you just read the docs / source / whatever you'll get the answer you need faster.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66619732/can-i-write-css...

I recently silently rage quit a subreddit because it got a new moderator who is not very bright and deletes my posts as being off topic when I'm clearly on topic to anyone with a greater than room temperature IQ. I quit after several months of getting my posts deleted. I remind myself they do it for free, which was why I was silent in my quitting. The article isn't about AI writing code instead of using SO, but a follow up will probably be forthcoming.

Moderators: Can't live with them, can't live without them.

Edit: Note to moderators: If a post has garnered several thousands of up votes overnight don't come along a say it's not a good post in the morning when you wake up. You don't know more than thousands of people who have invested a lot of time in knowing their subject.

That's gotta be frustrating. I'm sure you tried reaching out to other moderators. It's almost like Reddit needs a mod committee for mods so that users can petition their cases.

I think the problem is there is a lot of turnover. I appreciate the work of most moderators to keep the quality up, but like open source, the work-for-free model comes with it's problems

It's more accurate to think of subreddits as a bunch of kingdoms with an order of succession than parliaments or such like.

Top Mod can remove bottom mod. Not vice versa.

> bunch of kingdoms

Funny that many of the sidebar rules read like decrees from a King

I enjoy answering questions but like the poster, I kind of hold my breath any time I do.

Toxic downvoting is not just a question thing. There are people who will downvote any and every answer even a correct one to a question they feel is unworthy of an answer.

I think a big problem is voters are not shown and verified. If you upvote or downvote a post your id should show and you must provide a reason why the vote.

It might likely need to be an additional thing and phased in.

Current voting can carry on as is, but 'verified voting' would be a secondary mechanism, and... over time people could choose to ignore the non-verified votes, or the non-verified votes could be phased out altogether.

I like the simple up/down vote mechanism, but it definitely seems to be abused, and I would prefer more weight be given to votes with a public reason. Votes without an explanation should end up weighting less.

can you imagine if HN had the gumption to offer the same? would solve so many issues.

Perhaps downvotes should not be allowed at all.

How would you distinguish between "poor quality" and "just hasn't been viewed by many"?

Well right now on all social networks downvotes are used to silence others and in no way is indicative of quality.

HN seems to due alright. Things people engage with "bubble up".

Stack Overflow isn't a social network.

Whatever may or may not be the case on HN doesn't really have much bearing on Stack Overflow as they're radically different sites with a very different purpose.

If a 20k rep user answers a no-effort-clearly-duplicate-off-topic-question to get some more points, instead of using the moderation tools and pointing the asker in the correct direction, I gladly down vote.

I think SO has very distinct culture and it is a notoriously hard-moderated platform. It attracts a lot of like-minded people for the various exchanges and you can get a kick out of it if you're also extremely passionate on certain topics.

But outside of that, I treat SO mostly as a dictionary/reference. The whole points and reputation system isn't for me, but in this case that's how SO works and without this system it would be yet another lame Q&A platform that's riddled with spam and bullshit information.

I can see leaving the platform or not using it at all, but I wouldn't block it from Search.

> "SO was incredible when it came out."

Amen to that.

> "That begs the question, what fills the void?"

ChatGPT or another language model.

StackOverflow started with the vision of not being what made Experts Exchange so terrible - that was a brilliant plan at the time and SO did many things very right.

Now, many years have passed and not only have we seen SO grow into the whole plethora of QA sites that are Stack Exchange but also a couple of other QA sites. None of them are great, none of them are nearly as useful as the original SO was. I think it is save to say, that this approach simply does not scale.

I might be wrong and maybe, some day, someone comes around and nails QA at scale. My bet is that with ChatGPT the humanly curated QA site is as dead in the water as the humanly curated web directories were when Google came around.

My experience on SO has been overwhelmingly positive, but I can say that I observe a large difference in the behavior of other users depending on the subject of my question. The C/C++ community is the most pedantic I've experienced, with tons of people jumping in to get those answer points, but also some fussing over question edits, tags, comments, etc. But I don't mind pedantic; they're also the most active, and I don't remember the last time I had a question that was left unanswered.

I've improved my ability to ask focused, clear questions over the years, and that has led to a higher likelihood of getting answers. When I was a student still learning how to code, a lot of my questions would be left hanging, but looking back I think a lot of that was asking unclear questions, or not using the right keywords, or not even understanding what it was I wanted to ask (some was due to asking questions about arcane stuff used only in academia). Overall, I'd say that learning to use SO well has been largely a matter of improving my technical communication skills.

Just wanted to give a word of support for SO. I love that site, I've used it for over 10 years now, and I look forward to having a place to go for technical help for the foreseeable future. It's gold for googling issues, but I can always count on a community there to help me craft another piece of "internet documentation" to help me and the next person.

In my experience then preferred place is now Discord which is awful because it's not indexed by search engines. But at least there's a chance that your question gets answered, or you get pointed in the right direction.

This is such a foreign experience to me. I've been a member of SO for 13 years, and I've asked 24 questions.

I've had one question downvoted[1] which I'm a bit annoyed about (I misunderstood the documentation terminology - but I don't think that is an uncommon problem).

My only other bad experience was when I had a buggy version of a library and an error in my question[2]. Someone solved the error in my question after I had already edited it to fix that and wanted their answer accepted even though that didn't solve the problem I was having.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43889952/what-shape-inpu...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63256952/pil-image-from-...

"Stack Overflow is a toxic cesspool that is utterly useless outside of historical answers. That begs the question, what fills the void? It seems like Reddit, mostly."

The irony is too much. Reddit is wildly toxic. Though, there are a few good communities. With that being said, SO isn't super useful when languages like Python have awesome documentation.

I'd really, really like to see links to specific questions that were closed for allegedly bad reasons. These posts complaining about SO almost never contain them, so we're only getting half the story.

Stack Overflow can be a rather harsh experience if you're unfamiliar with it and have wrong assumptions about how it works. The "wrong assumptions" part is not intended to blame the asker, it's just a fact that SO has some rules that are not obvious if you're used to more forum-like sites.

I still find SO very useful, and I have no issue at all with getting questions closed. I may have received a downvote or two that I found unwarranted, but not more. And you don't always get an answer, but that is not that surprising for more specialized questions. It's still the most useful general purpose site for programming questions for me.

At least for this specific case, you hit the nail on the head. Here is a comment[0] from the reddit thread that found the actual questions (that the OP asked on SO) and explained in very clear terms why they were closed.

Not really happy with how trigger-happy SO is with closing questions based on wrong assumptions in general. But in this specific case, it feels very justified.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good...

In the beginning, I've had questions downvoted. But after a while, I learned how to ask questions. I can say that this is not something I struggle with.

One issue I did have recently was with having one of my questions deemed a duplicate. And it was a duplicate if you only consider the fix or root cause. But the original question did not have the error message that i was getting, and hence never came across the original. Hence I did not think it was a duplicate. In time I was able to get the duplicate label removed, and the question opened back up.

I love SO. And I'm saddened by the OP's experience. I can imagine how frustrating they must feel. Hopefully, posts like this can lead to positive change.

If the other question solved your problem, it's considered a duplicate. However, a duplicate isn't necessarily bad, and getting your question closed for it shouldn't be taken as a slight. It's just another angle (as you had a different error) to get to the same answer.

But the original did not have the error message in it. So one would not come to that answer if they are searching for the error message. That's why I wanted it opened back up. Not because I thought it was a slight. The fact that after a short period of time my question got 10k views and a gold badge shows that people were coming to my question which had the error people were searching for.

So why does this matter? Well SO runs on points. If its ok to remove points from SO and still have a functioning site, then yeah I agree leave it a duplicate. But if SO's point system does matter, then leave it open and allow it to generate points for the person who asked the question that is helping many people stuck at the same place.

I haven't used SO for about 4-5 years now.

In the past, it was the first place I'd go. The last few questions I asked were downvoted and closed or told to reference answers from another question that didn't have anything to do with what I was asking for. I just gave up on it being a useful resource when I got stumped as a developer based on the last few questions I asked.

The last few years I've gotten better answers from Reddit, Discord and various forums I visit from time to time. I've even started using ChatGPT to get answers which has worked surprisingly well.

I don't want to say its outlived its usefulness, but even the small dev circles I run in, none of those people have used it in a while either.

Unfortunately this doesn't really have much to do with StackOverflow, beyond it having the success that gives it

a) A large community.

b) Unpaid moderators who include people and cliques who feel self-worth in gatekeeping and other forms of "power".

It's always been this way in most fora; the more success, the larger the community, with a corresponding increase in inappropriate moderation.

See also, Wikipedia, Reddit, everywhere else of this ilk.

HN's acclaimed moderation - apart from being in a much smaller community, doesn't fit that model at all; perhaps it's not scalable though.

Yeah, there's probably a limit to how much dang can be scaled.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

These types of posts annoy me. I constantly see people talking about SO being "toxic", or closing perfectly good questions. And yet these people never link to specific examples.

Why is that?

Part of it may be that there’s nothing to link to. I received a toxic welcome in Stack Exchange comments just this morning and checking it now the whole thread is gone as if it never happened.

I was curious if these are captured in the Stack Exchange Data Dumps <https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19579/where-are-the...> but while researching that, I found https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow and at least according to my "select * from comments where userid=$my_user_id" the answer is no, they're straight-up deleted

What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and attributing it to me.

For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they locked the post.

So yeah, despite being top 5% in the world, I stopped answering questions on the stupid site.

That sentence is redundant noise on the page. Show your appreciation by upvoting answers instead.

Being polite is "noise" in the real world too. It just so happens that the noise serves to lubricate the interactions of humans by adding the frills of niceness and respect.

No it's not. Being polite is human. It exists in every culture in some form or another. And besides, who are you to judge anyway?

I think it's highly dependent on the individuals in the various programming language communities on SO. I've found answers to my Rust questions to be very helpful and welcoming, while I'm not sure I've ever managed to avoid a Golang question being downvoted (disclaimer: I write far more Go than Rust). Most languages are somewhere in the middle in my experience, with the default being not getting an answer at all.

That said, as a search resource for common problems SO is invaluable.

I wonder if the amount of reputation had an outsized effect.

I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K).

I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more of that to offset the overzealous folks if I find time...

Counter-ancedote: my 13 year old, 9K rep account gets the same treatment as original poster. I've given up on participating (after latest and particularly upsetting episode of "question not good enough"), and use the site only through google. Shame, it used to be easy access to expertise.

Interesting, can you reopen your own questions?

I'm quite OK with duplicate close if the reference actually solved my issue. But I've never had a question outright closed on me, I'd be fuming.

I had a lot of angst against stackoverflow for years. Eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that while I hated how I was treated there, they did somehow manage to create an incredibly powerful tool that helped me in my career. I had to come to terms with the fact the policies I hated somehow also helped make top-quality answers instantly accessible.

> helped make top-quality answers instantly accessible.

I wonder if it depends on what questions you need answering?

I stopped using SO because I couldn't find good quality answers to my questions (to be clear -- I'm talking about in their database, I wouldn't dare to actually post a question on SO). But the questions I have tend to be obscure or difficult ones, because I don't need much help with the easier ones.

It's also a bit irritating when I find someone else has asked the same question, but they were either left unanswered or the answer was incorrect.

I am on SO for 14 years and collaterally accumulated some 200k of rep.

I am an amateur dev and SO helped me tremendously to overcome problems that are obvious after some time. But at the time they were blocking.

Some questions I asked were brilliant :) and some were nightmarish. SO usually got it right.

Except some of the tags that are toxic to the point I do not even try to ask a question there because of the immediate down votes and patronizing. I am looking at you Golang (Go).

It would be better, I think, if the rep of the asker was more prominent. Voting down a question that *I* think is useless when asked by someone with 20x my rep is an indication that maybe I am wrong.

Also I never understood what the downvote is for because the description tells about quality and usefulness, but it is often actually used to say that you do not agree. Requiring a reason for the downvote may help.

This is slightly off topic, but still related to SO, Reddit, or whatever community out there that is being used for getting any kind of help:

Most people doesn't know what they are trying to solve or achieve. And/or they don't know how to phrase themselves correctly.

Look at /r/Unity3D, which I frequently visit, and you can see _tons_ of duplicate questions, with different wording, because the OP doesn't know what to search for to find the solution to the problem at hand.

I see the same thing in SO as well, which is why I have also disregarded that for problem-solving information. I'm back to finding out stuff the hard way; reading the documentation and use my 30-year old programming knowledge to sort it out.

Sometimes I share my knowledge on f.ex. /r/Unity3D, but often gets downvoted because it's illegal to use _anything_ that GCs in a simple ping pong game. So you need to use difficult to use data structures instead.

SO has an additional problem the article's author doesn't get to: high-voted answers that at the time were relevant and correct, but are not relevant now due to time passing and Microsoft aligning Windows to fit their current direction. I reckon this problem exists for other technologies that change with time, too.

Indeed, I was recently looking for some information, and all the SO results I turned up were for the language in question as of 2011, and found to be inapplicable.

I've had the same sort of experience. This leads me to believe SO could age off answers, or maybe even questions, and everyone except history buffs would benefit.

I just contribute questions and answers on the respective communities of the libraries and languages my question is about, which often have way more helpful and normal people. The moderation power of SO attract the horrible people and the abusive snark you get on the platform is just not worth it.

This is the way

I have pretty much the same stats as the OP, with 28 questions over 8 years.

I haven't had many questions closed, but there hasn't been one time where it was not legitimate, and the linked question didn't answer my problem.

The OP linked a few questions that got closed, and while we cannot see the content, we can see from the URL that it's pretty obvious they are very searchable questions that are obvious duplicates or do not fit SO:

- "meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex"

- "any-reason-to-use-grid-for-mobile-andn-desktop-views"

- "regex-matching-behavior-between-char-class-and-eol"

- etc.

Not only that, but those questions were not just closed, but were actually deleted, which indicates not only a problem with the content, but also big problems with the format.

StackOverflow ain't the problem here.

I don't see the rationale for closing questions. If they're bad questions, downvote. If it's a duplicate, put an answer linking to an answer to the other question. Closing cuts off the possibility that someone might actually provide a useful answer.

> It's been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn't closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted for good measure

sigh.

How can these kinds of jarring experiences be eliminated?

This was my experience years and years ago. I think the quote was:

"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"

This just made the site about as interesting as hanging out at the DMV. (actually, the DMV might be more interesting, because it's full of people)

It's a Q&A site, not a meet-and-greet.

Yeah, I don't need a social network, but the question asked was a really good question, and the answers were USEFUL.

My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer.

I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar pit. But sometimes there aren't that many options. You get 5 different opinions and you pick the best one for yourself.

I've sometimes thought there would be a place for a "Stack overflow overflow" site - banned on SO but allowed on SOO.

The difficulty is that questions that solicit opinion based answers often become unnaturally popular and difficult to moderate.

Consider https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorit... and the "is another answer going to be useful?" Or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-...

The "no opinion based questions" is a clear line that can be drawn (rather than other squiggly lines that are more difficult) that reduces the overall moderation workload.

You'll note that https://mathoverflow.net allows such questions - but they have many fewer questions per day and a much higher percent of the userbase performs moderation actions. This means that you can allow for that additional workload (which is a few questions rather than hundreds or thousands) to be spread across a larger part of the site's users.

If you want Stack Overflow to allow such questions, then get 1% of the user base to close questions that should be closed every day so that the moderation tasks on them don't get too heavy on too small a group of people who would eventually say "we're not carefully moderating this anymore and instead not allowing those questions at all."

That (plus "culture"-style questions as in the sibling reply) was pretty much the original purpose of programmers.stackexchange.com but it got taken over by people who didn't like these open-ended questions. After some years with them banned, it was renamed to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

Those questions were inherently difficult to moderate and that was realized very early on that such a site wouldn't work. For such to work, it needs many people who are actively moderating that content rather than just showing up to add fun quips.

https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/

From the SO Blog:

> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:

> Software Engineering

which was posted three months before it was out of beta ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... ).

I would contend that the 'it got taken over by people' is not representative of the history as it would have gotten shut down by Jeff and Joel if it didn't clean up its act.

Is this just a recent thing? I've had an SO account for years. Have only asked a handful of questions but they've never been closed.

What I found annoying was that a lot of the time I never got a helpful answer, and ended up solving it myself a few days later. I then went back and answered my own question (which ended up being helpful for a bunch of people and it got a lot of points).

What about the rest of Stack Exchange? I once asked for help identifying an insect and got pretty helpful answers there (bit of a segue - I ended up breeding a colony of those insects and still have them to this day).

Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached.

I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.

I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments.

Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped.

I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them.

I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.

You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR" questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality of the questions goes down, the discouragement for the answerers goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer" questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).

14 years, 5 months, 71 answers, 7 questions, ~5.6m people reached. Top 10% reputation overall.

The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not conducive to community.

And here we are.

I have had the same experience with programming SO. Anything you ask no matter how specific, novel, and well researched and written just gets insta-downvoted. And there are people who dont seem to know anything about your question's topic just spamming useless answers all day.

I posted a question on physics SO recently though.. and it wasnt a good question. It was a complete noob question, but the thread it spawned was amazing, and my question was answered incredibly satisfactorily in multiple ways.. I even gained karma by asking the question.

The difference is shocking.

It's been hostile for years. Lately I find that I'm getting actual answers from there less and less. Not sure what can be done apart from a decisive change in community engagement from the top down.

What has struck me was how many times the top answer to a question on S.O. has been utterly, pitifully wrong. That alone has gotten me thinking about whether S.O. is actually a force for good.

> I've finally decided to cancel my SO account, to add it to my hosts block list, and to block SO results from Google using an extension.

I won't say that Twitter and StackOverflow are exactly alike, but to quit a website I also find that I have go "cold turkey" by making it hard to enter the hostname on autopilot or click a search result. That's why I added "||twitter.com^" to uBlock Origin on both my desktop and mobile web browsers.

Don’t forget all the Nitter proxy sites: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

I do understand the frustrations of SO. All laid out with good examples by OP.

But the point :

> I've finally decided to cancel my SO account, to add it to my hosts block list, and to block SO results from Google using an extension.

This feels like the OP is just being spiteful. Love it or hate it, SO is a significant aid for developers and engineers of all levels. Simply blocking it because of some bad experiences trying to contribute seems really petty.

My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"

I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers.

The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted.

The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post—which they wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth, the rationale for these awful edits.

The user argued that “you” is not used in good, professional documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of “you”.

Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with anyone, saying that “standard C” only referred to the current C standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer “standard”. The user would insist upon removing the C tag from any question about C90, for example.

The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible users.

Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that are not obvious and clear improvements.

If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.

I did roll back, and the user started an edit war with me and I flagged it for moderator intervention. I didn’t see a response from a diamond mod.

You usually won't see a response, the moderator will either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.

Interesting. I dug through my inbox and was able to find the answer, and evidence of the edit war itself is gone, except for the actual edit history. The comments have been removed. (Good riddance, but the process is less transparent for me.)

The actions to warn and suspend users are kinda intentionally invisible or at least less visible. The idea is not to publicly shame the users and to let them come back and continue to participate without attaching a public black mark to their account.

So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag something except that your flag is declared valid and the problem is resolved in some way.

The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might be.

The edit thing is a self imposed problem because the site gamification for established Stack* sites mandates that people edit questions to get enough reputation for basic site functionality. Actually asking or answering a question is far too difficult for a new user, especially on SO.

I looked it up. Accepted edit suggestions are only +2 per edit and cap at +1000 for your entire account. A single upvote on a question or answer is worth 5 edits.

I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.

I have 334 answers (the last was in 2019) and only one that is popular. It's from more than a decade ago. I looked at tonight and there is was an edit on January 26. But from a glance there is nothing different from what's it's been for years. So it must have been a trivial edit.

I think this could easily be solved by removing the ability to vote on anything after X number of time units.

That would make sense if a new question could be asked after the same X number of time units. As it is, 2012 answers suggesting jQuery for any simple Javascript question are no longer relevant.

My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago

People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.

I'm not sure what your problem with downvoting is. It's not an attack on you, but to let other readers know that your solution is not the best solution. It may have been so in 2011, but readers like me don't want to be led astray if it is no longer a good solution.

Likewise for their comments.

But then you lose the ability to participate in the community because of your "reputation".

From https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation:

> Reputation is entirely optional

> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!

Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.

Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.

At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.

That's basically what I'm saying. Lack of reputation inhibits your ability to participate in the site (beyond asking, answering, and editing questions).

And what I'm saying is ... that's OK for 99% of users. I'm not sure it's a problem that it is hard to participate beyond voting, commenting and asking/answering.

This make perfect sense if one view SO as a FAQ site.

SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.

> It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it.

And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.

SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.

In unrelated topic, I’m wondering how others can resubmit the same post without being flagged as “duplicate”. I had many original submissions that were resubmitted and having more attention. For instance, this post was sent about two days ago here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873768

"My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout. I gave an example of a concrete maintainability issue..."

Don't you dare question or besmirch the viability of raw CSS!! I made that mistake on HN a few days ago.

This came as a surprise to me as I thought the tech community was well aware of what a quagmire CSS is.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

I remember SO coming onto the scene, to combat Experts Exchange.

Now, it's the modern EE.

I've never seen a duplicate question. I have numerous times seen a question I've had closed as a duplicate, but the linked to "answer" was definitely "NOT" the answer.

I never ask questions on Stack Overflow. I usually just chat with the people I know and trust in a Discord or Slack, which kind of sucks because the answers are not preserved for everyone else. I think with the toxicity of SO not getting solved, the future will be more distributed with people posting on their own blogs.

I would love to see the author's posts

Their profile was linked in the reddit comments: https://stackoverflow.com/users/8075005/webstackdev although one must have "close privileges" in SO to view their allegedly closed questions

(Programming) SO is done, and should be dismantled. Its historical answers have been indexed into GPT, and the recent content circa 10 years ago and since has been this constant fight against moderators.

I’ve had the same experience as the author, but haven’t blocked it from my hosts file. I think that I will.

Rant: I stopped flagging content on SO when my flags were moderated "unhelpful". They were not, and the content would later be removed or fixed (presumable after others had flagged it).

I do get it that moderating a site like SO is a massive effort. But there needs to be a check on rouge moderators.

The javascript and CSS community on Stack Overflow has always been toxic, interesting to see that its overflowed to being useless now.

Other programming languages on the main Stack Overflow are much more collaborative. But if you ever get into a new niche, you never know what will happen.

When is someone gonna make a new similar site without the crippling modern SO problems? I know similar sites exist, but they seem to have a tiny fraction of the users and not much activity. SO badly needs a successor everyone currently on SO can move over to.

Isn't Discord the new platform? I used IRC quite extensively for asking development related questions, but after the freenode fiasco it seemed Discord became the best place to get development questions answered for a large variety of languages and frameworks.

The "problem" with moderation is that it's open for debate and not hard science

The main closing reasons are ambiguous (generic), designed to cover many cases, but it became such that almost anything can arguably fall under one of them

You know sometimes it's better to find a project's slack/ discord / mailing list / forum and ask your question there. The responses will be from the most knowledgeable people online and you'll get humane treatment.

It used to be cool. A good place to ask questions (and answer them when bored).

Now it's read-only. One of many sources of answers (mostly for Linux config rabbit holes these days). Never post anything on there because it gets modded to shit within minutes.

A few weeks ago SO closed my 10 year old question as a duplicate of a 7 year old question.

I'll take help from any site, but I have no enthusiasm for SO and will not participate on the site (although I do have a lot of karma from old answers of mine).

Seriously i can't register new account on Stackoverflow. There're similar sites.

The bug is simple: You previously registered using gmail.

Now you register new account with same email but with password.

Instead of merging my account as before, they said account exist.

I mostly use other stackexchange sites, not stackoverflow, and my experience is completely opposite. I get good answers and my questions are usually upvoted. What I am missing is the ability to have a discussion.

My favorite feature of SO is their ephemeral chat system that returns 404 pages instead of useful information. It's a good alternative to forums that have been deleted and turned into SEO link farms.

Meanwhile, Old Reddit was recently shutdown.

Do not care for the New Reddit.

Goodbye, Reddit.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34885234

It still works for me. Looks like it was just a temporary problem?

I'm pretty sure that was just a technical difficulty. It seems to be up now. New Reddit is straight trash though.

Most of my questions on SO have wrong answers, didnt-read-the-question answers, no answers, my self answer, or "hey did you ever figure it out?"

I use it as my own personal knowledge base. I only post things that I have figured out and haven't been asked before, basically answering my own questions.

my most recent attempt wasn’t downvoted or closed, instead I got an ‘typo edit suggestion’ - or something to that effect - where someone had gone through and edited in about 5 false corrections to imagined typos. I did have the option to decline the edit, but it’s another example of the weird moderation culture

does anyone have insight into the moderator process that’s encouraging these behaviours?

post a link that proves what you say

Edits provide reputation when accepted and on SO specifically are about the only reliable way for new users to get reputation. Answering new questions that don't get closed is difficult, anything "easy" is mobbed by people and a single answer gets reputation and the other largely ignored or even deleted. Asking is also difficult for the reasons commonly cited elsewhere in comments. Edits are also further gamified to be accepted through review queues that give badges for stamping enough things.

Technically, trivial edits are discouraged, but there's nothing enforcing that publicly.

On the math stack exchange site someone will harass you if your question might possibly be a homework question. Infuriating.

I posted this comment, a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910

It was part of a larger discussion on SO.

In it, I mention an exercise:

Here's an exercise: Go to Meta, and suggest that people applying for positions of authority have at least a 10% question-to-answer ratio.

If anyone were to do that, they would be attacked and downvoted. Possibly banned.

My only advice: Karma is for burning.

Anything you post on Stack Overflow gets automatically downvoted no matter what.

Perhaps your code is ... compost? headduck

reddit is a lot more frendlier so I'm using SO mostly read only.

Quora is the better variant of SO. Not the toxic cesspool, that SO became.

But same mailinglists are much worse.

I find Quora difficult to navigate when I’m searching for an answer to a question. That’s my main issue however, I also don’t like the constant pay wall restrictions I feel I come up against frequently on Quora.

I haven't used SO for anything other than a read-only reference for probably over a decade at this point. It's always seemed incredibly hostile to me. But it's also about the only place you can find the answers to esoteric programming questions, especially specific error messages, so I keep clicking the links if they come up in a google search. But if I could do my job without using it, I would.

soon maybe the same will be said to reddit?

Unlikely. Reddit has subreddit built right into the ecosystem, so if r/developersneedanswerstotoughcodingquestions gets taken over by an SO style mod mob, you can just go start r/fucktheolddeveloperreddit and the cycle will start new.

Reddit has a lot of flaws, but stagnation isn't exactly one of them

Exactly my experience:

1. ask a question isolating and narrowing down my issue as good as I can

2. marked as a duplicate providing a link with an issue, which is loosely related, but does not solve my problem

3. start explaining / defending in comments why question is not a dupe

4. stays marked as dupe

5. give up and feel disappointed for the time and effort investment

Anecdotally, I've had an interesting experience on SO for a few months after I was fired from a small web shop in Boston. Literally every question I asked across the SE ecosystem was serially downvoted and/or had "request for closure."

That's when I stopped looking at SO as a place to get help. When ChatGPT came out, I loved asking it SO-esque questions and not dealing with elitist/asshole humans.

In the long 40+ year history of "social networking" (with that term construed broadly to mean "anything where people contribute") the most stale, boring, pedantic debates have always been "does this message belong on this forum?"

Besides SO have gotten that way, it's why almost no one wants to contribute to Wikipedia.

You could almost graph the decline of a forum as directly proportional to the percentage of content that debates that question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com