Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators, so I couldn't care less about their "strike." I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators (a few in particular, but I won't name any names as some of them are here on HN). It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on.

The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time.

On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco

I remember I stumbled on a StackOverflow question about my API. I wrote a comment to tell the user a part of the API they were using was being depreciated, and they should change one line to avoid their code failing in the following weeks. I received a couple of ugly replies saying that my post wasn't relevant to the original question and it should be removed. I mean, I agree it wasn't the original question, but I wrote the API and I was trying to help that user and any future users coming to the page. Not the kind of place where I want to spend my time.

I'm not a heavy user like you, I've only asked about 15 SO questions in the past 3 years (ranging from C++, gcc, Linux, software architecture), none of them have been deleted, and there's always people answering.

You don't have to, but can you give some examples of good answers being deleted or good questions being closed? I'm just surprised I always see some people on HN furious at SO, and wonder why their experience is so different from mine.

Btw, regarding old questions, I always make sure I search SO before I post my question, and if any similar questions exist, I link them in my new question and say "I found this [url1] but it doesn't apply to my situation because of circumstances XYZ". This is simply good practice to show you respect the community's time.

This is my experience as well. It's not that SO is inconsistent or anything, it's just that it's a very specific place on the internet that is appropriate for a narrow sliver of material. Sometimes your personal idea of quality material aligns with SO's, in which case great! Otherwise, frustration.

Examples are pointless. For those that must feel compelled to maintain the status quo, whether they are invested or just cretinish volunteers, they would inevitably have to argue against the examples. Even if he can put his finger on one so absurdly pathological that it can't be taken out of context, they'd do an "oops, so we got one wrong, it happens once in awhile".

He's not the only one who has this impression that it happens constantly. And there are enough such people that they can't easily be dismissed as malcontents and troublemakers.

I still ask questions once in awhile... if you're desperate, there's a chance that it slips past their asshole guards and gets noticed by someone willing to help. But it's certainly unusual at this point.

Once a culture of moderation develops, moderators have to moderate just to feel like they're useful/important. They do this even if moderation isn't needed. Instead of just keeping a watch out for the uncommon problem question, they're inspecting many/most of them and looking for reasons to close/delete. It's too high of a bar, the purpose of the site is to help those who don't necessarily know enough to ask brilliant questions. Or maybe it isn't anymore.

We've cultivated an entire society of busybodies out there measure lawns with rulers, so to speak. It would take decades to roll this back to something sane.

I've had a few questions closed for reasons I disagree with but I just looked back at my history and I'm thinking it must depend on what you're asking about - most of my questions are about AWS and have received answers and upvotes (as well as wording tweaks...) but when asking non-AWS questions, that's where I've run into trouble.

I have a similar experience as dvt.

Not all, but some of my questions also got downvoted or closed. You might not be able to see them when your reputation score is too low (also somewhat stupid).

The reasons of closes or downvotes vary:

- Being off-topic for the site. Which is often very arbitrary. And I don't fully agree with what they want to have as on-topic. E.g. they don't want to ask for library or software recommendations. I understand the reasoning (might be opinionated and can easily get outdated) but there are some cases where there are canonical answers even to those, and in most cases, it's still useful.

- Or quality not good enough yet. I don't think it's a good reason to close a question or downvote it. If it is unclear, people should just comment and ask for further clarifications.

- Duplicate. Sometimes it's true, but sometimes also not, as the question ask for a somewhat different thing.

Here are some examples, linked in this post: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127617/how-much-res...

Here are some more:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69721352/pycharm-style-d...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65492932/ficlone-vs-ficl...

That's funny, I would have said that a lack of moderation in favor of being more "welcoming" was a big part of what ails the site. Seems like it's been overrun with "write my regex for me" kind of questions.

I've had enough reputation to see the moderation queue for years now. Imo, the site is anything but welcoming, as it shuts down newbie questions all the time with zero guidance.

In spite of this it seems like most of the activity is for what I'd consider very low-value questions.

Already when I was a student working on my thesis, my issues were too advanced to ask questions on SO. I asked but I got no replies.

At the time I would answer to others. Now I don't really bother. I often see a wrong answer being marked as correct, because it came before an actually good answer.

For me SO now is at most a website where to copy boilerplate stuff like "how to create a unix server socket".

Welcoming and newbie-friendly are not the same thing.

QFT. There should be mandatory 'why this question was closed' in cases there was and (misinformed) effort. Currently it's -10 closed, no comments.

There is?

Nothing is worse than asking a question. And it gets closed as duplicate. You click on the duplicate and it’s asking a different question or obviously not the same thing. And they refuse to reopen the question.

I'll say. I'm too scared to use it because every legit question I've seen is shut down by a mod with bonkers reasoning

No need. ChatGPT to the rescue. The answer quality is about the same but for different reasons. It's a hit or miss for both. But! With ChatGPT there is no social pressure exerted by humans. It's only you and the machine. It's liberating.

Don't know why this gets downvoted. It is simply true. In most cases, ChatGPT4 gets it right. You have to check anyway.

I agree. Also, I've had good luck asking GPT-4 to cite sources with its replies. It speeds up the process of fact-checking, and makes "hallucination" detection trivial. (Does the link 404?)

Obviously it's not perfect, but it's no worse than asking human coworkers, which are also sometimes wrong. (I'd prefer not to interrupt my human coworkers with questions with searchable answers anyway.)

When I ask ChatGPT about stuff I actually know about, it always gives glib, misleading and completely wrong answers. I therefore don't trust it to answer questions about stuff that I don't know much about.

ChatGPT would be useless for programming questions without SO, though. If SO dies, ChatGPT will be stuck with a 2023 knowledge of many languages and libraries.

I always hear this but have never experienced it. What kind of bonkers reasoning?

Literally the first one in my moderation queue[1]. Perfectly valid question with almost enough votes to get closed...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/pnTLwcU

… as a result of two votes to close from members of the community, which is not an example of “shut down by a mod” (GP) or how “Stack Overflow has been absolutely destroyed by the moderators” (GGP). Closing questions isn’t really a primary purpose of elected moderators to begin with, because it doesn’t need more privileges than the rep-based privilege system already grants.

Meanwhile, the spam/abuse deletion, removal of illegitimate votes, conflict resolution, and so on that having mods is actually valuable for happen behind the scenes.

For what it's worth, I read the question without reading the flagging reason and could predict the flagging reason with high confidence.

The question looks like an "I'm out of my wits please debug my application" question which isn't atomic or precise enough to fit the SO format. I would have liked the person asking the question to provide a complete minimal failing example to even begin working on an answer.

Aren't all questions on SO of this type? With that reasoning you could close the whole SO. If you really debug hard enough and for a long time, you wouldn't ever need to ask on SO.

Not a moderator but have ~8k rep on SO and have spent some time on mod queues in the distant past.

Most questions on SO these days (that are not "do my homework for me please") are garbage like this. Signal to noise ratio is horrendous. Gin, Next.js, whatever are pure noise, the actual problem is glossed over in a vague sentence: "my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it's blocked at all but my browser isn't setting the cookie". You could try to talk the submitter into providing the complete HTTP request, which could take a very long back and forth, but after a thousand questions like this, you probably decide it's not worth the effort to salvage the question; or like me, you decide it's not worth participating in the site at all.

No. The purpose of the site is serving as a general knowledge base, not debugging random code that's only going to be useful to one person.

i second that sentiment. i also find the way the "question" is put somewhat confusing and technically it's not even a question as it doesn't contain a question.

This kind of thinking is exactly why I stopped asking questions on SO a long time ago.

Because once you can construct the perfect question, you can most certainly answer it yourself. It should be OK for questions to be somewhat vague, to contain "noise" and non-related stuff (because how on earth should the person asking the question know if something is relevent if they don't know the solution already?).

And I think in most cases a "complete minimal failing example" is way overkill. If someone in the future runs into the same problem, they have code already, and if there is already a solution accepted, then all that is needed is the description of the problem case and the solution (and in the best case, a root cause analysis, but that is an optional extra).

Some mods seem to think that SO is the next Encyclopedia Britannica, and each question is an article in it. This was not true in the beginning, and I don't feel like this is the right direction. But who cares about what I think.

> Because once you can construct the perfect question, you can most certainly answer it yourself.

Not if what you're lacking is declarative knowledge, which is what the site tries to elicit, to a first approximation anyway.

You should reduce the question to the point where you can say "between substeps 1.3.5 and 1.3.6 there seems to be a proposition I don't know. What is it?"

If you can't reduce the problem to a missing proposition, there are better resources to turn to for help with debugging it step-by-step until you have isolated a problem. I've had success with mentoring and IRC.

I can see that one being pushed back, there's a lot of context for sure but the direct question is not surfaced visibly enough.

""" I have this working no problem locally , but in production with different domains, my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it is blocked at all but the browser isn't setting the cookie. """

I know there's a question in there somewhere but it feels pretty much like a run on sentence and the clarity is lacking. There's something that could be wrapped up in that final paragraph that I think could make the question more direct.

Agree. Before generative AI came along, I once had to scroll down all to way to the bottom for the only valid answer, which got deleted the next day...

The outdated answer problem is infuriating, particularly on Server Fault. We have answers about the Linux login process that predate systemd still out there and being used to delete new questions that have similar wording but need completely different answers now.

We need a competitor that accepts any question, uses GPT to create answers, offers the public the ability to vote and discuss these answers, and uses GPT to rate and prune the discussions. Eliminate the community moderators.

Maybe we do but mostly as a cautionary tale for people who think LLMs are going to solve all their problems.

No, we don't. If you think you don't need moderators then you have never run a community site. But please go ahead and create it; it would be destroyed in a matter of weeks by trolls, racists etc that make your site look bad.

That doesn't appear to be happening to chat GPT, the moderation endpoints seem to do a pretty good job even if they're unfortunately overzealous. Moderation combines summarization and sentiment analysis - two things that large language models excel at.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation

You're naïve if you don't think that the job of moderation is going to be replaced with AI by large social communities.

Plug for the upstart smol doge alternative: https://codidact.com/

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