The tone of the remarks were laughable too, militant/unempathetic. Last time I bothered to ask anything there, about 7-8 years ago.
I understand the motivation to keep "noise" low, but I disagree that civility is noise.
Or is this just a generic SO complaint?
I still find SO extremely valuable even if some parts of it can be extremely nitpicky. To some extent you need a hardass moderation team and community in order to prevent it from being destroyed over time. See: Wikipedia.
Why do you think that?
I see quite a lot of garbage produced by the more meaty intelligences on the internet. And I don't understand why it'd be intrinsically more difficult to moderate ChatGPT content than any other.
- multiplies the rate at which people are able to produce content by many orders of magnitude, and
- uses sophisticated sounding language with a lot of correct statements, sprinkled with a few hallucinations that can be anywhere from slightly off-base to dangerously wrong, and
- doesn’t even need a human much in the loop on the producing side. Certainly there are karma farming bots posting answers written by ChatGPT right as we speak
So content produced by ChatGPT takes more time to review for the people looking into factual correctness of the answer while at the same time is able to be submitted at a much higher frequency than before.
They gamified community moderation. When you reward people for taking action, expect people to take lots of action.
But on some of the other SE sites? Man. I remember asking something on Server Fault about an obscure Apache setup, I can't even remember exactly what it was, but I was serving from localhost. The issue 100% had nothing to do with DNS, but some mod wanted me to add that info. I tried explaining it was irrelevant and he just deleted the question saying he knew better.
Petty behavior like that is all too common. Good moderation relies on a principle of least interference, not reviewing every post and punishing those that don't share a mods personal values/standards.
Some SE sites are better, some worse in that aspect. SO bring the largest usually gathers the anger most.
Then within SO there are better and worse communities. Some are toxic (Go, in addition to being maddeningly elitist), some are great (sql for instance).
The Meta is such a shitshow that I never get there anymore.
It is dad, but in reality a combination of culture, low effort questions and egos.
My guess is they go and find it, read it, realize they were in the wrong, but never retract their statements.
Yes, there are cases where questions are wrongly closed, or you get a nitpicky comment. But a few wrongs when you have to deal with thousands of useless questions every day is to be expected. Just think of the state of the site if it wasn't moderated as strictly.. I got badges for having reviewed 1000+ of stuff, and then you see the absolute garbage...
The rest of us moved on years ago.
Those complaining about SO being toxic are often quite toxic in their comments. I find that quite ironic as well.
I'm having a discussion on a discussion website, does that confuse you in some way? I don't go out of my way to talk about Stack Overflow, but this thread is about Stack Overflow so I'm talking about my experience with Stack Overflow. Not sure how any of that is ironic.
This thread is a discussion about a specific event at SO (the strike). You airing your general SO grievances is not really on topic for that, so yeah, I'd say you're going out of your way to talk about what you feel about SO in general.