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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer.

Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown. It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the community has to deal with.

What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers for a long time. And with no stewards, it will become toxic. And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.

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Nah, SO is really toxic. There are plenty of examples and probably dozens of blog posts illustrating it. It took two seconds to find two of MANY meta posts [0][1]. In fact one answer to the posts here illustrates what looks like at least a dozen similar posts. ChatGPT is just hastening an already well deserved death. I have not heard a positive opinion about SO in my professional network in years. Everyone passively consumes SO but a community built on contribution can't live on passive consumption. If the community is so high huffing it's own farts it drives away the exact thing it needs there's no good end for it.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-about-t...

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-rudeness...

Did you read your own links? I feel they explain it well. Strict moderation isn't toxic. It can feel harsh, but it isn't toxic. The rudeness is people joining a forum, spending zero effort to understand the rules or etiquette, and then demanding others helping them for free without putting any effort in.

> Strict moderation isn't toxic

SO's toxic moderation isn't strict.

strict /strɪkt/ adjective demanding that rules concerning behaviour are obeyed and observed.

Proper moderation for rules can be no more strict than are the rules themselves, and SO's are appallingly slack.

E.g. try and find the rule prohibiting duplicates. Mods have fabricated their own definition: "Questions may be duplicates if they have the same (potential) answers" (verbatim). By which 1+1 is a duplicate of how many does it take to tango.

Using that bogus grounds to close a question that fully follows the delared rules is, yes, toxic.

The rudeness stems not from moderation but drive-by insults in comments and rapid dupe marking. That's covered in one of the several answers to the topics.

Rapid dupe marking is not rude.

Only if it is accurate. And the vast majority of SO dupe marking fails to accord with any meaning of the word duplicate found outside SO.

It is when the comment wasn't actually a dupe because of a subtle difference that was missed or because the 'original' question was years ago and all the answers would be different today.

This view is exactly why SO is dying. It's elitist and exclusionary. It's the same as the grognards who autoreply RTFM to everyone.

SO could have been a place where someone could post a question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers from previously answered questions; if it was a unique question then it could be opened to answers. Instead, SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a question by answering questions posed by others. That right off the bat excludes a ton of people who don't have the time to wait for a question in their domain, and answer it before 1000 other people.

Sure, it's the Eternal September for tech sites. Comes with the territory. If you don't want people to visit your site (and contribute moderation and content for free), be hostile to new users. Reward aggressive closing of questions. Sure is a good way to drive away anyone but the most pedantic control freaks.

I used to refer people to SO when they would come to me with a question I couldn't answer, (I even have an SO t-shirt hanging in my closet) but now I'd only do that to my worst enemies.

> SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a question by answering questions posed by others

This is false. You can post both questions and answers without any rep.

How people get the basics of SO wrong and still have such a strong opinion on how it works baffles me all the time.

Oh I'm wrong. You get all of ONE karma point to use for either a question (that will get closed) or one answer. Earning karma is fundamentally impossible for anyone who isn't living on SO.

You were wrong. Accept it, don't be so snarky and toxic in your replies, please.

I'm sorry, when did I ask you for tone-policing? You seem to be taking any criticism of SO as overblown, and your comments are dismissive of how many user's post of how they felt they were treated on SO.

> SO could have been a place where someone could post a question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers from previously answered questions

It already does that, though. The current iteration of the 'Ask question' page finishes with box proposing existing questions

This wasn't present when I was using SO.

I don't think strict moderation is inherently nontoxic, it's really quite toxic in a format like SO where no one knows how much effort may have gone in and what level people are at. Strict moderation usually works in conjunction with exclusivity to not just traumatize random members of the public.

When someone reaches expertise are they going to participate in your forum? For many people, I think SO is understandably something they will never participate in after their early experiences being told off over things they couldn't yet distinguish.

>Strict moderation isn't toxic.

And yet, the site died exactly because of that ...

> ChatGPT is just hastening an already well deserved death.

If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API access, where will it gets its answers from?

Probably by doing the thing that can be used to answer 95% of all questions programmers ask each other: reading the manual.

Over time I've got used to it, but my colleagues tend to use me as a personal StackOverflow because I actually read the manuals for things we use/depend on. I regularly "amaze" them by answering obscure questions and when they ask how did you know that, the answer is always some variant on "by reading".

Now I just accept that most programmers hate reading and will prefer either just splashing around until they stumble on the answer by accident, or asking other people. It's frustrating but just how it is. I've had a senior programmer at a well known tech company tell me that now LLMs exist they+their team suddenly feel like writing documentation is worth it, because something will actually read it, and he was serious! They work on the assumption that if they write docs, zero programmers will read them! I don't think that's literally true but it might be directionally true.

I don't quite understand the assumption that LLMs are learning to code by reading StackOverflow anyway. Sure, it sounds plausible but we don't know how ChatGPT was trained. But it seems irrelevant now. GPT-4 has clearly learned programming to the level that it could generate self-training material just by reading the docs, writing experimental programs to try things out, and then summarizing its own findings which can be fed back into the next training round. At the moment it's not wired up to programming environments closely enough to do this, but it could be.

I think this is unnecessarily reductive. When your day job is programming and you have strict sprint deadlines you don't have the hour or two it might take to leisurely stroll through manpages. Quickness is a result of industry demand not because it's correct. But that also doesn't make the programmers "hate reading". I have never had a PM/manager/TL/etc budget "documentation reading" into sprint points. I will hazard a guess and say you haven't either. So if you're not reading manpages in your free time Google/ChatGPT/SO/whatever is usually the best option.

> I have never had a PM/manager/TL/etc budget "documentation reading" into sprint points.

When working with new software components, usually we're able to either work into our sprints an experimentation/PoC task, that'd include reading the doc or we just include into the estimation of the development task some time to read

I think reading documentation along with many other tasks is meant to be just budgeted into a task when planning it. You probably wouldn't write buggy code that doesn't work then say the sprint didn't have an explicit line item for debugging?

How do you think we used to develop software before the Internet became widespread?

> Now I just accept that most programmers hate reading and will prefer either just splashing around

Usable documentation has to exists in the first place, though.

It's a bit of a circular problem. If programmers don't enjoy reading, they assume nobody else does either, so they don't bother writing proper docs, so the people who do read find there's no good docs and learn not to bother next time.

> If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API access, where will it gets its answers from?

nowhere, they are cannibalizing their own source of data. They own Github so that's helpful, but still mostly just code, not a whole lot of discussion.

> 99% of the times it was really a dupe

I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.

> But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.

Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old question.

Why? Why not just answer the damn question and link it in the old question if you're the mod? There's now countless ways to center a div in 2023. It's unreasonable to link to a 15 year old post. I guess SO will find out the hard way that people like updated answers on updated pages.

Are you saying that in order to ask for a new answer (from someone else) to an old question, you should post a new answer yourself?

Really if I want and answer, I usually ask a question... I'm confused.

How would that work? If I just comment on some 8 year old question that the answer does not apply to $LATEST version of $FRAMEWORK, how would anyone with the know-how discover my question?

This truly is a new question because what is really being asked is what was the breaking change that occurred in $FRAMEWORK between the original question was answered and this latest version.

How can you post a new answer when you are asking the question?

That doesn't help if you're a person trying to get an answer rather than a person trying to provide one.

Though SO has made some small progress on this problem recently by changing the default sorting algorithm to no longer prefer old, entrenched answers over new, better ones.

How does that work for a question asker? Can I revive an old question that I want a modern answer to?

As far as I know the original asker owns the question, so I, modern asker, can't edit it asking for a modern answer or de-select the selected answer for being now wrong or out of date.

Yes, you could for instance apply a bounty on an existing question asking for an updated answer.

The sorting has also been recently changed, to no longer strongly favor the checkmarked question the original asker back in the day liked.

That doesn't satisfy the use case. How do you edit a question that isn't yours? If you are looking for an answer and don't have one, how do you trigger the question to be re-answered? How does the new answerer get the points?

I don't think it's in dispute that SO has to deal with a lot of identical low effort questions. What people don't like is that the moderators and power users are entrenched against duplicates in particular in a way that makes the site hostile by default to questions that are not outstandingly original, but are nevertheless legitimately different.

Subreddits deal with the same issue (tons of identical basic questions) but have better processes to divert them and educate the user while still letting legitimate mid-level questions live by default.

There are bad subreddits where moderators make it hard to get help, but since redditors can move to better communities on the same topic (and duplicate all the content!) users don't feel stuck with the current moderation in the same way they do on SO, which doesn't let competing Q&A communities exist for the same topic.

I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years and want to credit that too. That work is another indicator that there is a problem.

I also agree that leadership-moderation relations are a problem on SO.

> I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years

Oh? What work?

> I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown

"overblown" == "who ya going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

At Google I interviewed a refugee from Theranos, when they were still around. (It was just lunch, so I wasn't expected to ask him anything.) Still, I mentioned the bad press, and he said the news was "exaggerated."

When people mention something again and again, it's usually not "overblown" -- it's real.

No, you can't know without knowing the ratio of good to bad. With more popularity comes more negative experiences as well. And as with everything in life those with an axe to grind keep harping on forever and everywhere, making it more visible than the silent enjoyers.

"silent enjoyers" -- examples wanted? Some people never complain; they just leave. Others persevere because they're insensitive.

If I look at Yelp reviews, one or two bad reviews are standard. But if there are 30-40, all different, then I suspect something's up.

It doesn't matter about "the ratio of good to bad." If you're pissing off a lot of customers, you are bad. Period.

You could probably find 40 negative reviews of Apple world wide. But they are obviously bad then. Period.

You just don't give up, do you? Irrelevant. No one looks at Yelp to find out about Apple.

"Give up"? I'm just poking holes in your argument, not sure why I got anything to give up? Is me doing that worse than you not "giving up" somehow?

It's not irrelevant. I didn't even mention yelp so that's a straw man. You said the ratio didn't matter. I claimed it does, as looking at absolute numbers of complaints makes no sense. That's it.

But fine, I'll "give up", this isn't fruitful :)

I said, "If I look at Yelp reviews, one or two bad reviews are standard." So yes, it IS relevant, whether you forgot that or not.

Why are you just dismissing people with an other viewpoint than you as "those with an axe to grind" that "keep on harping forever and everywhere"? Your complete disregard of others experience and viewpoint is extremely in line with the elements that people dont like about SO.

"So that is your opinion, experience and thoughts? WRONG!". Add in some offhand slights, that will teach them!

Aren't you dismissing my viewpoint that it's not as bad as those claim? Is my experience worth less? I honestly don't get your point.

And nice straw man in your last sentence. Quite ironic while complaining about SO being the toxic ones..

Well, well. If we go to SO we see that a "matsemann" has been a member for 11 years, had 20,000+ reputation points, and is a "publicist" and a "steward".

Maybe that's not you, of course.

Relevant, how?

You're probably going to accuse me of some bias. I'm however going to claim I then know more of the state of SO, given my active membership there...

Usually writers do "full disclosure" when their objectivity is open to question.

Especially when they have 15 comments on one post. One does suspect they have an axe to grind.

As for "knowing about it" -- when hordes of people try it once or twice and get instantly repulsed (an experience we see in the other comments here), you could certainly claim they don't "know about it." However, that doesn't disqualify them.

Otherwise, Survivor Bias only lets in the people who like it.

Wow, what damning evidence! Someone commenting about a forum is a member of said forum! What a scoop, Pulitzer incoming!

Even in my very first post in this discussion, I mentioned review queues and what I feel is wrong with SO recently. It's pretty clear to everyone with reading skills that I'm therefore an active member there. And no sane person would think my "objectivity is open to question" based on me commenting a few lines about an article. I'm not a "writer", I'm just commenting on an article. What a weird thing to demand "full disclosure" of.

(And if you knew anything about SO (which I think one should do when discussing it..), you'd know that the badges you mention is just things normal members can do. I have no extra privileges or responsibility, as you seem to imply)

Edit: the comment I'm replying to has been massively edited since I wrote this.

As for my 15 comments: it's me in the root of the discussion. I'm not all over the comments, I'm just responding to comments in the tree of comments I've started. I don't think that should be discouraged.

> I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown.

It's toxic enough that neither I nor any of the programmers that I personally know would ever dare to ask a question there. We see how other questioners get treated.

I've been active on Stack Overflow since its founding, and have always found it delightful.

> It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic.

Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.

> But 99% of the times it was really a dupe

Not in my experience.

Almost 10 years ago, I asked a question about PHP. I wanted to know if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` always contained a _valid_ IP address. I specifically wrote down in my question that I knew it wasn't always the IP of the client, that it could be spoofed, but I wanted to know if it contained a valid IP, even it's a fake IP.

Without surprise I god closed as duped and redirected to the question asking if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` was reliable to get the IP of the client, which is specifically what I didn't ask. And I wrote down that this wasn't what I asked, because I knew some rando would close it as dupe.

This is just one example, from almost 10 years ago, but it's only gotten worse. I routinely search for a specific question in Google and find a "marked as dupe" StackOverflow answer, which is not a duped, and I'm left with no answer. I almost don't click on StackOverflow links anymore because of this, I consider them as clickbait

I think this shows that people need a place to talk about the same topics even when there is an answer somehere on the site. SO is not that place, but we need it. Like the old IRC days (in some channels, at least).

If everyone feel it is toxic, while you don’t, you might want to consider the thought that it is actually toxic.

> If everyone feel it is toxic

Citation needed. "Everyone", really?

Shame that you are focusing on a single detail rather than the point of my comment. No not everyone in the world, it should have been in quote marks. Glad to have cleared that up to you.

Don't mind me, in every thread about SO in here there are lots of comments mentioning the same, and I agree. Your experience may not be the same and that is ok.

If every thread also have someone claiming it not to be as toxic, shouldn't that also count the same? Aka you should then "consider the thought it is not toxic".

So are you getting paid by SO or something? Are you one of these moderators everyone hates? Why are you so all over this?

SO has built up a toxic reputation over many years. And yet somehow, according to you it's false? Why don't you just let this one die? You can collect your paycheck from SO now; you've done your bit.

I'm flagging this and ending it here. Ironic to complain about SO being toxic while you're posting unfounded attacks and accusations like this.

> unfounded attacks and accusations

it's "founded" because you are all over this topic, and it's legitimate to ask why.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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