Or, when searching for answers, you keep chasing your tail because the mods kept killing off the variants of the question you cared about, and you have to cobble together answers from the comments because those will often be all you get.
Or (and arguably worse), you'll find a relevant question but the answers are inundated with "like the real answer, but variation for situation X" because people are posting to the main question because they know the almost-but-actually-not dupes will all get closed out.
Their moderation doesn't prevent duplicate questions it just makes it more frustrating when the question you find has been marked as duplicate.
I don't see how all the people complaining about moderation don't look at all the low quality questions and see why moderation is what it is.
I guess you and any experienced user know the "meta game" of allowed questions. Survivorship bias, kinda.
That is mostly as it should be. The primary original intent of StackOverflow is to curate a good Q&A, not to provide an interactive support/mentoring service. Questions are (supposed to be) evaluated by what they add to the repository of questions and answers.
That being said - there has certainly been a culture of harshness in relating to newbie question askers on large parts of the SO.
If there is an experienced C++ developer around who is happy to answer questions, great. Otherwise you are stuck with having to figure it out by using trial and errors and Google-fu. If you post it to a forum, it could take a while for anyone to respond. If you post it to stackoverflow, very likely nobody wants to look at your horrible code (natural for a beginner, you know), and your question gets downvoted.
By contrast, ChatGPT can look at your code and explain very clearly what is wrong with it within seconds.
This is just one example. And it's not only for beginners. I have found that ChatGPT can answer high-level questions in programming very well. The alternative would be searching for the Internet and sift through all the noise to find the answers as well.
This is why reddit and twitter both locked down their APIs, due to the data being very high quality and immensely valuable for training.
Too bad they all did it too late, no one saw ChatGPT coming. And since all the data was already scraped from Stackoverflow, it no longer has any value for OpenAI. Stackoverflow is rapidly declining in volume, so future data from it is irrelevant.
What happens when this training data is 10 years old? Where will we get new data?
In the meantime we'll get used to functioning with these models with assumption the "knowledge cutoff" will just be moved. But if there is little new data, how? Furthermore, how do we prevent feeding ML generated data to ML training in the first place?
Anyway, have been using SO for 12 years and still think it's great.
I used SO a lot when I was a junior engineer. Most of my issues now stem from biz logic or internal design that really can't be googled for.
But, generally, yes, I tend to know the details of what I'm doing already. If anything I might check some API docs for a library.
For example, "how to insert multiple multi-columns rows dynamically using psycopg2" It is trivial if you are writing sql everyday but may take longer to find the right postgres docs. StackOverflow gives you the answer in 5 minutes: several variants with different tradeoffs (readability, performance, security).
Kind of ironic considering how the Rust community prides itself so much on being welcoming.
https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521
It's the top result for "case insensitive string comparison in C++". It has 372 votes and a ton of useful high quality answers. But it was closed 5 years ago for being "opinion based". Presumably because the author made the foolish mistake of asking for the best way to do it, rather than just a way to do it.
I don't see how anyone could defend that.
That's not cherry picked, and actually the situation is worse than it might seem to a casual observer because when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
The question doesn't show research effort, it's just two sentences. Sometimes that's all it takes, but if you add a requirement "without converting to lower/upper case", I think it should come with an explanation? I often encounter questions like that "How do I drive my car without using a steering wheel?" - and upon a confrontation I usually hear "well just for fun" or a similar answer - SO is a bad place to ask questions like that. If you're e.g. interested in performance, describe your situation, paste your current code and explain how you're concerned about the efficiency of your current approach.
Also originally the post wasn't not even properly written… Just a low quality post, so why bother improving a question (editing away the "best") that is so bad to begin with, especially as that doesn't guarantee you will avoid the critique (instead of critique of bad moderators who close a question, I would be reading about bad moderators that modify a question changing its meaning).
As I hinted at the beginning, we might be from different worlds: it's beyond my understanding how you could think of pointing out the example is not cherry picked, as if it was some beautiful post, with images, thoroughly explaining the issue, perhaps even addressing (preemptively or as an edit) the "opinion-based" flag, and yet was unfairly closed. Meanwhile it's shit. The revision history doesn't show any real OP's effort to fix the question, other than that meta exists to discuss such things, and if you're not satisfied with answers, you can write a real question describing your case.
So we might be from different worlds, and I'm happy SO/SE exist, because I find them, and their policies - for the most part - useful. You don't, and it's fine, you can use the alternatives.
> when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
you can see it in revision history: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/11635/revisions
The "closed" revision won't disappear when you reopen a question.
"In theory" - I think at least - answers should be updated when new things become possible. A lot of answers used to be "you can't do that with X, do Y instead" and should now be updated to either, "You can do that with X" or "You have to use Z"..
Maybe it’s the bias of being there since the early days and really getting how to ask and answer questions.
I have yet to receive a badge but could add that to the prompt or custom instructions as an alternative to its encouraging words when I'm nearly there.