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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of my experience with Stackoverflow. I tried to solve a very specific problem with Windows installers. I only got some responses from oldtimers that basically said “why would you do such a thing?”and similar. It felt extremely unwelcoming. It’s ok to not answer but why be so dismissive? I guess the only questions they like are things like “how do I calculate 2+2 in python?”. Anything more complicated is not acceptable.

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Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer my question instead of a different question they find easier, or why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one.

Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff in the comments.

That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO over time. I only go there as a last resort.

StackOverflow is a great resource if you want to know how you would have done some programming task in 2009. Their cultural aversion to new/updated content has frozen them in time.

Agreed. Certain categories should probably be purged every 5 years or so. In many areas there is no value in learning how things got done years ago. Obviously, there are other areas where the fundamentals haven't changed since the last decades.

I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.

> I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

I know that's what they say. The thing they have trouble understanding is that "helping everyone else" does not mean bending every question into some 101 level software design advice thing.

"Helping everyone else" very much can mean being a repository of answers to hard questions or solutions when non-typical constraints are at play. Every software engineer worth his salt must have had an experience where the answer he was looking for was in some old, weird forum post that was the single hit to his search query, but a lot of SO doesn't seem to get that.

Sources?

(Edit: Let’s add /s just in case)

I think StackOverflow is a good example of a site where cultural norms have become a life-threatening issue. The site has experienced a sharp drop in search traffic and yet people still say it's unfriendly all the time. Fixing that perception should be a top priority.

In the rare occasion I'm desperate enough to ask a question, I dread seeing the red inbox notification. I think I've abandoned the last three questions I asked because I couldn't stomach facing the drama I expected.

The cultural norms of internet forums should never have been allowed to take root on a Q&A site. There is nothing "professional" (or even helpful) about answering questions with out-of-scope proscriptions.

Your plumber doesn't show up asking why you want your toilet fixed, nor does he tell you your house is messy, give you dietary advice and passive-aggressively insinuate you need to fix your roof. SO responders are mini-spouse syndrome incarnate.

Fixing the unfriendly perception is why stack overflow is dead. Signal to noise for professionals is now close to zero. Maybe it's friendlier, but it's also no longer worth visiting other than the historical record.

From my last 5 stack overflow questions, 3 were some mod closing the question with a rationale that’s ridiculous.

Most questions are now answered in the comments instead of being written as an answer below the question and I assume this is because people have had bad experiences with gate keeper mods when writing answers.

I have reasonably high karma.

I don’t think quality deteriorated due to some attempts to make the site more friendly. It’s the spirit of a county rabbit breeders association that drives people away

Saying "mod on stack overflow" is much like saying "editor on Wikipedia".

Where these other community members who had the close vote privilege? Or an elected moderator that had a diamond in their name to designate that?

I (used to) answer questions in comments. It became too discouraging to post an answer that took 20 minutes to write and get immediately downvoted because someone disagrees with any single part of it (or they're trying to promote their own answer by suppressing everyone else's).

Comments can't be downvoted. MetaFilter had the right of it.

I had a similar experience in SO, I used the term "the most bulletproof-y way I can think of" or something like that in my answer, definitely used "bulletproof-y." Someone responded with something like "You shouldn't say that. Nothing's really bulletproof, you know."

Generally I've had pretty good luck with Stack Overflow. Recently however I had a ten year old popular question about how to read terminal responses in a shell script removed b/c some mod decided questions about shell scripts belonged on "another Stack Exchange site".

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