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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.

They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.

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They'd even delete chats. You'd see, in comments, someone inviting the author to chat, but the link would (in the present) take you to a 404 page. Did the question get an answer? Did chat ever work? Was something useful shared? We'll never know.

The system for managing chat rooms was buggy, but the entire point of the chat rooms was to keep things out of the way long term. If the invitation comment didn't also get deleted, that was a system bug. As someone who comes by "in the present", you are not supposed to go through a chat room to figure out whether "something useful was shared". The way you answer "did the question get an answer?" is by observing whether there is an answer post underneath the question. If you didn't see one and you're trying to parse the comments, then the answer to that is no.

Those discussions are not about figuring out the answer to the question. Anyone who used them that way, for example to try to provide individualized debugging assistance, was abusing the system. The point was to iron out issues with the question, so that it can be answered. Publicly.

It was extremely by-design that comments got removed. The comment section is, per the template moderator explanation of large-scale cleanups, not for extended discussion.

> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well.

The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.

Is that supposed to somehow excuse the deletionism?

No excuse is required, because there's nothing wrong with it.

You dare to compare a Wikipedia article (even a short one) to an SE "article," which is, according to SE's own rules, narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated on an equally narrow formulated question?

Yes, because there's no reason not to. A Wikipedia article (even a long one) is "narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated" on a single concept. There maybe a lot to say about dogs, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog only covers things common to all of them, and individual dog breeds get their own pages (as does the concept of a "dog breed").

Similarly, SO has good, valid questions about general concepts, which are narrowly scoped about the concept despite the broad applicability of that concept. For example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26337003 .

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