Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

Why are you even discussing tort law? Feelings are not damage. Has your emotional psyche has been permanently affected leading to challenges in how you function and cope in life? Feeling sad or frustrated or annoyed because your question was downvoted is not emotional distress. And what does this have to do with Stackoverflow? What's the duty of a commenter? How do you know the intent? Who's getting traumatized by that site specifically?

You're reaching here and if you are more affected than average by comments from other people (on SO or life in general) then perhaps you should work on that instead of claiming emotional suffering.

It's very difficult to be optimised for people Googling in their hour of desperation, while also being a community between the rest of the time. I have to admit that I'm somewhat hypocritical, in that I get angry when I see Wikipedia-style policing of content, but I also appreciate when I land on a well-edited, general-case answer to a problem that I'm having.

I don't think I've generally ever been disappointed with the Google-optimised workflow, but I've never cared much about scoring points on the site itself, and I only very rarely have to ask a question.

Random idea: replace the terminology of "duplicate" questions with "similar" questions. Add a mechanism where, if an answer could apply to two very similar questions, show the answer in both places. Rather than closing a question as a "duplicate", add UI to group "similar" questions, eg, rather than filtering out "duplicate" questions from search results, instead show "similar" questions as groups, with the "best" questions and answers shown first in that group.

The "best" way of asking a question may well not be as it was written the "first" time.

Or phrasing another way, remove the "older is better" bias.

Another example: currently, a new user, unfamiliar with the site, comes along, asks a basic question that has been asked a hundred times, and they ignore the "related questions" prompts. The community reacts by down-voting and closing their question, pointing to a better question. How about instead of "related questions", the question was immediately responded to with "related answers" instead? Rather than being snubbed for asking a simple question, new users would be encouraged by getting a quick response. As the questions would be grouped and the answers shared, low quality questions just wouldn't get much upvote attention, and could likely would get filtered out of searches and lists of "hot" questions, as they wouldn't be the best in a similar group of questions.

But the goal of SO is not for you two to have a chat - it's to produce quality questions and answers for future visitors. When SO's moderation team does its job well, you only see them "harassing" you. When they don't, you google your question and get vague, poorly-worded questions answered by incorrect one-liners. SO's moderation is an effort to balance three parties with conflicting interests:

- the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc.

- the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting.

- the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them.

To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".

Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth their time. You may say, well, leave it up to folks to what they want to answer. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. Even worse, lot of people go after trivial stuff just to get more points. Even more worse people who ask bad questions get encouraged to keep doing same things. You can see where this is going.

In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.