My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex).

It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance.

Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.

The history of questions is why StackOverflow is so great. If it were like a normal forum with only time sensitive content it would have gone away like all other technical forums.

Your question is shared with all the future people who have the same problem, it isn't your soapbox to complain in. Your experience with SO is probably fairly minor, the moderators have each had to deal with at least a half dozen people breaking questions to suit their own benefits, it gets tiring quickly.

There are a lot of replies on this comment, but I just wanted to add my experience and maybe some advice - I'm TA'ing for a CS class this semester, and we have an open forum for discussion kind of like Stack Overflow. Unfortunately it's content like what you posted in your revisions (expletives, open frustration) that make it unpleasant. The plain fact is that saying things like that does affect strangers, no matter how frustrated you might be - no one wants a public forum with that.

I have had questions like yours before, by the way (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24173094/c-polymorphic-in..., for example), and I kind of agree that it shouldn't have been closed like that. C++ is a confusing language and there was indeed a good amount to learn from the answer to your question. But you definitely could have handled it much better; get some feedback and maybe edit or make a new post with that feedback and you'd be good to go!

All this is going to trying to show you that your attitude is a little belligerent (it's showing on this HN thread again, even), and changing it goes a long way. I've come to the conclusion that the people on my class's forum and you don't really realize that there's something wrong with how you're communicating. But being polite isn't very hard, and I think you almost managed to do it in that SO thread. Take some time to work on your attitude, and you will get much further :)

Please don't take this in the wrong way. It's up to you to change if you'd like; I'm pointing out the benefits and you don't have to if you don't want to.

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said.

I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/)

There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.

Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized".

I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.

You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag for moderator attention if it comes to that.