StackOverflow Considered Harmful?

SO is much more pleasant if you stick to the less populous niche tags where there isn't a race to get the first answer, pompous mods, and other negative side effects of gamification.

I came to similar conclusions in 2010 or so; I had gotten a fair number of points whiling away my hours as a help desk TA in my CS department, I then got a job, asked some questions about Perl, and then faded out. Then as I realized money making was - broadly - absent from SO, it became clear that the digital sharecroppers were what was fueling whatever money making venture it would turn out to be.

As the community moderation approaches began to migrate from the lighthearted to the grim-faced bureaucratic, I migrated away.

While I have derived value from SO, I derive more value today from reading documents and manuals than I do from StackOverflow questions.

This highlights one of the fundamental flaws of text-based communication.

In text-based communication, deciding what is important is 100% on the reader - and while to you someone may be responding to irrelevant parts of your questions - to them, it is what they found interesting and thus important.

In face to face communication, the onus of importance is far more shifted to the speaker, because based on tone and facial expression - combined with societal norms - the listener has a much easier time seeing what you find important and a much harder time being able to only latch on to the irrelevant tidbits.

> where I put big disclaimers in my questions to steer users away from those useless (to me) responses.

I have found myself doing a very similar thing - essentially trying to convey the information that gets lost of text to insure the reader can understand what I want to convey is important.

I don't think so. In my opinion, close-votes are the biggest problem. As I learned lately, 5 votes are enough to take a question down and then no new answers are possible, even from people that where just writing one.

I really hated it, when my questions (or questions, I wrote answers for) where closed down. You invest effort and time to write a question or answer -- but all is senseless as soon as 5 people kill the question. And also it takes forms that every question that is just a small degree beyond the "group norm" will be taken down in short time without that anybody can do something about it. 5 "Soup Nazis" (as somebody else named it) or just people that do not read carefully suffice (there is nearly no benefit, to do so -- there are some "attention" checks, but those mostly will guide you to adhere to group standards and less likely will force you to really understand the question).

I did not find out completely, but it even seems that when some moderators vote to leave questions open and 5 others vote to close, it is closed. That would be the most ridiculous thing!

BTW: I give you an upvoting, at least here, because the voting system should not only reflect opinions, but interesting views.

You're already going against what Stack Overflow is by creating toy problems.

Stack overflow is for asking real questions and solving real problems.