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

That feels like it happens everywhere on the internet. Even here on HN, where you need a significant amount of "points" to downvote comments, you can still just get randomly down voted to oblivion based on a group of people just not agreeing with your content. Sometimes there just isn't rhyme or reason.

It's for several reasons (and why I personally find reddit (of all places!) a much more welcoming and useful community):

1. Points. They're very visible, giving you power. If you want power, you mine for points, and once you earn them, well you worked for your power, you use your power. You are expected by the powers-that-be to close questions for being bad, or for being duplicates, or whatever. In contrast, reddit doesn't focus on points. You focus on the name/flair. So the focus is hanging around and answering questions - in other words, it's more of a community than a way to show off your knowledge.

2. The communities are kept separate. For example, /r/Rust has a different community culture than, say, /r/golang. So they have different mods with different policies.

3. The lack of community moderation means that I don't have to be scared that 5 guys out of 5000 decide that my question "wasn't good enough" or "subjective", closing it. And yes, there are hard-code reddit communities. /r/askhistorians put's history.stackexchange.com to shame in rigor. To write an answer there, you're writing a term paper based of primary sources. So how do they do it? They have a team of moderators. Really, stackoverflow could be broken up into rust.stackoverflow.com and go.stackoverflow.com and python.stackoverflow.com, where each community elects[1] their knowledgeable moderators who know their community and respects them.

3. Unlike reddit, they're not trying to solve my problem. They're trying to be a large database of answers[2]. A wikipedia of programming or something (which is why duplicates are not just pointed out, but actively closed, and why "open ended discussion questions" are closed). The problem is that I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in getting my question answered. Now if you don't want to answer my question, that's fine. But it's up to the asker.

[1]. Another point - community elections means that there's politics involved. reddit allows one to easily fork a community, so if a significant group of users don't get along with /r/linux, they can fork and make /r/linuxos or something.

Yours is a beautifully written and well-considered reply.

As someone who has had both academic and career success (and failures), I know I am capable as a developer and able to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions.

As a person of color, however, I have also experienced harassment by police, suspicious looks from shop owners, and outright hostility from drunken young men.

So, whenever I encounter what appears to be irrational anger or inexplicable disrespect, I cannot help but wonder and worry that I'm being poorly treated because of my race, even when I suspect that's not the case. The person who treats me poorly need not necessarily be discriminating against me because of my race, but I can never know and, of course, unless someone is calling me racial epithets such poorly behaved people are unlikely to admit bias.

It's sort of like being bullied in elementary school, and then high school, and then college, and then as a working adult. You never outgrow the bullying. Indeed, the bullying seems to get worse as one matures and loses the youthful physical characteristics which people often read as non-threatening.

So regardless of intention (and sometimes because of it), feeling discriminated against can be partly the result of lifelong experience and is probably fairly characterized as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

EDIT: remove two instances of repeated "as"; add "often"; remove comma; change pronoun.

I think there's a strong selection bias that makes newbie questions generally sub-par.

If you know enough to do research and make MCVEs, you'll likely rubber duck your way into a solution instead of posting a clear and well formulated question.

This is why you get a pile of "Unable to checksum downloaded file" type questions with a 30 line code dump and vague "doesn't work" comment:

All the users who instead narrowed it down to their `if (sum="foo")` or `if [[ $sum=="foo" ]]` or whatever pitfall their language has will already have googled "how do I compare two strings" and discarded their draft.

I don't have a good solution, but I'm happy about the article's "new “beginner” ask page that breaks the question box into multiple fields". It'll help ensure all questions have actual/expected results, and the code section will hopefully clear a path for applying static analysis.

StackOverflow initially was very, extremely warm and welcoming. It's mission to replace the dodgy EE was noble.

Through natural daily interaction with the site (more than HN), built up a karma at 5K+. Why I found myself using it less?

The community aspect remained undefined and once the post police got a hold of the site, they interpreted the site to be only a technical reference, where technical discussion is allowed, instead of also a reference for soft skills and decision making that also were very popular.

Although asking such a question today will get the post closed, some of the insightful questions about how to approach software architecture, or a specific problem, continue to ironically generate me karma there.