I've had countless questions closed and received even more patronizing comments from mods. I wonder who these people were and why were they empowered in such a way by StackOverflow the company.
We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves. Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-…
There is no reward for closing questions.
The gamification is mostly via reputation, and only asking, answering (and very limited editing) grant reputation.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.
> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#94I must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…
There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case.
A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: This does two things: 1. It demonstrates that the question ask-er actually cares about whatever it is they are doing, and it's just trying to get free homework answers. 2. Ideally it forces the ask-er to provide enough information that an answer-er can do so without asking follow ups. and here is the issue I have . "
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…
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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#97StackOverflow wasn't a toxic hellhole. I struggle not to see the people describing it as full of exclusionary rants as telling on themselves.
I mean, HN has a similar ethos. The community downvotes you quickly for nonproductive comments.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#98This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource. For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise. For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits. I'…
StackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource. Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very…
This echoes my own experience. The very few times I attempted to post a question it was later flagged as duplicate, pointing to some other question which matched the keywords but didn't at all match the actual use case or problem. I don't know if this was the result of an automated process or zealous users, but it certainly put me off ever trying to engage with the community there.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#99Anecdotally, I have used SO much less in recent years, but I think a lot of what gets labelled as toxicity is just dedicated curation. I remember asking my first question - I got a quick response that it wasn't well written and was likely a duplicate, and they were totally correct.
The next time I asked I made sure to put the work in beforehand to make sure it was well written and included any relevant info that someone would need, as well as linking potential duplicates and explaining the differences I had to them. That got a much better response and is more useful for future readers.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves. Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-…
There is no reward for closing questions. The gamification is mostly via reputation, and only asking, answering (and very limited editing) grant reputation.
I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content.
And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about…