25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.

Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.

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zahlman 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.

> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.

It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .

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Quarrelsome 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

SO had an opportunity to branch out into a thriving community of people helping each other, I can't state with any authority if that would have been a better end goal as they had a nice exit, but maybe if it did then it could have better maintained its energy in the wake of AI.

You say I should have stuck to newsgroups but SO sucked all the energy out of those spaces. I have 25k rep on the site so its not like I wasn't activately engaged and helped a lot of people on there, I just wish it had been more than what it was.

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tacker2000 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.

There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.

Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.

If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.

Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.

I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here. I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately. But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions. > If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it. No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena. There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing. The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it. The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text. > Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts. You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658).