> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason

They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) and well considered, having been exhaustively discussed over many years.

> or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t

I have seen so many people complain about this. It is vanishingly rare that I actually agree with them. In the large majority of cases it is comically obvious to me that the closure was correct. For example, there have been many complaints in the Python tag that were on the level of "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)

> a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.

On the contrary, the top answerers are the ones who will be happy to copy and paste answers to your question and ignore site policy, to the constant vexation of curators like myself trying to keep the site clean and useful (as a searchable resource) for everyone.

> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

I actually completely agree that people who prefer to ask LLMs should ask LLMs. The experience of directly asking (an LLM) and getting personalized help is explicitly the exact thing that Stack Overflow was created to get away from (i.e., the traditional discussion forum experience, where experts eventually get tired of seeing the same common issues all the time and all the same failures to describe a problem clearly, and where third parties struggle to find a useful answer in the middle of along discussion).

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abanana 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us".

Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.

When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Often, doing what your users want leads to success. You misunderstand. People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users". Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this. Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why. > When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made. > trying to deny the toxicity and condescension I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context. As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?

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Flimm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)

This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.

	▲	zahlman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them. If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.