Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.

Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

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kstrauser 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"

Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011

The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

	▲	35 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	torben-friis an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity". It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.

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marcuschong an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.

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Olumde 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read

> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.

> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.

Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.

	▲	mcswell an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I came here to say something like this (mostly about LaTeX), but you and the posters you're replying to said it better than I could have. I had too many posts treated as "not an appropriate question" or some such, and got tired of posting only to get my post rejected. To be sure, there are some poor posts (my first post was that, because I didn't include enough information), but the "vigilante" term you use was by and large all too appropriate.
	▲	kstrauser 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's the kinda of thing I'd love to see on a resume, so that I could down-vote and close.

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golem14 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...

	▲	golem14 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		... and of course, this wondering applies to other training sets, like usenet ...