3 ms·

> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help them for ages. Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need bet

> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help them for ages. Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need better tools, they need to have their privileges pulled until they learn to use them responsibly. The whole "SO is an encyclopedia not a help site" thing started this, and it encouraged a lot of "content curators" to the site, who view their role as squishing every question unless it meets their personal editorial standard (Wikipedia has this too but IS an encyclopedia!). This post feels hollow. It is nice they're taking blame, but SO is still rotten at the core, the site needs something akin to a constitution setting out what the purpose of the site is. Everything else should flow down from the site's core purpose, not up from rules and "more <3!!!" Is SO a "help site for newbies" or a "encyclopedia of programming knowledge?"

deviationblue 9y ago
The problem is that there is already such a wealth of information that exists on SO, that some of the beginner questions I had starting out never needed posting. So I can imagine a similar scenario for someone else, and hope that they do a little searching around before posting. Sometimes you need to use 2 or 3 tangentially related posts together to see the bigger picture of how the question you were going to ask relates to the problem you wanted to solve. I mean, learning has always been that kind of tortuous process. Maybe there needs to be a separate place on the site that's primarily help for newbies.
bmn__ 9y ago
> the site needs something akin to a constitution setting out what the purpose of the site is I assert this already exists, laid out in the inaugural blogs posts and formally codified in the tour and help centre.