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People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are h
by scardine 8y ago
People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are helping strangers on the Internet for free. I'm one of them[1].
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=profile https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=pr...
- Mithaldu 8y ago> we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions You don't. Straight-up. You may think you do, but SO utterly fails at this. In almost all cases where i end up on SO in my research the accepted answer is trash, and the one below it is the real one.
- Sacho 8y agoThe accepted answer is decided by the person asking the question - I'm not sure SO moderators are allowed to change an accepted answer(at the very least, they're heavily disincentivized to do so). I think your example is a case for more moderation, not less.
- Mithaldu 8y agoI'm not saying less moderation is needed, but that the moderation itself being done is low quality.