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I'm trying to think what's changed Among other possibilities: SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than
by Silhouette 6y ago
I'm trying to think what's changed
Among other possibilities:
SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors.
SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. In that respect, it has become its own worst enemy, with old answers about obsolete versions and practices often ranking highly in search results.
The first of those problems then exacerbates the second, because the same cultural issues get in the way of both updating answers to old questions and asking new questions that might be superficially similar to ones that already exist but actually need a different answer.
Meanwhile, in many areas of programming, documentation from other sources has become both better in quality and more readily located thanks to other well-known sites and high search engine rankings. Relatively speaking, SO simply isn't as useful if there is already primary documentation that answers questions correctly and comprehensively.
And finally, you personally may have grown as a developer over time, becoming both more capable of solving problems for yourself and more familiar with whatever tools you use regularly, so you might not need external help so often.
FWIW, I'm also in the "rarely visit SO any more" camp. I think I have a kind of banner blindness for SO hits on search results pages now, perhaps because I'm assuming that following a SO link is unlikely to provide a useful answer so I almost always check other plausible sources first. On those occasions when I do get as far as visiting SO, I'm usually reminded of why I tend to work this way now.
- troutwine 6y ago> SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors. This rings very true to me. The GP's comment made me consider that I very rarely go to Stackoverflow anymore, no longer contribute and what stuff I do find there useful is from well before the cultural shift in moderation, back when questions could be a little more open and answers a little more freewheeling.
- nerdponx 6y agoIt's a wasteland now. Legitimate, perfectly answerable questions get hostile comments and close votes. The other sites in the Stackexchange network aren't nearly as bad, fortunately. English Language Learners and Math/MathOverflow are very positive places. Software Engineering is pretty good, too.
- flukus 6y agoThere's also a lot of people karma farming (for employment reasons?). A couple of years ago I was searching for something and the same question was asked by someone else on SO and this came up repeatedly while I was looking, but after 4 years there was no answer so it was a very low quality result. A couple of days later I did find/discover an answer so I went back to SO and added my reply, miraculously after 4 years someone else added an answer about 12 minutes later, it was the same answer as mine with a little more formatting and marked themselves as correct. So after that experience would I go to the effort of contributing back again? Maybe in this case, because the answer was shorter than this post, but the equation might change if it required more effort.
- dkersten 6y agoI actually deleted my account some time ago via GDPR request. So I haven’t contributed in a long time (but wasn’t a heavy user anyway). But I have noticed a major decline in my using it at all, even for just reading answers. Yes, I did look up that C++ thing a few days ago, and ended up finding the answer on SO, but before that, I have no idea when I used it last. Could be months.
- Spooky23 6y agoOnce SO killed expertsexchange and similar sites, it became less useful to me!
- fnord77 6y agoThere are weird people on SO who are both trolls and knowledgeable. There is one person who edits EVERY SINGLE question regarding a certain programming language. Then attempts to close every question as "already asked", even where it is somewhat questionable whether it had been asked already or not. He knows his stuff really well though so he ends up not getting banned. I do not get it.
- ollysb 6y agoAlso the moderation is often hidden. Last week I ran into one of my answers for a language I haven't used in a while. When I read the answer I thought it was odd because the english was very poor. Then I checked and found that a moderator had made a really poor edit of the original answer. Maybe this is reasonable on a site like SO but I really felt that somebody had essentially impersonated me and entirely changed the tone of some writing which was attributed to my name.
- physicsguy 6y ago> SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. In that respect, it has become its own worst enemy, with old answers about obsolete versions and practices often ranking highly in search results. Oh god yes, this is a nightmare.
- baud147258 6y ago> SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. I think the SO leadership is currently searching for a solution with this issue. Whether they deploy it and it works is another matter. Regarding the moderation and unwelcoming culture, I don't really see it, but maybe it's because I follow different tags?