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Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached. I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have be

Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached. I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.

avgDev 4y ago
I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments. Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped. I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them. I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR" questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality of the questions goes down, the discouragement for the answerers goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer" questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).
bena 4y ago
14 years, 5 months, 71 answers, 7 questions, ~5.6m people reached. Top 10% reputation overall. The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not conducive to community. And here we are.

avgDev 4y ago

I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments. Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped. I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them. I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.

bombcar 4y ago
You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR" questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality of the questions goes down, the discouragement for the answerers goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer" questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).

bena 4y ago

14 years, 5 months, 71 answers, 7 questions, ~5.6m people reached. Top 10% reputation overall. The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not conducive to community. And here we are.