4 ms·

This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012'

This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.

wwweston 4y ago
Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming. What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue. To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community. I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).
fishtoaster 4y ago
I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc). [0] https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
- autokad 4y ago
  the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.
  - snthrow 4y ago
    The site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.
    - autokad 4y ago
      the questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.
- Gud 4y ago
  This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage
bityard 4y ago
By contrast, Reddit is the exact opposite... Most subreddits that I read get several posts each day that could be answered in a heartbeat just by searching existing discussions or looking at the first result in Google. But most mods, in an (understandable) effort to be newbie-friendly, accept this as the cost of running a subreddit. As a result, most subreddits on some technical topic, are mainly populated by and useful to newbies. It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.
ilaksh 4y ago
Please don't turn this into ageism. I'm 45 and stopped participating on SO years ago for the same type of reasons as other people.

wwweston 4y ago

Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?

jrumbut 4y ago
Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming. What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue. To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community. I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).

fishtoaster 4y ago

I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc). [0] https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

autokad 4y ago
the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.
- snthrow 4y ago
  The site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.
  - autokad 4y ago
    the questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.
Gud 4y ago
This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage

bityard 4y ago

By contrast, Reddit is the exact opposite... Most subreddits that I read get several posts each day that could be answered in a heartbeat just by searching existing discussions or looking at the first result in Google. But most mods, in an (understandable) effort to be newbie-friendly, accept this as the cost of running a subreddit. As a result, most subreddits on some technical topic, are mainly populated by and useful to newbies. It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.

ilaksh 4y ago

Please don't turn this into ageism. I'm 45 and stopped participating on SO years ago for the same type of reasons as other people.