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> SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a

> SO gives people with points the power to bully others. When you protest you get collectively downvoted to the point that you a temporary banned, for asking a valid question. If this happens, there is no way to recover. That question is forever blacklisted, not just closed. No one could ever ask it again. For a particularly long term problem I was having, I asked for a friend to repost it with his account. He wrote up the question, the verbiage wasn't mine (let along copypasta). I'm not sure what gave it away, but his version got -4 within an hour. There are no effective appeals, no oversight, no reform possible. And, if we evaluate it honestly what they've strived for the last couple of years, they don't even want the site to be a place for people like us to ask questions or answer them. They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers. It doesn't matter that other people out there have the same sort of question. It's just not something they want. Does anyone remember back in 2007 or so when we were all excited that now every link wasn't Expert Sexchange, and we thought the internet and the world were slowly being improved?

marcosdumay 3y ago
> They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers. An encyclopedia of good questions is a very valuable thing. SO was created with the goal of it scaling, because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore. Then they decided to write a formal specification for "good question". This is when things started to break.
- john_the_writer 3y ago
  Yep. 100%. Before good questions would be upvoted. Bad questions would be down voted. Get to zero and the question remained. The dev could revive it with a few up votes. The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I shudder to think how someone who has english as a second language would fair. Noobs don't know how to form questions. That's what we're supposed to be here for. To help them learn answers, and how to ask better questions.
  - shagie 3y ago
    > The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I would encourage you to look at https://stackoverflow.com/review https://stackoverflow.com/review and the participation in those queues. If you believe that people are gatekeeping those queues and preventing good questions from getting out, help out in the queues and work to fix up the questions too. As moderators are on strike and things are not going through the queues, this would be an opportunity to help out the rest of the community. I will point out that typically the queues have orders of magnitude more things needing than people can do in a day - individuals are limited to how many reviews they can do in a day so that they don't burn out or get in the habit of hitting the same button again and again.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore. If that's your belief, then nothing I could say will ever convert you away from such a peculiar religion. (For everyone else) Not only will many need to ask questions still, but the "encyclopedia of good questions" is rather useless to many of us. Some small fraction of our needs is about a classic textbook example like out of some intro class. We live in the real world. The "encyclopedia of good questions" has more to do about soothing the egos of jackasses who are (somehow) ashamed of the great thing they accidentally created.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> They see it as some Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of "good questions". If your question isn't a good question, it does not matter that you need answers. An encyclopedia of good questions is a very valuable thing. SO was created with the goal of it scaling, because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore. Then they decided to write a formal specification for "good question". This is when things started to break.

john_the_writer 3y ago
Yep. 100%. Before good questions would be upvoted. Bad questions would be down voted. Get to zero and the question remained. The dev could revive it with a few up votes. The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I shudder to think how someone who has english as a second language would fair. Noobs don't know how to form questions. That's what we're supposed to be here for. To help them learn answers, and how to ask better questions.
- shagie 3y ago
  > The problem is the gate keepers, seem to hover over the questions queue. I would encourage you to look at https://stackoverflow.com/review https://stackoverflow.com/review and the participation in those queues. If you believe that people are gatekeeping those queues and preventing good questions from getting out, help out in the queues and work to fix up the questions too. As moderators are on strike and things are not going through the queues, this would be an opportunity to help out the rest of the community. I will point out that typically the queues have orders of magnitude more things needing than people can do in a day - individuals are limited to how many reviews they can do in a day so that they don't burn out or get in the habit of hitting the same button again and again.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> because once you answer the good questions, nobody needs to ask anything anymore. If that's your belief, then nothing I could say will ever convert you away from such a peculiar religion. (For everyone else) Not only will many need to ask questions still, but the "encyclopedia of good questions" is rather useless to many of us. Some small fraction of our needs is about a classic textbook example like out of some intro class. We live in the real world. The "encyclopedia of good questions" has more to do about soothing the egos of jackasses who are (somehow) ashamed of the great thing they accidentally created.