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SO made it such a pain in the ass to contribute I gave up trying every time I’ve historically been interested. Like I’m already sacrificing my time to offer my

SO made it such a pain in the ass to contribute I gave up trying every time I’ve historically been interested. Like I’m already sacrificing my time to offer my expertise helping someone, you want me to jump through a bunch of hoops to have the privilege of doing so? No thanks.

colechristensen 2y ago
That same amount of pain in the ass gaming made spam and terrible quality answers equally discouraged. Given the volume of at least decent content on stack overflow, I'd say the game worked. Somebody could try to make it better with a competitor but it would be a hard thing to succeed at.
- lmm 2y ago
  The more hoops they've added the worse the quality has gotten. The quality has declined over time, and most of the good answers you see nowadays are from people who got in the habit of contributing back when the process was much simpler, and would likely never have joined the site if it was as onerous as it is today.
  - hedora 2y ago
    On a related note, it costs my employer way more to pay me to solve a captcha than it would to pay a captcha solving service. At some point, passing the hoops turns into a negative predictor of comment quality.
- malfist 2y ago
  Have you assessed they quality of QA's that aren't years old? Anything decent that I find is usually quite old and possibly out of date. It doesn't help that asking for a more recent answer gets your question closed as a duplicate, and new answers can never overcome the inertia of the historical ones. September has came for stack overflow
majorchord 2y ago
What do you suggest as a better alternative?
- akira2501 2y ago
  I'm starting to wonder if the days of "free, ad-supported, user-generated content wells" are over. The audience and participation base have grown larger than the ability of these single entities to rationally cope with while still maintaining their original mission and profits. We've outscaled our original hopes for the Internet. It was originally meant to be a tool genuinely controlled by it's users; unfortunately, it's largely ended up in the stranglehold of a few monopolists.
deleted 2y ago
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colechristensen 2y ago

That same amount of pain in the ass gaming made spam and terrible quality answers equally discouraged. Given the volume of at least decent content on stack overflow, I'd say the game worked. Somebody could try to make it better with a competitor but it would be a hard thing to succeed at.

lmm 2y ago
The more hoops they've added the worse the quality has gotten. The quality has declined over time, and most of the good answers you see nowadays are from people who got in the habit of contributing back when the process was much simpler, and would likely never have joined the site if it was as onerous as it is today.
- hedora 2y ago
  On a related note, it costs my employer way more to pay me to solve a captcha than it would to pay a captcha solving service. At some point, passing the hoops turns into a negative predictor of comment quality.
malfist 2y ago
Have you assessed they quality of QA's that aren't years old? Anything decent that I find is usually quite old and possibly out of date. It doesn't help that asking for a more recent answer gets your question closed as a duplicate, and new answers can never overcome the inertia of the historical ones. September has came for stack overflow

majorchord 2y ago

What do you suggest as a better alternative?

akira2501 2y ago
I'm starting to wonder if the days of "free, ad-supported, user-generated content wells" are over. The audience and participation base have grown larger than the ability of these single entities to rationally cope with while still maintaining their original mission and profits. We've outscaled our original hopes for the Internet. It was originally meant to be a tool genuinely controlled by it's users; unfortunately, it's largely ended up in the stranglehold of a few monopolists.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]