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> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. This is a very charitable read of the situa

> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this. > > The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.

zahlman 9mo ago
> Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this. It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards. There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason. > It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available. This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site. (I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)

zahlman 9mo ago

> Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this. It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards. There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason. > It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available. This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site. (I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)