2 ms·

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a user

IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).

huhkerrf 5mo ago
It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
- ijk 5mo ago
  Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems. There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect. The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
- mcswell 5mo ago
  In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
ceejayoz 5mo ago
> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
- StableAlkyne 5mo ago
  That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
  - TeMPOraL 5mo ago
    This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week. Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
  - ceejayoz 5mo ago
    > If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
    - StableAlkyne 5mo ago
      And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available
Paracompact 5mo ago
Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".

huhkerrf 5mo ago

It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.

ijk 5mo ago
Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems. There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect. The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
mcswell 5mo ago
In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.

ceejayoz 5mo ago

> against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.

StableAlkyne 5mo ago
That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
- TeMPOraL 5mo ago
  This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week. Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  > If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
  - StableAlkyne 5mo ago
    And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available

Paracompact 5mo ago

Could've been a good rule: Unless the XY problem is so severe that X is impossible, you can't heckle or post Y solution unless paired with X solution.

ceejayoz 5mo ago
X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".