[tus88]

I used to participate in SO but it is really turning into a hit n run site for me now. Overzealous duplicate and notconstructive flags combined with the dumbing everything down for new users policy made it frustrating and unrewarding experience. It still is to be frank when the "answer matches actual question in title" rate is about 10%, but what else is there?

[mhuffman]

> Overzealous duplicate

This one is really killing me lately.

In almost all cases it points to something only tangentially related and is of no help.

SO used to be a place that smart people could go to get other smart people to help them with a problem.

Now it mostly seems to be a place where people help students with their high-school CS homework and then bitch about not being there to help with homework!

Quora is even worse!

I am eagerly waiting for whoever comes up with the next reasonable knowledge-sharing site to leave these two POS sites where they belong!

[jen729w]

Who would have thought that organising literally all of human knowledge in a linear Q&A format would have been so hard?

/s

[wodenokoto]

With great fear of this, I opened a question on SO a while ago and at the bottom linked to several other SO questions under the heading "similar but different, because ...", and it went quite well, although moderation was quite angry that I didn't choose an accepted answer within a day.

[segfaultbuserr]

> although moderation was quite angry that I didn't choose an accepted answer within a day.

I don't know about Stack Overflow, which is the largest SE site, and may have some cultural differences.

But I'm pretty sure that accepting an answer within a day is strongly discouraged on all Stack Exchange sites in general. You should wait, at least one day before accepting it - some users may still want to answer it. I only accept answers when nobody posts new answers. Also, a user doesn't have to accept an answer, if none of the answer is helpful for solving the question - it has been discussed on Meta before.

Personally, if I asked a question and none of the answer solves the question, I'll accept the most helpful one. If none is helpful, I don't accept any answer, and usually I will be able to answer my own question and accept myself in the future.

[GordonS]

I've tried that before too, but over-zealous mods still closed as a duplicate - I really believe a lot of them do that without even reading the question, or the question they say is a dupe :/

[MauranKilom]

Can you mention the tags you are experiencing this in? I see this complaint all the time and yet I don't observe it myself despite being quite active on the site (but in only specific tags)...

[mhuffman]

I don't have a list of tags at the ready, but it has happened enough to piss me off as a pattern.

I can say that I am usually on there looking for help on "advanced" programming or hardware issues. So think long-tail type questions, not the type that you stumble onto early in your career.

At one point I was beginning to think that the mods just did not technically understand the questions and that was why they had an itchy "dupe" trigger finger.

[karlshea]

I agree, I was actually watching this situation with glee, hoping every moderator on the entire site would quit en-masse. Maybe then it would be useful again.

[MauranKilom]

Anyone who thinks that moderators quitting will stop questions being closed as dupes doesn't understand how StackOverflow works. The moderators are the ones doing the absolute dirtywork of handling cases of abuse, harassment, vandalism, spam, vote fraud, and so on. If half the mods quit, all you get in return is more spam and hostile comments. The remaining community will keep closing questions like before - that's simply not the job of moderators.

[mistermann]

It's sad what it's become.

Are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky still involved? It seems hard to believe they could mismanage SO as thoroughly as this without having a complete change in personality.

[SyneRyder]

It looks like Jeff Atwood left in 2012 to create Discourse [1], and Joel Spolsky recently stepped down as CEO [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/jeff-atwood-bids-adieu-to-...

[2] https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf...