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by leonardteo
1984 days ago
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Re: Stack Overflow, while I agree with you, most of my experience with SO downvoting has purely to do with other members thinking "I feel this is a stupid question so I will downvote you". Usually SO is a last resort for me once I have done enough research and read through lots of documentation for hours trying to understand why something does not work as expected.
I ask a question on SO, and rather than being answered, am downvoted and belittled in the comments. It has made SO a toxic place where honest questions that are researched prior are punished. I do understand why it happens though because for every honest question, there's probably thousands of questions from people who obviously don't do any research. Then having your "Thank you for answering my question" comment removed by SO moderators because they don't want thank you's on the platform... It's just turned into too much of a toxic place and is an absolute last resort. IMO. Others experiences may be different :) The point is that people generally downvote for whatever reason they want. Even with community standards that help to educate people, by empowering people to downvote, they just exercise that right and it has consequences for the community. |
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This has been my experience too. For someone like me who's a non-professional programming hobbyist, SO has been one of the most toxic and unhelpful communities. My only helpful experiences there are with the people who also happen to have their real names for their user ids.
I've had questions downvoted because I omitted something that "should have been there", downvoted because I included some things that "should not have been there", downvoted because I "asked for a suggestion" (eg: which type of DB is better for this kind of data?), or because I asked for something "that has been asked elsewhere", even though the two questions might have different tech stacks and use cases altogether.
I recommend most beginner programmers to go to reddit instead, where there's a less barrier to entry and visibility for questions. People are happy to answer you in Reddit for some karma, while on SO, the people who answer correctly have to subtly beg the questioner to mark the answer as correct.