[fakedang]

> 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".

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.