[wokwokwok]

I mostly no longer contribute to stack overflow.

I don’t ask questions, because people take a very carefully explained, explicit question and post irrelevant stupid comments on it (“why are you doing this?”) instead of answering the question.

I don’t answer questions, because people upvote wrong answers and vindictively downvote answers to the actual question (which is why everyone posts comments instead of answering, because you can’t down vote them for it).

People care more about karma than actually helping.

The quality issues are real, but really?

I care not at all if 90k+ karma folk leave. Just leave. If you don’t like what it is, go hang out somewhere else. Why are you there if you’re not trying to help people?

What I care about is the people patiently answering questions in a way that is correct, not antagonistic, not ducking off because it took more than 5 minutes and they can get better karma somewhere else.

…almost like, a dedicated support community who care about a topic. That’s a nice idea. You could probably find one of those for your topic of interest and get help there from nice people. That’s what I do now. The folk there are generally quite lovely, because they actually care.

The people on stack overflow, by and large, are not nice, do not care and won’t help you if you have any really hard problems to solve.

An AI would be just as good, if it had decently accurate answers.

[emodendroket]

> An AI would be just as good, if it had decently accurate answers.

Well, this reminds me of "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle."

Failing to clean up bad questions is encouraging all the bad behavior you're talking about, since answering yet another question from someone who couldn't be bothered to write his own regex is an easy 25 points that nobody will ever look at again.

[wokwokwok]

Does it help any of the issues I mentioned?

Or would those people be happier if they just had their questions answered?

The answerers with their karma; happy! The askers with their answers: happy.

The only “losers” are people who hoard their karma… because (I guess?) now other people are getting karma? …and I just do not care about those people.

[emodendroket]

Well, you said you were dissatisfied that people were avoiding challenging questions in favor of karma farming easy ones. Failing to prune lazy questions with no value to other users incentivizes that exact behavior because hard questions don't usually have a better payoff.

[avereveard]

It's a gargantuan task to clean up low quality post and fight back low quality copy paste blog spam from a community that has become resume padding for the masses.

The community has spoken, to the extent whether the majority of usage becomes the defacto standard, and basically filtered out all but the most basic coding issues that are just one peg above homework assignments.

[emodendroket]

Well, I wouldn’t say it was the community speaking. This is what the operators wanted because the old way was not “welcoming” enough and didn’t contribute enough to growth. Hey, it’s a business. I get it.

[yladiz]

No, it wasn’t “not ‘welcoming’”, it was just “not welcoming”. Sure it’s the owners who forced this, but it’s not a bad thing to be more welcoming and thinking otherwise because “it’s better” is problematic. You should also blame the owners for not giving a shit about moderation for the low quality of things now, if you want to blame them for the push for being “welcoming”.

[avereveard]

You can be welcoming and still enforce guidelines, it's not an either/or situation.

[emodendroket]

At the end of the day enforcing guidelines involves telling people "sorry, this is not the kind of question we want here," and people are always going to find this less than welcoming -- justifiably so, since they've objectively been excluded. You can be as nice as you want about it, and I'm not advocating being rude or cruel, but it doesn't matter.

[yladiz]

Right, I think so too. My point is more that moderation doesn’t imply being unwelcoming, and they are more or less distinct. A great example is HN, it’s a pretty welcoming place with good moderation, albeit at a much smaller size than SO.

[matsemann]

"why are you doing this" isn't a "irrelevant stupid comment". It's because most askers are really asking a XY question. They ask for Y, since that's their immediate problem, but solving X is their real goal. So it's a question meant to make it easier to help, when doing Y seems a bit weird.

https://xyproblem.info/

> The people on stack overflow, by and large, are not nice

From your long rant, I'm not sure if you're coming off any better. To me it sounds like SO should be happy someone like you isn't contributing.

[animuchan]

Oh, the XY people are the worst on SO. Here's the latest example I've seen: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57121467/import-a-module...

Please see the comments under the OP. While the question is technically sound (I've needed this exact thing for a REPL I was writing), the comments are perfectly useless, self-entitled and discouraging drivel. Notable example:

> This is an incredibly odd thing to ask

(emphasis theirs). How is this even slightly odd. Are REPLs odd? Of course not.

[matsemann]

I don't see the problem there at all.

They ask a question with some weird requirements, people ask why those requirements are in place as it makes it hard to solve, the asker explains why. Everything is good.

[emodendroket]

If you’re writing a REPL it’s one thing but it does seem like evaluating a string is the kind of thing where most people trying to do it are using the wrong approach.

[matisseverduyn]

> From your long rant, I'm not sure if you're coming off any better. To me it sounds like SO should be happy someone like you isn't contributing.

Is quite a harsh personal attack, and probably contributes to the author's feelings regarding hostility and gatekeeping.

[matsemann]

They're the one saying people at SO aren't nice. My guess is just that the person feels that way after getting pushback from their own behavior / attitude. I feel it's a trend, I see lots of toxic comments from people "having given up SO", and I think to myself that it's a good thing..

But you're right, I should've avoided going personal.

[wokwokwok]

No, by all means go right ahead.

I literally not do care remotely what you, or other folk like you on SO say. :)

You’re why I no longer go there.

[LoganDark]

> They're the one saying people at SO aren't nice.

They never said that. They said that stupid comments get posted.

[matsemann]

I quote it in my parent post directly. So yes, they said that.

[LoganDark]

wokwokwok did not say that. wokwokwok replied to a comment that said that, but did not say it themself.