[kulahan]

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.

It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

[Arnt]

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them.

That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.

Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.

In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?

[stormblooperz]

Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.

[Arnt]

Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself.

Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.

[kulahan]

Probably right, definitely justifiable, super annoying and actively driving away users.

[Arnt]

Most users don't ask. They search.

The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.

[stormblooperz]

This. This is exactly it.

[zahlman]

When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again...

... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).

But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.

[stormblooperz]

I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on.

I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists!

Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.

[zahlman]

> not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation.

I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.

I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.

They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).

> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.

I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.

> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.

Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.

But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)

[stormblooperz]

So you have paid attention and read countless examples of people's experiences with Stack Overflow, but have concluded that, in fact, they are all in the wrong?

Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.

[bdangubic]

How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?

this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)

[zahlman]

> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem

You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)

If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.

If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)

If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.

And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.

[bdangubic]

The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.

[Arnt]

Stack Overflow has its own notion of what a question is. In short, a question has to be suitable as part of a searchable knowledge base.

If you want to post something that isn't SO's idea of a question, then you're really just posting off-topic. And if you then insist that people should help you with your off-topic posting, you're being overly presumptious.

[bdangubic]

I don’t disagree… However, that leads you to your eventual demise. They coasted for a long time being as toxic as they have been because there was virtually no alternatives. Now that we have alternatives it is no wonder the website is as dead as it gets. Make the bed, lie in it…

[zahlman]

> The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.

> > Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.

[daedrdev]

And this is why stack overflow now has as many questions asked as it did in 2009

[zahlman]

>And this is why stack overflow now has as many questions asked as it did in 2009

So now there is a manageable volume of new questions that allows for enough people to review them properly and apply question standards properly, instead of letting most things seep through and set bad examples for the next batch. And more time to sift through the existing questions to polish up the best.

Existing questions, by the way, that outnumber Wikipedia articles by more than 3:1. Even though they're only supposed to be specifically about programming rather than about literally anything notable.

[yuzzi]

Seems to me like you're part of the problem. Of course it's not my problem anymore because I no longer contribute there.

[zahlman]

From GP:

> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.

Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?

[int_19h]

It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.

[zahlman]

> while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.

None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)

Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?

[int_19h]

It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already right here in HN comments, but every time you do the equivalent of "la la la can't hear you" in response.

It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.

[zahlman]

> It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already

The only thing that any of you have explained is that the site doesn't measure up to your standards.

You have given me no reason why I should evaluate the site by your standards.

[Arnt]

Citation needed.

I know why one top contributor left (cancer) and I heard the same about another. I haven't heard what you say about any, except in sweeping statements like yours.

[int_19h]

I still have 100k SO rep from the glory days of old - is that enough for you to count my vote as "you dun fucked it up" in that category?

[zahlman]

I can think of multiple users offhand with 500k+ rep that I think are more damaging to the site than any newcomer ever could be. (No, I will not name names.) And I previously showed you a link of someone with 60k+ rep (slightly more than me) who went 14 years without even trying to use the meta site for anything and demonstrated a complete failure to understand the basic standards for questions.

[Arnt]

If I'm part of the problem, then that's because of something I do, or else something I don't do.

The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?

[solongso]

If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution.

9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.

I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.

You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?

For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.

Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.

Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.

[zahlman]

> I have a deadline and a problem.

Stack Overflow is by design not there to help you with this:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569

If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.

If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.

We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.

> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.

Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.

The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.

It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.

> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.

Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.

> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?

We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.

> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?

It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.

It is not about you.

> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.

A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.

> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?

No, in fact. It is not social media, either.

Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)

All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.

Stack Overflow does not. By design.

Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).

By design.

> Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.

You don't realistically get "dinged" for this. Whatever question of yours was downvoted to -4 (since your "reputation decreased by 8 points") certainly had other things wrong with it.

Sure, these things were edited out of your question; the post does not belong to you (in the terms of service, you license it to the community).

> Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.

The site is what it is. Sites on the Internet are allowed to be what they want to be. You are not entitled to them changing to suit you.

[yuzzi]

Of course not. But I'm entitled to look elsewhere. Thanks for clarifying, better than I could myself, why I no longer use SO.

[tstrimple]

There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.

[NBJack]

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem.

But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

[Arnt]

I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.

[daedrdev]

surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.

[Arnt]

Show, don't tell.

Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)

Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.

[daedrdev]

This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.

[mcejp]

Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.

[zahlman]

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.

If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.

It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.

But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:

"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.

"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)

"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).

[surgical_fire]

> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.

If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?

It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.

Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.

[zahlman]

>>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.

>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?

You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.

That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.

> Either what I was looking for was already there

The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.

[surgical_fire]

> You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.

> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.

I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.

That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.

> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).

This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.

> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.

I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.

[zahlman]

>was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for.

See: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/384711 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254697 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385343 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205

Not to dismiss you - but it's important to understand what the standard is for "duplication". This has changed over the years because the original (very narrow) interpretation turned out to be unviable - it doesn't scale. (And "it doesn't scale" is a big part of why Stack Overflow was created - where "it" is the traditional discussion forum model.)

>but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.

Because your search query is equally suited to find a bunch of garbage questions that should have been closed (and then deleted when they weren't improved) - often ones that are about something completely different, but click-bait because of the words in the title (often a result of OP completely misidentifying the problem and not producing a proper MRE).

>asking a meaningful question takes effort

It does. In fact, when I've written self-answered Q&A to share knowledge, I've often found the question harder than the answer.

The reputation system was very poorly conceived. It incentivizes terrible behaviours, while the best results will come from intrinsic motivation anyway. (Plus it carries the implicit assumption that answering questions demonstrates an understanding of site policy, when the opposite is often true: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357021 )

> my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue

Duplicates are not inherently bad. They help others find the original, and the duplicate count statistics help identify important questions and topics. Furthermore, it's 100% in keeping with policy to close something as a duplicate of a newer question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697 ). If you ask something well, and get a good answer, and then someone notices that it was asked before, your version is likely to stand instead. (And the target for a duplicate closure must have an accepted or upvoted answer.)

[soco]

Your point makes totally sense and it also sounds like a robotic overlord from some SF dystopia: cold and following its own programmed rules to the painful detail. As the other commenter pointed out: you are definitely right and we see your point. But it's a also because of it that I stopped using SO years except for maybe causally searching. Let me draw an inaccurate parallel: security, if done perfectly, lets nobody achieve anything.

[zahlman]

Having to say the same things repeatedly wears on one. I shouldn't really be participating in these threads, I should be blogging about it instead.

[yuzzi]

Yes. This

[NBJack]

> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.

Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.

Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.

[zahlman]

> Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify.

There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.

As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.

The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.

So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.

>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening

Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.

Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.

But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.

> (with seemingly little recourse)

As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:

> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)

> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.

"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .

> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.

Links:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions

Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.

If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.

(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)

[slyfox125]

Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base.

Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.

[s1ph3r]

I think the appeal of SO to its users (besides getting help for programming when you find someone willing) is that its also a source of narcissistic supply for the powerusers that can be maximized due to SO's gatekeeping policies.

[zahlman]

It especially hurts to see words like "narcissistic" used to describe my friends who volunteer copious amounts of their time to try to be polite to hordes of others who clearly don't give a damn about what they're trying to accomplish and seem to assume that their usual way of interacting with web sites that have a submission form is the only way that exists.

[zahlman]

My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used.

We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.

But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373801 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334870

Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352575

Rudeness happens all around, really:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326494

Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/523612

(And, of course, all of this really blows up once assumptions start getting made about who is or isn't especially sensitive: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665)

[yuzzi]

How ironic. For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo) and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

[zahlman]

> For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo)

This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.

> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.

What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.

[mvdtnz]

If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.

[zahlman]

It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content.

It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.

I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.

I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.

Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.

That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.

[Karrot_Kream]

You are a volunteer. You can stop volunteering. If the job is becoming corrosive to your mental health and you don't have the emotional energy to engage with the job in manner that involves empathy, then I think the healthier option for everyone is to stop volunteering and let someone new come in who still has the empathy to handle it.

[mvdtnz]

ok man

[jemmyw]

The last time I used it I was asking a math question that was somewhat beyond me. I'd already spent hours researching it. Part of the problem was I knew I didn't know the right terminology but I could describe the problem in detail. I asked on SO, got one slightly snarky comment that answered the wrong problem. It did give me a clue to the right wording to look for though so in a way I got my answer. But the general attitude, and your attitude, is "why are you asking this question?"

SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.

[yuzzi]

Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.

[zahlman]

> vandals

How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard?

> who seem to take glee

Why do you imagine so?

[solongso]

Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing.

OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.

[zahlman]

> Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism.

So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ?

By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended.

So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them.

> Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement

I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/

But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics.

It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design.

> and let the poster bring the post into compliance?

Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it.

> do you think that by damaging my reputation

Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.)

> Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.

No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350

My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.

[yuzzi]

I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards and, at the same time, preserve your audience. Your response is basically "shrug, that's the way the system works". Reminds me of Hal trying to talk to the onboard computer in 2001 Space Odyssey. "I can't do that, Hal. That's just the way I work, Hal."

[zahlman]

>I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards

No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.

Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.

Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.

Again: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436

[mixmastamyk]

Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.

But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.

No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

[zahlman]

>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.

You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).