[zahlman]

> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.

The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.

Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.

Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.

So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.

[palata]

> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.

How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?

I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.

[zahlman]

The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.

When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.

[palata]

> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions

I see that you just don't hear the complaints.

I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

[zahlman]

> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.

Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.

[palata]

> Because they usually can.

I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.

They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".

[zahlman]

>They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions"

Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.

>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

????? I said nothing of the sort.

>other than "we are great".

This, too, is your wording, not mine.

But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.

[goobie]

Antisocial people flood the site with low quality answers to low quality questions and not indexing everything to the web is just too hard.. Imagine if every town and school was filled with the same pricks? Your kids are stupid and don't understand PhD level research so they should shut up.

It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.