[fabianholzer]

Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

[matsemann]

It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.

One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.

Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.

[Aurornis]

> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.

Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.

Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners

The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.

[matsemann]

> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?

It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.

[Timwi]

Why do you continue to ask for examples if you're just going to downplay them or explain them away like you did here?

[matsemann]

Still haven't been given a single example? And no, closing a question isn't necessarily hostile.

[gn4d]

He's demonstrating in real-time to other contributors here why SO is toast hahaha

The feeling you are getting when talking to that arrogant brick wall was the prototypical SO user experience.

[matsemann]

No need for name calling. If anything, you're demonstrating what I'm pointing out: emotionally charged responses to perfectly polite behavior.

[tomrod]

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners

This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.

Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.

[matsemann]

Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.

As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.

[nerdbert]

Doesn't help with how often it is wrong, but if you preface every question with "terse answer please" at least you don't get the superfluous text tsunami and it sticks to the point.

[tomrod]

I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.

[matsemann]

If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed.

[bdangubic]

I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)

[Timwi]

You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user.

[n5NOJwkc7kRC]

Anyone who uses SO often enough have seen them for themselves. We don't really need proof. Besides which, this isn't court. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to know, not the strangers around them who have no responsibility to them.

[brabel]

Hm… as the person was new to SO it’s very possible they don’t understand what a good question looks like and I thought it may be helpful to give feedback on what may have gone wrong… but if you see that as “begging” and you don’t think you need any feedback, you have it all sorted out after all, then yeah it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

[m-schuetz]

Thing is, if that's how you are greeted at stackoverflow, then you'll go elsewhere where you're not treated like an idiot. Stackoverflow's decline was inevitable, even without LLMs.

[nkrisc]

And thus SO dies as people will go somewhere they can actually get their question answered.

[closewith]

This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow.

I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect.

[wpietri]

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem.

In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help.

But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think of users as a problem and an interruption, even though they were the only reason we were getting paid.

I've been refusing to contribute to SO for so long that I can't even remember the details. But I still recall the feeling I got from their dismissive jackassery. Having their content ripped off by LLMs is the final blow, but they have richly earned their fate.

[pasc1878]

The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions.

However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

[wpietri]

Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users.

[pasc1878]

The answerers are just as much users as the questioners - possibly in fact more as they are the ones spending time whilst the askers often (especially the poor ones) just ask a question and then go away.

Unfortunately the SO management want money and so want the fly away askers more than the answerers who provide the benefit of the site.

[dent9]

> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.

So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.

[shagie]

When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.

Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.

... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.

Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205

Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.

It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.

The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.

Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.

I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

[closewith]

> It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.

This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully".

> It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable.

It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.

[mvdtnz]

I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.

[wpietri]

I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how.

[gn4d]

+

[gn4d]

>Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

The fact that you even have to point this out to them, and how they still don't understand the root of the problem, is precisely why SO is finished.