[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.

[Timwi]

Using perfectly polite words does not mean your behavior is perfectly polite.

[gn4d]

Emotionally charged? No, just pointing out a statement of fact that conversing with you is like attempting to have a reasonable discussion with a brick wall. That's not emotional, just objective... you are perfectly suited to SO!

[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.