[matheusmoreira]

It's the deletionism that effectively ended my participation in stack exchange networks. Violated the rules with your question? Closed. Alright, I can deal with it. But they didn't stop, they just had to go and delete the goddamn post, along with all the useful comments and links that had built up on it, for literally no reason. There was actual content in there.

Seriously, fuck that. Went all in on my own website after that. Can't delete my stuff now.

[dspillett]

Their rules said duplicates should be deleted, at least most of the time, so they were. While it might be nice for extra useful content from the dup to be merged into the original page, that would be a lot of work and much of the time there isn't enough to make it worthwhile (or any).

> for literally no reason

Other than the reason that it was their site and that is what they chose to do.

While some criticism of SO is certainly valid, I find a lot of it boils down to "how dare they run their site the way they want instead of the way that I would prefer".

> Went all in on my own website after that. Can't delete my stuff now.

This is a good solution. Everything I've written on there that ended up being something I might want to preserve, and similarly useful answers to mine and others queries, I have archived for future reference too¹, in case the sites die, or that particular content does, or otherwise becomes inaccessible to me.

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[1] though in my case not online as I never got around to that, maybe I will one day, when I've been sacked for being inefficient because I refuse to have Claude do my job for me and I have plenty of time on my hands!

[matheusmoreira]

> Other than the reason that it was their site and that is what they chose to do.

Welp, they can go to hell along with their site. AI is better than stack exchange anyways.

Everybody's got boundaries, and they managed to cross mine. I can deal with rudeness and toxicity just fine. I can deal with moderators enforcing the rules. Straight up deleting stuff is simply not acceptable though, and I couldn't care less how they justify it.

[dspillett]

You might be happier in life if, having decided that you didn't like how things were done there, you moved on and got on with things elsewhere, rather than moving on but still being bitter and complainy about it to this very day.

[matheusmoreira]

It's not bitterness, it's anger. It can be a rather enjoyable and cathartic emotion, especially when one is confronting perceived wrongs.

Another benefit of sharing experiences, especially negative ones: it can help others. Maybe there are people on this site who aren't yet aware that stack exchange embraced deletionism. I certainly wasn't, wouldn't have contributed otherwise. If I help even one person realize this, it was worth it. That realization could prevent them from having their work closed down and deleted before they had even finished writing it.