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by annnnd
4665 days ago
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Interesting. I have an opposite view - for me it was easier to find answers before SO. One good example is when you need to get a library recommendation (which is quite a useful thing for a programmer). "SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question). The problem is that most of the programmers nowadays hang on SO, so other sites (where such questions would be allowed) have much less audience than they did pre-SO. Sure, I can disguise the question and hope that I will get library recommendations nevertheless, but that's an (ugly) hack. There are countless other examples where well-researched, popular and in some way contributing questions were shot down because they are unfit for SO. And as others have pointed out, most karma comes from answers to popular questions, which rewards generic questions which probably have tons of similar answers across the Internet. Domain specific answers however are less awarding. I cope with that in my way. I ask the questions and treat fairly all who answer / comment, but I hold myself back when I see a question I know the answer to. Why would I answer and help SO? I really hope some alternative arises so I can share my knowledge there, but until then I will just try to survive with SO. And what "if all did that"? Well, I guess the alternative would come much sooner. I wouldn't be unhappy about it, far from it. |
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Yeah SO is going the way of Wikipedia wrt rule nazi, trigger happy editors, it's very frustrating. Especially since many of those 'editors' have gotten much of their brownie points from farming them through answering 'soft' questions with popular answers, asking beginner-level but popular questions etc. When you look at the profiles of those voting for closing in cases like the one you cite, you very often see that their domain knowledge is very limited.
I've been sort of active on the site since the very beginning which has led me to have a few thousand points there. To my big frustration, a large part of them come from two answers: one in which I recommended the K&R for learning C, and another how to use the @ operator in PHP to suppress warning messages. I'm a bit disheartened every time I get yet another vote for those answers.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that I get the impression that when I ask or answer a question from that account (with several thousand points and active for 5 years), I'm treated differently than people on new accounts with few points, even when their question is worded exactly the same way I'd do it. It feels like bullying by low-quality users who through grinding stumbled upon editing powers. It certainly (mostly) stopped me from contributing a year or 2 ago; not even so much for the morality of it, but more the overall idea that a site run by the distinctly mediocre (even if there are a few very high quality contributors) just doesn't give me great confidence in the quality of what is on there.
Of course this is a widely documented phenomenon with any UGC (hey there's a buzzword we haven't heard since 2009!) site after it hits a certain critical mass, we just have to look at the very site we're reading now...