[vijayboyapati]

Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.

[duncanawoods]

At least you were told why you were downvoted.

I just had a similar experience - I posted an (IMHO) well written question that was immediately downvoted with no comment. It has no answers because I suspect few people are going to look at a <0 question.

This upset me more than it should because in a vulnerable moment of need, I was digitally slapped. SO used to feel like a special gem of altruism where devs helped each other out for the love of it but now it feels like a faceless, cruel and nasty place that I want to avoid. I don't think we fully account for the emotional impact of such events when we introduce voting\karma type features.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I make an effort to upvote questions and comments/answers that have been unfairly downvoted. The same problem plagues HN for anyone who dares to defy the groupthink.

[stinos]

May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.

[scrapcode]

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

[bjwbell]

I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.

[EduardoBautista]

The rust community is very helpful overall.

[savanaly]

Much the opposite for me. I get help from IRC all the time, but the one or two conferences I went to no one seemed very talkative or helpful at all.

[ZoFreX]

I completely agree. I've asked a couple of questions now that had lots of genuinely useful answers, and were then closed for some perceived rule violation.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the moderators were correct and my question was off-topic: it's really rude for half a dozen moderators to pile on and all say so. It gave the impression I was out of line / being told off and it really put me off continuing to be active on the website.

[sgress454]

I agree that the messaging displayed for on-hold questions can seem like you're being ganged-up on. In reality, the way that questions get put on-hold (and eventually closed) is this: there's a review queue that users with enough reputation can go to, where they will be presented with a question that has been flagged as being "off-topic" (or having some other problem). The reviewer can either agree, disagree or skip the question. There's no discussion with other moderators around the matter, and you don't even know who the other reviewers are until you cast your vote. So the "put on-hold by John Doe, Jane Doe, etc." message that ends up on your question is not intended as a rebuke; instead it's meant to force the reviewers to act responsibly, since they won't have the shield of anonymity. This is in addition to many other checks that StackOverflow puts in place to try and prevent reviewer abuse. Point being, try not to take it personally when your question is put on hold or closed; nobody's trying to tell you off (they would do that in the comments if anywhere).

[nisa]

serverfault.com is the worst community in that regard. Asking a technical interesting question for an uncommon usage scenario always provokes grumpy and short comments complemented by downvotes. I'll always include a detailed explanation yet nobody seems to care. Questions are closed as duplicate despite pointing out that this use-case is unique.. I don't bother using the site anymore.

[sgress454]

> Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question

Getting down voted never feels good, but it sounds like the system worked exactly as it was supposed to in this case.

[z3t4]

That must have been an exception to the rule though. If something is down-voted it has a significant higher chance of getting more down-votes and vice-versa.

You might think "doh". But if you get down-voted, try deleting the post and post the exact same content twenty minutes later. You will be surprised.