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123 points eterm | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.398s | source
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palata ◴[] No.43925550[source]
I used to be very active on StackOverflow, it was a great platform.

After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.

What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one. Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche). So what I started doing was answering my own question (or answering those existing unanswered ones) after solving it on my own. Still, it was fine and I was contributing.

And for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid". Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)! The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year. Not so useless, eh?

Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse. So I stopped contributing to StackOverflow entirely. If I find information there, that's great, if not, I won't go and add it once I find a solution for myself. I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project, bypassing StackOverflow's moderation.

I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly. I'm here to say that what pushed me away was the toxic moderation, not LLMs.

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1. devrandoom ◴[] No.43925770[source]
I stopped flagging things on SO when some of my flags were deemed unhelpful. They clearly weren't.
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2. zahlman ◴[] No.43928212[source]
The underlying system has some weird behaviours and moderators are sometimes compelled to mark flags they find helpful as unhelpful. This might happen, for example, if you report something as "rude or abusive" where they agree that the content should be removed, but disagree that the user should be penalized. But also, a lot of problems are better handled by just editing out objectionable content. When you flag a question as a duplicate or as "needs improvement", that goes to the community; but everything else is sent to a team of 24 volunteers overlooking a site that still receives thousands of questions a week and is still full of years-old comments that should be cleaned up but which nobody has gotten around to yet.