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123 points eterm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.278s | 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. metalliqaz ◴[] No.43925847[source]
I left SO a long time ago when it was really at its peak. Your SO score was starting to be used as a metric to get hired for jobs in the valley. At that time moderation was totally out of control. One contributor in particular* would find a post he didn't like, then go to chat rooms to rally a downvote brigade. It was so toxic I called it quits on the spot. I still use SO quite a bit, but through DDG. I search for something, it displays an answer that it scraped from SO. Some years ago I read that they made an effort to soften the atmosphere there because they realized it was chasing away female devs and other minority groups. I guess they couldn't turn it around.

*Later he took over the Flask project and I was still bitter so I stopped using that too.