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123 points eterm | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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agos ◴[] No.43925635[source]
just a few months ago they closed a question of mine that I posted in 2010 (!), which in the meanwhile had gathered more than 1000 votes, nearly one million views, and 20 or so answers. I get it that it does not meet their most recent criteria, but closing a question after 15 years telling me to edit my question and read the comments on how it could be improved (there were none) sounds tone deaf and unnecessarily bureaucratic
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Larrikin ◴[] No.43925740[source]
What was the question?

If it is from 2010 and was a relevant question or answer then but has since become irrelevant or even wrong because the framework or language has moved on I actually support this kind of clean up.

There are a lot of best practices that just don't apply anymore that far down the line. Even simple things like whats the best way to use a variable inside of a string in Python would have an outdated (and to most users, wrong) answer if it was from 2010.

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1. palata ◴[] No.43925854[source]
> I actually support this kind of clean up.

I don't understand the idea. Are you also in favour of deleting blog posts that are older than a couple years? There is a date next to the question...

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2. Larrikin ◴[] No.43926275[source]
Why would I want to go to a blog post that also describes the wrong way to do something?

I never said delete anything, but deprecation warnings, closure, and subsequent SEO down ranking of formerly correct but now incorrect/irrelevant answers would be a huge improvement to StackOverflow. Somebody may need to to know the best way to handle permissions in Java on Android 6.0, but it absolutely should not be a top question or answer in 2025 unless somebody is specifically looking for it.

3. zahlman ◴[] No.43928271[source]
Closing a question on Stack Overflow doesn't delete it or hide it from public view, so the comparison doesn't make sense. Closing an old, popular question only prevents it from receiving new answers and puts a banner at the top. The point is to avoid setting bad examples for new questions. The fact that a question was well received many years ago does not guarantee that it's in agreement with current policy.

Additionally, we generally do not close old questions simply because they're "outdated", e.g. refer to deprecated libraries etc. We recognize that people are often stuck maintaining unsupported legacy systems, effectively indefinitely. We sometimes close questions because they refer to services (especially web APIs) that are no longer available. But overwhelmingly, when old popular questions get closed, it's because they're deemed to be no longer on topic for the site. Since a lot of people will see the question, we don't want them to get the wrong idea about what's topical.

And, of course, it makes perfect sense to downvote things that used to be correct but are now incorrect. Practically speaking, this doesn't happen nearly enough; upvotes have a kind of inertia, and wrong answers are often evaluated by people who don't know they're wrong.

By the way: about 89% of up/downvotes ever cast on Stack Overflow are up (https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/492368/to...).