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123 points eterm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.334s | 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. karmakaze ◴[] No.43926167[source]
I had stopped interacting with SO as well, though the fact didn't really cross my mind. I had a few popular answers that got be enough points to be a moderator. The experience there is similar--possibly worse because the idiocy is unveiled. In the past I've often argued to reopen questions, sometimes even making edits to make it more agreeable to other mods.

It's common for those to get shouted down based on some policy or other bureaucratic nonsense by those who have no idea what the question is actually about. The problem could be that many of those who don't do, moderate. It attracts different sorts of people than those that are actually working with the things being discussed.