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123 points eterm | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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. PaulHoule ◴[] No.43926867[source]
Somehow I never found the StackOverflow game to be worth playing.

In retrospect it is a case study of a particular enshittification scenario: "benign neglect" Back when they published a data dump I had a project on my speculative list to clean up their database, take only the best answers, etc. For python, the numerous Python 2 examples

   print "something"
would get rewritten to Python 3

   print("something")
basically do the maintenance work they weren't doing. Personally I find their idea of what is a valid question to ask offensive. If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.
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2. zahlman ◴[] No.43928153[source]
> If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.

Over time we found that hardly anyone asking questions could achieve the kind of "good subjectivity" that we wanted. Questions like this attract flame wars (which are especially obnoxious in a format with answer posts with non-threaded comments) and advertising for alternatives, add-ons etc. that result in a completely derailed discussion in a place that isn't supposed to have a discussion at all.

If you want to ask "what factors should I take into consideration when choosing..." then I would agree that can in principle fit on a Q&A site. But open-endedness again makes it hard to choose the best answers and ensure they float to the top.

The general principles are much the same at Codidact Software (https://software.codidact.com), but the scope is considerably wider than Stack Overflow's (https://software.codidact.com/posts/search?search=category%3...). You might have better luck with that kind of question there.