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123 points eterm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.236s | 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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handsclean ◴[] No.43925812[source]
I’d appreciate if somebody more familiar with SO would verify this, but I believe there’s some low constant number of close votes required to close something, and this doesn’t adapt to how many people are voting or to positive signals. Because there’s an error rate in all things, this naturally means that things are wrongly closed all the time, especially content that’s viewed a lot and not fought for.
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1. zahlman ◴[] No.43927135[source]
Hi, I'm intimately familiar with Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/523612).

It requires either:

* Three votes (it used to be 5) from community members with the close vote privilege (awarded at 3000 reputation)

* Unilateral closure by a moderator (there are currently 24 of these: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators - compare to 29 million user accounts: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1877958/c... )

* Unilateral closure as a duplicate by a user with the close vote privilege who also has a gold badge for one of the tags originally used on the question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589)

The thresholds are deliberately fairly low, mainly because closure of new bad questions must happen promptly for the site to work as intended (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). This is frankly a major fault in the site design; but the new Staging Ground feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430404) helps a lot, on the occasions when the site software actually decides to use it.

However, "closing" content "that's viewed a lot" (this basically only ever means old questions; new questions rarely ever get a lot of views, regardless of quality, unless it's from spambots - see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431084) is emphatically not wrong. We close old, popular questions all the time, because they don't currently meet site standards (usually, because they are no longer deemed on topic). This is at least partly to discourage new questions along the same lines; but the primary effect of closing a question is to prevent answers from being contributed. These old questions generally wouldn't need new answers (although edits to existing answers may be helpful - and are not blocked) even if they were still considered suitable.