My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about CoreWCF

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.

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.

There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.

And because recourse is so hard and goes trough the same gatekeepers anyway, they don't get any signal about the accuracy of the maintenance.

One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these points.

Peak of the fenomenon was 2014 when people started publishing their so scores on their resumes, but the platform never really recovered.

> There's a metric incentivizing "maintenance tasks" so the system is biased toward the side of closing and duplicating.

Could you describe this? A lot of people seem to believe that closing or duplicating questions awards reputation. It doesn't.

The complete list of reputation gain sources is at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

The incentive is directing traffic to answers or questions of your profile ring. You can find plenty examples of question closed duplicate that brings you to a question asked later, plenty with an answer lifted from the original.

Hypothetically, if that was the case it doesn't cover the closing of questions that are not duplicates.

I would contend that the "close as something that you have an answer on" is less driven by "I want more votes on the answer" but rather "I know where to find this answer."

Alternatively, if the person didn't close it as an answer you would instead have the person copying and pasting the same answer into the new question - which would accomplish the same thing (more votes for your answers) and further fragment the "one place to look" ideal.

From the perspective of the site and curation of information, a given answer should appear in one and only one question. Closing a question as a duplicate serves to further that goal. Copying and pasting answers ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320351/how-to-handl... ) to questions that would be duplicates is frowned upon. Diamond mods get such behavior raised to them as a system flag ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317988/ ) - "Duplicate answers (auto) - raised on each duplicate answer"