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123 points eterm | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.047s | 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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esafak ◴[] No.43925615[source]
The moderators were elected. What should StackOverflow have done, held a vote of no confidence? Given them less power; make moderation more democratic?
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hobs ◴[] No.43925662[source]
The core problem of SO was the the goal of it (and what made it great) is very much in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want."

The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate.

You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.

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palata ◴[] No.43925830[source]
> in tension with "I want to ask whatever questions I want."

As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to.

This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.

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zahlman ◴[] No.43928057[source]
> Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers.

Please feel free to show concrete examples, and I'd be happy to try to explain the reasoning.

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1. palata ◴[] No.43935079[source]
Deal.

Say I ask "How to do X in settings.gradle?" and it is closed as a duplicate to "How to do X in build.gradle?". I know how to do X in build.gradle, I know it is not the same as doing X in settings.gradle (even if it's is twice the same X), and I know how to do X in settings.gradle (because I just had a need and found a solution without the help of StackOverflow). So I post an answer right away.

Can you explain the reasoning, or do you need it more concrete because you're absolutely sure you know better?

Because what's clear to me is that those (because it required multiple votes) who closed it as duplicate have no clue how it works. They obviously stopped at "X == X, it's a duplicate".

At some point I got into the habit of adding notes like "Note: it is not a duplicate of A because [...] and it is not a duplicate of B because [...]", which honestly made the question worse for those who actually understand it (just for the sake of pleasing those who would close it as duplicate). Spoiler: they closed it as a duplicate of A.

But stay happy in your world where you know everything, I'm not coming back anyway.

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2. zahlman ◴[] No.43936401[source]
To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.)

I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

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3. palata ◴[] No.43941506[source]
> I'm not familiar with [...] but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.

That's probably exactly what those who closed it thought: "I'm not familiar with it, but I'm certainly a better judge than the person who is working with it".

Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong? That would be the first step to understanding why people don't really enjoy your behaviour.

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4. zahlman ◴[] No.43942796{3}[source]
>Do you realise that you are going around telling everybody who complains about the StackOverflow moderation that they were certainly wrong, and StackOverflow was certainly right, and if they showed you the specific question you could certainly teach them why they are wrong?

No. s/certainly/probably/g.

And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.

People really will go up to you and tell you straight faced that no, this is a completely different situation because of a detail that is in fact completely irrelevant to the problem. And that the answers on the duplicate won't work, when they haven't tried. And I've had it happen that I can show these people directly that the answers actually do work in their case.

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5. palata ◴[] No.43949840{4}[source]
> And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.

I think you miss something basic here. Nobody is saying "no question should ever be closed as a duplicate". What I am saying, is that I have had many of my own questions, where I was an SME, that were closed as duplicate where in fact they were not duplicates and the answers on the "duplicate" were not even applicable. By "many" I mean "enough for me to consider StackOverflow moderation toxic and leaving.

Because many questions are actually duplicates doesn't mean that all are duplicates. But you don't seem to be even remotely open to the idea that it can ever happen that a question is wrongly closed as a duplicate. Again, I have had questions closed where I listed the "similar questions" suggested by SO and explained why they were not duplicates. Do you think the moderators would have discussed it with me? It felt like they didn't even read my question entirely because in some cases I can't get how someone who knows how to read may ignore my "warning: this is not a duplicate of X because [...]".