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A comment on Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change. Parent comment

Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by scardine on Thursday April 26, 2018 @05:36PM (#16936061)
People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are helping strangers on the Internet for free. I'm one of them[1].

Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.

Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=pr...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by Mithaldu on Friday April 27, 2018 @03:17AM (#16939000)
> we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions

You don't. Straight-up. You may think you do, but SO utterly fails at this.

In almost all cases where i end up on SO in my research the accepted answer is trash, and the one below it is the real one.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by Sacho on Friday April 27, 2018 @05:00AM (#16939371)
The accepted answer is decided by the person asking the question - I'm not sure SO moderators are allowed to change an accepted answer(at the very least, they're heavily disincentivized to do so). I think your example is a case for more moderation, not less.
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Re:Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That ... by Mithaldu on Friday April 27, 2018 @05:09AM (#16939410)
I'm not saying less moderation is needed, but that the moderation itself being done is low quality.
[ Parent | on HN ]