> their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer

Has it changed a few years ago? When I started 3 years ago, I could answer right from the start and I got the ability to vote quickly enough, after a pair of vote on an answer, without having to do menial tasks every day. Reputation can also be gained with edits, is that what you are talking about?

Answering questions doesn't help unless those answers get upvotes. As a newbie, your answers are less likely to get upvotes, especially if you're slower than the old timers.

It's true. For my part, I started (and continued to) answer on a tag with not a lot of questions and answers, so most/some of the time I'd write the only answer. Though I had a professional interest into the tag at the time, I didn't choose it because it was easy to write the single answer on a question.

And that's an example of the system working at its best. You were incented to answer questions nobody else could or would answer. In my experience it doesn't work out that way often.

That’s funny, maybe it did change. I haven’t tried in many years as I gave up.

I definitely learned a lot of my attitudes about software engineering from "Joel on Software". It's weird to think that those works are "ancient" now.

I don't really have an answer to the problem, SO has some very smart people working for them who, I'm sure, think about this issue. For some reason technical discussions held by competent people on the internet seem to trend towards dumpster fire. I've also noticed this phenomenon on photography discussion groups.

I expect to burn a few karma points on this, and be ignored, but all evidence I have says that this is human nature at work, and that at scale it cannot be prevented.

I've seen moderators of small communities hold off the effect by setting a good example, using a deft touch, and not letting the community get too big.

My suspicion is that once the number of commenters gets much past Dunbar's number [1], the universal fall into "default jerk" happens. Once that's taken place, you're stuck in an Eternal September.

Communities in the real world don't scale well. I'm not sure why programmers expect them to on the Internet, with its well-known capacity for dehumanization.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

I think there's something to this. Not sure if it's Dunbar's Number specifically, but something. It seems like there's a pattern where a community is nice and small, with people joining at a trickle. Things change when a jerk joins and starts doing jerk stuff. This tends to drive away the nice and helpful people, attract more jerks, and pushes people still there to be more jerk-ish themselves. Sometimes deft management can prevent it with some well-timed bannings, but I think this gets increasingly difficult as the community gets larger, and may be effectively impossible in internet-scale communities.

You're describing the broken windows theory [0], it's not related to Dunbar's number.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/broken-windows-theory

Yeah, I'm not sure it's Dunbar's number precisely - it was just what came to mind.

They could start by simply making it just a little more difficult to give negative feedback. For instance: Require that every down-vote is given a written reason for it.

And perhaps make it so that DOWNVOTES CAN BE DOWNVOTED (provided a written reason is given for that as well).

> SO has some very smart people working for them

I think they don't have enough (or any?) moderators working for them. They rely too much on making profits with the free help of trolls.

I understand it would be hard for them to change the power of the troll-users by now. Perhaps we simply need a new Stack Overflow, some competition.

You don't even have to have an account to post an answer, nor any points to post a question. You need only 15 points to upvote (2 upvotes on an answer, or three on a question).

Or no upvotes and 1 "accept" on an answer.

Experts Exchange, where the paywall could be bypassed if you scrolled down far enough.