[1] https://imgur.com/a/pnTLwcU

The question looks like an "I'm out of my wits please debug my application" question which isn't atomic or precise enough to fit the SO format. I would have liked the person asking the question to provide a complete minimal failing example to even begin working on an answer.

Most questions on SO these days (that are not "do my homework for me please") are garbage like this. Signal to noise ratio is horrendous. Gin, Next.js, whatever are pure noise, the actual problem is glossed over in a vague sentence: "my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it's blocked at all but my browser isn't setting the cookie". You could try to talk the submitter into providing the complete HTTP request, which could take a very long back and forth, but after a thousand questions like this, you probably decide it's not worth the effort to salvage the question; or like me, you decide it's not worth participating in the site at all.

Because once you can construct the perfect question, you can most certainly answer it yourself. It should be OK for questions to be somewhat vague, to contain "noise" and non-related stuff (because how on earth should the person asking the question know if something is relevent if they don't know the solution already?).

And I think in most cases a "complete minimal failing example" is way overkill. If someone in the future runs into the same problem, they have code already, and if there is already a solution accepted, then all that is needed is the description of the problem case and the solution (and in the best case, a root cause analysis, but that is an optional extra).

Some mods seem to think that SO is the next Encyclopedia Britannica, and each question is an article in it. This was not true in the beginning, and I don't feel like this is the right direction. But who cares about what I think.

Not if what you're lacking is declarative knowledge, which is what the site tries to elicit, to a first approximation anyway.

You should reduce the question to the point where you can say "between substeps 1.3.5 and 1.3.6 there seems to be a proposition I don't know. What is it?"

If you can't reduce the problem to a missing proposition, there are better resources to turn to for help with debugging it step-by-step until you have isolated a problem. I've had success with mentoring and IRC.

Meanwhile, the spam/abuse deletion, removal of illegitimate votes, conflict resolution, and so on that having mods is actually valuable for happen behind the scenes.

You have access to the moderator queue and have been according to your history a person with relatively influential ability. Why don't you work towards changing the culture yourself?

""" I have this working no problem locally , but in production with different domains, my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it is blocked at all but the browser isn't setting the cookie. """

I know there's a question in there somewhere but it feels pretty much like a run on sentence and the clarity is lacking. There's something that could be wrapped up in that final paragraph that I think could make the question more direct.

Obviously it's not perfect, but it's no worse than asking human coworkers, which are also sometimes wrong. (I'd prefer not to interrupt my human coworkers with questions with searchable answers anyway.)

At the time I would answer to others. Now I don't really bother. I often see a wrong answer being marked as correct, because it came before an actually good answer.

For me SO now is at most a website where to copy boilerplate stuff like "how to create a unix server socket".

You don't have to, but can you give some examples of good answers being deleted or good questions being closed? I'm just surprised I always see some people on HN furious at SO, and wonder why their experience is so different from mine.

Btw, regarding old questions, I always make sure I search SO before I post my question, and if any similar questions exist, I link them in my new question and say "I found this [url1] but it doesn't apply to my situation because of circumstances XYZ". This is simply good practice to show you respect the community's time.

He's not the only one who has this impression that it happens constantly. And there are enough such people that they can't easily be dismissed as malcontents and troublemakers.

I still ask questions once in awhile... if you're desperate, there's a chance that it slips past their asshole guards and gets noticed by someone willing to help. But it's certainly unusual at this point.

Once a culture of moderation develops, moderators have to moderate just to feel like they're useful/important. They do this even if moderation isn't needed. Instead of just keeping a watch out for the uncommon problem question, they're inspecting many/most of them and looking for reasons to close/delete. It's too high of a bar, the purpose of the site is to help those who don't necessarily know enough to ask brilliant questions. Or maybe it isn't anymore.

We've cultivated an entire society of busybodies out there measure lawns with rulers, so to speak. It would take decades to roll this back to something sane.

Not all, but some of my questions also got downvoted or closed. You might not be able to see them when your reputation score is too low (also somewhat stupid).

The reasons of closes or downvotes vary:

- Being off-topic for the site. Which is often very arbitrary. And I don't fully agree with what they want to have as on-topic. E.g. they don't want to ask for library or software recommendations. I understand the reasoning (might be opinionated and can easily get outdated) but there are some cases where there are canonical answers even to those, and in most cases, it's still useful.

- Or quality not good enough yet. I don't think it's a good reason to close a question or downvote it. If it is unclear, people should just comment and ask for further clarifications.

- Duplicate. Sometimes it's true, but sometimes also not, as the question ask for a somewhat different thing.

Here are some examples, linked in this post: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/127617/how-much-res...

Here are some more:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69721352/pycharm-style-d...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65492932/ficlone-vs-ficl...

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation

You're naïve if you don't think that the job of moderation is going to be replaced with AI by large social communities.