StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or Y is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that way, why would you even ask that?"

Did I get into pointless back and forths with aggressive users (and of course, sometimes I was the one in the wrong)? Sure! But so have I here on HN. I'd say of the last 5 years or so, the worst, most aggressive, and draining flamewars I've been involved in were here, in HN. Much worse than StackOverflow.

Would you say HN is useless or failing because of this? I wouldn't!

I think that's true, but lateral to the point being made above. Stack Overflow banning opinion based questions was done for good reason and not part of the reason for its loss in traffic.

Yes, because StackOverflow—like Wikipedia—is not about interpersonal communication. Neither is intended to be a forum. They're intended to be repositories of reference information. Nobody wants their encyclopedia or dictionary to engage in idle chit chat with them.

The question is not "should wikipedia/stackoverflow be a cold reference?", but rather, "do the editors of wikipedia/stackoverflow have to be such jerks about accomplishing that goal?"

Any web site that relies on humans for its content must accept humanity, and commit to serve the needs of the humane sides of its users. Otherwise, you'll end up with all kinds of toxicity, abuse, and finally abandonment that is observed with SO.

Stop and imagine if the search results you get for programming were as polluted with "personal touches" as the results you get when searching for recipes.

Your content contains opinions. Please rephrase your comment in a neutral tone directly addressing the arguments instead of the person without polluting it with your opinions. Your personal assessments on a person or a topic have zero value and considered a BS (baseless statement™). We only expect you to respond to the arguments in a logical, netural, unopinionated language to achieve purest form of information in JSON format so it can easily be digested by AI training machinae. This is your final warning. Otherwise, your account will be replaced with a more logical, analytical, objective user in the waitlist according to the terms of the license you agreed during the registration.

MOD27-123 XBOTMODX v2.7.1283

> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.

That's been in the tour since the earliest captures. https://web.archive.org/web/20140113033915/https://stackover...

Stack Overflow was designed with the goal of removing personal biases from the writing and working from the content - not the person who edited it.

And with Wikipedia, for what it's worth. The amount of behind-the-scenes bullshit there is amazing - and on top of that come all sorts of "external" bad agents, anything from hired ghostwriters to whitewash a company's or a person's Wikipedia article to enemy nations' troll crews.

I think I more or less agree, but once again, this is lateral to the point above about causes for loss in traffic.

As for the substance of what you are saying, I think I partly agree and disagree. I think it is very true that the SO culture has broadly been felt to be pretty poisonous and bad in non-trivial proportion of interactions there experienced by many. My personal anecdote is about tetration, a kind of mathematical exercise that you could consider to be next in the progression from addition, to multiplation to exponentiation. Tetration is "next" after those.

In response to a question about tetration, someone responded with the most spellbindingly obtuse answer, not validating the intellectual curiosity of the asker, not answering any questions about the nature of a "tetration" operation, not identifying any of its peculiar, curiosity inspiring features, not discussing any circumstances where it has been researched, used, discussed previously, not surveying where it lies in the educational landscape relative to other fields of math. Instead, the answer was to opine about how one does not "need" tetration, which, again, I find so offensively against the spirit of asking questions that I genuinely become upset when thinking about it.

I make that point just to emphasize that I do agree, to some extent, as to the pervasive negative atmosphere on SO. Everyone has their anecdote, and there's mine. However, I think I partly disagree, because your criticism appears to be about the normal goings on, of SO even as it would function in its ideal state. I am not so sure I believe that people should need that kind of vague, generalized recognition of humaneness, as something understood to be at cross purposes with building a reference guide on subjects. It is fair, in service of that mission, to expect and request activity that serves that purpose, and not concede everything, and allow an inundation of low effort memes, lists, jokes, and off topic responses.

Those are the default state of internet comments, and one degree removed from those are the demands to amend standards to welcome such behavior, from people who would engage in such behavior if they could, who in fact probably were trying to engage in such behavior, but, upon realizing it was not allowed, switched to advocating for it. Every such internet-based project centered on accumulating information will experience pressure to lower standards, accept memes, anecdotes, trolling, which are either just produced, or advocated for, with both stemming from the same impulse, and rejecting those demands in favor of a real mission or purpose you can articulate is a legitimate response to those demands.

It does appear to be incredibly unfriendly to a lot of people, but honestly when I look at some of the questions that get downvoted, it seems that a lot of the questions that do get downvoted are "help me, I've done no research!"

That said, it's pretty hard to get a good answer on the site these days.

And, as a volunteer, most of the questions on the site, I don't have the inclination to answer. Most of the rest I don't have the requisite skills to answer. Which ends up meaning that I don't spend much time answering questions anymore either.

There should be other was to get karma.

Maybe through writing a post about how something existing helped you.

About the only use I see for comments is asking for clarifications or pointing out an obvious mistake in relatively recent answers.

Clearly I'm becoming a dinosaur. Back in the days there were newsgroups and IRC. What do the non-dinos use these days?

Like, not long ago I was looking for a library to X in language Y. Most of my questions are like that, so SO is almost never a fit for me. And I'd love to get some input from people who have tried the alternatives.

So yeah, where's the plethora of places to ask for such things?

These days I'd generally start with "awesome" lists on GitHub, use number of stars as a coarse filter to exclude obscure stuff, then dig into the documentation of each of the alternatives.

It works ok, but I really would like to have a better way of finding opinions about libraries or whatever.

For discovering the options it's probably ok, but the value I got from newsgroups and IRC were the experiences behind the opinions, potentially saving me from doing in-depth evaluations.

I never ask a question on Stackoverflow like I did before, anything useful I'd ask can't be asked.