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A comment on Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer editors on Wikipedia. Parent comment

Re:Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer edit... by magicalhippo on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @05:44PM (#38537975)
I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.

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Re:Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer edit... by tivert on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @12:29AM (#38540748)
> I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

I know that's what they say. The thing they have trouble understanding is that "helping everyone else" does not mean bending every question into some 101 level software design advice thing.

"Helping everyone else" very much can mean being a repository of answers to hard questions or solutions when non-typical constraints are at play. Every software engineer worth his salt must have had an experience where the answer he was looking for was in some old, weird forum post that was the single hit to his search query, but a lot of SO doesn't seem to get that.

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