On the positive side, all of the above have attracted many people to their communities who have contributed useful or interesting points. We all give away our thoughts and experience for free while participating in these discussions, but we gain in return from the freely shared knowledge and experiences of others. I also appreciate those who take the time to vote/moderate so that the best contributions stand out. Overall I find these online discussions extremely valuable and I’m sure others do as well.
On the negative side, there are some common failure modes. There have always been the trolls who will post offensive or misleading comments, and even when it’s a small minority, they can be disproportionately disruptive. There have always been the Dunning-Kruger contributors who would insist they were correct even as others tried to explain why they weren’t, and then the people who do know what they’re doing feel obliged to waste time repeatedly setting the record straight so no-one comes along later and gets misled by the incorrect or misleading contributions. I will never understand the current fascination with getting AI bots to contribute mediocre or just plain wrong comments in these discussions. But the worst recurring pathology by far, IMHO, is when there is some form of community moderation but that goes off the rails. It killed SO by deterring good contributors for petty reasons. It has killed many a promising subreddit; I have recently given up participating in several myself that used to be interesting, because their moderators started killing entire posts retrospectively, which repeatedly cut off discussions where some contributors had already taken the time to write up good solutions to someone’s problem or share their relevant experiences.
I’m not sure anyone has really got this right at scale yet. On smaller sites like HN, the moderation can be very good, but that relies on the fact that it can be managed by a small number of decent people. If your community is big enough that it needs to be more self-policing then the time-honoured question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is as relevant as ever. I strongly suspect that the only real answer to this is some kind of hierarchy where the operators of a forum set culture from the top, then just as a few negative contributors can spoil things for everyone and so some form of moderation is introduced, so a few negative moderators can spoil things for everyone and so some ability to guide or if necessary remove the use of moderation privileges is needed.
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
I don't understand why it never caught on elsewhere.
Meta-moderation was an interesting idea, though they seemed to have stopped promoting it much by the time I stopped posting there often. I’m not convinced it’s as effective as having a small pool of “super-moderators” who can not only affect the prioritisation/visibility but also comment themselves to guide contributors in positive directions, but practically speaking, it might be more scalable.
I get that, but moderation points carried a lot more weight than they do most places because a randomly code chosen subset of users would only get like 5 points… so you had to choose carefully where you used them. Since it wasn’t super common to get mod points, it’s not like you were limited often.
And the users on that site, frankly, could be downright feral in its heyday, let alone now. I think it needed more structure, not less. If there was even one person that would clean up the garbage, maybe the discussion would be civil enough to allow that. They can’t even be arsed to remove swastika ascii art half the time. That’s what happens when you address fundamentally human problems with purely technical solutions.
Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.
The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?"
Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their ability to help and welcome new users. It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)
It is good that leaving comments is hard. First off, because it was learned repeatedly, the hard way, that removing that barrier leads to ungodly amounts of literal spam. Second because even insightful comments detract from the main intended flow of using the site, which is: you find a question from a search engine, read the question and verify that it reflects what you're trying to figure out, then scroll down to the answers and learn something. The entire point is to not be a discussion forum (which is also why comments were not threaded for most of the the site's life). In fact, the site came into existence specifically because of frustration with what ends up happening on a discussion forum where people can discuss endlessly.
It is, and that's fine.
It's incompatible with a site becoming large; and that, too, is fine.
A large site was not required to accomplish any of Atwood or Spolsky's goals aside from perhaps making a profit off of ads. Many other choices were also counterproductive to the goals aside from profit.
Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it. We had no access to modify the help pages or do anything about user onboarding flows. Downvotes were the tool provided to de-emphasize things and take them out of the way, and to rate quality; so they were used appropriately. (Despite this, and despite public perception, voting was historically very biased in the positive direction.)
Because new questions were open by default, they had to be closed explicitly and in public in order for them to be dealt with. People walked away with the completely incorrect impression that closing a question is inherently a rejection; the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed. It is done with an explicit expectation that fixable questions will get fixed; but the nature of some problems (in particular: missing information) is such that only the OP can do this. There was a period of time in which "closed" was rebranded as "on hold" in the interface, to try to impress upon people that no, they aren't being turned away, they are being asked to take further action. But this was reverted because it was somehow apparently making things even worse.
But also, yes, after telling countless people the same things daily, sometimes humans lose their ability to be gentle. But nobody who's dealt with roughly ever gets to see what the other side had to deal with earlier. The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs. The evidence shows that the large majority of that sort of content (which explicitly violated the Code of Conduct, and there was a full system in place to deal with this, that pundits often ignore or even lie about) was directed at the curators. One of the most common questions on the meta site is "why aren't people required to explain downvotes?", with the main retort being "why don't you think they should be required to explain upvotes?". But the main answer to that question is because people who stuck out their necks to try to explain the site's standards politely, would frequently get sworn at and even threatened. (I was once openly called sexist for applying these standards, with no evidence beyond the fact that the OP was a woman, which I didn't know at the time).
> the explicit purpose and sole effect of closing a question is to prevent answers unless and until it is fixed
This is a decision I would question. What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed? Especially when the judgement of such badness might be faulty (even if it's encouraged to bias towards leaving it open). Again, the answer may be the moderators doing the best with the tools their given (e.g. lacking good ways to otherwise surface the better questions to potential answers), but this is exactly the kind of issue I think tends to underlie SO's problems.
> The way that people talk about "toxicity" on Stack Overflow comes across like they think it was constantly full of insults and slurs
I don't get that impression. The perceived toxicity comes from a somewhat inscrutable set of rules and also apparently inconsistent enforcement which created a lot of frustration with the site. None of this requires that the moderation is even impolite. In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone. The trope of a saccharine sweet but utterly evil bureaucrat exists for a reason, and I think that is the kind of impression people who describe SO as toxic are describing, whatever the underlying cause (which is almost certainly not that a bunch of people spending their spare time moderating a site are just evil for the sake of it).
(And it's not unique to SO. Wikipedia has a lot of the same problems, though with different causes and attempts to solve them)
So we agree (but the people you're talking about are not moderators). Again:
>Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it.
Onward:
> What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed?
Many things.
It was partly about working around other missteps of the system design: closed questions that aren't fixed are supposed to get deleted, but the system automating this was deliberately conservative, and in particular would preserve anything that had an answer.
The more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that a third party trying to find a good question with a search engine will find a bad question instead. Sometimes that can be fixed with duplicate linking, but often not.
When a curator believes that a question is a duplicate, and is trying to find the "canonical" version with the best questions and answers, the more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that the curator fails to find that question. This is because bad questions carry a risk of resembling the desired target while actually being about something else.
Answers written for a bad question might be worse because they misunderstand the situation due to the quality issue; and they might be invalidated when the question gets fixed.
Answering bad, low-effort questions contributes to the incorrect impression that effort isn't expected (because the OP gets a reward that might be seen as far more valuable than abstract reputation points: personalized, possibly-working code). It incentivizes more bad questions, when the goal is to preempt bad questions and get people to understand question quality.
Finally, of course, answering bad questions wastes time and effort that could have been spent on better questions.
See also: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808
> In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone.
Right. And the site owners would insist that we adopt that cordial tone, and made multiple attempts to shift the Code of Conduct around in a way that they hoped would lead to more cordial tone.
And people reacting badly to commentary, even when given in a cordial tone, led to people not trying to explain their actions at all. Which led to people being upset that actions were taken without explanation (including in a significant fraction of cases where the system's automatic explanation was perfectly clear enough, frankly).
Seriously: there were many people who came to the meta site after asking a question that literally started with words to the effect of "What do you think is the best...", and then presented as if they could not possibly understand why the question was deemed "opinion-based".
Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions of Stack Overflow accounts, only a few dozen have ever actually been moderators, and they do a tiny share of curation. Their main job is responding to flags.
> It should have been very costly for them to make a new users feel unwelcome.
The overwhelming majority of people who came to the site wanted the site to be something that it was fundamentally not trying to be, and often something it was fundamentally trying not to be. It was correct to make such users "feel unwelcome", because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with or explained to. The statistics make it clear that most of them never had any intention of trying to join a community (or, say, ask another question after the one that motivated account creation) in the first place.
Message received I guess, seeing as how the overwhelming majority left.
The thing that killed it was the thing that made it prominent.
According to a blogpost i can't find any more about "how to speedrun social media" or similar, it's basically impossible to pivot a community once established given the levers of voting mechanics and mod policy. (I distinguish between Facebook's and Reddit's enshittification and a pivot.)
IOW, the seed of a community property's growth is also the seed of its decline. Analagously, the charming village is attractive to new residents because the existing residents resist the changes that new residents embody.
Very broadly and by no means universally: techies don't like lusers, because lusers don't put effort into understanding, they just want turnkey answers. This is totally counter to the archetypal techie value system.
SO optimised for grumpy misanthropes over bumbling newbies, which, in tech, is roughly congruent with optimising for people with knowledge to share over people who want their homework done for them.
The questions are not the scarce resource - you can browse Microsoft Community Answers to verify that. The answers there are correspondingly useless, which is why "blindly copy from SO" is a meme and "blindly copy from Microsoft Answers" is not.
Here ITT, and more generally on HN, comments are excoriating about the cost of being offputting to new users. Those commenters should recognise that it's not a pure cost, it's a tradeoff, and the upside has been a treasure for a decade. A million projects completed by people who found quality answers, mostly by searching for existing questions.
That resource is still relevant for stacks other than the latest web framework hotness, and i personally still get benefit from it in my archaic hobby of learning to code.
That resource is not still directly relevant for coders deeply plugged into AI, but it did train that AI.
It's one of the most successful endeavours on the web and a towering community achievement. It is a superficially a shame that people experienced gatekeeping, but if "gatekeeper" has only negative connotations in your lexicon, then I advise you to compromise your principles and firewall your network.
But I'm upset that my conscious attempts to make a more useful reference for everyone got disrespected from all sides: outside commenters ascribed incorrect and hurtful motives to me while refusing to consider what my real objective might have been; new users cursed me out or wrongly accused me of various things; the site ownership tried to make the task harder in all sorts of ways (while never compensating me for my work in any way); other high-rep users took destructive actions because the reputation system incentivized them (closing and downvoting questions was not incentivized in any way); the reputation system was never meaningfully revised even though everyone knew it was crap; and Google actively and deliberately made their search worse.
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
Er... yes.jpg ?
You seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to defend all the site's design choices. I'm not. I'm trying to defend a community that did the best it could with what they were given, after all sorts of requests were repeatedly ignored or denied (or preemptively judged unreasonable and not even made) and then new ownership came in and tried to force an unending torrent of even worse ideas on us, even undoing the few things we actually liked about the design.
> The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.
Again, qualification in the subject matter is entirely orthogonal to understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish, what the policies are, and how those policies were designed to align with the objectives.
That was the part we did have control over. But we were making a good faith effort to carry forward the oral tradition of Atwood and Spolsky's vision.
My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
The choice of license is made clear at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice..., and the consequences elaborated at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com... . The license itself is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . It is one of the BY licenses, so the site is legally required to leave your name on the work. The interface explicitly marks both the original author and the most recent editor on the main facing page; and it offers the ability to click in and see the entire editing history.
> But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
This is overwhelmingly done in good faith, and it's explicitly policy not to change your meaning. In fact, there are many posts on meta where people complained about attempting a good-faith edit and having been judged as falling afoul of that for no reason. See e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349950 .) But it's also explicitly policy that they can "edit your words, attributed to you" (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ). The people who make these changes, generally, sincerely believe that they are either saying things you intended to say, or at least adding information that you would have added if you'd come back to keep things up to date. There has been a ton of discussion trying to clarify and/or figure out where the line is: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bediting%5D+intent... .
If you saw someone change something that fell afoul of this, there was a meta site where you could raise the objection. But we were constantly inundated with people who thought it was wrong that we took "thank you in advance, my_username" off the end of the their questions or similar (see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ), as if they thought they had a right to that.
It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.
Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).
Most edits I saw to answers on stack overflow were crap though, the system was regularly abused
That stubborn refusal was because it was a terrible idea, and one of the reasons why the site died
That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.
> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods
The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.
> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.
If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.
If your lack of interest in how the existing community works is that profound, then you could hardly be said to have a good-faith interest in joining the community in the first place. Which means you're actually upset that the site doesn't provide the service you expected it to.
Sites are not required to provide services simply because the people who arrive there believe that's the service the site provides.
If you're sticking around to keep answering questions, and it's because you think the place has a cool concept behind it and you want to become part of something, you owe it to yourself to make sure you understand what the "something" is. And you owe it to the other people there to accept that you are only one voice out of N in deciding that.
> and they failed to provide a reasonable forum to do that despite being its sole purpose
That is emphatically not what the purpose was. See for example https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107 .
The point system was a broken mess. But it was not intended to represent what you appear to mean by "expertise"; it was intended to represent trust and engagement.
By answering questions, you obtained reputation which granted you privileges, which you were expected to use to maintain the site according to the site's objectives. This includes, notably, filtering questions according to what helps build the site as a useful reference for users of search engines, which is the real motivating force behind the standard question-closure reasons (even if it took a while to achieve consensus on that, and to decide how to phrase it all). And to refrain from answering questions which should be closed, because that acts counter to the site's objective.
The design was specifically intended to ensure that you get scrutinized by peers or superiors — in the domain of using the site properly and working towards its goal, not in the domain of the subject matter where you have expertise. I agree that the reputation system utterly failed in effecting this.
Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave. You can’t look at it in a vacuum or pretend the negative behavioral consequences were somehow different from the purer intentions of the site. When someone that has permission to change what you say and they abuse that, it doesn’t matter if there’s some justification in the site concept — we’re just going to be bothered by the bothersome people, and tell other people about how annoying the experience was. It could have have been structured to prioritize stewarding people’s knowledge, like Wikipedia, but it wasn’t. There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t. They could have chosen to not reward people for doing exactly that, but they didn’t. Instead, in interface and in the audience of privileged users it attracted, it prioritized gamification, popularity, the ‘erm aactually’ guys that were way out of their depth, and a whole bunch of other shit that everyone else rolled their eyes at. It was successful in spite of the obnoxious governance and self-important pseudo stewardship of other people’s knowledge, not because of it.
If SO was even vaguely still relevant to the conversation, I’d still be telling people that it’s time for a big ego deflation and giant reality check. But it’s not relevant. If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative. Wikipedia didn’t lose anywhere close to that about amount of traffic. Search results are also barely relevant these days, comparatively, but I’ll bet the people there now are just as overzealous about policing questions for the same justifications.
It's not lawyering. I'm extremely well aware of the impedance mismatch. It wasn't created by the community. It was created by the site software failing to align with the site's goals.
> in the minds of the vast majority of people who knew about it, it was a site to ask questions about relatively obscure topics, and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge.
Well, no. "The vast majority of people who knew about it" were asking beginner-level questions, as is to be expected, because every field of human endeavour is full of neophytes. They believed their questions to be obscure due to a lack of expertise. They often were obscure; not because of the subject matter but because of a lack of attempt to debug the code (and, often, a lack of general awareness of the concept of debugging). And they were often not coherent questions at all, or else they were multiple questions arising from multiple problems with the same code sample.
But it was a site to ask questions and for knowledgeable people to answer them to disseminate their knowledge. That is not even slightly inconsistent with anything I've said here.
The problem is, "this is a place to ask and answer questions" is not the same thing as "this is a place to show what's causing you a problem and get someone to help you, specifically" and also not the same thing as "this is a place to help people solve their problems one-on-one".
> You make it sound like users were supposed to consider using the site as their primary goal, and consider the subject at hand as secondary.
Yes, because they were. Just like they are on every other website, e.g. this one. When people come to HN and post things that are counter to the guidelines, other community members use downvotes, flags and polite replies (and, in some cases, emails to the site staff) to address the issue. This much is obvious and I don't understand how it can be a point of contention.
> If you read what people were saying here in good faith (or really what damn near everyone outside of that insular community has said about it for like a decade and a half) you’d realize that you are in the extreme minority.
I have been reading it for most of that decade and a half. I have been flooded with it again and again and again. I literally cannot find an off-site discussion of Stack Overflow that isn't full of it. I am intimately familiar with the argument, and you have said nothing new here.
What I have said over and over again, which everyone outside "the extreme minority" seems unwilling to accept, is that this does not matter. If people come to a place and don't care about how things work in that place, the place is not in any way obligated to change to accommodate them. The people should leave of their own accord, and they should accept that they misunderstood the place, and accept that the place has a right to sovereignty, and find a different place that does work the way they want.
There were countless places that did work the way the typical new SO user wanted. SO existed specifically because of a belief that those places are incapable of producing a useful knowledge base, and cause experts to burn out on repeating basic advice. (SO use patterns demonstrated to me that actually there are more than enough people around who are happy to repeat basic advice and operate a free help desk for beginners; if they get upset, it's because the beginners still fail to understand things after they were explained. But those people were actively interfering with the site's objectives. They were far more destructive than any beginner could ever be.)
> And there are a hundred billion ways it could have pimped its best questions to Google without having the layer of obnoxious, arrogant people playing question police.
You had over a decade and a half to try proposing some on meta.
> Yes, the points system was a mess because of the way it made people behave.
Specifically, it enabled the people I describe in the above parenthetical, yes. But you present this argument as if you think people were downvoting and closing questions, and otherwise trying to uphold policy, in order to gain reputation points.
That is the literal exact opposite of how the system worked. You got reputation for basically everything else, which then enabled you to take those actions. You got 0 reputation for voting to close something, or for "dupe-hammering" it with that specific privilege. You got either 0 or -1 reputation for downvoting something.
You could potentially get 2 reputation points for editing something, if you didn't already have unilateral edit privileges and your edit was accepted (and because the people who could accept your edit could also edit unilaterally, and were doing all of this specifically to try to make the site better by getting good edits in place ASAP, they were therefore incentivized not to give you that reputation.) Plus there was a cap on total reputation you could get that way; you still had to ask and answer questions to reach the unilateral edit privilege.
By contrast, you got +25 for an upvote and accept-mark on an answer, no matter how clearly the question violated site guidelines; versus -2 from an annoyed curator downvoting you for not understanding that you weren't supposed to answer the question and were supposed to help close it instead. (Plus you got a five minute window to post if you'd started, even if the question got closed immediately. Plus you could do this unilaterally while three curators would have to agree to close except for duplicates. Plus only a small fraction of the userbase could cast close votes, while everyone could answer.)
> There could have been a much greater barrier to being able to meddle with other people’s words but there wasn’t.
That would have been an actively bad thing. The editing was by well-considered design, specifically to make the site better. The edits people complain about overwhelmingly do, objectively, obviously make the site better and I'm frankly tired of trying to explain the obvious. I have, over and over, for years, tried to point people at the policy explaining this. Nobody ever even tries to engage with it.
You may have noticed that Wikipedia frowns on signatures on main-space pages, and expects citations for claims, for example. SO policy is roughly analogous.
> If preponderance of users were really enamored with the community and governance and rules and site structure and all of that shit, rather than it simple having information on obscure topics and issues where you could get a question answered by someone who knew what they were talking about, then everybody wouldn’t have jumped ship literally the moment they had an alternative.
Nobody ever tried to say they were, certainly not me.
What I'm saying is that the people who didn't understand this stuff, shouldn't have been there in the first place. Because simply getting questions answered is not how you build a useful Q&A reference, and that is what the creators of the site wanted to have. Which is amply demonstrated by looking at a random sampling of questions (you can do this yourself on data.stackexchange.com with an SQL query, if you like).
I am genuinely happy they found the alternative(s) they wanted the whole time, and should have been using the whole time (well, as they became available).
If quite literally every person I interact with professionally has an anecdote about this happening, your anecdote about it not happening is not very convincing.
Have you/SO staff/SO mods considered why this impression is so prevalent if you’re confident it’s (as you claim) not actually true?
"But you said you want to build the sum of all human knowledge! Why can't you accept this piece of alternative history I just made up?"
"So, Stack Overflow is for the computer stuff, right? I have this Word document that... what do you mean this is not a programming question?"
"Since I have no idea where else I could go with this, you must allow me to post it here!"
I mean, it's not like either project is free from power-tripping moderators and overzealous application of procedure; in fact, it's not even particularly rare... but still rarer than the loudest naysayers keep insisting. I have witnessed plenty of dysfunctions myself, and yet whenever I hear others' complaints, I tend to suspect this is yet another case that boils down to "how dare you delete my stuff". With many such anecdotes, I notice they only speak of the situation in the vaguest of terms, omitting details that would have enabled me to identify the actual problem... which I cannot help but wonder if this is because if I were to see the situation myself, it would have made the complainer look much worse.
Even if everyone else on the Internet thinks a person has a certain belief or motivation or ideology, that doesn't mean that person actually has that belief or motivation or ideology.
I'm speaking to my own mental state, as well as to my general impression of what other curators told me, and the frustrations they espoused. There were chat rooms where people could have easily spent all day talking about how cool it is to power-trip, if they'd actually been power-trippers. Instead, they talked about how helpless* they felt as new people kept coming in and making the same innocent mistakes; about how they had no tools to deal with this except the ones that left offsite users with a bad impression; about how annoying it was to be constantly aware of that offsite bad impression when they were trying to do things necessary to the site's objective; etc.
What you also seem to be missing is that since the Prosus acquisition, "SO mods" (and the rest of the community, who are much greater in number and take the large majority of the actions incorrectly deemed "moderation" by outsiders) and "SO staff" were in active conflict most of the time. The LLM-content ban policy was against the staff's (really the company, who employ a handful of staff as liaisons) wishes; the fighting over this got so bad that there was an actual moderation strike and an extended period where the site got the amount of spam you'd expect for a site that size instead of the almost miraculously small amount it would normally get. (The spam filtering also involved community-operated automated systems that were suspended in solidarity.) Then we got hit with proposal after proposal for AI-powered features that were obviously terrible half-baked nonsense with no real value ad; we constantly tore into them on the meta site; the company showed zero sign whatsoever of caring in the slightest, while Prashanth Chandrasekhar (the new CEO) would give TedX talks and such demonstrating a complete ignorance of how the community felt about AI in general.
Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.
Before I worked as a web developer, I was a formally educated and credentialed professional in a non-computer-related field with a pretty high barrier to professional practice, but a lot of passionate hobbyists. When I found the related low-ish volume SE, I excitedly poured hours into writing authoritative, well-informed, well-cited, thoughtfully worded, and concise but layperson-friendly answers. I also provided encouraging and positive, but usefully critical feedback to people that missed the mark. I knew how negative the format could be after using SO for years, so I bent over backwards to avoid discouraging newcomers with a punitive or imperious tone. People seemed to find my contributions useful because I became the top contributor in something like two weeks, and still regularly get points for things I wrote over a decade ago.
Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.
::slow clap:: Well they might not have protected the utility or integrity of their knowledge base, but they sure protected the integrity of a bunch of people’s egos. That’s something, right?!