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.
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.