> ...
> 3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
Yeah, SO's culture meant that it was always my absolute last resort to ask a question there. And whenever I did I had to be super-defensive from the get go. It was either people trying their hardest to close it, or "redefine" a hard question into an easier one they could answer (e.g. ignore the constraints that were key to my question).
I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions, but in retrospect they took the wrong approach. They should have let people ask and answer questions freely, even dups. Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.
It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.
The one thing that always struck me, was that most (not some) of the high-score individuals had 1-digit question counts (with that digit frequently being "0"). It was clear that asking questions was a "demerit." These were folks judging questions, that had no idea how to ask a question, themselves.
Also, I found that many were not ones that worked on shipping software. It seemed that their vocation was SO. That's very much like the kid that spends all his time, playing Counterstrike, and giving advice to soldiers in theater.
I'm really big on apprenticeships. We become masters, by moving through being juniors. It gives us an extremely solid base, and elicits acknowledgment from others.
Journeymen can often be demanding and irascible, but they command respect, by demonstrating that they have been in your shoes, and that's really important. You suffer the slings and arrows, because you know that there's a clear path to where they are at.
I have friends that are former US Marines, and they all have Boot Camp stories. These stories all feature downright abusive Drill Sergeants. But they also all profess immense respect for these dudes, because they came from years of experience, and they often showed boots how to do something, by demonstrating it, themselves, at a high degree of skill.
> "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."
-Brendan Behan
Yes this! I found it painful to watch abuse being heaped upon obviously junior programmers. Points should have beem award for mentoring those on the path, not gratuitously rejecting their questions.
However, when you spend an hour looking at low-quality answers, questions that have he's been asked like ten times already, etc, I get the sense that the people doing the moderating were trying their best - some of them, at least. No doubt there are mods there who just enjoy the miniature lower trip a la overzealous reddit mods, and I can't imagine the stress of trying to handle the amount of traffic some of the exchanges got.
Also a lot of communities do their own QA on discord where they can modererate themselves.
Have seen this every where, even in case of people. If people are dreading to even approach you for something, its over for you. You can't get just the good things to pass through a filter. No such thing exists.
In many ways you need to be open for everything(apart from outright wrong things, like abuse) including stupid things, to get the good things.
> I understand a lot of that came from their desire to create a curated list of questions
I think both of these are true, but I'm not sure that many of the contributors (or even many of the moderators?) _really_ cared too much about building the "curated list of questions".
I'd posit that part of the problem was also its competitiveness – contributors wanted to earn rep, so they ignored constraints or answered the question they really wanted to answer. Some of the tags I used to frequent had a few contributors who seemed to do nothing but answer SO questions, so there were never any good questions left for a mere mortal with other commitments in their day.
I am generally unconvinced that reputation-based systems like SO's are actually useful. Contrast SO with a project mailing list or issue tracker – where I've had some of the best support – where there's nobody tracking rep or keeping a tally, and everyone is there to simply help and share their knowledge.
> Instead of hunting for dups to close, they should have had their moderators link them together and author the "canonical question" from them.
I did plenty of free moderation over time on the review queues. I have no idea today why I invested so much time in that, for it was a thankless task and ultimately didn't feel I could move the needle on the bigger problems.
In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.
Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.
They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.
Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.
But it's also what wrecks such platforms.
SO didn't arise in a vacuum; it was explicitly a reaction to how shitty ExpertSexchange had gotten by then with an anything-goes moderation policy.
First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.
The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.
Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].
The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.
Honestly, point seeking behaviour of people writing answers was one of the worst anti-patterns of SO. It would lead people in later years to quantity over quality (especially because of the bonus 15 rep that OP could give you by "accepting" an answer in addition to upvoting it). Worse, it would incentivize them to answer terrible questions that should have been swiftly closed and then deleted when OP inevitably failed to do anything about them. Instead, getting an answer in before closure would prevent the automatic timed deletion system from removing those bad questions.
Quality answers come from intrinsic motivation: from people wanting the site to be a place where people find quality answers. (Something I didn't personally understand in the early days is how important a quality question is to finding a quality answer.)
I was glad when S.O. put an end to them.
Good riddance.
For the Javascript ecosystem in particular... it also massively helped that projects finally started to work on their documentation. The churn rate was insane and documentation or working examples took an afterthought for far too long, that is what drove so many people to SO in the first place.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.
They should have accepted a certain level of mess instead of being so strict. After all, even good popular answers become outdated sooner or later.
I used to end the questions with "It's not a duplicate of AAA because BBB is different. It's also not a duplicate of CCC because DDD". It DID force you to check for already answered questions, but the automated hints while you typed was often good enough to spot duplicates.
In the end, imagine wasting half an hour to post a four-lines issue... No thanks.
The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.
Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.
They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.
That was a terrible, awful plan, and I always reverted edits to my answers that went beyond fixing typos or updating old links.
So, the place was a shit hole.
And even if I find the right existing question, the accepted answer might not be the one I need. Sometimes the question asked accepts the wrong question. Sometimes the current right answer didn't exist at the time of the answer acceptance.
SO was a good first approximation of a good Q&A site. It didn't evolve with the times.
The one time I tried, I couldn't answer directly because I had no reputation, and I couldn't comment either, but I could edit the question (!) which someone else had already done, answering the question in the question. It was an incomplete answer, so I added another edit with a complete answer. Then the mod who approved my edit also added a newline to it, so it was them and not me who was credited (unless you went to the 'history' page).
I gave up after that.
1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).
2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.
3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.
This was before LLMs or COVID.