Well, that mechanism has not worked well. Especially, someone with a large reputation point appears to be exempt and there exists elitism amongst it's members.
Largely, Stackoverflow has now become something like wikipedia, just an index of questions and answers with zealous moderators and elitists and no longer a community.
I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.
I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?
I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.
And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.
Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside.
I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege" community that comes to mind and my experience with it has been uniformly unpleasant, let's say "bordering on toxic". If anything, automatically earned privilege creates competition which makes everything worst and nastier.
In contrast, I moderate a medium sized FB group in a topic that often has trolling. We eliminate it entirely through hand-picked moderators and a zero tolerance statement. There's no competition to be a moderator and there's actually little for the moderators to do since making things clear mostly works. So there's no competition for anything and people spend their time discussing issues instead.
HN seems to be closer to that situation also - with karma hidden, competition is pretty limited. And anonymous posters can make fine contributions here.
This is a prime example of why Stack Overflow is well past its prime.
It started out as a community built to help others, but as the comments indicate they've gown into bitter, self obsessed reputation point hunters.
Heaven forbid someone new come in and ask a question without having gone to the very edge of the internet first because the mods and the user community there would rather close the question - with no comments - rather than help the new person or even just point them in the right direction.
> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless.
Are you serious? Whenever a community allows for more-or-less self-appointed authority figures, they ALWAYS emerge, as they are drawn to the perceived power.
Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc. They all have their toxic "lawyers". Users who have passed a certain threshold of "points", or else are simply willing to invest the time to squat on a topic, and enjoy abusing the power to delete or revert contributions from others.
To a certain degree it's probably a good thing, as the sites would be overrun by trolls without them. But they also tend to calcify the culture after a few years, and drive down any incentive for new contributors to step in.
StackOverflow's core problem isn't a lack of people willing to edit questions or vote-to-close. It's core problem is that it's been at least 5 years since I last felt like reading or answering any open questions, or even posting any new questions of my own, and I don't think this sentiment is uncommon.
This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-(
Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users.
Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...
This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-(
Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users.
Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...
Stack Overflow has a vigorous moderating policy. That's usually a good thing. It helps form a community, and keeps stuff out.
The problem comes with a huge site like SO, because there are so many "not welcome here" topics which get closed, with no suggestions about where to put those questions, and without great explanations about why those topics aren't welcome.
It's not as thoroughly toxic as some[1] aspects of wikipedia are, but it's not pleasant for some people.
[1] for various values of some, including "all" for a few users.
It is inevitable that any Q&A system managed by the masses versus a knowledgeable few will descend into mediocrity. The harder the question is, the fewer people will vote on it, and even fewer would be qualified to vote on it.
Having said that, I think Stackoverflow does a reasonable job of coping with it, but abuse still goes on. I only first noticed these tactics when they were used against me. Without naming any names, I can tell you that many of the people with 15k+ rep have used these tactics.
Yeah - my experience with the Stack Overflow moderation community has been uniformly negative too, they basically get in the way of the users.
Arbitrarily closing/rewriting questions, removing useful information etc. The site can be useful - but only in spite of the community tasked with running it (not because of them) and it makes it frustrating to use.
Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on.
The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time.
On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times.
For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way.
Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be quantified.
Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I believe this was a mistake.
Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderators.
They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have seen measured.
An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how to evolve, the voting system.
yeah, but that's not what the author is complaining about. the problem is that stackoverflow has reputation barriers for performing various actions, so until you acquire some rep, your site experience is pretty broken. this is well and good if you intend to put some effort into building up reputation so that you can participate fully, but it works against someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things to say.
The problem is that people who are actually going to ask questions that I find interesting don't know or care how the powers that be have decided to organize things - they just head to the site that is most popular. Which would be stack overflow.
So I'm left with a choice. I can not see those questions. I can answer those questions on a site where I know that is not wanted. I can become one of the people trying to moderate the site into the structure they want despite knowing how frustrating that can be for the people affected. None of those options is palatable to me, so I'll find other ways to amuse myself.
Look through my answers at http://stackoverflow.com/users/585411/btilly?tab=answers and tell me whether the loss of contributers like me is good or bad to the whole stack exchange enterprise. If you think it is neutral to good, then our value systems are so different that there is no real point in continuing the conversation.
It's straight-up wrong though. A number of people feel unwelcome or hostile? Okay, out of how many?
There's always going to be a very small percentage of people who don't fit in in large groups, no matter how much you try to work with them. They're also the ones who tend to speak up, and StackOverflow's userbase is massive, so this number gets inflated to something that may seem like a lot, but really isn't that many - and may well be within the error margin for "people who won't fit in".
Typically moderation would push these people away, so they don't keep complaining, but StackOverflow, despite any issues it has, is too good a resource as-is.
Yeah it's a weird mix of helpful content moderated by an irritating hall monitor like community wielding power and making changes nobody wants.
I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons.
I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
This discussion really resonates with me. It seems that stackoverflow incentivizes very bad moderation: shutting down on-topic questions and good answers, locking questions prematurely, etc.. I'm not sure what causes bad answers to be voted to the top, but that seems like a common problem as well. And as commenters have noted, it is almost pointless for a newcomer to try to contribute.
These issues look very hard to fix, so I wish them luck. For now, I've given up on stackoverflow.
I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top.
I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite.
That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).
I think they've identified a major problem with the site, and I wish them luck changing it.
I was a very early user of Stack Overflow, and racked up a bunch of karma long ago, but I fairly quickly felt pushed out. I felt that the site became less useful as a place for me to get answers, and I felt that it became much less welcoming as a place for me to answer questions. Much of that revolved around the increasingly militant gatekeeping and arcane rules the community adopted.
Nowadays, I mostly run across Stack Overflow when someone links a fascinating question thread which will - invariably - be locked for being the "wrong" kind of content. (Because of course it is.)
It is a bizarre, broken community, and one I don't think is meeting its original goals. (And I say that as someone who had what was, back in the day, a pretty high score.)
Their reputation system is the worst. I'm by no means a power user, but I've asked and answered some questions on the main overflow site. If I go to any of the subforums I have to start over with a reputation of zero and "re-earn" privileges. No thanks.
Another problem is their aggressive pruning of questions. There have been dozens of times where I've found something relevant via google and found the question was locked for being off-topic or opinion based.
Largely, Stackoverflow has now become something like wikipedia, just an index of questions and answers with zealous moderators and elitists and no longer a community.
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