You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
“The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
“That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
“No, you don’t want to do that.”
“No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
etc.
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Because different servers would have different rules and moderators so if one becomes toxic like that you could block the instance and stick to ones that are actually helpful
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/
multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
The big problem is that half the time the answer that you get is that you shouldn’t be in the situation you’re in so the question doesn’t apply.
Well yeah, but here’s the thing, if I ask the question it’s because I am in the situation I’m in, and therefore need assistance. So telling me that the situation I’m in is not optimal is literally the least helpful thing one could do.
I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away
Yeah. I found myself not adding a potentially useful comment, more than once, due to reputation restrictions on a SE community despite me having enough rep in the ones I regularly use.
And I am one of those that aligns well with the Question & Answer style format of their site.
So, I just leave, knowing that - some answer is incomplete - or - some question is not worded well enough to attract the correct answerer. I prefer suggesting fixes to the question rather than changing it myself, which would otherwise be assuming that I have understood correctly.
Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I’d love to see a federated version, we all host shards
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Why would you think it would be different
Because different servers would have different rules and moderators so if one becomes toxic like that you could block the instance and stick to ones that are actually helpful
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
The big problem is that half the time the answer that you get is that you shouldn’t be in the situation you’re in so the question doesn’t apply.
Well yeah, but here’s the thing, if I ask the question it’s because I am in the situation I’m in, and therefore need assistance. So telling me that the situation I’m in is not optimal is literally the least helpful thing one could do.
I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
Exactly.
And it seems we, on average, decided to part ways with Stack Overflow.
I don’t know what the best answer is, but I’m not terribly surprised that Stack Overflow didn’t turn out to be it.
Yeah. I found myself not adding a potentially useful comment, more than once, due to reputation restrictions on a SE community despite me having enough rep in the ones I regularly use. And I am one of those that aligns well with the Question & Answer style format of their site.
So, I just leave, knowing that - some answer is incomplete - or - some question is not worded well enough to attract the correct answerer. I prefer suggesting fixes to the question rather than changing it myself, which would otherwise be assuming that I have understood correctly.
Individual tools already often host their own Q&A or forum systems. We just need to encourage more of that.