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points by 999900000999 1 day ago | 0 comments

Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use

There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

[–] cwillu 1 day ago

The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.

[–] minitech 1 day ago

I’m curious what both of these comments are referring to, since it’s not supposed to take any privileges to answer a question on Stack Overflow (you can even answer without making an account). Maybe some anti-spam block?

[–] worthless-trash 1 day ago

My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.

[–] kstrauser 1 day ago

That infuriated me and I revoked those edits constantly, until I gave up and left the site altogether. I'd rather you steal my answer and put your name on it than put your own words under my name. Fix some dumb typo I made on mobile or something, sure, fine. Edit my answer to change the meaning or phrasing whatsoever? Oh hell no. Go make your own answer, and don't lie and say that I was the one speaking your words.

[–] lazyjones 22 hours ago

The numbers suggest that said hostile community is actually very small, or that it never intended to contribute to the site in the first place. As opposed to Wikipedia for example, where the very hostile admins and moderators actually add a lot of content.

[–] hatthew 1 day ago

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

[–] sobellian 1 day ago

I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.

[–] braiamp 13 hours ago

Codegolf still exists, it's just not part of stackoverflow.

[–] IshKebab 22 hours ago

The problem was it was a discussion forum. They just didn't like that.

[–] p-e-w 1 day ago

> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.

They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.

[–] hatthew 1 day ago

I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).

[–] zahlman 10 hours ago

They really didn't change their minds. The bulk of the prior meta Q&A that people on the meta sites ended up citing to justify policy, all came from around 2014 and a fair bit of it was older than that. Plus there are numerous on-the-record statements from Atwood and Spolsky from 2011 or earlier that are broadly speaking consistent with the modern understanding.

However, they didn't really understand what makes a question valuable, or why low-quality beginner questions are low quality, and thus what exactly to expect in order to get higher quality things that could be helpful to other beginners. And yes, they did initially make some gestures towards some threshold of question difficulty, but this was a misstep (and also hard to disentangle from question complexity, as well as whether a question is interesting and to whom). And yes there were experiments like the Documentation project (which I lamented the loss of). And yes the reputation system was a totally broken idea and implementation, inconsistent with stated goals.

It turns out that when you have a critical mass of users and the alternatives are frustrating enough, you can get away with a lot of those missteps.

As for enforcement, that's what happens when the overwhelming majority of it is assigned as the community's responsibility. Misconceptions about the site's purpose compound when some users get away with them and then gain reputation from a single old/popular Q&A. (I had some, too.)

Fundamentally the site failed to figure out how to impress those values upon people before they got too involved. I think this was out of a fear of scaring users away, but clearly this was counterproductive — surfacing the misconceptions and conflicts later on only made things worse. An ideal system would have started questions closed, so that having one closed on you wouldn't feel like a final judgement (despite it not being one); and it would have shielded you from downvotes until question opening (because the entire point of this would be to recognize that questions require work by default to meet the site standards). In other worse, what the half-baked Staging Ground was trying to accomplish (and mostly did, for the small minority of questions the system decided to send there at random).

[–] EvanAnderson 1 day ago

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

[–] bombcar 1 day ago

Those people are always drawn to these unpaid positions of power and they’re absolute death-knells for the community. Time and time again you see it.

[–] tintor 1 day ago

ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.

[–] gerdesj 1 day ago

Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...

[–] Good4boothee 17 hours ago

> I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea

Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276998 lack of knowledge doesn't prevent people from using random biotech keywords as measure against LLM's assisted reverse engineering.

[–] yongjik 1 day ago

Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.

So there's a clear difference in expected utility.

[–] eluru 1 day ago

it does not

[–] heisenbit 16 hours ago

But it charges you for both the question and answer.

[–] zahlman 9 hours ago

SO didn't ban you for asking a bad question, either. It just closed the question, and then if you kept doing it you might face restrictions on asking more, which, yes, ended with something far too harsh.

If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.

But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.

[–] damowangcy 1 day ago

In a dystopian fufure where a few or ONE AI company bested the rest, the company might banned you from using the AI for coding because the AI thinks you're incompetent or require you to pass a test to activate the coding function, because it's dangerous.

Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.

[–] ergocoder 1 day ago

I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.

I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.

People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

[–] zahlman 10 hours ago

> People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

No, they absolutely do not.

They propose that you might be having an XY problem because they have seen people commonly ask the same thing before and turn out to have that same XY problem, and they want to help you by making sure that you are asking a question where the answer will actually be useful to you. Or else they genuinely cannot understand why a person would want to solve X.

[–] kstrauser 1 day ago

To be fair, there was a lot of X Y question asking there. "Would it be better to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to implement a clone of the Redis protocol? We're deploying an app that needs a 100% compatible Redis API. We own the Linux server it'll run on. Which should we use?" Uh, can you just use Redis? "Don't XY me!"

I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.

[–] gspr 23 hours ago

Was it so hostile?

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

[–] ranger_danger 1 day ago

Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.