The irony

[kazerniel@lemmy.world]

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

[bleistift2@sopuli.xyz]

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.

[kazerniel@lemmy.world]

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

[darkdarkhouse@lemmy.sdf.org]

Thanks Cloudflare for giving me a moment of reflection on why the fuck I am heading to Stack Overflow so I can close the tab before I get there.

[theslad@sh.itjust.works]

Yes, but did the LLM get it from the answers or the questions?....

[porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml]

Who knows, and furthermore, who cares?

[mmddmm@lemm.ee]

Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.

It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you'll find your answer on the experts-one.

[user224@lemmy.sdf.org]

CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!

The 65,000 users: ️L️

[reddfugee42@lemmy.world]

He still doesn't understand how we got the rock to think

[alecsadler@sh.itjust.works]

Oh thank god, I thought it was just me and that my IP had been flagged for some reason.

[wfh@lemm.ee]

Look at how shitty our implementation is. We need a full refactoring.

[simulation6@sopuli.xyz]

I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.

[fckreddit@lemmy.ml]

On a serious note, last year I felt so pathetic after reading a comment on a question I posted on stackoverflow that I went over the edge and attempted suicide and like everything else I failed. Not saying that SO was responsible or anything. One guy pushed me over the edge, when I was already under a tremendous stress.

[lovablesidekick@lemmy.world]

I think the same people who run stackoverflow must run a ton of subs on reddit.

"Your post was removed because it uses "the" too much and doesn't contain enough w's and because the moon is in Pisces and it's Saturday. If you think this was done in error please message the moderators."

[opisek@lemmy.world]

Glad to still have you here with us.

[lars@lemmy.sdf.org]

I am a better programmer than God, peace be upon Him. This implementation of knees is Exhibit 1.

[sturger@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[mcv@lemm.ee]

SO used to be really good in the past, but these days when I'm looking for an answer to a problem, I only unanswered closed questions.

[hupf@feddit.org]

INTERCAL's PLEASE Politesse Checking

[fckreddit@lemmy.ml]

I really wish I could say the same. Depression sucks.