Do people on Stackoverflow get paid to downvote every single thing? Like WTF Stackoverflow is the most unwelcoming and toxic community I've ever seen.

Don't you know? They've all grown so bitter the only way they can get off is when they feel they're superior to another dev because they find the question trivial 🤷🏻‍♀️

To be fair, a lot of shit deserves to be downvoted because SO is not intended as help or support forum.

@Fast-Nop What is it supposed to be if not a question and answer site?

@ayushjn A knowledge base. This implies that asking stuff that has already been asked, or asking low quality questions (e.g. without supplying the required data, previously tried things, expected vs. observed results, "pls give me teh codez sir" etc.), reduces the quality.

What pisses me off is people downvoting questions/solutions without even specifying the reason. I mean that's opposite of helping.

@ayushjn They don't want to help such askers. They want to help the platform by making perceived low-quality askers go away.

I don’t think SO was made to give this level of elitist mods trying to make sure everyone knows just how insignificant they think everyone is and how trivial & dumb your question is

But it is now

People go on SO when they’ve tried a bunch of stuff to fix their issue and
oh
all hell breaks loose if you don’t word your question correctly! Omg

It’s almost better to live with the question eternally if it hasn’t already been answered 😣

@Fast-Nop I agree with you that questions that have been asked before should be removed. What I don't believe is that SO should act ONLY like a knowledge base. It was meant to be a question and answer site (you can read that on company's wiki). If people hesitate to ask questions on SO just because of fear of getting downvoted, there's no point of SO. You can always find stuff in documentations. SO is just a heavily indexed website.

@ayushjn or removing your questions

@EDragon I preferred asking a question on my company's discussion channel rather than SO because I didn't want to deal with such toxic people. The level of autonomy people on SO have is unacceptable.

@EDragon SO is not about the askers, that's the wrong perspective. It's much more about all those after the askers. 90% of SO "users" use SO via Google and don't even have an account.

SO is not about providing answers to the specific asker, it's much more about providing answers to future non-askers. It is the duty of the asker to word a question properly as to provide value to them.

If the asker doesn't understand this and thinks it's about him, he should be driven away from SO as quickly as possible.

@ayushjn SO is not intended as easy way out for people who are just too lazy to read the documentation. It's when the documentation isn't clear, or even wrong. That's why the "expected result" part of the question is there.

@Fast-Nop I have found SO to be quite hostile in places. I used to participate and help people. Then I was abused for doing this. So I finally said "fuck you" and stopped engaging. I will upvote periodically, but I will not post any kind of text.

@Demolishun Helping people who ask low quality questions should be punished, of course, because it attracts more of them. SO is not about the people who ask, but about providing value for future searchers who won't have to ask.

@Fast-Nop Well I'd disagree with you on this because your perception of SO is different from the SO team as you can read this in a blog post addressing this issue. They even promote asking duplicate questions.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/...

Most specifically, this :

@Fast-Nop this whole time I was under the apparent wrong impression that SO was supposed to be a place to ask Q’s and/or answer if you know what others are asking like all the other overflow sites.
Hmm
So you’re saying that instead of thinking About figuring out my problem I should instead ensure I am providing quality content for SO itself?

It sounds like they’ve done a good job at “keeping those deserving of downvotes” away because personally, I’d rather never know than risk being insulted on SO

@ayushjn Quite honestly? If a tech post starts with whining about "women and people of colour", I know the poster is a shithead. As if anyone online would see what's between one's legs or what the colour of one's skin is.

@EDragon Of course. What about your current case could be of value to future readers? Like, having tried the obvious route (and providing info!), only that it doesn't work for some fucked up reason. That's likely to be of value because others will fall into the same trap, will find the question, see "shit yeah that's what I'm also trying" and see how to do it.

SO is not there to help you with your job. It's there to help everyone. You are only the trigger for a specific Q&A cycle, but not the objective.

If you think how your question can also help others after you, that's the mindset.

Especially "new coders". Read the damn thing.

Think logically who needs SO the most. Senior developers? It helps a lot of new coders to find a solution to a problem that they don't even know where to find.

@ayushjn New coders should shut up and learn how to google. Google-Fu is the most valuable skill a dev can have. Not joking. I've used SO many times and don't even have an account.

The one structural weakness SO has is that it is intended as permanent knowledge base, but the tech domain is moving fast. The accepted answer from 2015 can be wrong today. There's too little incentive to improve the answers and change the accepted answer because the person who was asking in 2015 doesn't care now.

Stackoverflow should be anyone's last option if they can't find answer even after extensive googling. Even when asking, give a complete description, what you have tried, where it is stuck, what do you expect. And always give your code. If you don't give any effort in asking, they won't bother answering and maybe just downvote it. That's completely fair in my opinion, That's a very huge Community, and such strictness is necessary for anything of that size.

Downvoting keeps the answer pool clean. Stackoverflow is about asking good questions that haven't already been ask to build a body of work. If a question doesn't contribute to that, it should be flushed.

There's also a bunch of cliqueish dicks on SO as well.

@Fast-Nop nah, you all just get a kick out of bullying newbies to hide your own insecurities. You can try to justify being a dick all you want, but you are still a dick.

@Fast-Nop your opinions are quite underrated, so I'll chime in. Having agressive rating system and content requirements (because more questions = more evolution) - this all is far better than letting tons of people resort to other communications after googling and unsorted answers in *streamline* Q&A platform.
Nevertheless, if we talk about SO encouraging toxicism, I say plain "No". It grows from other more general problem - consumerism - and only it. Fakey mods want to push buttons for nothing good apparently? Well, they consume your defenselessness. Angry kids in comments or improperly asked questions without repro steps? They consume your time. Answers with little effort and research put? They consume the thread's space.

I understand that a lot of people want to keep SO clean, but the way that's happening is toxic imo.

I had an account twice, asked one or two questions after extensive research (read hours of searching) which I couldn't find on SO either and all of them got closed as (and resurrected later, for some) duplicate within a minute or so. Explanation and/or feedback or link to the duplicate(s)? Naaaah.

I definitely use it a lot while programming but without an account of asking questions.

@gibus Once again, SO does not revolve around the newbies. It revolves around the future readers. Thinking "but why don't they help ME ME ME" is the wrong attitude.

Sure it would be nicer to take every newbie at the hands and show and teach, but reality is, there are too many newbies and too few resources. "RTFM or STFU" is what's feasible.

However, there is actually a platform that is more friendly - Quora. It's just that the Google results are also much less useful.

@linuxxx Yeah the "false positive" rate of the "stupid crap" recognition is a problem of course. Especially if people mark stuff as dupe while the question even explains what the difference to the alleged dupe is.

@ayushjn I know Joel Spolsky personally. Their perception of SO is mostly correct.

@ayushjn you should read again, they do not encourage asking duplicates.

@aviophile My point is people have a choice to answer questions. If they "think" that question is a dup/low quality, they can either link the duplicate issue and explain politely or stfu and let others help.

Most importantly, there is not metric for whether a question/answer can be considered a dup/low quality. It's just a bunch of jerks judging others instead on answering the questions which was the purpose of SO.

Very often I go to SO via google search for to find a solution to a problem. While I find the problem most of the time, the solutions don't work half the time. Even the accepted answers don't work quite often. What am I supposed to do? Ask the same question again with my specific case/example or sit back silently and let the goons "moderate" their "high quality" content?

@Fast-Nop You're not putting 2 and 2 together here mate. I couldn't care what stack overflow 'revolves' around. It does not excuse the antisocial elistist egotistic belittling.

I personally think that people who act like that towards people who lack their skill are dicks. You're not going to change my mind on that by arguing philosophies about the nature of a website.

@gibus On other hand, not being open about arguments for WHY these people behave that way is being a prejudiced dick, so I guess it's a wash here.

on a scale of 1 to 4chan, where do you place SO?

@ayushjn As I already wrote, outdated answers are a big problem, but no, asking the question again would only make things worse.

You still havn't understood that SO is not primarily for the asker, but for the googlers after the asker.

Oh, and btw: asking dupes or mal-prepared questions is also being an anti-social dick.

@Fast-Nop These are all arguments from hypocrisy. It does not negate the bully from being a dick.

In other words A dick is a dick regardless of the asshole on the other side.

@gibus Makes sense. However, the problem is that being friendly to people who are too lazy to ask properly prepared questions (or even have others do their homework, as also witnessed on devRant!) usually invites more of them.

@Fast-Nop Not everyone who asks bad questions is a bad person. Some people don't speak english as a first language, others are young teenagers just starting out their adventures into programming, others are just brand new who only have experience with quora and yahoo answers and simply aren't aware of the intention.

It's possible to make a point to someone without being a dick. e.g. Where a simple "What have you tried so far?" is the correct phrase, it's not uncommon that you find comments making fun of the users code or calling them lazy or a paragraph rebuking them for not finding a duplicate which is near impossible to recognise to a new user as the same question.

@gibus It's not that they're "bad persons". It's that they're "too many persons". Eternal September anyone?

I sense a never ending loop of the same reply phrased in different ways so I must leave proponents of bullying behavior to their “almighty” SO

//* slowly steps back, no sudden movements *//

My 2 cents...

I used SO extensively when it first arrived. It was great. Really helpful people and I got answers pretty quickly.

These days, I try to avoid it. As a long time user, I am used to researching first and making sure my posts are well formed. I even make sure I read the suggested duplicates, include the links in my post and explain why they don't answer the question. Some dicks still close the post as a duplicate of the thing I said wasn't a duplicate.

I'm all for cleaning out the crap but seems to me some mods just love trolling the site.

And @Fast-Nop, sorry, you're wrong. SO IS a Q&A platform. You'll just have to deal with it.

@TedTrippin Sure it is Q&A. But it is not a help forum. The Qs and As are instead primarily intended for later visitors. That's why they crack down on questions where they think there is no value for others than the OP (for whatever reason).

Using Google and never even registering on SO is the intended workflow for 90% of the people.

@TedTrippin
exactly my thoughts, especially on the trolling

It's toxic. Hence the reason why your answer/question only survives if it objectively the only/best alternative. You can be assured any upvoted answer picked from a busy topic will be worth your time.
Toxicity for stability 🤷‍♂️

@3rdWorldPoison Picked answers aren't always worth the time.