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0 pointsbonoboTP6y ago0 comments

It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact.

Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.

It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.

The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.

You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation.

This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.

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Kaze4046y ago· 2 in thread

I don't understand what any of this has to do with people not being insufferable assholes on a platform.

bonoboTPOP6y ago

I think there are multiple issues and it's hard to point them out because everyone talks about what they see from their own point of view.

1) There are certainly power-hungry ego-inflated people killing off questions as duplicates when they aren't duplicate, or labeling things too easily as opinion-based etc. This is often a problem with community efforts, like Wikis and other places where people act like they own the place.

2) On the other hand, you have genuinely low-effort questions that are just pure lazy. Being a novice is normal, everyone started there. But doing at least a minimum of research is expected. Seriously go to the front page and browse the questions from <5 minutes ago. Most is very low effort with no context, just some code from the middle of some software and an error message without saying what they are even trying to achieve. It's not in any shape of form a question that should enter a long term question bank.

3) On the third hand, you have the power grab at StackOverflow by business-minded, MBA type suits, who care more about branding, marketing, and legal CYA than about programming. The project is no longer community driven. They seem to forget that SO's value is derived mostly from the unpaid labor of volunteers and working with the community should be a priority. And this is also a great lesson for all the contributors that sinking enormous amounts of time into a private company's proprietary product, it may not be worth it. At least Wikipedia is guaranteed free and open source and truly community owned. Maybe something similar needs to be created in place of SO.

Kaze4046y ago

Number 1 and 2 are what I've personally experienced and believe is what the StackOverflow team means when they say they're working to make the platform more friendly. I've been helping people with all sorts of programming problems on Discord for years, and I've encountered my fair share of people who put absolutely no effort in either their problem or asking a question people can work with, but at no point I've ever felt it was justified to publicly shame them or not be kind. If people are going to go around closing / deleting obviously mediocre questions with copypastas in the comments, is it asking to much to make the copypastas at the very least welcoming?

I actually followed your advice and browsed the recent page on StackOverflow to collect some samples of what I mean. To my (pleasant) surprise, it seems to have changed significantly from when I used the platform regularly. That said, I found this one that's a good example:

> Asking homework questions without any other detail is simply unacceptable. Please put more detail, because we are volunteering our time to help you, and if you put in absolutely no effort, then we can't help you.

I wholeheartedly, but why not say "StackOverflow is not a code-writing service. Please post another question with sample of your work, so we can direct you to a solution that'll make you learn in the process"? These types of comments are what made me so anxious to ask back when I started programming, and I think is something everyone will benefit greatly from getting rid of.

As for point 3, thanks for clarifying. I agree that dumping knowledge on a proprietary product isn't exactly a good thing, but the perspective of the business people can at least be understood now that they're selling it as a Q&A engine for private teams / companies. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but your previous comments made me think it was some sort of conspiracy theory :)

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