> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
thanks in advance,
--
znpy
I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.
1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
Yes.
Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?
> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)
I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.
There was a gold badge given out if you got 100 edits approved. And another if you got 100 edits reversed.
Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.
This sounds similar to the people who think that using normal pleasantries in conversation wastes everybody's time.
That's the crux of it, though. What conversation?
Stack Overflow was created specifically to avoid conversation. Hence the treatment of comments, and the fact the posts on the page consist of one question and everything else being a candidate answer (and not part of a help-desk or troubleshooting process). It was created by people expressing a common frustration with discussion forums, where you scan ungodly long threads without even knowing whether an answer got posted, have to ignore back-and-forths that are completely irrelevant to you as a knowledge-seeker, and perhaps ultimately end up at a "never mind, solved it" post with no elaboration.
SO questions aren't really intended as a messaging or conversation forum - they are closer to a wiki of questions. Wikipedia also doesn't allow pleasantries or signatures in articles either.
The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.
The founders left, and it went downhill as a result.
I think I replied to you earlier about it, but to reiterate: the site was going downhill for years before the founders left, and there is abundant evidence that the founders wanted exactly what mark-r claims.
This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
I put my name on my professional communications.
When you submit a documentation PR to an open-source project, do you put your name (real, screen or otherwise) in the section of documentation that you add? No; you let Git put it in the commit history. (And if you have to discuss it, you put it in the discussion, or let a forum system such as GitHub's put it there for you.)
Stack Overflow is the actual document being worked on, not the discussion thereof. (That's why there's a separate meta.stackoverflow.com domain.) And analogously to the Git commit history, your name is automatically stamped onto your posts, along with a link to your site profile, in a box at the bottom of the post.
It depends on the medium - SO is closer to a wiki of questions, and Wikipedia has similar rules against pleasantries or signatures on article pages. (They do allow it on "talk" pages, and SO similarly has less restrictive rules in places other than their primary questions and answers.)
Communicating professionally and coming across as polite are not mutually exclusive.
Stackoverflow was not the K&R.
> i got stung by exactly this.
> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you ignored that it's explicitly site policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950 ; https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ; many others) to remove this exact sort of thing, exactly because posting a question on Stack Overflow is not "a conversation between you and whoever answers". The site, in fact, explicitly started so that people could get answers without having a conversation, by creating an actually searchable resource.
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)