One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.
Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.
And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.
Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.
Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts
> Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.
Meanwhile, I saw so many people come to the meta site apparently completely unable to understand that a question leading off with "what do you think is the best..." (almost literally, in many cases!) is asking for a subjective opinion, that I had to make an artificial meta-canonical for it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806).
That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess
> Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".
Please show examples. People arguing that XYZ is not a duplicate made up a large fraction of volume on the meta site, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it was very clear that the question was indeed a duplicate per site policy. It absolutely was not something people would do "just because these two questions related to the same library". (If it were really like that, tags would never get more than one question each.)
The goal is not that you can copy and paste code from the answer and have it work as-is. Minimally, we don't know your variable names, constants etc. and any number of other trivial details like that which perhaps shape the problem you are facing but are completely irrelevant to the question.
Christ, this is actually the SO problem in a nutshell.
I'm not going to go dig through SO to refind the examples of improperly "closed as duplicate" questions I stumbled on years ago while looking up a problem.
It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play. Feel free to completely ignore my comment in that case. You win.
SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere. I'm not on SO.
Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO. Trying to make that subjective feeling technically wrong does nothing to rehabilitate SO's reputation.
> It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play.
See, this is the part where I'm actually getting insulted by the invocation of the "bro" language. No; what's happening here is that my lived experience as a curator of the site (which was quite stressful) is being denied, and it is supposed that evidence to counter me is not necessary.
This isn't about "winning"; this is about me wanting you to understand something that you apparently don't understand. Again, it's hurtful to have that motivation ascribed to me.
> SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere.… Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO.
First off, I want to make this extremely clear: posting a question that gets closed is not, and was never, considered "breaking the rules". When people close a question, they are not moderating the site, but curating it; which is exactly why the overwhelming majority of such actions are taken by non-moderators. People are wrong and ignorant to call them mods, and it's hurtful that they don't take the time to understand this. I understand perfectly well that people felt that these actions were harsh, or even cruel. Many of them were not executed properly. But nobody ever takes the time to understand my perspective; they assume many false and hurtful things about me (and others) and refuse to be corrected on those assumptions. Worse, the site software, and the company, actively interfered with the intended curation of the site in many different ways over the years (changing according to whatever the company was currently trying in order to be profitable).
There is nothing "technical" about things being marked as duplicates. There is a clear standard for it which was reasoned out according to a very specific purpose: people who search the site should find the best possible version of the Q&A, so that they can directly get the answer to their question.
The only time that "litigation goes nowhere" is when people come to the meta site with the assumption that the rules do and ought to work the way they expected them to, and refuse to accept that they actually work differently. Stack Overflow was (and still is, to the extent that anyone remains) a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination. It's not the fault of the curators that the site presented a misleading interface, to the extent that that happened; they had no power to modify the interface beyond making more Q&A posts on the meta site.