> And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
Let's just be blunt. The main target audience were clueless idiots who just wanted to solve their current programming problem, e.g. compiler error etc. They didn't care about anything else, they just wanted to copy-paste text and for the problem to go away, preferably without even needing to turn their brain on.
Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
> The main target audience were…
"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
You are correct about that. But the fundamental design of the site facilitated the value extracting vermin. Then the biggest value extracting vermin the internet has ever seen came along, used you as the training data and replaced you.
The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
are you perhaps a mod from SO? if not you should apply as one asap.
you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
As one of those "mfs", we were undeniably correct in this, as any sampling of new questions at any point in the site history would amply illustrate. People really do just want their question answered without heed to what the site expects of questions. Web sites featuring user-generated content are allowed to set their own rules about how that content works. When people go to a new site with their own expectations about how the posting process works, and refuse to be corrected on that point, they are the ones in the wrong. Just because a website offers a Q&A interface absolutely does not in any way, shape or form mean that you can ask anything on topic, phrased in any manner, without any effort on your part, with no motivation beyond benefiting from getting an answer, and expect straightforward answers that accommodate your personal circumstances, for free.
But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).
Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
As you said elsewhere here, the site is not good at communicating its expectations. To the outsider it looks like a huge pool of questions and answers to which you may as well add yours.
The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter