I am as addicted to SO as someone is to their favorite social media website. I am not much of a writer but I will try to document my recent quibs with SO in this post.

The SO community is very unfriendly and abound with hate and this is by design. This hate is evidenced in downvoting of questions for no reason and closing them. The reason why there are so many downvotes on questions is because it costs nothing to downvote a question. Downvoting an answer does have a cost [1]. Also the hate on SO percolates from the top. The so called moderators and policemen on SO are zealots who downvote and close questions for no reason. Many moderators on SO have surprisingly little technical knowledge. I have read some posts trying to understand the reason behind all this and it seems it has to do with the very origins of SO and misplaced beliefs of Jeff Attwood (the creator of SO).

SO developer surveys are also continuously degrading in quality. I liked them because they would tell me what technologies are popular, most wanted and dreaded but now the surveys have more and more non-technology related questions and I really don’t know how even SO benefits from those questions.

Finally, SO – by design – does not want people to ask questions that do not have a well defined answer. Such questions are promptly closed and again the moderator community makes up BS reasons for this design. The problem is that its only simple questions that have well-defined answers. As I have moved up in my career, most of my questions now are not something that have a well-defined answer. Most advanced questions need an iterative discussion with a back and forth dialogue. SO realizes this and have launched the discussions feature which is a step in the right direction.

The solution to improve SO is astonishingly simple (but SO does not want to improve and herein lies the opportunity for a new SO like site for developers – what SO should be):

• ban closing of questions (unless it is spam which should be deleted). Don’t like a question, just navigate somewhere else and downvote it if you must. If the post is spam or offensive, flag it.
• for every downvote irrespective of whether it is on a question or answer, there should be an equal and opposite reaction i.e., a reciprocal 2 points should be deducted from the profile of the user casting the downvote.

IMO the SO moderator community is useless and there is no need for most of them. They are the cause of the mess not the solution. Google and other search engines are smart enough to know what questions are relevant (just by simply counting the votes – no advanced ML required) and detect comments or answers with offensive language etc. We have come a long way in this area and our emails etc. use such spam and inappropriate content detection everyday – why can’t SO?

latest storm

what do i think about this? OpenAI is going to mine SO data whether SO (and its users) like it or not. They already do so. And there is nothing SO will be able to do about it – OpenAI has deep pockets. So its actually better to strike a deal with them and at least get something in return. I know it doesn’t sound nice but its the sad reality. because of reasons like this i have now stopped posting answers on SO – all these sites benefit at your expense. i continue to post questions but here also i avoid if i can because half of the questions get downvoted for no reason at all – it doesn’t cost anything to downvote a question.

Recently all my questions on SO have been downvoted and closed as if some people are tracking and following what I post. The other day I got this email in my inbox:

So what is this about? The question I had asked was that how do I go about developing a custom voice that I can use with the Narrator app on Windows. And I opened a second question for the same thing on Mac as the two are different platforms. If I had clubbed the two in one question, they would have closed it saying the question needs to be focused and do not ask multiple questions in one. If I ask separate questions, then also they close it saying its a duplicate which if you look closely it is not. And what is wrong about this question to be downvoted?

I hate StackOverflow. I hope it dies a painful death.

A Google search on the query “The rise and fall of StackOverflow” brings several interesting results for further reading. This reddit user summarizes it well:

Now if you ask a question it’s more than likely to either be arbitrarily down voted to hell or you just get made fun of for not knowing. It’s become a toxic learning Q/A board and imo no longer worth logging in to.