Summarizer

Lots of moderation issues are also UI issues. I suspect it’s the same issue for whatever is the “meta” in a competitive video game. Optimization based on the available affordances ?

Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.

Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?

> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before? This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work. So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.

They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago.

Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.

I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar. There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too.

> and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration. However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates". Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening . I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort. The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved.

The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution. If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.

I would say that going onto Stack Overflow to answer questions made me a better coder - yeah, even with the cacophony of bullshit and repeats. It's almost more offensive for that job to be taken by "AI" than the job of writing the stupid code I was trying to help people fix. [edit] because I kind of get what you're saying... I truly don't care what marginal benefits people are trying to get out of popularity in the high school locker room that is the Social Media internet. I still have a weird habit of giving everyone a full answer to their questions, and trying to teach people what I know when I can. Not for kudos or points, but because the best way to learn is by teaching .

The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question For me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality. When SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit.

I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO. I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma. The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also). With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.

Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 .

> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex... ). And I suspect they both shared blame in that. A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum. (Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room . The old adage about foolproofing rings true.) Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589 ).

Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library. Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for. And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow. https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008) https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011) Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes. Spolsky: Oh... Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/105232/clay-shirkys... (2011) 2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester. That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014... How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. That question now has 10,356 questions linked to it... and that's part of the "why search quality is going down" - because poor questions were getting linked and not deleted. Search went downhill, dupe hammer was over used because regular close votes took too long because community moderation was going down, which in turn caused people to be grumpy about "closed as dup" rather than "your question looks like it is about X, but lacks an MCVE to be able to verify that... so close it as a dup of X rather than needing 5 votes to get an MCVE close.. which would have been more helpful in guiding a user - but would mean people would start doing FGITW to answer it maybe and you'd get it as a dup of something else instead." All sorts of problems around that time.

Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me. When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim. And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it. It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with challenging/novel questions. Pair that with the toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes, you get a zombie community with little new useful content.

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.

Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.

The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.

How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).

Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.

Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points?

Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days. Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.

The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me as a bizarre feature, to put words in other people’s mouths. I think overall SO took the gamification, and the “internet points” idea, way too far. As a professional, I don’t care about Reddit Karma or the SO score or my HN karma. I just wanted answers that are correct, and a place to discuss anything that’s actually interesting. I did value SO once as part of the tedious process of attempting to get some technical problem solved, as it was the best option we had, but I definitely haven’t been there since 2023. RIP.

> took gamification way too far I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.

Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes. Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer. You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points. This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model". Someone please build this. Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.

I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant. Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.

It's also disconnected incentives. SO users get numbers to go up by taking moderation actions so of course they do that. Also you literally get banned from reviewing questions if you don't flag enough of them to be closed. These are incentives put in place by the SO company intentionally. It's not like only slimy people get to use moderator tools like on Reddit, since you need a lot of reputation points you get by having questions and answers voted up. It's more like (1) you select people who write surface-level-good answers since that's what's upvoted, and they moderate with a similar attitude and (2) once you have access to moderator tools you're forced to conform with (1) or your access is revoked, and (3) the company is completely incompetent and doesn't give a shit about any of this.

Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent. Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement. Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.

I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.) SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which. But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior. I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.

Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.

OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers [0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927371#g... [1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927375#g... The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend

Has anyone tried building a modern Stack Overflow that's actually designed for AI-first developers? The core idea: question gets asked → immediately shows answers from 3 different AI models. Users get instant value. Then humans show up to verify, break it down, or add production context. But flip the reputation system: instead of reputation for answers, you get it for catching what's wrong or verifying what works. "This breaks with X" or "verified in production" becomes the valuable contribution. Keep federation in mind from day one (did:web, did:plc) so it's not another closed platform. Stack Overflow's magic was making experts feel needed. They still do—just differently now.

I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points. What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake , as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated. For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on. >> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination. Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble. May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.

In 2014, one benefit of Stack Overflow / Exchange is a user searching for work can include that they are a top 10% contributor. It actually had real world value. The equivalent today is users with extensive examples of completed projects on Github that can be cloned and run. OP's solution if contained in Github repositories will eventually get included in a training model. Moreover, the solution will definitely be used for training because it now exists on Hacker News.

LOL. As a top 10% contributor on Stack Overflow, and on FlashKit before that, I can assure you that any real world value attached to that status was always imaginary, or at least highly overrated. Mainly, it was good at making you feel useful and at honing your own craft - because providing answers forced you to think about other people's questions and problems as if they were little puzzles you could solve in a few minutes. Kept you sharp. It was like a game to play in your spare time. That was the reason to contribute, not the points.

Yeah, they didn't even bother to suggest paying you with tokens for the job well done! The audacity!

hehe yea this existing of course. like these guys https://yupp.ai/ they have not announced the tokens but there are points and they got all their VC money from web3 VC. I'm sure there are others trying

Consider updating your answer on SO - I know I'll keep visiting SO for answers like these for quite some time. And enjoy the deserved upvotes :)

I can relate. I used to have a decent SO profile (10k+ reputation, I know this isnt crazy but it was mostly on non low hanging fruit answers...it was a grind getting there). I used to be proud of my profile and even put it in my resume like people put their Github. Now - who cares? It would make look like a dinosaur sharing that profile, and I never go to SO anymore.

SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.

I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow. So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]

I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks. But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate. I said to myself, let it die.

I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get

It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.

Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers. I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.” To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.

> I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. You can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits. After you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't "suggested" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them.

While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding. So some possible reasons: - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. - Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users. - Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam - Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn. - Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented Some non-reasons: - Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).

And half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot.

What points do you get for moderation activity?

Love this comment [1] under the post > $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that? 1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...

Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3. The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.

It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.

Maybe it's a mix of me using the site less, or questions I previously answered not being as relevant anymore, however as it stands, it's just not fun to visit the site any more. I have about ~750 answers and 24K rep after almost 12 years of being a member. The site was a great way to spend some free cycles and help people. My favorite bounty answer lead to me finding a bug in the Java compiler! I even got recruited into my current role from the old Stack Overflow Jobs board. With AI, not only did the quality and frequency of posts go down, but the activity on my existing posts are basically zero now. I used to have a few notifications a week with either comments on my past answers/questions or a few upvotes (for those fun little serotonin boosts). Looking at my past stats.. in 2023 I had ~170 notifications, in 2024 that dropped to ~100, and in 2025 it went down to ~50 (with only 5 notifications since September). I don't feel engaged with the community, and even finding new questions to answer is a struggle now with (the unanswerable) "open-ended questions" being mixed into the normal questions feed.

I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time. I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago. I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time. So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP. I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.

I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation.

OK, you might be right and I got it backwards. It still felt wrong at the time before I got enough points.

Good times. Although, I have to say, I was getting sick of SO before the LLM age. Modding felt a bit tyrannical, with a fourth of all my questions getting closed as off topic, and a lot of aggressive comments all around the site (do your homework, show proof, etc.) Back when I was an active member (10k reputation), we had to rush to give answers to people, instead of angrily down voting questions and making snark comments.

I've never once asked a question on there Mostly because you can't unless your account has X something-points. Which you get by answering questions. This threw me off so much when I got started with programming. Like why are the people who have the most questions, not allowed to ask any...?

Are you sure? You can post questions even with a completely new blank account. It's comments that require some reputation, maybe you were thinking about those?

You don't need any reputation to ask questions, you only need to create an account.

I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.

Comments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments. https://stackoverflow.com/tour > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.

I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000. I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated. This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong. I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval. Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics. I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.

Since the trend must go on, we expect StackExchange to now offer answers, and the user responses need to be questions. We could even make a quiz game show out of that! /s