llm/5daab79e-f20f-476c-ab87-82c7ff678250/topic-14-ba4925d8-50eb-42df-bbe6-7788409dded8-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Elitist gatekeeping behavior COMMENTS: 1. I know the feeling of being happy not being the only one with that same problem (and that somebody bothered to actually ask on SO) and the crushing feeling that the question was closed as off topic (so no reason for me to ask) or marked as duplicate (referencing that is clearly not a duplicate and just showing that the mod took no effort to understand the question) 2. I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so you can't even view the question any more. I'd long heard of abusive moderation but... experiencing it first hand is something else. Anecdote of one, but I know I'm never going to ask there again. In case anyone's wondering, I ended up asking on the WhatWG or W3C or something github project (via an issue?). The TLDR was rather eye opening, that basically the spec only codifies points of contention for browsers and old behaviors are generally undocumented. With some pointers I figured out the default size behavior through code diving, and it was complex (as in, hard to use) 3. its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily. 4. Yeah. You're not a real programmer. It's just terraform. You're a stupids and we're smaht, and you should go off into your little corner and cry while we jerk each other off about how smart we are. Gee, I wonder why people don't want to use the site? 5. 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? 6. I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully. 7. I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how. 8. Yes but that only works if the questions are identical . Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless. 9. No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place. Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point . It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal. 10. You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. 11. > That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy. > When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't contributed to that topic at SO. That is generally irrelevant. 12. Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sure, maybe it's the user. But broadly the point of software is to serve and adapt to users, and developers who forget that are starting an argument that they cannot win in the long term. It's especially wild to see you talking like this on an article about how Stack Overflow is just about dead. It needed changes a decade ago, but everyone just hunkered down and defended the existing approach. The policies you are somehow still defending are a big part of what doomed the site. 13. What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users" . I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that. Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia . For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it". I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congrega 14. > It's up to you to figure out why users are avoiding it. Hint: They've been telling you quite loudly. No, it is not up to me to figure that out. I have heard it said quite loudly many times, over a period of many years. What you are missing is: I. Do. Not. Care. The goal was never for the site to be "not dead". The goal was for the site to host useful information that is readily found. The site already has tons of useful information. But it's drowning in... much less useful information, and Google has become much worse (to some extent intentionally) at surfacing the good parts. > And that's exactly what happened to Stack Overflow, and you're one of those guys still trying to promote the use of Python 2.7 in 2026 This is a bizarre thing to say to me, of all people. I am always the one catching flak for telling people that 2.7 had to go, that the backwards-incompatible changes were vital, that the break wasn't radical enough, and that people were given way more time to switch over 15. I am only responding to many people trying to explain why I should care about the thing I don't care about. The defense is useful because a) it being "dead" by these metrics is unimportant; b) people are blaming a community for mistreating them, when they came in without any intent of understanding or adapting to that community; c) other sites in this mold exist, and are trying to establish themselves. 16. > The dupe is what I linked. The orig is Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me. > The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert. 17. I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me, to the point where I would avoid going to search results from SO first. The comments here are teeming with others voicing similar experiences. It is quite... something to read your response to this, which pretty much comes across as "nu-uh!", garnished with an appeal to "policy". I think your SO-specific bubble is a little different from most other people's. I've no doubt that overwhelmingly, the dupes are dupes, but on the other hand, the false positives you're discounting are overwhelming the user experience. 18. I don't understand how you can read all this and conclude that people get the information they need. In fact, your latest response is so far out that I've started to seriously wonder if you're trying to troll. If you aren't: sorry, just trying to tell you how this comes across as absurdly disconnected. If you are: you're bad at trolling, or a master at satire. Either way, I'm outta here. 19. The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something 20. > Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate Users would fail to find the existing question not because there was an abundance of poorly-worded questions, but because there was a dearth of questions asked using lay terminology that the user was likely to use. Users were not searching for error codes but making naive preliminary searches like “XYZ doesn’t work” and then branching off from there. Having answers worded in a variety of ways allowed for greater odds that the user would find a question written the way he had worded his search. Redirecting users to an older answer also just added pointless friction compared to allowing for the answer from the original question to be reposted on the duplicate question, in the exceedingly rare instances I understand the motive behind wanting to exclude questions that are effectively just: “Do my work for me.” The issue is you have users actively telling you that the culling p 21. > to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework". (My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github. 22. I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me. 23. this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences. SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045... 24. Here is one fine example. [1] The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ 25. You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here: > "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them! > Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR! 26. How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service. Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape. If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater. 27. Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds. Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention. 28. You overvalue the impact of LLMs in regards to SO. They did have an impact, but it's the moderation that ultimately bent and broke the camel's back. An LLM may give seemingly good answers, but it always lacks in nuance and, most importantly, in being vetted by another person. It's the quality assurance that matters, and anyone with even a bit of technical skill quickly brushes up against that illusion of knowledge an LLM gives and will either try to figure it out on their own or seek out other sources to solve it if it matters. Reddit, for all its many problems, was often still easier to ask on and easier to get answers on without needing an intellectual charade and without some genius not reading the post, closing it and linking to a similar sounding title despite the content being very different. Which is the crux of the issue; you can't ask questions on SO. Or rather, you can't ask questions. No, no, that's not enough. You'll have to engage with the community, answer many other ques 29. > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with. 30. No, I think the reason human expertise on the internet is dying out is because we have a cacophany of voices trying to be heard on the internet, and experts aren't interested in screaming into the void unless they directly need to do it to pay their bills. 31. > I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems Just to add another personal data point: i started posting in on StackOverflow well before llms were a thing and moderation instantly turned ne off and i immediately stopped posting. Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. Moderation was an incredible problem for stack overflow. 32. The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could. 33. Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better informed person by the power of internet pedantry. 34. Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question. Hey, can you show me the log files? Sure here you go. Please help! Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck! 35. The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience. 36. > But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that. Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic. Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style? 37. 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. 38. Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them). 39. This is called the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want Y. 40. Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have any help? ...(crickets) 41. The well known XY problem[1]. I spent years on IRC, first getting help and later helping others. I found out myself it was very useful to ask such questions when someone I didn't know asked a somewhat unusual question. The key is that if you're going to probe for Y, you usually need to be fairly experienced yourself so you can detect the edge cases, where the other person has a good reason. One approach I usually ended up going for when it appeared the other person wasn't a complete newbie was to first explain that I think they're trying to solve the wrong problem or otherwise going against the flow, and that there's probably some other approach that's much better. Then I'd follow up with something like "but if you really want to proceed down this rrack, this is how I'd go about it", along with my suggestion. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem 42. Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes users away and (b) ...what you said. 43. How do I add a second spout to this can? ... Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car. ... It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not? ... I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home. 44. You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us". Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure. When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this. 45. Toxic community is mostly a meme myth. I have like 30k points and whatever admins were doing was well deserved as 90% of the questions were utterly impossible to help with. Most people wanted free help and couldn't even bother to put in 5 minutes of work. 46. You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn. 47. I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't. 48. And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated. 49. Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all. 50. For every example of that, there were 999 instances of people having their question closed, criticised, or ignored. 51. At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv. 52. I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource. 53. Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for "reddit your question here". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search. Has the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the "rejection police". 54. 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 55. Garbage was never moderated on StackOverflow, it was always ignored. Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out. 56. I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online technical community once they become popular enough. I even see it happening on HN. 57. It's surely both. Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest Most questions have negative karma. Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem. All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders. SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked before ), and felt energized to answer them. SO solved a real problem - knowledge being locked into forum posts with no follow-up, or behind paywalls. 58. For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now. To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked". 59. For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM" https://sosimulator.xyz/ 60. I think the biggest issue, what lead to the toxicity, came down to the question/answer format not suiting the problem it was trying to solve — The answer could only be as good as the original question, and the platform gave little leeway to "get to the bottom" of the problem. Getting to a high-quality question/response required a back-and-forth that the platform made difficult by burying the discovery/definition work in comments and edits instead of a clear discussion mechanism. All of this meant the learning-curve on how to participate was high, and this spurred gate-keeping and over-zealous moderation. High-quality but out-of-date information was preferred over lower-quality but more recent updates. When combined with the rapid shifts brought on with mobile development and web frameworks, the answers could easily get out-of-date months after being answered. I remember a time when StackOverflow dominated every search query. Now we're seeing searches take you to a dedicated forum/dis 61. IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community. 62. It's a very toxic place, you ask a doubt, and someone will abuse you, down vote you, make you feel you are not for to be a human. Better it's dead. 63. Good riddance. I stopped using SO before LLM's were a thing because the community was such a pain in the ass to deal with. 64. RTFM 65. Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community 66. It was a good idea ruined by the compulsively obtuse and pedantic, not unlike Reddit. 67. StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask. Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement. 68. 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...? 69. Good riddance to bad rubbish (TLDR: Questions are now almost never being asked on Stack overflow). The most annoying example I can think of (but can’t link to, alas) is when I Googled for an answer to a technical question, and got an annoying Stack Overflow answer which didn’t answer the question, telling the person to just Google the answer. 70. Not surprising. It's very often a toxic, unhelpful, stubborn community. I think maybe once or twice in years of use did I ever find it genuinely welcoming and helpful. Frequently instead I thought "Why should I even bother to post this? It'll just get either downvoted, deleted, or ignored." 71. 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. 72. Maybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs. 73. For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators ) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 If your question was not well received, read this before you post your next question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254358 Why the backlash against poor questions? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 What is Stack Overflow’s goal? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263 How long should we wait for a poster to clarify a question before closing? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592 How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questi 74. Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist. They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain a community when they are scaring users away? 75. Eternal September is finally over =) It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Elitist gatekeeping behavior
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