StackOverflow has Become Too Toxic. My Personal Experience
I have been actively using StackOverflow for more than 5 years. I have found a LOT of useful information there. However, in the last years, things have been changing for the worse and it seems like SO is losing its relevance
First of all, I have only 2300 reputation on StackOverflow, so probably my opinion doesn’t matter :(
StackOverflow started as a dev forum in 2008. Initially, anybody could ask anything, but with the increased number of users the need to regulate who can post and answer questions arose. The SO staff decided to introduce the rating system. Users will gain ratings when people like their content and lose ratings when people dislike them. This rating is then used to grant or take privileges away from stack overflow members. For instance, you need at least 50 ratings to upvote, this keeps the bots away and you need 2000 ratings to create new tags.
Overtime stack overflow rating became a selling point for recruiters. And people thought that there is a direct correlation between rating and IQ. Fortunately, this has been proven false, since telling people how to reverse a string in python and gaining a 20k rating just from that doesn’t prove you are a great developer. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying that having a high rating is always due to luck, I am just saying that perhaps we placed too much value on it.
As you might imagine the rating does not form an equal distribution, quite the opposite
18 million of the tracked users have under 200 reputation, I wasn’t able to find more granular data but I would assume that most users don’t bother with the rating system at all and are not eligible for any privileges. Speaking of privileges here are the ones that are obtainable by us the common folk.
As you can see, being a simple low rep user sucks. Your posts have limited capabilities and you can’t cast any votes. This whole thing builds a very (in my opinion) rigid system, where new users first need to be accepted by the SO 1% elite.
After this rant on the rating system let’s consider some of the great ways other users can show their love to the community.
Flagging/Reporting Questions
As a new user, you will only be able to ask questions and you have no other privileges since you have only 1 reputation. When you ask a question without reading the SO community guidelines everybody will go after you. First, they will downvote your question into oblivion, Then they will report and flag it. Next is your profile. It will also be reported, when they erase you from the website they will go after your family! Ok maybe not that far but you get the point.
SO is extremely hostile to new users. Sometimes students post their homework and want people to solve it for them, but most people are just regular joes that are facing a problem beyond them and nobody at their work can help them. Instead of receiving help, they are lectured on how to properly format text, how their question is stupid, or that it was asked somewhere before and they should use google.
Moderation
StackOverflow moderators are religiously dedicated and they never sleep. Violate a community rule and your question will be closed and you won’t be able to do anything. Do you know why? You need 2k reputation to have a say if the question should be closed or not, so good luck with that. At this point, you start questioning your life decisions and the imposter syndrome becomes best friends with your ADHD. Then you go and post your question somewhere else and receive an answer without any scolding. No seriously, each time I ask a question on SO I always mentally prepare myself to be attacked, schooled, and called incompetent even on topics I think I am proficient in.
Duplicated questions
This is an all-time classic. You search the entire internet for a solution. Can’t find it anywhere, StackOverflow included, and then post a question on SO. After you are told how to properly write text, someone flags your question as a duplicate. Soon after the duplication is approved and your question is closed and locked with a link pointing to another question that is the first result in google and also the first thing you tried and it didn’t work. This process can be repeated infinitely; it’s an endless loop. Then you might ask “But wait I will tell them that my question is different and the solution doesn’t work for me”, but then you remember that you are a simple pleb and you have no such privilege.
Off-topic questions
At some point, the holy founders of SO decided that this site will only be used for programming-related questions and everything else should go to other subsidiaries part of the so-called stack exchange. It has only 150 subforums and finding the correct forum is very easy. The best part is that the community is friendly and they will gladly help you to find the right place to post your question. (I hope you are getting the irony here)
But wait, isn’t everything a programming-related question, including algorithms, machine learning, and software theory? Well someone hasn’t been reading the stack overflow community guidelines!
Take a look at my question. It was closed 3 times. The first time it was off topic and I was told to post it in a different community. Then it didn’t have enough code in it so I had to put a pointless irrelevant code snippet. I managed to save it by appealing since I had enough reputation.
Then as per usual it was downvoted to around -5 and flagged as duplicate pointing to a post explaining how to bake the perfect brownies. I appealed that as well and brought back the question.
All of this happened on the first day of me posting it. After that, the regular users found my question and I received around 15 upvotes in 1 week. Indicating that there was some interest in this, so the community moderators decided to leave it alone. However, I have already posted the same question in the surprisingly less toxic Reddit community and got my information from there.
After that, I had the audacity to answer my own question 10 days later describing what I have found hoping to help other users in their search. My answer was downvoted to oblivion and closed and I had to put my answer in the question since it was no longer under fire.
Gaining reputation on SO
If you still, for some reason, need to gain a reputation I found out that answering questions is the best way to go. Look for questions that are old enough, which means they slipped through the moderation because if they are closed/deleted you lose the reputation gained from them.
Focus on quality and don’t expect quick results. You might get an upvote from the author or even mark it as the correct answer, but most of the reputation gain will come after the question is indexed in google and people start landing on it from there.
Don’t get your hopes too high, if you have a low rep at the moment chances are that you will never reach very high numbers. Pleb life awaits you.
Final thoughts
Stackoverflow has become a knowledge database. It used to take up most of the first page results for dev-related topics, but I can see that this also started to change. Dev blogs and other communities are gaining more and more friction.
In my opinion, if you just read on the forum and never interact with the community you will have a good time. There are plenty of good answers out there. But good new content is rare these days and it seems that the website is declining in popularity.
