Stackoverflow - you want help ? you get downvotes

Somehow people might be attracted by Stack Overflow ,

• maybe because it’s mostly top-ranked by Search Engines,
• maybe because sometimes it really helps ,
• maybe it keeps people in business that should better do stuff without brain-usage or something where they cannot harm people.

But over the years it has become a dirt-pool that is quicker in instant-downvoting and duplicate-flagging than answering.

Maybe that is what happens when platforms tend to be “up/down-vote”-style places full of Mr./Mrs.-always-right …

• people that post and are downvoted just because of “how the answer was " just leave or don’t post anymore, leaving the self-confirming “crowd” to play their toxic games

• in fact the knowledge collected is turned into $$$ by StackOverflow

• There is a youtube Video that has some painful examples of what is going on over there , stories where people are rewarded to remove their questions (WTF!)

  In the description there is a very true statement:

  The Stack Overflow culture needs to be fixed. The overall gatekeeping & elitism in computer science & programming - as a whole - needs to be fixed. I just see it more on Stack Overflow than anywhere else .

• the internet is full of threads that ask why a bunch of bullies is dominating on SO

  And to sum it up there is a reddit that says it all , so here are some quotes ( of more than 1 user ) from that thread:

  In return for my technical question, I get what amounts to a colonoscopy, by what appear to be 14 year old “engineers”, who racked up internet points asserting wrong information with brazen confidence.

  Why is everyone responding in underhanded, condescending tone, under a thin veil of technical clarification?

  Why is it that people who don’t know the answer, nor care to even understand the question, need to comment, then upvote their incorrect comments, all meanwhile downvoting my question?

  .. asking a question on SO is equivalent to giving up whatever dignity you have, or be downvoted for no logical reason.

  SO has always had a problem with toxicity. I think the main reason for this is that it’s not actually a Q&A platform. It’s a wiki under the guise of a Q&A platform. This explains why people can edit your posts and why ++SO explicitly encourages users to post questions that they already have the answer to**.

  SO doesn’t want people to post questions asking for help. They want people to create Q&A-style wiki pages to add to their curated collection of knowledge. If your question doesn’t have a good answer of general use to the populous, then it’ll be downvoted and closed because it’s not useful to them.

  Unfortunately, people innocently try to get help on the site and are subsequently berated and their questions torn apart. SO has tried to address this issue, but it seems that they haven’t made any progress. The first rule of SO is NEVER EVER ask questions on it. It’ll get down voted and marked as duplicate immediately. It’s a great reference. Absolutely terrible source of help.

• A reddit has some user-horror-stories and a lot of criticism about the self-righteous moderators and that they act as if they were the north-korean authorities, here are some excerpts:

  Stackoverflow lives from the contribution of thousands contributors, but is controlled by a small band of moderators who have dictatorship like powers … Of course, it is good that Stackoverflow tries to enforce a certain level of quality for its content, but having this “police” punishing others leads to the same problem like any other police has: They feel they are omnipotent and always right, even if they are wrong. I wish Stackoverflow would be more supporting of their content provider and help them to improve their contribution instead of removing content with wrong justifications and no easy way to challenge that .

  One tool these moderators like to use to suppress a discussion is to mark a question as duplicate, which means the question/answers get closed, no further discussion is possible. They just pretend that a many year old question sounds similar . The worst example I have seen: A question asked why he gets a null reference in a specific WPF situation. The question got marked as duplicate, because someone had posted 100 reasons why a null reference can happen, but with zero relevance for WPF. There was a good reason why the null reference exception happened in this particular situation, but it was no longer possible to add an answer explaining why the problem happen. And normal mortals have no chance to overturn the duplicate decision, for that you need to have a tons of points on Stackoverflow.

  .. problem started when my answer got deleted with the reason " Code plagiarised without attribution”, which was wrong in my opinion . Since my original answer got deleted, you cannot see in that link, that’s how censorship works on Stackoverflow. I wrote all the content myself, except at the very end where I pasted some WPF source code. I made it clear that this was not my code and where it is coming from… clearly stated that I could not write this code and that it is WPF source code. How can this be plagiarism ?

  I am using Stackoverflow since many years but I really could not figure out how to appeal this decision. So I tried to raise the issue on Meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/416605/how-to-get-an-answer-deleted-by-a-moderator-because-of-code-plagiarized-withou. I did this reluctantly due to my earlier experience with self-righteous moderators, who usually react aggressively when anyone dares to mention that there was a problem on Stackoverflow. I wonder if they feel personally questioned and go into defense/attack mode automatically … got there comments like “You don’t know how to quote and cite your sources when writing any professional document? I find that hard to believe.” Well, the truth is that I have never written a professional document citing sources. As it is common on Meta, many commenters do not consider if the case presented has any merit (i.e. I did write in my answer that it is not my code and where I got it from). Instead they like to attack the person who dares to question their actions… To suppress any further discussion, the moderators used their preferred weapon and marked my Meta post as duplicate, even the other question had completely different circumstances.

  Since they didn’t like me raising my question on Meta, they also marked my original question as duplicate. Please note that my question had gone already through a review process and was accepted as proper. Only after I raised it on Meta my original question was closed because of “This question needs details or clarity”. Again, no easy option to appeal the decision. The only action they allow is that I change my question.

  In the replies, users have more horrific stories:

  .. once asked a question that took hours to write and referenced 5 different approaches to the problem, and all I got was a downvote without explanation.

  stack overflow has at this point deleted as much useful content as it currently contains… there were always attitude issues amongst the power users, I wouldn’t expect anything less, but when they started getting militant about the definition of subjective and combining loosely related topics as duplicate then later *deleting the question the defined as the original as low quality it started to go downhill pretty fast

  SO has become a place where dictatorship is rife, people are unfriendly and there is too much moderation going on.

  StackOverflow has become a slightly less spammy version of Experts Exchange. It’s woefully out of date on most things, gives bad and/or conflicting advice on everything else, and generally has become a useless pile of junk. And most of the reason is what you’ve described here. The moderator fiefdoms result in petty turf wars and bad comments rise to the top because of political reasons rather than technical ones.

  “Someone read your answer”, no they did not read it, they just posted competitive answer and after they realized they need a little bit more reputation (for what?!) and my answer is already upvoted (more important to them then to me), they started plagiarism story. Couple hour later, moderator that also did not check ANYTHING (answer, profile, links…) deleted my post. There is no reason for any kind of “we are just trying to protect our company” action, but on the contrary: people are decreasing SO reputation because they need just to distinguish themselves, not to help people.

  Fyi Stack overflow is really old … Is still uses Windows Server and MSSQL

• On Quora .. different place , same story

  To also cite the “highlights”(dark spots) of SO from there:

  It’s the dumbest web-site I’ve ever seen. They should help people but they kept closing my questions for no reason, even banned me from asking more. I am asking BECAUSE I am not a pro. I always tried to be concise and clear, their stupid bots just closed many of my questions.

  the voting system on Stack Overflow is that it penalizes users. It only takes a few negative votes to get you banned from asking questions, taking part on the platform. In my experience, rarely do downvotes get removed from questions that have been improved through editing. Even “deleting” questions will not remove their negative score on one’s account. … ** the strict gamification** of Stackoverflow, turning users into winners and losers, creates an overall unwelcoming, precarious attitude towards beginner programmers

  it’s sh*t, and I will use the word totalitarian, Stack Overflow (regarding its coding forums side) is a totalitarian place, the totalitarianism is first handled by the people who run SO.

• In the mentioned Quora thread ….

  the Quora Question Details Bot seems to have a good sense of humour, since it replies to the Question

  What is bad about Stack Overflow?

  with the balls-of-steel answer

  ...if you're using their service.

Final statement

• In the end there is no need to delete your Crap-Overload account, just don’t ask if you don’t want to loose your dignity , there is even an answer how to log out :D

But to be honest : Windows Server and MSSQL Stack in 2022 ?

They could just ask on their platform why and how to not do that .. Basically when reading CVE’s on a regular basis , nobody should put personal data there…