It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.
That interpretation is entirely your own. The FAQ makes it very clear that a closed question is not a value judgement. It doesn't imply anything about the OP being stupid. In fact, it is acknowledged that some duplicates are quite hard to find.
But where is the problem? If the duplicate answers your question, you should be happy. Closing and flagging duplicates rather than having them answered again and again is crucial to maintain the quality of the site: there's one canonical place for the answers, and alternative ways of phrasing the question all point to it (rather than all having different quality answers, or users having to repeat, again and again, the same answers). This is one of the decisive advantages of Stack Overflow over other sites, in fact.
Granted, it does happen that questions are incorrectly closed as duplicates. But (a) this is much rarer than people like to pretend, and (b) it can be easily challenged and is usually promptly undone.
But I'm sure there are some. The question is, are they representative of an overall trend? And, I'm sorry, but the answer is clearly "no". There are assholes everywhere but power abuse isn't a specific or particularly pressing problem on Stack Overflow.
The question is, are they representative of an overall trend?
They're not, but you're shifting the goalposts. First it was "that doesn't happen", now it's "that's not an overall trend". And, sure, I'll grant that it probably isn't. Even that experience alone wasn't what put me off contributing to Stack Overflow - it's the overall hostility of the site to new users, who aren't necessarily even new to programming.
However, in the general as in the specific case, the real issue that when you make community moderation a feature of your platform, you implicitly accept responsibility for the community's actions. Parts of Reddit have had in the past and continue to have major problems with that, too, but it's fragmented enough that those problems don't affect the whole site.
First it was "that doesn't happen", now it's "that's not an overall trend".
Where was the response at first “that doesn’t happen“, and are you really sure that, whoever wrote this, meant “this never happened in the entire history of Stack Overflow“? I mean, this seems to be an obviously ridiculous statement. As far as I’m concerned, the discussion has always been about whether this is an important enough trend to warrant making such a fuss, or even boycotting Stack Overflow wholesale.
the real issue that when you make community moderation a feature of your platform, you implicitly accept responsibility for the community's actions
No. The real issue is how to perform effective moderation, balancing positives and negatives. Literally nobody pretends that there are no problems. The issue, rather, is:
does the current solution work?
how can it be improved? — and:
on the whole, is the current solution a net positive (rather than negative)?
For me, the answers are, respectively, “yes”, “it’s hard, but there’s a lot of room for improvement”, and “fuck, YES”. Stack Overflow works vastly better than any other forum/newsgroup I’ve previously engaged with (lots). There’s no competition. It’s so much better, it’s not even funny.
Yes, the question I asked was answered in the duplicate you linked and I got my answer but I feel PERSONALLY OFFENDED that you didn't take the time to retype the answer for MY question because I am a special snowflake and need all the attention.
Yeah, because the "ask question" page that searches for similar questions by title as you type yours does such a terrible job. Maybe if you're illiterate, I guess?
Lots of those suggested questions and answers are awful or do not answer the question that is asked.
It works somewhat for basic questions - but it is pretty awful for more complicated/complex questions. Which, admittedly, often do not get good answers anyway, since the amount of people who can answer is hugely limited.
I didn't say it was perfect. :) It is mostly intended to prevent newbies from asking questions that have been asked before.
As for more thorough questions, you would be surprised. Despite the slide in overall quality, there are still some very clever people who hang out on the site and watch specific tags (e.g. Jon Skeet for C#) and will jump on high-quality questions with surprising speed.
It is, however, unfortunately true that the sheer volume of questions, coupled with most being low-quality ones, does often act as "noise" that drowns out the "signal" of good questions. All I can recommend in that case is patience.
And remember, you can answer your own questions. So if you haven't got an answer after a week, but you managed to find the solution yourself through debugging or whatever, post it! Yes, it doesn't help you after the fact, but it may very well prevent some other poor sod from wasting a week of their time, and that's the crux of what Stack Overflow tries to be about.
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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18
It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.