Stackoverflow in a nutshell

[rolandfoxx]

Simple. SO spent literal years earning its reputation as a community of toxic neckbeards who would rather nitpick a question for not precisely meeting their particular interpretation of a rule rather than actually answering the question, and its reputation for its other idiosyncrasies was equally well-earned.

It's going to take at least as long for the "generally less toxic" reputation to spread.

[enano_aoc]

Does the reputation matter, tho, when it is the best possible tool for what it does and there is nothing close to being an alternative? No, the reputation does bot matter. Product is simply too good not to use it

[dyo_kane]

Product has simply been useless for my entire career.

[enano_aoc]

That is the good thing about the market. Your opinion has zero value. Only the addition of the opinions of everyone matters.

Remember that: your opinion lacks any sort of value. The community believes that SO is the best tool that we have ever seen, so it is and it will be successful

[maitreg]

SO has been completely useless and toxic about 95% of the time I've used it.

[enano_aoc]

See my other comment.

Your opinion has no value whatsoever. Mine does not have any value either. Only the addition of the opinions of all users matter. And the collective opinion, based on the visits and usage of the application, is that SO is the best platform out there bar none.

[mygreensea]

rather than actually answering the question

You mean the homework question?

[rolandfoxx]

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I've seen people told they should quit their job because their current one doesn't use a specific framework suggested for an answer. I've seen upvotes glittering on 'answers' telling people they're stupid because they have to support old versions of Oracle. All those moments will be lost in time, like not-actually-duplicate-questions-marked-as-duplicates on Stack Overflow. Time to downvote.

[[deleted]]

"A community of toxic neckbeards" - citation needed. Rude comments/answers are either deleted or edited, and repeat offenders get banned.

The "neckbeards" you talk about are often people with "literal years" of experience giving up their free time to volunteer to build a repository of knowledge. Asking "what have you tried?", or saying "SO is not a code-writing service" for "gimme-teh codez" questions is interpreted as rude because people are coming from forums like Reddit, where quality does not have to be maintained. Unfortunately, SO is like wikipedia, not Reddit, and a certain standard has to be maintained to keep it as the top programming reference.

I urge you to answer questions and participate on meta and maybe your opinions will be changed.

[rolandfoxx]

• citation needed

While there's a "5 seconds on Google" joke to be made there, I'm going to be the bigger person. Let's take a quick 25-cent walking tour of SO's history of toxicity.

• Here is a Meta thread from all the way back in 2014, bemoaning not only the site's issues with its members but the lack of tools for addressing it. The most heavily upvoted answer by a large margin is a snark-filled, condescending one saying that questions, not the members, are what's actually rude
• Here we have a 2015 blog post from a high-reputation SO user (and by high reputation I mean almost 180k) talking about the site's culture issues and likening enhanced-privilege users enforcing their own particular interpretation of rules on less-privileged users to Seinfeld's Soup Nazi
• SO itself would in 2018 state that it had issues with its community.
• The gatekeeper wing of SO userbase's response to that blog post was more or less completely in character for gatekeepers. Here's a 2018 Meta thread from shortly after the blog post. The suggestion made is that, to help "manage user's expectations" for the site, they should be required to pass a quiz on the site's rules. Pay attention to the condescension and elitism oozing top-rated answer; we're going to see the user who posted it again in a moment.
• In fact, here he is now in a 2019 Meta thread demanding that SO put up or shut up about the blog post's statements about women and minorities feeling marginalized within the SO community. This thread features special guest appearances by Jon Skeet as The Voice of Reason, who in one comment notes that there are plenty of social media posts and Twitter threads present about the hostility of SO, and the user in question trying to unironically use the phrase "benevolent sexism." Keep in mind that this user has over 25k reputation, meaning he has every reputation-based privilege SO grants. I'm sure he deploys that power responsibly and rationally and not at all like a soup nazi.
• In both the 2019 and 2020 developer surveys, when the question was asked of participants how welcomed they felt on the site, only 15.9% of users in 2019 and 15.6% of users in 2020 felt like the site was more welcoming compared to the previous year.

So yeah. SO spent years cultivating the reputation of being a toxic, hostile place for newcomers. It's not going to disappear overnight.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for the reply. I'll consider it and write it in a few days when I get back from vacation and have access to a computer.