Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/
multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
“The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
“That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
“No, you don’t want to do that.”
“No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
etc.
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I’d love to see a federated version, we all host shards
Why would you think it would be different
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)
Individual tools already often host their own Q&A or forum systems. We just need to encourage more of that.
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.