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###There is not one community on SO.

There is not one community on SO.

I think you get hung up on the word community. And I think it's one of the factors making discussions difficult. There is not one community on SO. The C++ tag is attracting very different people than the Go tag or PHP tag, and time zones might be a factor as well. It's not a community, it's thousands of people that you or I have nothing in common with, and we only interact with some of them. So trying to generalize is pointless, and so is a sentence like "The community is toxic". It might make more sense to say something like "people didn't like the way they were treated".

It doesn't feel like a community when the people you interact with are more interested in gatekeeping than including others when working towards a common goal. The question is not "how can we salvage this question?" or "how can this question become useful to others?" Questions are getting closed without any comment, and the asker doesn't have a say in the matter. It's a decision by some nebulous moderators that you have no obvious way of interacting with, for unknown reasons, with no obvious way to appeal the decision.

One recurring theme I see on Hacker News (HN) is that people are getting tired of SO, so they leave. And I believe SO is worse off without them. I don't believe these problems are limited to new users, at all. Attrition is real, and I believe it is a much worse problem than not being nice enough to newbies. I don't care that some student didn't get his homework question closed nicely enough. What I do care about is good people being driven away by abusive behavior. And not only because nice people leave, but for evolutionary reasons: It tilts the population towards being less nice on average, and more thick-skinned on average.

I think you get hung up on the word community. And I think it's one of the factors making discussions difficult.

###There is not one community on SO. 

The C++ tag is attracting very different people than the Go tag or PHP tag, and time zones might be a factor as well. It's not a community, it's thousands of people that you or I have nothing in common with, and we only interact with some of them. So trying to generalize is pointless, and so is a sentence like "The community is toxic". It might make more sense to say something like "people didn't like the way they were treated".

It doesn't feel like a community when the people you interact with are more interested in gatekeeping than including others when working towards a common goal. The question is not "how can we salvage this question?" or "how can this question become useful to others?" 

Questions are getting closed without any comment, and the asker doesn't have a say in the matter. It's a decision by some nebulous moderators that you have no obvious way of interacting with, for unknown reasons, with no obvious way to appeal the decision.

One recurring theme I see on Hacker News (HN) is that people are getting tired of SO, so they leave. And I believe SO is worse off without them. I don't believe these problems are limited to new users, at all. Attrition is real, and I believe it is a much worse problem than not being nice enough to newbies. I don't care that some student didn't get his homework question closed nicely enough. What I do care about is good people being driven away by abusive behavior. And not only because nice people leave, but for evolutionary reasons: It tilts the population towards being less nice on average, and more thick-skinned on average.

Your post is phrased as a question, but all you do is argue in favor of a certain point you're trying to make. You put toxicity in quotes as if to imply that it doesn't actually exist. You use words like supposedly when you quote. That is not the start of a fruitful discussion. What you're doing is setting yourself up to attacking and defending, winning vs losing. That can also be seen in the comments that you're leaving, where you turn to unwarranted sarcasm. The purpose of sarcasm in a group setting is to divide the group. What is it that you're trying to achieve?

Another issue are the drive-by downvotes. You research a problem, invest time and effort in the post, and all you get is a couple downvotes, for no obvious reasons. It feels like a slap in the face. It happened too often to me (that means a couple of times) that I just don't want to post questions anymore.

One recurring theme I see on HN is that people are getting tired of SO, so they leave. And I believe SO is worse off without them. I don't believe these problems are limited to new users, at all. Attrition is real, and I believe is a much worse problem than not being nice enough to newbies. I don't care that some student didn't get his homework question closed nicely enough. What I do care about is good people being driven away by abusive behavior. And not only because nice people leave, but for evolutionary reasons: It tilts the population towards being less nice on average, and more thick-skinned on average.

And why have downvotes at all? I downvoted your question because I didn't like the way that it is phrased. I also did it because I am judging your behavior in the comments, which I'm not 100% okay with. I don't know you, all I see is this small window in the form of one question. But I have already decided that I don't like you. I'm probably a bad person for being so quick to judge somebody I've never met. You're posting on Meta, so you probably really care about the site. Yet I clicked that little downwards arrow, just to spite you. It was super easy, and normally there are no social repercussions because it's completely anonymous. Nobody would ever have known that it was me if I hadn't confessed here (so now I might get downvoted out of spite). So, yea. I did it, mostly because I could. But does that make SO better in any way? Is that helpful to anybody involved? I doubt it. What is the goal? Do downvotes bring us any closer to that goal? Downvotes should either be removed, or not be anonymous (" downvoted with the following suggestion: ..."). Maybe a downvote should be tied to a condition: "Please fix this issue with your post, I'll rescind the downvote once you have." Currently, downvotes do more harm than good.

Your post is phrased as a question, but all you do is argue in favor of a certain point you're trying to make. You put toxicity in quotes as if to imply that it doesn't actually exist. You use words like supposedly when you quote. That is not the start of a fruitful discussion. You're setting yourself up to attacking and defending, winning vs. losing. That can also be seen in the comments that you're leaving, where you turn to unwarranted sarcasm. The purpose of sarcasm in a group setting is to divide the group. What is it that you're trying to achieve?

Another issue are the drive-by downvotes. You research a problem, invest time and effort in the post, and all you get is a couple of downvotes, for no obvious reasons. It feels like a slap in the face. It happened too often to me (that means a couple of times) that I just don't want to post questions anymore.

One recurring theme I see on Hacker News (HN) is that people are getting tired of SO, so they leave. And I believe SO is worse off without them. I don't believe these problems are limited to new users, at all. Attrition is real, and I believe it is a much worse problem than not being nice enough to newbies. I don't care that some student didn't get his homework question closed nicely enough. What I do care about is good people being driven away by abusive behavior. And not only because nice people leave, but for evolutionary reasons: It tilts the population towards being less nice on average, and more thick-skinned on average.

And why have downvotes at all? I downvoted your question because I didn't like the way that it is phrased. I also did it because I am judging your behavior in the comments, which I'm not 100% okay with. I don't know you; all I see is this small window in the form of one question. But I have already decided that I don't like you. I'm probably a bad person for being so quick to judge somebody I've never met. You're posting on Meta, so you probably really care about the site. Yet I clicked that little downwards arrow, just to spite you. It was super easy, and normally there are no social repercussions because it's completely anonymous. Nobody would ever have known that it was me if I hadn't confessed here (so now I might get downvoted out of spite). So, yea. I did it, mostly because I could. But does that make SO better in any way? Is that helpful to anybody involved? I doubt it. What is the goal? Do downvotes bring us any closer to that goal? Downvotes should either be removed, or not be anonymous (" downvoted with the following suggestion: ..."). Maybe a downvote should be tied to a condition: "Please fix this issue with your post, I'll rescind the downvote once you have." Currently, downvotes do more harm than good.