Why does Stack Exchange have to feel so unfriendly now?

Question

I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years. Like most of you, I have worked with the guy who sits in the corner, seems to know everything, but whom you have to approach with kid gloves if you need to ask him a question. Stack Exchange feels like this now.

I fully understand the need to try to maintain the quality of content, but other sites seem to manage it in a much less intrusive way.

Recently, my posts were blocked. I checked my history, read the guide on how all the metrics are computed, and I'm none the wiser. So now I am scared to post. I'm even wondering if this post will end up closing my account.

When Gerard M Weinberg created the concept of 'Egoless Programming', he suggested a number of things that still seems to be good and relevant today. One was to 'Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience'. Another was 'Don’t be “the guy (or girl) in the room"', which I've already alluded to above.

I only ask for help when I really need it, when I've been stuck for hours, and I try to do the work to make my questions concise and not to waste anyone's time. I generally don't answer questions because (a) I don't know the answer, or (b) much more knowledgeable members have already answered it. Does this make me welcome or unwelcome on Stack Exchange? (This is a genuine question; I intend no sarcasm in it.)

Answer 1

The other two three answers cover a lot of stuff already and are making sense, but; I need to let this off my chest.

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So Stack Overflow was built up. They wanted a "library of good answers to good questions", a "library" of programming knowledge you can't/couldn't obtain in other parts of internet because they didn't hold up somewhat pedantic but useful standards required for a resource of good-quality answers.

It was a small city, and was growing. People in small cities are more friendly. They know a lot of their neighbors. Mr. and Mrs. A's son happily runs to their neighbor's (Mr. and Mrs. B) backyard to play with their son as the parents of the two families joyfully watch these cheerful moments.

There was also a happy watchman. He guided tourists and visitors and gave 'em free advice on how things go on in the city.

But,

The city didn't remain small. It grew big, bigger and bigger. The watchman guided 10 tourists every day, but now this has turned into 1000.

Now this isn't the happy small city it used to be; the city now has robbers, homeless people in the streets, starving beggars and people who'll do anything for "money".

The watchman used to guide 10 people. 2 of them asked very similar questions. 1 of them didn't follow the city's rules. But he embraced them with lengthy explanations. "It's OK if I explain it to this guy for the fourth time. It's not like I'm gonna die or anything."

But now,

a comes and asks "How to parse HTML with Regex?". The watchman says "Come on! I explained it in detail here, a few years ago. Have a look! :)" Person b comes and ask Plzzz debug my codez and the watchman sighs and says "Unfortunately, we don't do that here." c comes and says "I don't knowz the codez. I'm suck. Plzz give me teh codez" The watchman and Mr. A get disappointed. "Something's wrong; we didn't get these things back then".

d, e, f, g etc etc etc. come and ask the same questions. The watchman is tired now. Mrs. B was really easy going and tolerating bad behavior, but this is too much.

While we're at it, z comes and answers a bad question. "What? I didn't have enough 'money'!" y watches him and says "why should he get money for doing what I can do?" and joins him in a money hunt. x joins them. w imitates them.

The watchman watches this from afar, gets a bit frustrated, and then . . .

People in the city aren't happy anymore. There's suspicion, lying and cheating way more than it used to be before.

Some of the natives give up, buckle up and move somewhere else. Some of the natives get angry at the newcomers. Some natives complain to the authority that "I'm not enjoying this anymore." Watchman and his friends don't guide anymore. Instead, they handcuff outlaws. They're tired of guiding people over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Some natives look for solutions. Some just ignore the outlaws. Some keep being harsh to them. A very, very small percentage of the natives still struggle to go backwards in time and bring that happy little city back. But it's a big city, and its problems.

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This is a very exhaustive demonstration of what's happening in SO. I only have an account in SO because this bot posts alerts about spam there, and I've started flagging them.

Now these are the sides in the argument, and the people in the current mega-city:

• People who like to keep quality (AKA watchman and his friends)
• People who just want to post answers and questions for fun (AKA The A & B families)
• The majority of people with bad posts on SO (AKA People who like to bend the rules to get what they want, even if it destroys the image of the city AKA outlaws)
• People who unknowingly post posts that need some twitches and fixes (AKA you, most probably)
• People who are watching all of this and sighing, and aren't participating in SO anymore
• Rep-farmers (AKA people without money)

Now your group is a direct victim of the current of sourness in the city:

Watchman: I hereby arrest you (close your Q) for violating the code principle of the city (SO help center)

You: Huh, I didn't even know!

That's where some of the outlaws or some uninformed people go on meta and get sour "Why aren't you helping me? If you can't answer me, step aside!" Sometimes the watchman asks himself: "Why not leave this place and find my utopia?" But then he sees a flower (A good Q, a "thanks" to mods) and realizes: "This is my utopia. I came from hell some time ago in a hope that my and my friends' handcuffs will keep it from burning, just like the rest of the world."

Now I can't speak for the feelings of the watchmen, as I'm not one, and they tend to choose different ways to counter with the pollution of the mega-city, but we should be thanking them for not letting the city burst in flames.

Answer 2

I decided to look through your own questions and give you a personalized answer. Here are my takeaways, in no particular order:

1. You haven't answered any questions.
   • Stack Overflow discourages people only taking knowledge from the community, and not giving any back.
   • Having no upvoted questions is probably the main reason you are question blocked. There is nothing in your questions that would suggest any human did it manually, you simply triggered the "too many questions, not enough answers" block.
   • While you don't need to answer questions to remove the block, doing so is the easiest way to remove it. See: What can I do when getting “We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account”?
     • Note: these must be well-received answers (receive upvotes or accept checkmarks); spamming useless answers will, obviously, only make things worse for you.
2. Your questions are often filled with fluff.
   • Fluff is statements like:
     • I am betting someone is going to point me at something obvious and I will kick myself, but ...
     • Any help at all would be very much appreciated. Kind wishes ~ Patrick
     • (Apologies for the vagueness of this question. It is the result of some muddy thinking on my part.)
   • Why is fluff a problem?
     • Don't think about Stack Overflow as a forum, think of it as more like Wikipedia than like a message board.
     • Would you see quotes like the above in Wikipedia? Never! So it's inappropriate here, and it sours many people against upvoting you.
     • See: No thanks, Damn it!
3. You don't accept answers of the people who help you out, even though you say thank you in the comments. You've only accepted an answer once.
   • Click the hollow checkmark next to the vote button to accept an answer.
   • If people work hard to help you out, the least you can do is give them 15 imaginary internet points. People notice.
   • This can result in people not upvoting your questions.
   • Examples of you posting a comment that says "thank you" but you didn't accept the answer: One Two Three Four Five
4. You don't use proper markdown in your posts.
   • This would greatly benefit from some code markdown
   • You used bold instead of backticks for a regular expression here
5. You don't post Minimal, Complete, Verifiable Examples.
   • This regex question would benefit from a sample input and a desired output
   • This question contains no code from which we might try to reproduce your exception
   • You didn't include any of the things you've tried in this question

The bottom line is this: Thousands (millions?) of people use this site to help others and get help every day. Perhaps it is not working for you, not because of

the guy who sits in the corner, seems to know everything, but whom you have to approach with kid gloves if you need to ask him a question.

but because you are not contributing your own knowledge to the community and not following the site guidelines. Don't take this the wrong way, you seem like a very nice person; you asked a question and I am answering it. I hope you take this answer in the spirit it is intended; constructive criticism.

Answer 3

Imagine you are now a teacher in highschool, standing in front of 30 students, who all have less knowledge and experience than you.

When they all behave well and ask proper questions one by one, all is good and you can be calm and answer politely and with all the respect in the world.

However, when 29 out of the 30 just shout in the same time "plz halp!", "I needz help now!" etc etc, you can't possibly treat each of them with respect and dignity. You must shout to be heard, you must calm them down with punishments.

In my opinion, this summarize what's going on in Stack Overflow. Can't tell about other sites though.

Answer 4

I see the things you see on the network here too. But it isn't all bad. Since a short time I have been trying to contribute to Seasoned Advice, a low-traffic site. I find the people very welcoming and very helpful. Posts that seem to be off-topic are rewritten by the community to make them on-topic.

This behavior isn't the same across the entire network, you see every community stands on its own.

I often feel 'hostile' myself if I come across a question that has been dealt with for 100 times already, here on MSE but also on SO. Often, a simple search would have yielded enough results to help. A little effort would have been enough. Often such posts are answered immediately with low-quality answers. That frustrates a lot.

On SO, we are very fast on closing questions, and people find that often harsh, but it protects the community as a whole to keep the quality up.

Answer 5

I am a new user (although I have been solving problems with stackoverflow answers for years) and I must admit there seems to be a certain hostility to newcomers, both implicit and explicit. Here is an example:

"It looks like you might need a break (a break? This sounds like "Bob... You've been working a lot... Maybe you should, you know, take a vacation... Come back in a month and start fresh." when an employee does something borderline insane) - take a breather and come back soon!

You've asked 1 question recently, which has not been received very well by the community (has not been received well "by the community"...? All of them? And nobody liked me/my post? Well at least I got this kind automated message to soften the blow...). Everyone learns at their own pace (Again, subtly condescending), and it’s okay to make some mistakes. However, the reception your questions have received thus far might ultimately block your account from asking questions entirely ("ultimately block", sounds very serious. Am I going to receive a perma ban? Should I be shaking? Seems drastic).

And I'm assuming that the same person/group of people wrote a large portion of the other automated responses/documentation. I also think it is safe to assume that the tone is very similar as well. I get this sort of "slap on the wrist" all because one (one, not the entire community) person came across my post and voted it down. I'm not shook up about it, but I guarantee you that users are less likely to return because of this. One user here suggested that a downvote must accompany a constructive comment, which would have helped exponentially more than the above message I quoted. What was helpful, was the box to the right of my post which generated suggestions as I typed out my question.

What I am starting to observe is an "Us vs Them" mentality. Look at Dead's reply. It is an upvoted answer which approximately 50 users agree with (or found humorous...) I appreciate longer, well thought out answers, however, this answer seems to be primarily fueled by frustration (hence the "off my chest"). O.K. kudos for using an analogy to convey an idea. But is a city really the best comparison? If anything, the users of a website are the most geographically dispersed of any population. Cities face problems like crime and homelessness because they are overgrown as well as crammed into one area. One densely populated area, where people compete for resources (space, money, reputation/respect). There is no reason stackexchange can't be a distributed network of small towns, each with their own town guide and community.

Has a user really ever came on stackexchange and said "can i have teh codez??" Do we really need to employ such hyperbole? I understand that new users not following the rules is frustrating and detrimental to the quality of the site (which is very high) but you must also allow these people time to conform to the standards of the community. It shouldn't need reminding that websites can be accessed from any part of the world, and that sometimes a given user's grasp of English or age will deviate several standards below the mean. That doesn't mean you should be hostile or condescending towards them.

I'm not telling you, the expert, how to feel when you read a lazy question/answer. Or what to feel when you see another newcomer disobey the rules. All I'm asking is that you simply not wear your emotions and let it seep into your responses/actions. I think that ignoring a submission would be more effective than a negative/hostile comment or answer. A polite and professional response is ideal. And if you browse through stackexchange, upvoting and downvoting as you go, I only ask that a downvote that puts a 0 point post to -1 points is also accompanied by an explanation in the form of a comment. A person can't be reasonably expected to know what they've done wrong unless there is something connecting the reinforcement and the action. A -1 all by itself does not constitute a causal explanation.

This is an honest and earnest answer only because I think that this site is being held back by these tendencies (which are symptomatic of any online community, yes). If this site could better channel newcomers and integrate them with the community, the website would benefit (as well as the newcomer) immensely.