My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers.
The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted.
The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post—which they wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth, the rationale for these awful edits.
The user argued that “you” is not used in good, professional documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of “you”.
Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with anyone, saying that “standard C” only referred to the current C standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer “standard”. The user would insist upon removing the C tag from any question about C90, for example.
The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible users.
Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that are not obvious and clear improvements.
If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.
You usually won't see a response, the moderator will either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.
Interesting. I dug through my inbox and was able to find the answer, and evidence of the edit war itself is gone, except for the actual edit history. The comments have been removed. (Good riddance, but the process is less transparent for me.)
The actions to warn and suspend users are kinda intentionally invisible or at least less visible. The idea is not to publicly shame the users and to let them come back and continue to participate without attaching a public black mark to their account.
So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag something except that your flag is declared valid and the problem is resolved in some way.
The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might be.
I have 334 answers (the last was in 2019) and only one that is popular. It's from more than a decade ago. I looked at tonight and there is was an edit on January 26. But from a glance there is nothing different from what's it's been for years. So it must have been a trivial edit.
The edit thing is a self imposed problem because the site gamification for established Stack* sites mandates that people edit questions to get enough reputation for basic site functionality. Actually asking or answering a question is far too difficult for a new user, especially on SO.
I looked it up. Accepted edit suggestions are only +2 per edit and cap at +1000 for your entire account. A single upvote on a question or answer is worth 5 edits.
I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.
And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.
SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.
This make perfect sense if one view SO as a FAQ site.
SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
I'm not sure what your problem with downvoting is. It's not an attack on you, but to let other readers know that your solution is not the best solution. It may have been so in 2011, but readers like me don't want to be led astray if it is no longer a good solution.
> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!
Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.
Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.
At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.
That's basically what I'm saying. Lack of reputation inhibits your ability to participate in the site (beyond asking, answering, and editing questions).
And what I'm saying is ... that's OK for 99% of users. I'm not sure it's a problem that it is hard to participate beyond voting, commenting and asking/answering.
That would make sense if a new question could be asked after the same X number of time units. As it is, 2012 answers suggesting jQuery for any simple Javascript question are no longer relevant.
