25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians got out of control and it no longer was about helping people but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge where most users started to be categorised as problematic to that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at expressing themselves in English.
Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking (e.g. poor English).
Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had, that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.
I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.
> librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking
By the way, if you don't want your answer go to waste in this situation and the question was on-topic, you could open your own question (reword the original question if it wasn't clear) and then immediately self-answer it.
About half of my questions are self-answered. Many because I found a solution before anyone else answered. Some because I found a solution while preparing a question but didn't submit it yet (this happens quite a lot to me). Some I even planned as self-answers from the beginning, when it took me a lot time to find a solution an issue that wasn't on SO yet. All of those questions were well received.
Using quirky metaphors and swearing can be problematic for people who aren't fluent in english though. I think the removal of all greeting lines and thank you comments is a bit over the top, but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.
quirky metaphors and swearing are about top answers I've crafted to existing questions that editors are slowly blandifying until its no longer my contribution anymore. The English is about people phrasing questions poorly and the mods immediately closing them, while muggins here has crafted a detailed three paragraph answer that now has nowhere to go.
> but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.
I mean you can argue that, but I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.
Point is the founders made a choice and it was a choice that pissed some people off, so I'm answering the "I don't have a problem with SO" comment to point out that I did because their choices made me dislike contributing.
I also think immediate closing is bad because it can waste your time like in your case. Maybe some grace period before closing would help, then closing also wouldn't be perceived as so bad
> I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.
Dictionaries can be difficult to read but I would compare SO more to Wikipedia in its writing style, which is very readable. Wikipedia is much more strict and without those style guidelines it would be way less useful.
> Point is the founders made a choice
Unless you mean recent choices, I would say the founders choices made SO so successful. There are a lot forums/platforms that are better suited for getting help, were discussions and expression of individual personalities are welcome and beneficial for community building. But at the same time those forums mostly help the people who are asking questions, but not people who google their issues, because long threads are less searchable and answers are harder to find. That's were SO shines, it scales because it prioritize people looking for answers instead of people looking for individual help. I too used to contribute in such forums, but knowing the limited reach of my answers there, I stopped helping individuals and choose to contribute to the much larger audience of SO (even if that means being subject to occasionally questionable mod actions or a few downvotes)
I lucked in to some moderator powers by posting the answer to an extremely simple and common problem in Objective-C.
Sometimes I'll go through and undo lots of those trivial "improvements" that people make where they slightly change the wording of the questions and answers.
Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking (e.g. poor English).
Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had, that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.
I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.