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Discussion on: Has Stack Overflow Become An Antipattern?

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Sometimes problems do get downvoted by mistake.

And often on purpose, even by the voter's own admission. Remember, the community has explicitly blocked all suggestions of attaching an (anonymous, even) reason to a downvote. "Downvoting for whatever reason I feel like is my right!" That assertion is conclusive proof of guilt that it's being used for harassment and bullying. No one who truly desires to use it only constructively would object to attaching a reason.

Whether a question is closed has a voting process, and the question will be closed only when the close vote accumulates to 3.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who participate in the systemic bullying who have close-vote privileges. This system does nothing to stop the elite from ganging up on others. (Observed personally as a close-vote reviewer.) In contrast, it tends to encourage it.

When OP corrects its problem according to the rules, it can be re-opened.

Can, but seldom is, even with corrections. What's further, often the problem wasn't broken in the first place, so there is nothing to "fix". Ill-aimed dupe-hammer closures are a constant problem, and are seldom re-opened.

Depending on the person, the reputation mechanism does encourage users to post high-quality questions and answers to some extent.

"High-quality" is an odd term, that generally doesn't relate to actual measures of quality, but rather the arbitrary whims of the elites. I've encountered many who consider "high-quality" to be merely "something I personally find interesting" or "something I didn't already know". I have personally observed people being downvoted because of their inexperience, their country of origin, and even their income level. DEAD SERIOUS. But because downvoting has no accountability framework, there's no way to correct the problem. I've watched hateful explainations of the downvote be removed, but the downvotes remain nonetheless. One person had a good, well-written question heavily downvoted because he was a black student who couldn't afford a $300 book someone in comments recommended. The comments were removed, but the downvotes were never cancelled out.

Many good questions and answers get downvoted needlessly. It's not a matter of "doesn't work for some people," it's a matter of "inherently broken for the majority."

Anonymous, unmoderated downvoting and community diversity are inherently incompatible concepts.

No one punishes people who don’t know the basic concepts and knowledge...

I was a reviewer for some time on StackOverflow. There was not a single day that went by in which I did not encounter at least one (usually more than one) instance of a high-rep user literally punishing people for not having basic concepts and knowledge. I'm glad that hasn't been your experience, but believe me when I tell you that you're uncommonly sheltered in that regard. Be grateful for it.

Nothing is perfect...

Ahh, yes, the classic excuse we've been bandying about for 30+ years in the face of literally all anti-social behavior in the industry. It needs to stop somewhere.


If you're wondering why you haven't observed much of this, just look at your profile. You have nearly 30K reputation points with 28 gold badges.

What's further, you're mainly active in the JS tags, which we concluded elsewhere in comments here is not as prone to the problems I described because the space is constantly evolving and changing, preventing anyone from really becoming a long-term expert in the JS ecosystem. The JS tags don't "run out" of questions like most other technology tags do.

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mrdulin profile image
official_dulin • Edited

In fact, I have also encountered a downvote under the go tag or even on Reddit. Even for people like me who are familiar with SO community rules. Some people seem to be very demanding on the problem of golang. Golang is great, but people in the SO community not. You can see that many problems are downvoted and closed under the Go tag. This is not common under JS tag and Python tag.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

My point exactly, and if one is a relatively new coder or has few reputation points, that negative experience is amplified by an order of magnitude.

(My experiences on the Python tag have not been stellar, for the record. I have better outcomes with the Freenode IRC room.)