With all due respect, your (2 whole pages of) comments here are showing exactly the kind of in-group out-group aggression and defensiveness that I described, and it's that attitude that people are consistently complaining about. It's what started killing Stack Overflow long before LLMs.
I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about. Should I not correct people when they say factually inaccurate things about a service I care about? Should I not point out that their use of a service is not aligned with the intended use of that service, or that a community already exists with differently aligned goals? Should I not point out that they are not in a position to override that community's purpose and vision?
Because I absolutely will not agree that other people should get to change what Stack Overflow is, simply because they think it should work like the other sites it was explicitly intended to provide an alternative to.
I'm trying my hardest here to be courteous and to consider all sides: the fact that the software doesn't work optimally for our goals; the fact that the site owners have unaligned interests (corporate ones around ad revenue and site traffic); the fact that key parts of the site software were poorly designed at the start and not properly re-evaluated and fixed (in particular, the reputation system, which saw only a passing attempt to invite meta-discussion and then no corresponding change); the fact that the site's UI affords misuse by looking too much like a discussion forum (compare and contrast Wikipedia: there's no sense that anyone is replying to anyone else except on the Talk and other meta pages, and the edit form is hidden behind a link).
For what it's worth, alternatives exist, and I prefer them. In particular, I use Codidact (https://www.codidact.com) and I consider that its design has fixed many problems with the Stack Exchange network. But fundamentally, these kinds of Q&A sites are meant to work a certain way in the main Q&A space (although Codidact opens up the possibility of parallel related spaces, not just meta). They are fundamentally and crucially not a place to just ask something because it's on your mind (or with the specific intent of getting out of a bind), without heed to existing questions, and hope that someone addresses you personally. That's how traditional forums work, and ultimately the cause of all the things that made experts fed up with them and motivated to try something new in 2008.
I've written a lot ITT because there are a lot of misconceptions about Stack Overflow out there, and many of them are quite popular; and because the site itself is not very good at presenting the needed correct information.
This. This is what I'm talking about. If you can't see it, nothing I will say can change it, but suffice it to say that I'm more convinced than ever that SO is culturally very sick.
I'll just refer back to the key relevant part of my initial post:
> A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.
I don't necessarily think you've misidentified the culture. I disagree that it's sick. I think it's not only exactly what we want to have, but a huge improvement over what we started with in 2013-2014, when new question volume was peaking, curators and experts were getting increasingly frustrated, and the volume of discussion on meta exploded. (I've noticed that whenever I need to refer people to Q&A on meta that's our highest-quality meta content, to explain what Stack Overflow is, a large fraction of it is from 2014.)
In particular: we have always had what could broadly be called a code of conduct; it's become more refined and more like official codes of conduct over the years, for better or worse. But overall, over time, we've become much better at removing actually abusive, profane etc. comments, and editing off-handed details in questions to avoid giving needless offense. (By the way: a quite large fraction of curse words and insults come from new users who are upset at the realization that questions are subject to quality standards, or who take downvotes personally when we intend it purely as content rating.)
When I say that I don't understand, it's because you describe "in-group out-group aggression and defensiveness" and I don't see it that way. I'm not trying to protect other meta regulars. I'm trying to help people integrate by explaining to them how we want them to approach the site instead.
But it's impossible to do that without first informing people that their current approach is wrong, and trying to explain patiently why it's wrong.
> it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about.
Because we actually, objectively are.
And what's wrong with that?
Why shouldn't we be able to have this thing?
And why should it be considered an invalid thing when e.g. Wikipedia is not?
If 29 million people want to use the "anyone can edit" property of Wikipedia to edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog and ask whether Rover's condition is serious enough to require veterinary attention, does that invalidate Wikipedia's model?
> that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.
Stack Overflow started in a closed beta and was marketed from the start as being for people with a certain level of cluefulness. We had to argue among ourselves to get everyone to accept that a) easy questions are not only fine, but often the most valuable and b) the thing that experts tend to hate about beginner questions is not the fact that they're beginner-level; it's literally every other consequence of a beginner asking them.
And acceptance of that is still not complete; sometimes long-standing members get yelled at on meta for trying to close good, easy questions because they're easy. And they, too, are acting against consensus, and against Stack Overflow's vision. (They're just, you know, nowhere near as troublesome overall as the long-standing members who don't care about policy and just try to answer as many questions as they can figure out an answer to.)
Stack Overflow was never intended to provide the kind of "service" that most newcomers (including newly arrived experts hoping to answer questions) expect. It was instead intended to show people that there's another way, that's fundamentally different from the traditional forum experience.
You have literally responded to a person saying that their questions were closed very quickly without proper review with, "I'm happy to hear it. This is how it's supposed to work." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927524).
Yes. I said that because that actually is the policy.
Review comes after the closure. This is the explicit and intentional design of the system. In other posts, I cited this (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263); not sure how that escaped from that post.
(To clarify, the entire point is that the closed state is the review period. It's temporary by design. And questions that are answerable may still not meet site standards, and can nearly always be improved. If I had my druthers, questions would start out closed.)
