tl;dr: There is no tl;dr. If you don't wish to read the entire thing, then don't worry about it.

I was hoping my month off would've cooled me off a bit or at least given me a different perspective on this whole matter. What I can definitively say is, at least it gave me that new perspective...

I've been meaning to reflect on this sort of paradox with "the limits of community moderation" being what they are, as per my moderator nomination, but it turned into something else along the way.

I'll start with what I believe to be the actual problem here - we can't retain subject-matter experts (SMEs). Another take: the experts we've retained on Stack Overflow have more expertise in the Stack Exchange platform.

As an expert in the field of Java and Spring, I find it incredibly unfulfilling to answer the same ol' questions day in and day out, which are just as broad and as scope-unrestrained as ever before. To make matters even worse, a lot of the questions being asked retread old and already-asked questions, even if the OP doesn't recognize this fact.

If I were just playing the role of subject-matter expert, then I'd get burnt out pretty quickly, since answering the same integer-division question or the same NullPointerException question would exhaust me.

Thankfully, we have the ability to close questions as duplicates, and downvote questions which are not all that particularly good. We also have policies here on Meta which we reference when dealing with questions in a certain way and we can use that as our shield to justify not having to answer the same question or poor questions.

This works... but has its limitations.

  • Closing questions is something seen as "unfriendly", which seems to be the buzzword of the year.
  • Downvoting poor questions or answers is also seen as "unfriendly".
  • The nature of the site itself, which gives and bestows a lot of trust unto a group of people who have spent a lot of time on the site (who may not necessarily be SMEs), festers mistrust amongst those who are unfamiliar with the way the site works (note that this is largely a paraphrase of Jon Ericson's blog post).
  • There aren't enough people who willingly and actively exercise this power, nor does the UX appear to be geared to doing so. My waking nightmare is that there will never be a UX update to address this gap.

One part of my hiatus allowed me to see the other side of the fence. We on Meta often build walls of policy, sometimes to the benefit of our own sanity, sometimes to simply avoid answering questions.

This is a very poor situation to be in because it gives Meta the opportunity to have its opinion of certain types of questions (hell, even certain kinds of English) calcify and proliferate since that's the only actual relief we know.

Stack Overflow wants to portray that they have metrics and data that indicate that questions are improving with the new wizard, but if there's no data to back up that claim, then there's nothing to prove that it's accomplishing anything.

What would be the real relief? Demanding better tools.

Oh, I'm getting a frightful shade of déjà vu...

This summer, Shog9 posted an answer which resonated with me.

Water doesn't care what you want. No amount of pleading or nicely-worded signs are going to convince water to wet your parched plants when it wants to tear out a gully and carry away your precious topsoil. You can dam it, drain it, redirect it, slow it... But sooner or later, water always finds its level.

To that effect, no amount of pleading, signs or documentation is going to stop a user from posting a "give me teh codez" question, nor does it stop users from providing an answer.

The only real thing we can do at this point is beg for the tools to start directing the water. Better, more effective tools to help us moderate content - not necessarily increasing the number of votes, but increasing the impact of our actions. The simple reality is that the water is coming, and the simple truth is that all of the most beautifully written prose in the world about what is and is not acceptable on the site is going to get ignored.

All of that to say:

Our energy is better spent asking for demanding better tools.

Now here's why I believe that the Stack Overflow I want to build is no longer supported.

  • Quality of Life features for moderation are simply not a priority. The big thing that seems to be on the interest of moderation at all is a synonym dashboard. And that was only just this June (2019).
  • A lot of energy has been spent on this "Welcoming" initiative, which seems to be driving an even deeper wedge between the community. I don't care if someone calls me unwelcoming any more, since it is usually a symptom of their question being closed or downvoted, and the knowledge gap which exists for this


    and I'm over being blamed for it. It's the fault of the platform which has consistently failed to communicate to the recipient of those what this actually means, or how to actually correct themselves.

  • There's still no concrete direction for the site, or community. No employee or CM has provided guidance for what the site should become, and I refuse to spend another second guessing. In other words, if you're not a CM, it doesn't matter what your opinion of the direction of the site should be; it can and will change, because it is an arbitrary and capricious entity.

But in the midst of all of this, Stack Overflow benefits from the raw efforts we put into the site on a daily basis. The services which exist today - Careers and Teams - simply cannot exist if Stack Overflow is a smaller entity. For instance, you couldn't let something like Careers work on Super User; it doesn't have the same order of magnitude of traffic.

Basically: we can hoot and holler as loud as we want to, but at the end of the day, the lights need to stay on.

I couldn't even propose a new Stack Overflow site (analogous to MathOverflow) since that poses several logistic and question-discipline questions which no one seems prepared to have a discussion about.

At this point, I'm just fed up. I once believed that I was helping the site out, only to be referred to as some kind of "aristocrat" who would flog those in need of help with scorpions. (Another paraphrase, but this is how I interpreted it.)

I want to say, "Until the moderation side of the site improves, I don't want to moderate content ever again," but I think I can just leave that first part off. Nothing will change until the Community Management team actually listens to us.

I've seen nothing to convince me that they are, though.

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    I reached this point about three years ago. There is no indication anything we say is going to make any difference. I'm sorry to say the best advice I have for anyone feeling this way is to start doing something more fulfilling with your time. The place will probably continue to do ok for a long, long time to come because new SMEs come in who yet have to reach that point of frustration. All things considered this probably is a good thing as the site still looks like a net positive for the world. – Pekka supports GoFundMonica Jun 21 at 17:19
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    @halfer I disagree. Good questions attract people from search engines looking for an answer. Bad questions don't. – Rakete1111 Jun 21 at 17:47
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    @Halfer I'm pretty sure the ad revenue from hits on How do I exit the Vim editor alone pays for the site. – Davy M went to fund Monica Jun 21 at 17:53
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    @halfer whoever thinks that ad revenue can go from LQ posts would better learn some basic math. Traffic stats say SO gets ~10m visits a day, now compare that to stuff posted by newcomers. Even if we assume that all 10K questions a day are LQ homework dumps and even if we assume that each of them gets whopping 5 views, this would still be about 0.5% of total visits. Real traffic goes elsewhere. – gnat Jun 21 at 19:06
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    ...I sometimes wonder why Stack Overflow doesn't do (or doesn't publish) analysis of where these millions daily visits go. Maybe they are simply afraid that this data will bust their political myth about how it is important to be welcoming to newcomers – gnat Jun 21 at 19:07
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    I wrote like 3 answers for this, but all of them were just too grumpy ... the TL;DR being very similar to what @Pekka웃 mentions. I gave up answering on Stack Overflow long back because of various different reasons, including poor quality, too many dupes, bad tools and so on. However, that became a main motivator for me to become a moderator. The 20k tools are pretty much useless, like using a plastic knife to kill dragons. Heck, I had used even the "protect" option as much as possible. After becoming a mod, life has become more simple. I've forgotten about lookin at new questions. – Bhargav Rao Jun 21 at 19:59
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    Hypothesis: SE no longer values its veteran users. We have already produced all the content that matters. Now they are focused on fixing their image by appeasing the vampires and withholding the tools needed for site curation. (Site curation and appeasing new users are inherently conflicting goals.) At this point, it seems that us veteran users contribute negatively to the company's chosen direction because: 1) We harass new users by curating and being "unwelcoming" instead of answering. 2) We complain endlessly on meta. SE wants vampire feeders, not site curators. – Mysticial Jun 21 at 21:49
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    @Mysticial: Experiment: What if we just stopped moderating content? On the surface, we would no longer be considered "unwelcoming", nor would we have to suffer the blowback of misguided users when their use of Stack Overflow doesn't mesh with actual expectations. This is at the risk of the site itself, though... – Makoto Jun 21 at 22:46
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    @Makoto TBH, I think that's exactly what SE wants. They secretly want us to stop moderating and start answering (vampire feeding). Quality isn't important anymore since all the valuable traffic-generating content has already been produced (IOW, content saturation). So at this stage, SE probably sees quality of new content as a worthwhile sacrifice to appease/feed the vampires and fix the site's public image. – Mysticial Jun 21 at 23:07
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    @JonEricson: I suppose there's a tacit difference in interpretation behind responses and response times. Admittedly, it'd be a nice change of pace if a CM responded to suggestions about new moderation tools or tactics and also had a rough timeline on when they expected to deliver it. Hearing nothing about that and watching CMs make public announcements about... not what the community is saying is the problem is where the rift widens more. – Makoto Jun 22 at 4:43
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    You are labouring under the misapprehension that SE values your contributions. All of their high falutin words about community and quality are empty. All they care about is eyes on ads. – user353608 Jun 22 at 7:02
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    I've been reading and re-reading this for the past two days, composing replies in my head and discarding them... But the truth is, it's not my place to answer this sort of thing anymore, and I can't really think of anything to say that'd carry any weight anyway. Mostly, I just want to thank you for all the time you've given over the years, for all the thought and energy you've put into this; it's folks like you who've made this place good, and whether you stay or go or something in between... It's been a pleasure; thank you. – Shog9 Jun 22 at 21:48
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    The beatings will continue until morale improves. – user4639281 Jun 23 at 1:00
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    @EJoshuaS: Precisely. They're the only ones who could provide relief at this point. I'd ask why you would want to close this as a dupe at all, frankly, when several diamond mods and quite a few other people have simply walked by. – Makoto Jun 24 at 4:02
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    If the solution to "beginners are not welcome" ends up being "experts are not welcome" then it is game over. I resisted it for years, too, but a separate, beginner focused stack overflow (with beginner oriented rules, and special beginner tooling) feels inevitable to me at this point if the site wants to survive. – Jeff Atwood Jun 26 at 8:34

19 Answers 19


I totally agree with everything you've said.

I joined Stack Overflow about eight months ago, and I admittedly struggled to first participate. I posted multiple questions that were not well received in the slightest. What I initially experienced was a bunch of the diamond moderators, in my eyes, yelling at me about the quality of my posts, and directing me to MCVE.

I never really stopped to consider why they were so angry.

I think your post perfectly outlines the question situation we're in. I browse the new feed a lot and I'm afraid to say that about 1/5 or 1/4 questions that pop up are duplicates, or questions that are just crap.

The community team, as happy-go-lucky as they may play, really don't care about the community, and after reading your post, I'm starting to understand the scope of what you said. It makes the diamond moderators unhappy, which makes the high-rep users unhappy, which in turn makes the low-rep users unhappy.

And another point I'd like to hit on is reputation. Now, I'm no ten-year club person or anything, and I currently have about 900 reputation. I'm also not an expert in my field. In fact, I'm really just a novice. But I have contributed to Stack Overflow in ways other than answering questions. I edit posts, work through Triage, and comment on questions kindly informing users if they are not following guidelines.

I don't think users like me, who want to contribute but can't, are getting enough respect on this site. I'd like to do things like approve suggested edits, be open to the other review queues, and be able to help contribute to the community more. But at this rate, that's not going to happen any time soon. It's taken me almost a year to build up the reputation I currently have because of my limitations in technical knowledge. And frankly, I've worked my butt off for all of it.

And that's the part that makes me unhappy. It's difficult for me to see these "updates" come out, with no consideration for what the community wants. Does it look like I care about an update to the tag synonyms page? I don't think anybody goes on it enough for there to be a majority of people saying that is important.

But of course my opinion doesn't matter, because I have less than 1k reputation.

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    Reading through the other posts, it appears that your last line is correct. Except it isn't just you - it's everyone. SE doesn't seem to listen to our opinions, at least on feature requests. I completely agree with you though. The situation has gotten worse, and new members are probably facing consequences of that, even though it's not their fault. I had a somewhat rough start here 3 years ago too btw - you're most certainly not alone with that. – Zoe Jun 22 at 16:41
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    If anything, your opinion might matter more, because it proves it's not only those grumpy high-rep expert users that joined from the start and are reminiscing on the golden days when the first ever nullpointer exception question got asked. It's also new users, that are just getting started contributing, and still feel this way. Thanks for sharing. – Erik A Jun 22 at 16:54
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    I have occasionally used a sock puppet to get a feel for the new user experience, so I think your opinion is quite valuable. The tag synonyms page facelift is, of course, a minor change, but I'm honestly glad it got done because it is has been a barrier to curation and the only way things are going to get better is to knock down all the little walls that cause frustration. The new user experience needs an overhaul so that people can learn the system without unnecessary frustration. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 22:30
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    @JonEricson Interesting. Does it feel a lot different than being a big name around here? I'd bet it does. – connectyourcharger Jun 22 at 22:32
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    @connectyourcharger: Not as much as you might think. In my experience Stack Overflow users really do focus on the content of posts rather than the author. If reputation buys a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, it's only a little bit. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 23:03
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    It's both good that a new-ish user is experiencing the same pain that us old farts are... and terribly, terribly sad. – Ian Kemp Jun 23 at 14:32
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    Interesting. So far what I feel is that, with just a little subject-matter knowledge and a lot of time, it is relatively easy to build up reputation just by answering questions (admittedly, I'm not above answering LQ questions as long as there is a well-defined answer). But working through Triage, with my level of technical knowledge? No thanks. Too many posts out of my expertise to skip. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 3:21
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    Thank you, I'm in the same situation. Few questions and answers, hundreds of edits and flags, some Meta questions... But for 1k rep it is even discouraged for all kinds of edits (which I understand). I also don't see myself at 3k rep to access more queues in near (or later) future. – franiis Jun 24 at 12:32
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    Same situation as well. I find it odd that you get moderation privileges by answering questions and not by moderating the site. – KevinG Jun 24 at 18:18
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    To OP (CC @JonEricson) A large portion of this (tooling) is solved through an, admittedly, major reworking of the system. Give users who spend time moderating the tools to moderate and not to those who know how to earn some quick reputation. I've said in chat a few times (usually SFF because that's where I mainly sit in the network) but being an expert in a tag doesn't mean you know how to moderate the site. I can be a >20k gold badge user but never having closed a post, why should I be given unilateral decisions for dupe closures? – TheLethalCoder Jun 28 at 10:46
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    @JonEricson To look at it differently being a tag expert doesn't make you a moderation expert. Give the users who are moderation experts the tools faster than those who don't get them. Largely remove the rep based moderation privileges and move to a system where good moderation gives more users the ability to moderate better. For example, 100 SEs all approved, you can now edit regardless of rep? Successfully flagged 200 questions for closure, you get close vote privileges. etc. – TheLethalCoder Jun 28 at 10:49
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    @JonEricson And this system doesn't have to be a you earn it you keep it, if say the user starts dropping in quality (compared to actions of others) start taking close votes away from them again. – TheLethalCoder Jun 28 at 10:50
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    @JonEricson Sorry for the spam, it's something I've had in my head for a long time and something I doubt would ever get implemented at this point but if you do read these messages it might be worth a think about. – TheLethalCoder Jun 28 at 10:51
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    @TheLethalCoder I totally agree with your viewpoints and it's a feature that must be put at the top of the priority list. – connectyourcharger Jun 28 at 21:16
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    @TheLethalCoder damn right - I'd contribute more to moderation, but seeing as I have less than 1k rep, I can't do much. But the steps need to stay in place to some extent. Step the users up in queue and mod tool access as they get get more good flags. Just make enough work that it'd take more than a day to get full priveleges. – Legorooj Nov 27 at 8:30

This is my second attempt at a reply. The first one was becoming very soapbox-y. I hope this one is more on point and better gets my point across.

I completely agree with the need for better moderation tools. Moderation tooling for all users. That means from the point a user is allowed to flag a post and up. BUT, I think the focus should be on moderator tooling for the higher rep users. We need tools that help the users that spend many hours a week trying to close questions, edit questions into better shape and wade through the review queues. We need tools to for those power users.

We need tools that can quick handle the "bad stuff". Personally, I'd prefer automated methods to deal with some of that. Almost three years ago there was a planning post for the "Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project". This generated a lot of answers. Go read through those suggestions. Almost all of them are still needed.

There was a project undertaken with the University Of Melbourne to help identify duplicate questions. The paper was eventually published, but I only found it because someone answered a question I asked about it with a link to a tweet by a Stack Exchange Employee that linked to it. Now that I look though, I'm confused by the publishing timeline...the paper has a copyright date of 2015, but the original announcement was in 2016. In any case, what happened to this? Why isn't some of this work the focus of the monthly data science posts? Or, better, why isn't some of this integrated into the software that runs the site so that we can properly link users asking questions to duplicates before they are posted?

I was really excited about this project. I'd love to be able to have far less duplicate posts because the system could handle those automatically.


I agree with this too, but I think it needs to be expanded. We all need to communicate better. The community has been asking, begging, and demanding new tools for a long time. When that hasn't appeared, we have gotten hostile. (We've gotten hostile about other things too, but that's not for this post.) In turn, that has prompted portions of the Stack Exchange employee base to pull back from meta. That cycle has repeated several times in the past few years.

When both sides aren't willing to talk to one another in a civil way, communication breaks down and trust erodes. I think Stack Exchange has made several communication blunders, especially in the last two years, and that lost trust is just gone. Ten years into this endeavor, the honeymoon is over. The low hanging fruit has been harvested and now both the company and the community need to work out how to move forward in a way that benefits both.

I have been a proponent for better tooling for a long time. I built a tool to flag comments automatically. I've helped with Smoke Detector. I did an analysis of broken links of Stack Overflow (roughly 10%). I've helped, suggested, or been involved with various other automatic tooling around content quality for years. My problem with ALL of those tools is that they have to exist.

These tools have proven their worth. They've been built to identify content that doesn't belong on the site. The users involved in building them have ensured that they are very accurate. Yet...they have to exist because the quality filter is applied by these automatic systems after the content is posted to the site. Not before.

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    SE employees hasn't stopped reading or interacting with meta because people are uncivil, they're said to have done so because SO is "negative". So apparently putting forth criticism in a civil manner is unacceptable to them. They appear to have a problem with what is being said, not how it's being said. – Servy Jun 21 at 18:29
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    We need tools that help the users that spend many hours a week trying to close questions, edit questions into better shape and wade through the review queues. We need tools to for those power users you are five years too late!. I requested for my account to be removed so I could NEVER be tempted into wasting the amount time on the site like I used to regardless what happened. Now I just waste time on the site waiting in line just because it is a car crash in extremely slow motion and there is a certain amount of schadenfreude in my Cassandra predictions coming true. – user10677470 Jun 21 at 18:42
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    @DavyM Thanks Davy, that was precisely the comment I was referencing, for the record. – Servy Jun 21 at 19:02
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    So, it is indeed a Vicious cycle. But if Meta isn't being heard because the employees backed off .... How can Meta be the fix here? We're talking to a black hole. No matter how civil we could potentially prove to be to the black hole..... When will the black hole answer? Never. There is a need for more communication. But one side of the conversation has entirely left the building... How can the side that stayed be expected to do anything? :/ – Patrice Jun 21 at 19:22
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    @Patrice: I honestly don't know. It seems to me that folks aren't picking the most important battles to fight. I've often encouraged employees to post on meta and been embarrassed at the sorts of responses they've received. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 1:06
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    To add on to what @Servy said, I have commented on an answer from Tim Post before and promptly had the comment removed. I could not get an explanation as to why it was removed; it was absolutely civil, just disagreeing with his points. It's straight up censorship. – jhpratt GOFUNDME RELICENSING Jun 22 at 4:55
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    @Jon the responses are potentially born of resentment towards being ignored for so long. It sucks, but it is what it is... As for the emoji question... I mean what would you rather, that people don't post about something they don't like? To me it's not an example of anything except that someone cares about emojis enough to post it. I read the post in a few minutes, gave it my support. It was quick. Anyway, my point is just that if we wanna restart this conversation, it may require, at first, for SE to rejoin the convo. I agree the community has to go softer too, but it starts with SE :/ – Patrice Jun 22 at 19:58
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    @JonEricson seriously? A discussion asking for a more considered use of something that has no place in this community at all qualifies as an unimportant battle? I think it is a very important discussion to have. But hey, you don't think so, so everyone else must be wrong. Your users are talking to you, and you're ignoring them. – user4639281 Jun 22 at 21:18
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    @Patrice: I know there's a lot of resentment toward the company. That's understandable. But it wasn't Julia who made the decisions that got us here. (Not too many of those folks are left, to be honest.) So that resentment is misplaced. It makes me physically ill to think of the trust this company has tossed away and I want to build it back up. I think getting more employees to step up and interact with users will help. And we've been doing a lot of 1-on-1 interviews lately. It would be nice if we could use meta more, but that's not looking nearly so hopeful. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 21:30
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    @TinyGiant: I suppose I should have linked to the comments complaining about the emojis instead. I wouldn't mind having that discussion on meta, but I wish it didn't involve calling out people who I'd like to see interact with you all more. Also, I wish people would stop questioning credentials of employees. Stuff like that adds up quick. Much better are answers like Bhargav Rao's which are respectful, engage directly with the question (rather than peripheral issues) and focus on actionable solutions. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 21:37
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    @JonEricson I think you realize that, and I say that with the utmost respect, this entire mess is of your own making (you as in the company) in entirety, and any attempt to mend or fix it has to come from the company. No amount of individual users you convince to give y'all another shot or assume good faith for now will actually make a dent, it's like the water analogy. The dam has broken and short of mass construction of a new one and lots of drainage work, pleading to the water to please recede won't do anything. And I know it feels unfair and bad that – Magisch Jun 24 at 6:51
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    @JonEricson It's been a while since I've gotten on and actually made my presence known around here. (Hello all, I'm still alive.) But I have to say that, as optimistic as I have always been in the face of things going downhill around here... I have to agree trust with the company is pretty well non-existent at this point. The only person at the company that I still fully trust and respect 100%, because they get out there and interact and I feel are honest about the situation, is you. The others... I just don't know as well anymore. (cont.) – Kendra Jun 24 at 14:30
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    I wonder if this rising fracture in the community is being treated as the existential challenge to the company that it is. It doesn't seem like any of it will go away or even just stop getting worse by the week without some form of intervention. It's good y'all are conducting interviews, but it feels like the company stance is still decidedly anti established user base and more in favor of non users and casual users. As long as this remains, I don't think it'll stop getting worse. – Magisch Jun 25 at 10:45
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    From your answer and the state of Reddit, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other places that have had quality content issues and issues with trolling and other anti-social behaviour, it definitely seems like there is a huge market need for better community moderation tools. And none of these platforms, including StackOverflow, want to devote enough engineering resources to better serve moderator and community needs. – Rudolf Olah Jun 25 at 15:07

There's a project a-brewing that may support your desires: https://codidact.org/ Looks like it's barely two weeks old as I write this, but worth checking out, I think. Gilles, who I respect quite a bit, appears to be involved.



I appreciate you writing this up. It's not an exact match for my thoughts, but it's a well-put summary.

I'm forced to agree with Pekka. I haven't logged in for about three months now. And I, well, I actually haven't missed it. I'm genuinely surprised, but I haven't, at all. Time spent here had been more disappointment and frustration for me than fun or even interest for a while now. And it's been nice not having that. I guess it comes down to giving up hope, or to put it more charitably, acceptance of reality. As for Bhargav Rao, for me my mod nomination was a last attempt to feel like there was something useful I could do, and that didn't pan out. I can't justify trying to use this pair of tweezers they gave me to manage a sandpile anymore.

Disappointing as it is, I can only recommend the same course to you.

I've popped in once in a while during a long compile to see if anything noteworthy has happened. Everything seems to be on the same basic course. Funny that I happened to come by about five minutes after you posted this. I thought for a bit about replying, then shrugged and went back to coding. But I've been composing this in my head since, so I may as well write it down, I guess.

I said this before,* but I've noticed even more recently, since I haven't been logged in to be able to edit or vote: newer answers on Stack Overflow for my tech (iOS stuff) are largely garbage. And without enough moderation to keep up. There's still long tail tool posts "How do I XYZ with git/bash/grep/etc." that are hanging around. But I'm not sure how often I come to Main even to get answers anymore.

I wish I could still be proud of contributing here, but yup, it's not turning out the way I thought and I don't see anything I can do to affect that anymore. Dunno if I'll come back eventually. (I found another place where I can sometimes help with interesting questions. It's not quite the same, but it scratches the itch a bit.)

So...all the fish, and all that. U+1F937 U+1F6AA U+1F6B6 U+1F44B

*"the core of my concern with quality isn't even about me as a power user answerer; it's about me as an anonymous nobody looking for answers to my own problems"

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    I feel like what I'm trying to say in this post isn't what people are hearing. (To be clear, this is my fault for poor communication.) I'm sorry for indirectly insulting you. I don't want anyone to leave, but if it doesn't feel worth your time to stay, I understand (I once left the site because of quality concerns and it was positive for my psyche.) Thank you in any case for your hard work and dedication to this community over the years. – Jon Ericson Jun 22 at 22:47
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    You should be proud of your contributions; you’re definitely someone that has always brought positivity to the table. Regarding the nomination/election, I would say not to let it wear heavy upon you. The people here who you’ve interacted with throughout the years definitely appreciate you no doubt. Sadly, everything is a popularity contest nowadays and more often than not the real heroes aren’t recognized as such. – l'L'l Jun 23 at 1:25
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    a long compile >> you should be fencing on roller chairs, not lurking on forums! – TT. Jun 24 at 17:11
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    Thanks for that, @JonEricson; I guess...I don't understand what it is you're trying to get across in the post, then. I'll remove that parenthetical remark; it's probably too sour to be of any use anyways. – jscs Jun 24 at 21:24
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    @l'L'l I would be a liar if I said I wasn't disappointed when the election results came out. I was, most definitely. But that doesn't mean I hold any ill will towards the process, or the people who were elected. But thanks for your kind words. – jscs Jun 24 at 21:25
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    Good news! Now, you can't even find the sandpile anymore unless you are logged in. I guess that's one way to fix the quality problems. It was fun while it lasted. – Cody Gray Jun 27 at 6:11
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    I respect you standing for election (and I voted for you), but at the same time, I also feel like you dodged a bullet by not getting elected. – Jeffrey Bosboom Jun 28 at 0:05
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    You can't still say that @Jeff, the election is still not quite old, and the good ol Josh can still be called upon as a moderator if someone resigns... – Bhargav Rao Jul 2 at 4:31
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    Not a chance in hell I would take the job after what's been going on the last few weeks. What in the name of Edsger W. Dijkstra is happening to this place? – jscs Aug 6 at 0:38

I can say this rings depressingly true.

You'll notice, I don't have many good answers and not much reputation here. I started on this site in 2015, and even then, it was apparent that the amount of time necessary to find a good question to answer and then not have that answered by 5+ people and done with by the time I compose anything is just not worth the effort. It's become worse in recent times.

Every so often I get a pang of motivation and try to look for something to answer. What I find is either

  1. not answerable, but unclosed and any close vote I cast will age away. So much like pissing into the wind.
  2. answerable, but trivial and likely a duplicate. I can answer those, but then I inextricably feel like I'm making the site worse by dispersing information. If I search for the duplicate and VTC as it, that too will age away or I'll draw ire from the asker, and maybe get a link to the blog post from a year ago about how I'm keeping everyone down. Not really a motivating prospect.
  3. It's actually something that interests me, but has been already answered to satisfaction and adding another take on a solved problem would be high detail bikeshedding. I find that there are better uses of my time.

As for curation, I have a couple thousand reviews. Sometimes, I'll review some close votes before realizing that most of those questions will never get closed despite being unanswerable or off topic and I'm pretty much just throwing my time and mental energy into a large black hole.

In the meantime, answering on meta felt like I was helping some people understand the network better. But 200 variations of "this is the policy and you can find it here" or "this is how it should be handled" or "here's why that's a bad idea" have worn me out on the concept and I hardly ever do it anymore.

Seeing all that and feeling like my contributions had no appreciable impact, I turned to other forms of helping out. I had a thing with flagging serial voting, but that too is like fighting windmills and even flagging a hundred cases a week feels like I'm not doing anything but incrementing my helpful flags counter. I can't even tell if 2000 flagged cases of serial voting have made any sort of difference at large, and lord knows it has cost me time and nerves immemorial.

So in broad, I agree with most of your points here. Even as a non expert (I'm still very much a junior developer by all standards) it doesn't feel like I have a useful angle to contribute that is appreciated and makes a difference.

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    There's a slight variation to your category 2: trivially answerable, but can't be closed as a dupe because it asks how to combine multiple trivial tasks. E.g., this one which asks how to parse a timestamp and then set its time to noon. I find these even more frustrating because it seems like we're not allowed to close questions that combine anything that hasn't been combined in another question before. – jpmc26 Jun 25 at 2:39
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    @jpmc26 that is because every question is sacred now I guess you did not get that memo. – user10677470 Jun 27 at 3:08
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    @JarrodRoberson I got the memo and burned it. =) – jpmc26 Jun 27 at 3:09

In all honesty my biggest complaint for SO is the fact that we are still trying to change Stack Overflow to be more welcoming.

I wasn't there back in 2009, so people may have been rude back then, but when I asked my question in 2017-2018, people left helpful and nice comments to me. However, this came with downvotes and close votes; naturally, I was angry at Stack Overflow, and I left it. However, a year or two after, I returned and looked at my old questions after viewing Meta and the home page for a long time. It was then I realized that Stack Overflow was helpful; my question was crap and I couldn't accept it.

So, the next time we see a help vampire who wants us to do their homework that could be Googled in 30 seconds or any other question that would be unfit for SO, just downvote, close, and leave a comment which welcomes them to SO and explains how to improve their question.

  • 4
    I would say most of the LQ questions aren't "something that could be Googled in 30 seconds". They are mostly trivial (typo in code, assigning to list instead of appending, etc.), too broad, or "vague dupes" (for which it might be clear to you that this question can be solved by the existing solution, but not to the asker). Of course those all satisfy the close criteria, but if you downvote and close them, it will most likely leave the asker helpless (instead of finding the answer on Google anyway, like you implied). – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 18:33
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    Or unclear. This deserves a special mention because an unclear question has the potential to be a good question if enough details are extracted through commenting. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 18:36
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    @ImperishableNight There are plenty of both. I see lots of questions answered by literally copy-pasting the title of the question into google. I come across several most days in just the questions I'm looking through. I probably see more of those than typos where there's no lack of understanding, just writing something different than they intended to. But by far the largest portion of bad questions are those simply lacking adequate information to describe the problem and what they're trying to do. – Servy Jun 24 at 19:40
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    I just realized that you said "downvote, close, and leave a comment which welcomes them to SO and explains how to improve their question." But, I suspect you are sending contradicting messages to the new user that way. By downvoting and closing, you are saying that their question is unlikely to be improved. Maybe that's not what it means on SO, but that's what the new users will think it means. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 20:51
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    @ImperishableNight Closing is important to both prevent low quality answers until a question is answerable, give the author information on both why their question is problematic and for them to understand the importance of fixing it. The votes are a very useful signal to both the author and other readers that the question has problems and needs to be fixed. – Servy Jun 24 at 21:48
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    @ImperishableNight The author has lots of incentives to fix their question. 1) Presumably they want an actual answer to the question. Fixing it's problems helps them get an answer, and is more important than votes, presumably. 2) Fixing the question will result in future readers not downvoting, and, if done well, upvoting. 3) Some downvoters may reverse their vote, even if it's not a guarentee. And then only incentives to not fix the post are 1) It's work 2) For a bad enough question, it may not be possible. Neither of those are affected by voting mechanics. – Servy Jun 24 at 22:15
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    @Servy The problem is that, since it has a downvote, it is less likely to get an answer anyway. So from my viewpoint, downvoting reduces the incentive for the author to fix the question. And like you said, (1) is more important an incentive than (2) and (3). – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 22:21
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    @ImperishableNight "but I expect most askers to either make an honest effort to fix it, or leave it alone" You'll find yourself sorely mistaken then. As someone who spends a lot of time looking through recently edited content trying to see if the question is salvageable, this is by far the minority of edits on bad questions. A minority even improve the question at all, let alone improving it enough that it has become a good question. – Servy Jun 25 at 0:52
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    @ImperishableNight Not fixing the post doesn't remove the downvotes, and thus doesn't incentivise not fixing a question that's problematic. – Servy Jun 25 at 0:54
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    @MilkyWay90 Fixing the post might remove some downvotes, and it's very likely to attract upvotes and to not attract more downvotes. Not fixing the post is much less likely to result in downvotes being removed, and increases the odds of more downvotes and fewer upvotes. So what's the incentive to not fix the post instead of fixing it? Just because fixing the post doesn't instantly make everything perfect immediately doesn't mean it's not incentivised. – Servy Jun 25 at 2:22
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    @Servy My point was that downvoting subtracts from the largest incentive to fix the post, which as you mentioned, is to get an answer. The incentive not to fix a post is also as you mentioned --- it's work. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 8:09
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    @ImperishableNight But it doesn't subtract from it. If someone has posted a question an wants an answer, getting feedback that the question is problematic and needs to be fixed to be answered heavily incentivises fixing it if they want an answer. People aren't more likely to fix a problematic post just because you refuse to inform them that their post is problematic. That just results in them not even realizing there's a problem to fix, and having no incentive to fix it even if they considered the possibility that they could. – Servy Jun 25 at 12:21
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    @Servy People are more likely to fix a problematic post because you refuse to inform them that their post is crap and doesn't have a chance. I don't think new users are informed that a downvote isn't that big of a deal. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 16:54
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    @ImperishableNight Why do you think refraining from downvoting a post is going to incentivise the author to fix it? You've stated that you somehow think people are less likely to fix a post that's downvoted, despite there being numerous incentives to fix a post in response to downvotes and the only incentive not to is that it takes work (which is no less true if you refrain from downvoting). – Servy Jun 25 at 16:54
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    @ImperishableNight You think people are more likely to fix a post when they're not actually told that it's bad? Why do you think people are more likely to fix a post that they don't think is problematic than one that they think is problematic? Sure, it may feel good to be told that you asked a good question when you didn't, and it sucks to be told that you didn't ask a good question, but people don't fix things they think are good. – Servy Jun 25 at 16:56

I started writing this as a comment and it soon became clear there were too many words.

Don't read this unless you want to see your own frustration poured out uncensored.

This is full of exclamation marks and ranty. I'm sorry. I'm tired of trying to craft a decent response or question on here about this, as nothing changes. Usually I'd include a bunch of relevant posts to support what I'm saying. I can't be bothered.

Fed up

I hear ya. I'm so over begging and my ability to remain civil over this issue (like many others) is impaired. It would take so little to offer significant relief for users.

Alter the metrics on closing and deleting!

I haven't seen the code base, but changing the number 5 to 3 somewhere and the number 3 to 2 somewhere surely would take a day tops to make sure all the bases were covered and it didn't break the build?

I'm Less Welcoming

I'm becoming less welcoming, less patient with people and feel like snapping at people, because I'm tired, I'm burnt out. I do have enormous pressure in my personal life, but this site was a balm for life's rough edges, a way to escape and become involved in something enjoyable - programming. It just feels like a constant 5h!t fight now.

As mentioned by one of the mods in the comments, I actually got involved in moderating the site, because I got tired of sitting on the new questions page and 9/10 (a guess) of the questions were unanswerable. Often this is due to the programmers complete lack of knowledge of programming, so they do not even recognise the question doesn't have enough information to be answered (if it's debugging) or they want an intravenous transfer of knowledge in how to program X and it's simply not possible. It's exhausting!

We cannot help complete beginners!

Unless the asker knows enough about programming to know what is needed for other programmers to help them, when posting a debugging question, we cannot help them. I started off a complete beginner. I didn't know what a parameter was. I didn't know how to ask questions, as I had no idea what I needed, let alone how to translate that to total strangers on the internet. You know what happened? My questions were downvoted and closed! I was rate limited. Did that stop me from loving the site and wanting to become a good programmer? NO! I'm a moderator! These experiences taught me what is not just expected, but essential to post a decent question.

Somewhere along the line Stack Overflow changed from being a site for professionals and enthusiast programmers to include beginners! It's killing the site! Create some goto (yes this is desperate enough for a goto statement!) site to redirect beginners if you want to keep their patronage, or just accept that we need to lose them, as it's causing a frightening attrition in the people who actually made the site the valuable resource it is (buried in the mud as it may be)!

We're exhausted! Listen!

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    "We cannot help complete beginners!" I agree with the sentiment you're going for with this line, but it's not quite accurate. We help beginners all the time by our existing content. I can't tell you how many times I've had to make a change to some code at work in a language I'm not familiar with, and the beginner question "how do I concatenate strings in _____" and the like, when punched into Google, pulls up SO resources that help even the most basic beginner. What we can't do though is tutor every programmer personally when they're beginning, they need to find the existing helpful content. – Davy M went to fund Monica Jun 29 at 1:57
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    @DavyM ofc and I agree. By reading. I'm referring to active questioners. Most, if not all, the canonical beginners questions are laid down. It's those debugging ones or hopelessly broad or unclear due to unrealistic expectations – Yvette Colomb Jun 29 at 2:01
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    It isn't beginners that we can't help. Stack Overflow helped me a lot as a beginner. When I joined, I wasn't a programmer; I learned it here! I know plenty of other beginners that it has helped. I have several interns this summer who are very early in their careers as CS majors, and the site has helped them tremendously. Being a beginner is as much a red herring as being a professional. Who we cannot help are people who cannot help themselves. It may seem like nitpicking, but it's not. This is a very important distinction. – Cody Gray Jun 29 at 2:32
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    Needs more exclamation marks! But I agree with Cody Gray, I was one of those beginners who started off knowing barely anything. – Passer By Jun 29 at 14:24
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    +1 goto: W3Schools – user10677470 Jul 1 at 2:05
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    @CodyGray is 100% correct, it has nothing to do with beginner vs professional, it has everything to do with not being a lazy mooch and putting some effort into solving your problem before coming and posting a NPE stacktrace. I swear 99.9999999999% of every question on the site could be solved in less time than it takes to post with a single pass through a step debugger! There are plenty of professionals that post crap here and go get coffee and wait for their copy-pasta answer because that is easier than being competent. – user10677470 Jul 1 at 2:07
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    @Davy M: Yes, indeed. I recently had that experience with PHP. All the beginner gotchas for PHP are on Stack Overflow (though they can take some time to find). In the time of Usenet they would have been in a FAQ (for comp.lang.php?). – Peter Mortensen Jul 11 at 20:02
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    "These experiences taught me what is not just expected, but essential to post a decent question." (+1) – SecretAgentMan Jul 17 at 21:43

TL, DR: it's not only additional tools for the mods, it's entropy in a wicked model.

First, I'd like to say that I can understand the frustration felt with the way the whole site is being [whether intentionally or in a laissez-faire laissez-passer's style] run. And I feel sorry to read in meta about the disengagement of the high-reps, high-commitment, high-quality users. The 1s turning into 4s (from Mysticial's great answer to Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?).

I'd love to see the tools you're asking for, but honestly I don't know if they will work entirely on their own. I sometimes think the Q-A model is wicked, and that it'll require a disproportionate amount of effort to go around that wickedness.

Why is it wicked? Because it is made for the 2s and 3s (the help vampires and the reputation whores), but it's built upon the shoulders of the 1s (the caretakers). No wonder 1s are turning into 4s, when there are hordes of OPs asking bad questions that are quickly answered by the hordes of rep harvesters. The problem, I think, is exacerbated by three facts:

  • Question visibility in search engines. Newest questions seem to get a better positioning in search results. This encourages upvoting of duplicates.

  • Reputation awarding rules. If reputation is undistinctively awarded, it will be undistinctively sought (I, in the process of transitioning from a repwhore to a caretaker, can attest [2.5k at the time of writing]). You, high rep people, were likely rep harvesters at one point (with all due respect to those who weren't), so please bear with me.

  • The OP is often ignorant about his own ignorance. You don't know what you don't know, we say in safety awareness. Sometimes the OP is so lost and confused about the question he's asking, that a poor, convoluted question is the best he can come with.

Out of these 3 things, the third is impossible to control, so we need to control the first two if we want to fight entropy. Specially the second one.

So, along with the better tools that @Makoto wants, I think we need to try to straighten the model, lest it naturally wins over us and our intentions.

In practical terms:

  • find a way to signal the best answers to search engines, including the internal one, that doesn't exclusively depend on removing the duplicate / lower quality questions.

  • devise a merging strategy and actively merge questions. I wonder if that wouldn't serve also as a re-engagement strategy for the 4s out there.

  • restructure the rep awarding model to fight against rep harvesting (there are enough ideas about this in meta to write a book).

  • Help repwhores transition into caretakers. Award reputation for helpful flags and even for comments directing the OP to existing answers / obvious glitches, kind advices to rtfm, etc.

Tell me how you measure me, and I tell you how I'll behave. If flagging a duplicate gives me zero points, and quickly answering it gives me at least 15, make no mistake, a lot of people will walk the rewarding path, eroding --unintentionally-- the motivation of those who produce the high quality content we all want to have.

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    +1 for Award reputation for helpful flags and even for comments directing the OP to existing answers / obvious glitches, kind advices to rtfm, etc. – Acinom Etatsnier Jun 24 at 3:12
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    Plus, I feel that if I really put in the effort to flag every duplicate I run into (which can be hard in the case of "vague dupes" --- much easier to just answer them), I would quickly run out of flags. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 4:40
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    Questions can be merged. But only diamond moderators can do it, and it does not happen to many questions. – Raedwald Jun 24 at 6:28
  • "restructure the rep awarding mode to fight against rep harvesting" would be difficult to reconcile with "award reputation for helpful flags and comments". Just based on your own italicized quote... if you start rewarding rep for comments and flags (which, how do we determine 'helpful' comments? A lot of comments that receive upvotes are just complaints or "me too"s) will mean a flood of flags and comments (themselves likely generating even more flags) for mods to deal with. Not that I'm opposed to us electing more mods, of course. – TylerH Jun 24 at 16:16
  • Actually, I have a thought: If what you ask is that 2s should not exist (or should exist in a lower volume), then you may be asking the impossible. See the water analogy. If you ask that 2s should be redirected somewhere else, another site that is either affiliated or unaffiliated with SO, then maybe something could be done. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 17:53
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    Before SO existed, the 2s bugged their classmates, their instructors, their colleagues, etc. But somehow, I don't think turning them back there is a progressive solution. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 17:56
  • @ImperishableNight I agree help vampires are going to be there forever. They are the very reason of a Q/A site, and I also agree that educating them is an endeavor huge enough to be accomplished in a lifetime. That's why I think the whole strategy should hover around repwhores, devising a way for them to become caretakers. Help vampires will exist as uneducated as they may get, for me it's working about a different target group what is finally going to help avoiding the frustration and motivation loss of the SMEs – PavoDive Jun 25 at 0:40
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    But if we accept that help vampires are going to be there no matter what, then why are repwhores a problem? The canonical answer seems to be that "they encourage help vampires", but I think the amount of help vampires is determined primarily by human stupidity. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 1:15
  • I guess your answer is that even if the actual effect is negligible, repwhores still frustrate the caretakers, which might be true: As an analogy, if someone downvotes me, I would be pretty unhappy, even though a single -2 doesn't really make a dent on my rep. But I cannot help but feel that that isn't the real problem to solve. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 1:36
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    Plus, that's not even considering that some people (like me) might genuinely like to help clueless individuals, and thus will continue "repwhoring" even if it earned me zero rep. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 1:45
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    @ImperishableNight The problem with feeding the vampires and not closing duplicates is that the majority of people who interact with SO are people landing here from Google. Having to wade through 150 duplicate questions of questionable quality with varying quality of answers is a poor experience compared to landing on a high quality question with a few high quality answers that let you get on with your work. – Heretic Monkey Jun 25 at 15:16
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    @HereticMonkey Why can't we have both? First answer the question. After the OP confirms that the answer solves their question, close it as a dupe. – Imperishable Night Jun 25 at 17:32
  • @ImperishableNight Because the question is open for the time until the OP confirms and can pick up multiple unneeded and low-quality answers in the meantime? And they can confirm the duplicate is a duplicate after the first vote to close. – Heretic Monkey Jun 25 at 17:46
  • @ImperishableNight When flags are marked as helpful, they give you more flags. Use all your flags. – wizzwizz4 Jun 27 at 19:26
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    @ImperishableNight It really needs to work into the reputation system, though. Have you seen a feature request for this recently? – wizzwizz4 Jun 27 at 20:01

During the last two years I've watched things go downhill fairly rapidly. For me personally it started with the HNQ debacle and the subsequent pandemonium that ensued. The common recurring theme I see is that anytime a post is made calling Stack Overflow out, we get the age old: 'We know we've been bad at communicating and we're working on that[...]' trope and it really isn't helpful. The community doesn't need to be told what we already know, we'd much rather know about what you are doing to gain our trust back. It feels even worse knowing that after so many years of contributing all it took for Stack Overflow to throw folks under the bus was a couple of Tweets and that really makes you feel cheap.

Another major turning point was the constant barrage of the "welcome wagon". How seasoned users were made to feel as though they were the cause of new users feeling "unwelcomed". I've been saying all along that this whole "welcoming" thing is a two way street yet only one side of it was focused on. I won't deny that some users can be heavy handed in their approach but throughout this process the new users weren't berated in the same way the old folks were with regards to the quality of their questions (the lack thereof) or how they shouldn't be upset by down-votes/close-votes and that they should expect nothing different if all they do is code dump or any of the other million things that people viewing the queues day by day see and to cleanup. Things are released without the consultation of the community and for some reason people are actually surprised when there is backlash, really?

Finally, I feel as though people are just fed up - I know I am. More and more frequently I see that when issues are raised, they are somehow tied back to sexism/racism/<some-other-ism> and that just gets tiring. Case in point, Jon's comment seems to imply that the question regarding the emojis were raised because it was Julia that posted them (maybe I've misunderstood it).

Why is it that the worst motives are assumed about the users?

Why can't it be that a user is genuinely interested in knowing what the policy is or is trying to get a policy set?

And for that matter, why can't a user discuss a post of an employee?

Are we expected to tiptoe around people?

Maybe they're focusing on these newer (possibly trivial in your eyes) issues because the older issues have been gathering dust and even when someone tries to resurrect an old suggestion it gets slapped with , duped with 5+ year old posts, or is put in the pile of old suggestions to gather dust.

We have always scrutinised content, irrespective of who posted it.

It seems as though there is a serious disconnect between (some) employees and their understanding of meta.

  • 5
    I think you're misunderstanding Jon's comment, he's just saying that there are a lot of things that are more important than a couple of emojis in an otherwise good and useful post. – user247702 Jun 24 at 18:27
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    There is a disconnect between all parties involved. Don't make it so it looks like only staff is to blame. – rene Jun 24 at 19:06
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    @rene can you explain the disconnect with users and meta, please? – Script47 Jun 24 at 19:28

My biggest complaint about Stack Overflow is that it rewards speed more than it rewards effort. The flow of the site pushes virtually all question answering and answer upvoting activity to the questions posted in the most recent few minutes.

Good answers to complex questions may take time to write. There is little incentive to write such answers, since virtually no-one will see or reward the answer with votes.

Answers bashed out in the first few minutes to trivial language errors are easy to write and receive easy votes.

So we're not incentivizing experts to be interested in the site, either to write good answers or submit good questions. Instead, the incentives are biased towards the Q&As that are fast, easy, and cheap.

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    This is easy to agree with but I don't think it contributes to the topic at hand. – Oleh Prypin Jun 22 at 17:05
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    My highest voted answers have received the majority of their votes long after the answer was posted. – user4639281 Jun 22 at 18:20
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    I see what Boann means. when a python question about classic error on "or" or "and" or conversion to float or whatever isn't closed fast enough, there are answers and there are upvotes. Annoying. – Jean-François Fabre Jun 22 at 19:53
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    @TinyGiant Of your answers with more than 11 upvotes, all but one were posted on the same day as the question was asked, and most of them within a few minutes of the question being asked. And the one answer you posted long after the question was asked has two answers with a higher score and one answer with more than 200 more votes than yours. So whole none of those things are bad, they all suggest answering the question quickly is important, because you've only gotten a high score answering a question not quickly once, even though many of the actual votes came later. – Servy Jun 23 at 3:18
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    I will say that this is one of my biggest frustrations with using the site, but it's one of the areas where I blame the company very little. The problem is that people upvote these answers. The platform provides tools to deal with these questions, but the community either doesn't use them, doesn't use them often enough, or doesn't use them quickly enough. While the platform can always improve, this is largely a cultural problem. – Servy Jun 23 at 3:20
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    @Servy I think that may be more indicative that the majority of my answers posted were to new questions than it being indicative that answering quickly is important, though that may very well be the case. I agree with your overall point though. I think that morale is low because real time signal to noise ratio is so low. That causes curation to suffer which lowers the effective signal to noise ratio. Those who do hang on can't handle the strain so they ask for better tools, but the problem isn't so much the tools as it is the real time signal to noise ratio that tools won't do anything to fix. – user4639281 Jun 23 at 3:46
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    It like that answer combined with this high-quality answer posted here: How do I fix "call to super must be first statement in constructor"?. Certainly no low-hanging fruit picked there. – Tom Jun 23 at 13:51
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    @Tom Exactly. I'm a product of the environment too. – Boann Jun 23 at 14:15
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    I've said it before, and I'll say it again, to all who'll listen: if you don't want to sit on the sewage pipe that is the front page, then don't, and become a necromancer instead. Bookmark high-viewed questions you stumble across with inadequate answers, come back later, do the hours of work needed to create a solid answer, and post it. That is the origin story of most of my answers, and I am a happy man. Driving yourself to depression over front-page garbage that'll never show up on Google anyway is a choice you don't have to make. – Mark Amery Jun 24 at 16:12
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    @MarkAmery I guess that is indeed good advice, although maybe not for everyone (not everyone accesses SO enough to come across those problems, has the familiarity with the topic area to identify that the existing answers are inadequate, and the kind of time to create a solid answer). – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 17:19
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    @MarkAmery If only it were SO instead of individuals like you who are promoting this approach, though. The fundamental problem I see is that especially new users are encouraged to work on the front page, and once they are there, it can be hard to transition. – Imperishable Night Jun 24 at 17:32

Let's add another perspective on the subject.

A typical curator (a fair number of which are Meta regulars, I assume) takes their time and patience to run against the tide. For most peers of the site, the acts of downvoting and voting to close are as alien as volunteering to clean up public streets. It's already been said that the tools we have are inefficient for curating the site. On top of that, we have to put up with unreasonable users who lash out at those who downvote and vote to close their questions. While the linked answer provides anecdotal evidence, one can gather several samples of these attacks towards curators just by traversing the list of comments captured by the Heat Detector and see that they greatly surpass the number of abusive comments from curators or other trusted users.

It comes to no surprise when I say that I've had my share: been called an idiot, a troll, having a very small brain, and receiving emails suggesting that I do not do real programming (out of the fact that I'm a PhD student). Just recently have I had the heaviest surge of serial downvoting, which I really don't get that often. It's not like that affects my reputation or anything, but knowing that someone out there despises me enough to make such a commitment of hurting the score of my hard worked content is a bit hard to take lightly. People who know me also know that I stand as a protector of the downvote, but not as a means of fraud. Misusing the downvote by targeting users like this only gives people a bigger reason to dislike these votes.

Some say that being a target of abuse while curating is "part of the job", and that we should just suck it up. Granted, there's the usual argument that the chances are higher for a new user to misbehave because they don't know better, but we do (know better). But how exactly is this fair? Is it not enough to know that we are far from having enough curators to achieve full content moderation, do we also have to hear nasty stuff from other people both in-site and (especially) off-site?

So, to sum up, we get this:

  • Newcomers, askers and caretakers do not appreciate our work (putting it lightly), to the point of cursing curators and giving downvotes a bad name.
  • SO as a company became increasingly indifferent to our proposals, because that would conflict with their agenda of being more "welcoming" to the former, larger groups. Size matters, after all.

The programming Q&A site that I would like to support would set the right expectations to users regarding how they should use the service and interact with their peers. So far, the welcoming movement, despite the name, has only slightly contributed to the very opposite of alienating curators, by giving fake shields to the greatest source of abusive conduct.

I wouldn't mind staying here to see how things go (I have my own reasons after all), but if the constant abuse towards curators (insults and exhibitions of arrogance, entitlement, etcetera) get any worse, I'll just stop curating.



Well, if we think about it - a good chunk of the SE platform has been static, and somewhat cob-web covered for years. There's a bunch of technical and social debt, and some pretty major back end changes (the move to .NET Core 3.0) going on.

Quite honestly while a lot of this is the company's fault (and I love complaining about how certain specific features ended up being a distraction), and they've made some absolutely whoppingly silly decisions at times, we're not going to be able to change this, or the neglected aspects of the network overnight. It's probably not been a priority.

It's also probably a lot more complicated than it was before. Even a minor change could have rippling effects. Ironically - As much drama can probably come out of a quick, well meaning change than a long term attempt to 'fix' the community.

Also... the synonym dashboard was slightly my fault. It's been an utter pain in my side, and I was complaining about it a lot in places. Even had a member of staff interview a slightly bleary eyed me (sorry Donna!) about various UI choices.

Presumably that's not the only thing that's going to come out of the hackathon (else I would be disappointed).

There's another perspective worth considering BCG growth matrix

Now, I kind of majored in business (and more fun things), and they really dig this (and this is the one chance to use it).

SO (and maybe even SE) is kind of at the cash cow stage. It's a mature product. It's basically got as much of the market as it can get (as far as tech focused Q&A goes). In a sense stuff like Documentation and even Careers (which is probably a Dog, and was unlikely to me to actually get anything better than a question mark) was probably a way to find some new growth market.

That said, software is never really done is it?

Assuming enterprise and teams works, SE has a potential short term star, and a longer term cash cow, so actually developing Q&A (and who knows, maybe enterprise might end up finding features we never thought about but are useful) ought to make sense again.

A lot of energy has been spent on this "Welcoming" initiative, which seems to be driving an even deeper wedge between the community. I don't care if someone calls me unwelcoming anymore, since it is usually a symptom of their question being closed or downvoted, and the knowledge gap which exists for this

I admit, this has never been done quite right IMO. It's always been rather ineffective and never quite seems to have the intended effect. I've never felt though that the top down, declaratory blog post is the best tool for the job. It feels a little preachy and well, many folks don't seem to like it.

Least on my own sites - and on a smaller scale, I've often used meta and chat for getting smaller changes rolling. It may not scale, but folks are probably going to react better to those.

We do however typically have the advantage in a few years of 'our' way of doing things, and considering inevitable attrition, it is good if we can work out how to onboard folks into our way of doing things.


Yeah, you shouldn't. And maybe the zero friction approach hasn't scaled with the site or scope. In theory the Ask Question Wizard should hopefully help with that. I traditionally have and do encourage folks to post comments, but eh, I find I do that less myself. That said - I suspect how we'd do that is the hard part, considering most/many of us got here with less rules and a chance to grow with the site.


Which has actually not been a bad thing as a moderator on a smaller site. There are situations where we need support, but we've managed without too much supervision. That said it is a bit awkward. Sites have always, for most part been able to set their own rules (and I've at least once told a CM they can't ask Hackintosh questions on my site. No ifs, no buts, and certainly no robots). I'd love to see CMs working closer with the sites though, but that would certainly require quite a lot of planning and resources.

I do keep hearing a lot about how meta feels hostile - both from employees and users who aren't meta regulars.

That's a really hard problem. Maybe I like the fire, or I'm really good at socially engineering folks, but I kind of seem to do ok. Many SE employees do get a lot of pretty hostile responses and dealing with that is hard. Even with normal users, I've seen folks afraid to post questions because of downvotes. I've seen folks do seemingly personal attacks. These things don't work that well and there isn't any easy fix. Our culture can be a problem even if it's hard to see, but it isn't as simple as telling people to be nicer.

Feeling like you're not getting heard sucks (we've been there). That said, we can't stand at the banks of the river, glaring angrily at the broken down bridge, and expect to get across. Someone's got to throw a line to the guy on the other side first. If they don't take it, then maybe yell ;).

Admittedly - I suspect I do have a little more of a voice than most regular users with the community team through main meta. I've also picked a lot of things I've disagreed with (occasionally with no idea what to do... like the term help-vampire) and tried to get them changed individually. I've also had a huge amount of luck (and a great support structure within my own sites) in actually getting change on a site level.

Feel free to poke SE on specific issues, but I do feel constant, good-natured nagging will go further than dramatic quits, assuming we want, or believe in change.

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    Where to start...First, I feel like the experience you have on smaller sites, while valuable in some contexts, doesn't really scale or compare to the circumstances Stack Overflow has. Smaller sites are a lot more tight knit and require a lot less in the way of CM intervention, and when it happens it's usually a big deal. Second, this isn't really me complaining about a broken-down bridge. My goal with this is to bring more attention to the core group of users who actually made this a cash cow in the first place. – Makoto Jun 23 at 7:01
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    Third, hearing that "Meta feels hostile" doesn't motivate a solution to that problem, either. I know that it can seem that way and I would hope that my track record here on Meta goes towards somewhat alleviating that particular issue, but you're going to get people who...kind of insist on bikeshedding when the reactor's overdue on maintenance. – Makoto Jun 23 at 7:03
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    Lastly, the lack of focus or direction on a site Stack Overflow's size is actually going to have a long-lasting impact, should the product team decide to build something based on some rather narrow UX feedback. Stack Overflow can make their money how they wish, but building something nonsensical (and again I only hope this won't be the case) isn't going to be sustainable in the long term. – Makoto Jun 23 at 7:04
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    Additionally...this isn't really a dramatic quit. This is me shouting in the room, commanding attention on a topic that a lot of people have simply silently acknowledged. Sure, I'm probably going to be putting a lot of the moderation gubbins on hold for the foreseeable future - if only for my own sanity - but I'm hoping that this will get the attention of some product owner around here so that we can have certain things better prioritized. Look at it this way - this won't be a cash cow for long if it starts to atrophy or give sour milk. – Makoto Jun 23 at 7:06
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    "Many SE employees do get a lot of pretty hostile responses and dealng with that is hard." But why do they get hostile responses? Because we're all a**holes... or because they don't listen and we're tired of being ignored? – Ian Kemp Jun 23 at 14:35
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    Niceness suffers when morale is low. In that situation asking people to be nice is just going to exacerbate the problem. Addressing the cause of morale being low will fix the problem, but so far SO has done very little on that front for a long time. Instead they keep trying to beat us into being nicer. Hence my comment on the question above "The beatings will continue until morale improves". – user4639281 Jun 23 at 18:10
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    Niceness is innate. I make an active choice over how I choose to treat people. Posting comments like 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' does nothing to improve the situation. SO has messed up a lot of things and ignored some aspects of it's core user base, this is true. But the tone and specificness of complaints helps a lot in actually changing things. So... What's the effect you want? How is the comment helping the change you want? – Journeyman Geek Jun 23 at 23:00
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    When I first started using the internet, lesson #1 was "grow a thick skin", because it was generally understood that people will be mean to you, and that there's nothing you can do about it. Did that change? Is it too much to ask that the people who get paid to run SO grow a thicker skin, so that "hostility" can no longer be used as an excuse? Sure, it would be nice to convince hundreds of thousands of people to all "be nice", but I see that as quite unrealistic. It's far easier to convince less than a hundred employees to learn how to deal with abuse. People who work at call centers do it. – House- 'Reinstate Monica' -man Jun 23 at 23:28
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    Yes it is. I'm not the touchy feely sort but I've seen how fragile communities run on the basis that people should grow a thick skin are. If someone stabs you, you will bleed. Unlike a call center, you don't have to stop dealing with the person once the call ends. I've found communities built on mutual self respect tend to last longer and build bonds. The problem with people who expect others to have thick skins is they often lack that themselves and it's a cover for their own insecurities. It didn't change. It was always stupid and weak – Journeyman Geek Jun 23 at 23:40
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    @JourneymanGeek your response shows how little you understand the problem. The problem is not that people are not nice, the problem is that people are frustrated. Their being frustrated leads to a decrease in niceness. Attempting to beat those people with a "be nice" stick isn't going to solve anything. That is my point. The change I want is for the powers that be to stop trying to beat their community with a "be nice" stick and fix the damn problem that they have thus far refused to even consider. – user4639281 Jun 23 at 23:44
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    @Houseman or work on the idea that a "thick skin" isn't normal. We set examples as more experienced users. We work on taking away the excuses for disengaging - cause lets be honest, most normal users wouldn't go on meta, so its mostly on the folks who're core users who we can influence. I mean if you're going to keep on hoping folks magically grow a thick skin, you can keep complaining no one listens to you till your face turns blue. Or you can try to encourage the reasoned, fair but critical voices who folks cannot ignore. – Journeyman Geek Jun 23 at 23:56
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    @TinyGiant A lot of us are pushing for changes. And I don't think the be nice stick is a stick, its a pool noodle - a stick actually hurts. I've often said the top down way of encouraging 'niceness' dosen't work. But I also like actually being listened to - and actually think about what the effects of my words are, and how its seen. Language that goes "us vs them" is ... ineffective. It encourages folks to go "eh, they hate us, sod them". Being nice is my way of socially engineering people. You're probably going to just get more frustrated, and impotantly tilting at windmills that way. – Journeyman Geek Jun 24 at 0:01
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    @Houseman Well then, if someone told you "Grow a thicker skin, and get used to being ignored" - I suspect you'd not be ok with it. I don't have a thick skin, nor have any of the folks I'd consider mentors in running a community. What I have is folks watching out for me, and a community that cares for each other. "Grow a thick skin" is literally the last refuge of the emotionally stunted, who literally cannot take being told that their toxicity is unwelcome. – Journeyman Geek Jun 24 at 0:09
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    Like I said, there's no other way. That's the reality of the situation. You can either face it, or hide from it. Those are your two options. Your choice. – House- 'Reinstate Monica' -man Jun 24 at 0:14
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    @IanKemp It's probably more likely that there are a vast minority of people who are a-holes/rude, and they're just way more vocal. Negative experiences always push people to comment/review more than positive experiences. The problem is there is no "5th estate" on Meta for singing praise of a job well done or a feature/project well-implemented. There are Discussion, Bug, Feature-Request, and Support. So maybe we should add that 5th estate via a 5th "required" meta-tag so the community can start sharing positive stories and devs/CMs stop seeing "overwhelmingly negative" content? – TylerH Jun 24 at 16:25

As been pointed out many times before, one root of the problem is conflict between different interest groups:

  1. People who are new to the SE site model.
  2. People who are new to programming.
  3. People who are veteran SE users.
  4. People who are veteran programmers.
  5. SO the company.

1 and 2 will always, at some extent, clash with 3 and 4. Because there's several problems that any programming site will face:

  • Every healthy site will always have new users.
  • Every programming site will always have their share of newbies and students.
  • Good programmers are not necessarily good or willing newbie teachers.
  • Good programmers are not necessarily good or willing moderators.

Those who aren't willing to teach are using the site solely to interact with those with more knowledge than themselves. However, someone who is a domain expert might be willing to teach advanced concepts to intermediate programmers. But they are not necessarily interested in teaching complete newbies how to print "hello world".

The state of affairs for many years have been that the veteran users are getting fed up. Essentially they sit and wait for a site with higher quality standards than SO to pop up.

But even if such a site would appear, it would still have to deal with new users and rookie programmers. You don't get rid of the conflict until the new users have learnt how to use the site and not until the rookie programmers have somewhere to go. There will always be more of them.

One solution that's been proposed before is to create a beginner-friendly sister site. But then you would still have the problem with all rookies hitting the main site, because it is already so well-established that a beginner site won't change it. You'd only create friction when you have to constantly shovel newbies and their questions over to the beginner site.

A better solution is therefore to move the veterans to a new site. Let Stack Overflow be the welcome-wagon'd beginner paradise, where you can learn programming as well as the SE concept. Then create a separate site exclusively for professional programmers who already know the SE concept.

To ask questions on the professional site, you have to be a professional programmer, or at least know the technology you are asking about. You have to know the quality standards of the SE sites in advance.

This could be done today, with existing tools. We'd just need to make a proposal in Area 51, then gather enough willing moderators and the blessing from the company.

Ideally there should be a mechanism to swiftly delete or migrate newbie questions, homeworks dumps etc. If the quality standards are higher, the site could be moderated with less mercy, less consensus and so on. You could even make a prerequisite that you need a certain rep or certain badges from SO to register on the new site.

Yes, there will be plenty of elitism. That always comes with setting higher quality standards. But with different sites, we wouldn't have to worry about elitism or even the new site failing, because there's always the old SO to fall back to for those who don't like the new site for whatever reason.

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    Great proposal; great feature request. Simply separate the concerns. – Amit Joshi Jun 25 at 14:43
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    Another alternative I can imagine is to hold answers on questions from new user (cannot define this term) for some (30 minutes?) time. This will avoid "fastest gun" issue. While this time, interested users will propose useful changes in question. They will also ask for clarifications from OP which will make the question clear. If necessary, this will also spare a time to close the question. As there are no answers, such questions will be removed easily. Also, as it cannot be answered immediately, interested users will write good and detailed answers instead of one liners. – Amit Joshi Jun 25 at 14:47
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    Of course it's not the first time this has been brought up, and it usually dies because of the same concerns. Even if you split into two SOs, one SO will be a bunch of experts with very few questions, and another SO with a ton of crap questions with nobody to answer them adequately. Until the newbs realise that all the experts are on that other SO, and migrate there to get answers. – deceze Jun 25 at 14:49
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    So, is the solution to make a ring of Q&A sites. Every time one of them saturates, experts perform an exodus to the next one. :> – E_net4 is sad Jun 25 at 15:54
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    "Until the newbs realise that all the experts are on that other SO, and migrate there to get answers" - this just says that "newbs" would eventually choose expertise over welcoming-ness. If that were the case, then the obvious solution would be to just to reinstate the higher standards on SO right now, abandon the welcome wagon initiative, and without any of the messy in-between we'll already be at the outcome that the offended users would eventually choose for themselves anyway. – Crowman Jun 25 at 17:47
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    I suspect Yes, there will be plenty of elitism. That always comes with setting higher quality standards is precisely why SE won't do or allow that. The company is working on becoming less elitist and more inclusive, across all sites, and it doesn't look like that is up for negotiation. – Magisch Jun 26 at 8:10
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    @deceze It has not been tried, so nobody knows what would happen. Intermediate/expert programmers are likely more eager to ask questions themselves if the question wouldn't instantly drown in a flood of crap. Lower activity isn't necessarily a bad thing, the current SO is far too busy - the question you were interested in yesterday has disappeared into the archives today, if you didn't remember to bookmark it. – Lundin Jun 26 at 10:33
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    @PaulGriffiths The point is, you don't need a Jon Skeet to answer how to do hello world in C#. Last year's C# students are perfectly able to answer that question. The sites wouldn't be mutually exclusive. Most SE veterans hang on multiple sites today, so it wouldn't be any different. For example, the Unix experts didn't stop answering questions on SO just because the Unix site was released. – Lundin Jun 26 at 10:40
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    @Magisch Tough luck then, because the experts aren't about to leave, they are already leaving as we speak. The newbies will follow, soon as there is somewhere else to go. If SO doesn't want their customers, someone else will claim them. This new site I speak of doesn't necessarily need to be owned by SO. – Lundin Jun 26 at 10:47
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    You're right, it hasn't been tried. We can only wring our hands in anticipation until somebody does. We're just trying to prognosticate how it may turn out based on past experience, and whether it's worth attempting in the first place. – deceze Jun 26 at 12:38
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    professional programmers are usually the biggest leeches and help vampires with the less amount of effort in their questions. professional means nothing as an indicator of quality. – user10677470 Jun 27 at 3:03
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    @JarrodRoberson My experience is rather that it is students and kids. The idea here is to make a site for people who have a clue what they are talking about, who have at the bare minimum taken beginner classes or read a beginner-level book. That's far more experience than what 90% of the people asking questions right now can claim. You don't need to raise the bar very high. – Lundin Jun 27 at 6:21
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    @Lundin - it is my experience that it is mostly older do not want to learn anything new "professionals" and "cs students". True passionate hobbyists and those that really want to learn tend to have fairly well formed questions even if they do not know what they do not know and may be trivially solved. Kids as in < 13 should not be on the site. My personal opinion is students as in college/uni level should not be on the site either if they really want to learn how to be my peer, they need to learn how to learn not learn how to leech/mooch. – user10677470 Jun 27 at 14:42
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    This in no way addresses how a "newb site" is supposed to accrete a knowledge base that is the entire goal of SO. This has been discussed at great length before. – Passer By Jun 29 at 14:21

The question mentions these two concerns:

Closing questions is something seen as "unfriendly", which seems to be the buzzword of the year. Downvoting poor questions or answers is also seen as "unfriendly".

If I understand, part of the problem is that users who do what is required to make the site useful are blamed for unfriendliness. That creates a difficult choice - don't do what has made the site work, or do it and get criticized for it.

One approach - not a comprehensive solution my any means - is to reduce the conflict between downvoting and friendliness. In other words, make downvoting friendlier.

New users are given plenty of help to ask good questions, but still ask low quality questions. Obviously some (many? most?) users do this because they just don't care. But there are also a lot of users who just don't get it. They think they're asking good questions, they're not, and they're frustrated by the response. They incorrectly conclude that other users of the site are hostile.

One way to mitigate - not solve - that is for users who downvote to keep doing exactly what they are doing, while tweaking what new users see and experience when their questions are downvoted. This is not a suggestion that we add comments with downvotes. It doesn't involve any new behaviors or requirements for anyone who downvotes.

My specific suggestion: When a user's question is downvoted, show them - and only them - a generalized message explaining why questions get downvoted. Remind them of the same things they were told before they asked the question. And emphasize that it's not personal.

Do those users even realize that if they've asked a low quality, downvoted question, that they can delete it and restore their reputation? Do they realize that they should? Think of what that would communicate:

We don't want you to have a low reputation because you asked a low-quality question. We want you to fix it.

One could make a giant list of the problems this would not solve and the types of users whose behavior would not change. But there are significant number of users who just don't get it, and the way the response appears to them is more likely to make them angry than to encourage them to improve.

I'm not saying they should be angry or frustrated. It's just human nature, and there's a way to help them to respond more rationally and less emotionally. It's technically easy to implement, and it places zero burden on anyone who downvotes. It might even make downvoting easier. I don't downvote nearly enough. I'm imbalanced toward seeming nice, even though I know it's not what's best for the site or even the user who asked the question.

It's not a cure-all, but I'm 100% certain it would yield productive results in at least some cases. And it's simple, low-risk, and doesn't make anyone do anything they aren't already doing.

It might also be fitting for new users' downvoted answers.

Edit: I previously suggested encouraging users to delete their downvotes questions, which apparently doesn't help - they still get banned. I edited that, but shouldn't users with downvoted questions be encouraged to delete them? Isn't that pretty much the same thing someone else will have to do anyway? Is someone who deletes their own low quality question the same as someone who "pollutes" with bad questions and needs to be banned?

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    This proposal seems quite similar to the one in this Meta Q. We don't quite know whether it will help, but the way I see it, these times are ever desperate, which would call for equally desperate measures. – E_net4 is sad Jun 25 at 15:41
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    @SirE_net4theWiseDownvoter, yes, that nails it. I'll add some thoughts over there. I'd even go a lot easier with the suggested boilerplate message. They already know they received negative feedback. No need to lead with that. Wording is critical. The downvotes are objective and impersonal, as they should be. The message doesn't need to be. We don't like to be all warm-fuzzy-touchy-feely. Just as a brainstorm thought, maybe we should overdo it with unicorns or kittens or flowers or something. Introduce a little levity. We can afford that since it doesn't impact the objectivity. – Scott Hannen Jun 25 at 15:51
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    Quite honestly, I think this would solve very little, and here's why: there's already a ton of text thrown at new user's faces to make them understand and to help them along, and it's too much. Nobody is reading all this stuff. It's information overload. People just want to get their problem fixed, they don't want to read through what feels like a TOS (which nobody reads either of course). And even if they read it, they have received so much information that they're not sure anymore whether their question is on-topic or not, so they just go for it anyway. – deceze Jun 25 at 16:03
  • @deceze - I agree that what it would solve is limited. It's somewhat about perception. But perhaps people are skimming a little too much over all of that information before they ask the question, viewing it as a speed bump on their way to getting what they want. Some are heavily biased to think that their question is a good one. Maybe getting some of that information after the fact will help. But it's also largely about making it easier to accept the negative feedback. That's what we want - for them to accept it. – Scott Hannen Jun 25 at 16:18
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    IOW, I think we lean heavily toward helping them as much as possible before they ask the question. Then, because of all that help, we reason that if you don't like the downvote, too bad. Your fault. We tried. And all of that is correct. But is it working? Could it work better? Even if it doesn't stop people who don't care from asking bad questions, if it helps some to benefit more from the feedback without diluting it or reducing its objectivity, that's a win. – Scott Hannen Jun 25 at 16:22
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    "Do those users even realize that if they've asked a low quality, downvoted question, that they can delete it and restore their reputation? Do they realize that they should?" - Sure, but those downvotes still count towards a question ban, even if the question is deleted, better would be to encourage them to delete the question, fix it, and then undelete it – Nick A Jun 25 at 16:24
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    @deceze - Sorry, I'm really wordy and now I'm answering your comment with three. "Quite honestly, I think this would solve very little." Considering the scope of the problem, I think that's true of anything. But as software developers, that describes exactly how we approach problems. We try to isolate them into smaller ones and solve those. In this case the "problems" are human so "solve" is the wrong word, but the principle applies. – Scott Hannen Jun 25 at 16:31
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    Maybe if they didn't have a half dozen ads grabbing at their attention at the same time, they'd notice the information we're trying to get to them. – user400654 Jun 25 at 18:08
  • "We don't want you to have a low reputation because you asked a low-quality question. We want you to delete it yourself." which would be another step towards a question ban ... – DavidPostill Jun 26 at 12:03
  • @DavidPostill - Yes, I had no idea how that works. I'll edit my answer accordingly. But why don't we want people to delete questions? If someone asks a question, realizes that it's bad based on the downvotes, and quickly deletes it, is that the sort of user that the question ban is intended for? – Scott Hannen Jun 26 at 13:07
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    @ScottHannen Because they are supposed to try and improve their questions. It's easier to do this before they are question banned. – DavidPostill Jun 26 at 13:10
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    A lot of times a question is beyond repair. I don't get why we would want the user to focus on editing it instead of deleting it. It doesn't result in a good question, but it means there's one less bad one for someone else to close. – Scott Hannen Jun 26 at 13:13
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    It isn’t so much that deleting questions leads to a ban, but rather that the quality ban still considers deleted questions. In other words, deletion doesn’t erase history. Either way, the real solution is to encourage people to edit the questions and improve them. That’s going to help them get an answer (and thus be satisfied), and it’s also going to prevent them from being banned. While I agree with deceze that this probably won’t make a difference, it does seem worth a try. Perhaps I’m a perpetual optimist, but I always imagine there’s people out there who do want to help themselves. – Cody Gray Jun 26 at 16:38
  • Note that "delete the downvoted question, then repost it (with tiny wording changes)" has the exact opposite of the desired effect - moderators now have to deal with more poor questions, not fewer. – Móż Jul 1 at 1:39
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    @Móż - A lot of the feedback I'm getting is that people should fix questions instead of deleting them. But I don't know if such a blanket approach makes sense. Sometimes the question is a mess and it's attracting downvotes. Is fixing it going to help? If they just delete it the problem goes away. I hear a lot of frustration about the CV queues, how it takes so many votes to close a question. An edited, improved question is a better outcome, but if they just delete it doesn't that still solve some problems? Isn't it one less for the community to close? That seems like a win or a lesser evil. – Scott Hannen Jul 1 at 2:13

I'm a relative newbie to Stack Overflow and I won't pretend that I'm on SO except to get some very simple solutions like how to use Vim for some specific mundane task that an experienced user would find laughable is even inquired about.

However, the good thing usually is that these so-called inane queries have already been asked and responded to. So most new users like me don't have to requery you. If they're repeated, that's because there isn't an easy way to locate previous Q & As. That's something SO could look at. A way to let users know that this query has already been answered somewhere else, someplace else without having SMEs intervene and do so.

As for SMEs not finding or receiving queries that don't challenge them or permit them to demonstrate their expertise on SO, unfortunately, users can only seek answers if they themselves are working on, solving or learning such problems. Are they? I'm certainly not.


Stack Overflow is not welcoming to newcomers; possibly because they do not adhere to proper posting policies.

Answerers do not like to have to clarify or check out more details than necessary. Stack Overflow must provide a templated question format so that new users can check themselves when filling out a query.

Also, they must be reminded that their post may not be looked at if they do not adhere to the guidelines. (For examples of how to do that, you can check out CHECKSTYLE and PMD issues on GitHub.com.)

Unfortunately, I'm also one of the few (or many) who have been flagged as posting low quality questions to the site.

The issue is how a query is framed in the OP's mind.

While I might be looking at my problem in a particular way, the answer I seek may be available to a question framed in an entirely different manner. Questions paraphrased differently or problems approached from an entirely different angle could enhance the quality of the site despite being flagged as duplicates and could be merged with the original question.

When I first started using the site, I was exploring Assembly programming on ARM. Thus, my question followed my exploratory frame of mind until matters got clearer and the final question found itself a duplicate Q & A elsewhere.

Stack Overflow needs technology guides for newbies informing them where to look for resources that handle teething issues.

The above said, Stack Overflow may not be the best place to look for immediate answers to critical questions. Is it?

My contention is that people like me have already tried to find answers to questions elsewhere and everywhere and are finding it difficult to filter out the right solution from the chaff. It would help if there were reminder links that told users like me that there is certain etiquette and decorum to be maintained while framing those questions and that it's not a free-for-all. That said, framing questions correctly and providing detailed, exact information helps in getting prompt replies.

No user is an expert on everything. Because they're NOT, they're looking for answers here. Does Stack Overflow intend to drive away the very audience that provides traffic that makes it a sought after destination on the Web?

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    SO is supposed to help you locate existing solutions in multiple ways: while you type your question, you get duplicate suggestions. If your question is a duplicate and closed as such, that closed question is now a new guide to the existing solution. Arguably, especially the search function isn't great. It's hard to tell whether that's because it's a fundamentally difficult algorithmic problem, or because not enough time has been invested into it. It's been a long standing gripe either way. Whether a better search algorithm would solve much is anyone's guess. – deceze Jun 26 at 7:06
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    So why are you asking Vim questions on Stack Overflow when it has a dedicated site – DavidPostill Jun 26 at 12:01
  • @deceze through the app? – fernal73 Jun 26 at 13:27
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    @DavidPostill You misunderstood me. I haven't asked any Vim questions yet. But, yes, I do look for vim solutions. Thanks for the link. – fernal73 Jun 26 at 13:30
  • @fernal73 …? You mean iOS/Android apps? I guess duplicate suggestion while composing a question does not exist there, no. The apps have been in disrepair for a while now. – deceze Jun 26 at 14:35
  • @deceze I'll have to check out the mobile Web version the next time I post a query. – fernal73 Jun 26 at 16:58
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    Literally all of the things you're suggesting already exist, and have existed for years. The problem is that users like you are refusing to take advantage of those features, even when they're often pushed on users rather aggressively. People are simply determined to not be helped, and to instead just ask their question without letting anything get in their way, no matter how inappropriate that is in the situation. – Servy Jul 10 at 13:24

Really, Stack Overflow has become the giant site for newbies in programming. I too, when I had got an interest in new technologies, heard about HTML, CSS, Java, etc., started reading some books. The starter pages of two books I bought included this text:

While reading this book, so many new libraries and tools might have been published and this book might not cover them, so you can use the Internet to learn about them. We would try our best to include that in the next edition. Also, if you have some doubts or clarifications, you can get over to https://stackoverflow.com for clarifications.

Now, it was around a year ago when I searched about Stack Overflow and joined it.
This is what I face the biggest problem here:

The community is now tired of editing, closing and duplicating questions. This is because of the new bunch (very very large bunch though) which don't care for contributing, but they need just answers. Now, I can try to split the problem to the cause.

  • The new users are not welcomed with that warmth. The tour page must also include a strict, but welcoming, warning that the users must include an MCVE, do research, etc. in their questions.

  • A major problem is also with (some) high rep users, who think they are much superior to the low rep users.

  • The low rep users must also think twice a hundred times before posting a new post, because they are new to the community and have much to learn.

  • Another major problem: The newcomers just want answers to their questions ,but don't want to contribute to the community.

What should be done now?

The need is of better moderation tools for the time being, to clean up low-quality posts, and then the need is of a better standard of informing the users about what the community is and how can they contribute in a better way.

As Scott Hannen depicted in his comment, the point about the high rep users is not about all of them, and that was my personal experience when I joined Stack Overflow. Those users many-a-times (as I remember an incident including my question) get raged upon the low quality posts of the new users who don't have experience about how to ask in the community, and also leave comments that are extremely unfriendly. Again, this is my personal experience and not my motive to harm the sentiments of anyone.

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    That quote from the book - is it a translation? "Not every information might not be included in this book [comma, run-on sentence] also if you have some doubts or clarifications..." What book is that? – Scott Hannen Jul 4 at 16:43
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    Saying that "the high rep users" think they are superior is a blanket statement. Do you really know what someone thinks? That's really a statement about our feelings and perception. Those feelings can be caused by someone being unkind or acting superior, but that's the exception. Most of the time we feel that way because we don't like being wrong or corrected, and we attribute our negative feelings to someone else. That's an extra bonus from contributing on SO. We get to practice being emotionally healthy by not internalizing negativity, whether intentional or imagined. – Scott Hannen Jul 4 at 16:53
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    @ScottHannen I just converted the text into simple form from the book, it was Beginning Android programming with android studio by J.f. Dimarzio. But that intention was to tell the readers that the there might be new features rolled out while you are reading the book, so to learn about those new things, you can use the internet. And for the second part, that's what I personally felt when I joined StackOverflow, as I grew with rep I came to know that the low rep users' post are checked by high rep users' on review, and then came to know why they were like that in their behavior. – Gourav Jul 5 at 3:29
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    Novice programmers always had full access to the site, nothing has really changed there. What you describe is the popularity of the site doing it's thing. More visitors, more aggravating repetitive curation duties. It is absolutely not to be attributed to how new someone is to programming, everyone is contributing to it. – Gimby Jul 11 at 8:34
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    "What should be done now?" - I refer very junior question-askers to codementor.io or similar. I'm surprised SO doesn't have a way of linking (paid) mentors and (paying) mentees to help walk them through the early days of learning. – Robert Grant Jul 15 at 16:43

The issue is that Stack Overflow has completed its mission: every question has an answer, and SERPs send every relevant question to Stack Overflow. All new questions are duplicates and just need to be routed to the original, underlying question.


New content does not provide incremental fun for askers or responders or the site's SEO rankings. So the next step is obvious. Asking questions will (optionally) cost cash-money and duplicates will be encouraged. Askers post a few bucks with their question and answerers race to find the previous answer, repackage it, and send it to the asker. So basically Google Answers from like 20 years ago.


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    This isn't anywhere close to being true. For starters, new technologies are released all the time, so there won't be any existing questions about those to use as duplicate targets. Furthermore, Stack Overflow is designed to deal with the long tail of programming questions---narrow, yet focused, questions. They certainly haven't all been answered yet. There's plenty of new ground. – Cody Gray Jul 2 at 1:22
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    If I have a problem, the probability of finding an answer to the SO is around 70%. 20% that I find a solution from other sources and 10% that I ask a new question. My questions are typically left open, but I am not sure, it is the result of my reputation and my defense, or that I ask really good questions. I think, the count of the askable, essentially different questions is ℵo (inifinity), but the hardness of asking a new one is increasing. This is why the probability that a new question is a dupe, is increasing. – peterh says reinstate Monica Jul 5 at 10:30
  • Here is a SEDE query showing the historical change of the percentage of the dupe questions. It is growing, but it is still around 5%. – peterh says reinstate Monica Jul 5 at 10:48
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    @peterh The percentage of duplicate questions doesn't mean all that much considering how few duplicate questions actually get closed as such. Way more people are interested in re-answering duplicate questions than closing them. – Servy Jul 10 at 13:26
  • @Servy And I would gladly agree and sympathize with your view, if I had not seen so many falsely dupe-closed question. But making the case better would imho require a major tuning of the system. Mainly, tuning the rule to motivate reviewers more, and using more sophisticated AI to detect possible dupes. Both of them looks very unlikely for me. However, running the query on other sites, I found that it is around 5% on most of it, with a slow growth on the long-term. – peterh says reinstate Monica Jul 10 at 13:53
  • @peterh So you have even less reason to trust the number as being meaningful. That just means the stats on duplicate questions doesn't reflect reality, so we don't have concrete evidence of how many duplicates there are, and thus shouldn't be basing decisions on extremely flawed evidence. – Servy Jul 10 at 13:55
  • @Servy Well, yes. Imagine an "ideal" world, where all the dupe / "too narrow" rules are rigorously kept. I think most question would be closed, not around 30% as today, but maybe more than 90%. But the main site activities focus mostly on the new questions. If only little new question would be created, not even the old guys would find fun here. So exterminates a site itself, and this would be the fate also of the SO. – peterh says reinstate Monica Jul 10 at 14:09
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    @peterh Or, if it was actually possible to find the quality, non-duplicate questions, experts would have a much more enjoyable time participating, and would actually continue to participate over time instead of constantly getting discouraged and burned out by the constant duplicate and otherwise problematic questions. – Servy Jul 10 at 14:20
  • @Servy How can you narrow the actual publishers (i.e. people whose posts are not downvoted/closed/deleted), without narrowing also the visitors? – peterh says reinstate Monica Jul 11 at 7:20
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    I think there will be plenty of new questions for new JavaScript frameworks (and new versions thereof that completely break the previous version of the API). – Peter Mortensen Jul 11 at 20:20
  • What is "SERP"? – Peter Mortensen Jul 12 at 11:16
  • @PeterMortensen Google tells me it's "search engine result pages" :) – Gimby Jul 12 at 11:25
  • @peterh You were the one who brought up a hypothetical ideal world where duplicate or otherwise problematic questions questions either didn't exist or were quickly moderated, and claimed it would be a bad thing. I'm saying it wouldn't be. I have no idea how one could possibly attain that ideal (you can move closer to it, but likely never attain it), you were the one to propose the hypothetical. – Servy Jul 15 at 13:18

I believe everyone is becoming hyperbolic. I am a fan of Makoto as I have seen him many times on SO. If Makoto wants something and the other moderators think alike, they should ask (or demand) together from the head office I think.

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    The way to ask for something is to create a feature request on Meta. But it was already made clear (by comments and be missing action), that "they" don't care anymore, so feature requests become worthless. – Tom Jun 28 at 13:43

I just want to mention a few things in addition to all of the problems and solutions other have highlighted. I'm not a high-rank SE network user but I've been a community moderator in Arduino SE for a year, so I think I have seen both sides of the fence and hopefully my opinions are not worthless.


Because to be fair, it actually does feel quite disheartening to get your question closed with 0 comments (excluding the automated ones). The "Too broad" reason is a bit too broad to give the users any meaningful feedback what about their question is broad. To make people asking feel better one another possibility would be rewording close reasons, e.g. "This question has been marked [x] but don't worry, you can fix your question so that it can be efficiently answered".


Due to the fact that a single downvote is enough to bury a question under the question diarrhea, it might not be unfriendly, but it means the question isn't going to be answered. I think that downvotes would be more friendly if they had names attached, if the question is bad enough for a downvote then everyone (except maybe the asker) understands why. What I want to say is that there's no reason to worry about your username being next to a downvote if it's based.


As reports have to be reviewed by humans, I don't honestly see an even increasing amount of reports working out. Some other solutions have to be devised in my opinion.

@EJoshuaS wrote in the comments:

For example, the Java tag gets up to 5 or 6 questions a day on the NullPointerException. Are you seriously going to tell me that it's beneficial for us to sit here regurgitating the same information over and over when people could already Google this in 5 seconds?

Given that quite a lot of the answer base is getting quite old it also means that a lot of the answers actually get outdated, best style changes, programming languages change - the correct answer changes.

I suspect we could close questions as duplicates better if we'd never use generic tags such as java, python or c++ alone - it should be clear the person is using the same version of thing and the answer has remained same if something gets closed as duplicate. Just as an example, getting your Python3 question closed as duplicate to a Python2 question is really not ideal (I can't unfortunately recall actual examples, but I've seen quite a few), or as an another example questions about Python3's async have very different answers based on which Python3.x they're using. I do not think the "knowledge base" idea will work until the "fourth dimension", time, is taken into account and it currently really isn't.

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    Oh hey, I got the "New contributor" flair, that's a bit amusing in this context. – Avamander Jun 24 at 17:16
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    "Because to be fair, it actually does feel quite disheartening to get your question closed with 0 comments" First, we were told, don't leave comments when closing questions because they were determined to be unfriendly. Now, you're saying that it's "disheartening" to have a question closed without a comment. Well, dilemma. It seems we are damned either way. What shall we do? Perhaps stop worrying about friendliness and perception, and just decide whether we want to be a site with or without quality standards? (You got the flair because you're new to Meta SO, not the network.) – Cody Gray Jun 24 at 17:35
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    @CodyGray In fairness, pretty much the only people saying it's "unfriendly" to comment on close-worthy questions with explanations of why they're problematic is SE staff. Almost all of the feedback given by actual people asking questions that dislike the process are talking about the close votes and downvotes being what they dislike, not the comments, and SE has been told repeatedly that the comments aren't the problem, but the SE staff decided to go on a crusade against comments with constructive criticism anyway. The result is unsurprising, and the response from new users is consistent. – Servy Jun 24 at 17:42
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    I suspect the downvotes are due to a misunderstanding of the question I posed...I'm not fussing about the friendliness, implied or otherwise, of voting. I'm fussing about the lack of tooling and support needed to deal with the deluge of poor questions, and the lack of support (i.e. "top cover") to help with the whole "unwelcoming" stigma that comes about as a side effect of the tools. – Makoto Jun 24 at 17:49
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    Although I value a differing opinion, your primary position seems to be one that contributions which are generally considered bad by the community shouldn't be downvoted or closed so that more of them can be coddled and brought up to good quality. However, the largest problem SO faces is low-effort posts of people saying "It doesn't matter if I don't search first. People can just ignore my question if they don't like it." A tragedy of the commons which burns out valuable contributors. It seems like your suggestions would result in it being harder to remove this chaff. – Conspicuous Compiler Jun 24 at 17:55
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    No, I'm not saying that, I'm saying we can justify such decisions to the users better, provide a way out and make less mistakes when doing such negatively perceived changes. I seriously do not understand where'd you take the "keep the bad questions" from. We need many changes instead of just giving people more power to deem stuff as "chaff" will only end worse because not everyone is suitable to be a moderator. – Avamander Jun 24 at 18:57
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    Nothing ironic about the downvotes here. Folks disagree with your assessment and proposals. That’s a common, valid reason to downvote. Voting is not a friendly or unfriendly activity. We can still be friends even though I disagree with you. Regarding staff, it isn’t just staff who recommend not leaving comments. I’ve been saying this for years. When I stopped commenting, I stopped being the target of vitriol and hate nearly as often. You guys don’t see it, but I do: constructive critical comments are flagged constantly. People say they want them, but the fact is they don’t. – Cody Gray Jun 24 at 20:09
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    While I agree that it's disheartening to have your question closed without any feedback, that's the culture that SE (the company) has purposefully crafted. Further, I don't see much value in any proposal which asks even more of our curators. – canon Jun 24 at 20:29
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    I used to leave comments requesting clarification or pointing out flaws in answers all the time, until the welcoming wagon came rolling through and people started swinging their welcoming blog post bats around. it's just not worth the trouble to leave comments anymore. – user400654 Jun 24 at 20:34
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    "Why do you imply I haven't seen it?" Because you're not a mod and unable to see flags on comments? That's the most obvious reason, I guess. – Tom Jun 24 at 23:04
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    I reckon attaching people's names to downvotes would lead to a whole lot more flaming towards downvoters and nothing else productive at all. There's a reason voters are not public and have never been, and it's been suggested and re-treaded close to a thousand times by now. – Magisch Jun 25 at 6:23
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    I'm surprised a previous moderator would suggest de-anonymizing votes; you should have encountered many of the reasons why in your work as a moderator. I'm not sure there'd ever be a very good reason to drop that wall, but a post being downvoted surely isn't it. – fbueckert Jun 25 at 13:38
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    I once went on meta to tell someone politely 'you mean to go on stack, not meta.here are both help centers and how they differ'. The guy proceeded to follow me on main, throw insults at my country of origin (yes somewhere someone is pissed enough at Canada to do that lol). That was me politely pointing someone to the right place. You don't see the potential torent of abuse you're opening by deanonymyzing downvotes? Surprising...... – Patrice Jun 26 at 11:05
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    My contact information is in my profile. I got an angry email from someone - "thanks for the downvote, now I'm banned!" - when I hadn't even downvoted them I just commented. I felt for the person and we had a nice discussion. He just didn't understand the site. He was just a normal guy. If downvotes weren't anonymous I'd have to choose between downvoting and using my name. – Scott Hannen Jun 26 at 13:29
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    We attach names to close votes, those are pretty much exactly as negative-feeling-creating as is downvoting, I don't think there'd be more abuse with public downvotes. – Avamander Jun 29 at 23:34

Your mistake is that you only see Stack Overflow for your own needs.

Since you are a highly experienced Java/Spring coder, you find basic or broad questions annoying. For the rest of the world out there, who are googling to try and find an answer to a problem, the search engine results that come from Stack Overflow are a god send, as they usually provide the best and in-depth answers and opinions.

But the worst is when you find a Stack Overflow question in your search, only to find that a moderator has closed the question because they deemed it too something-or-other and thus prevented any decent answers to the question you just found in your search. There have been many times I have found such a question and pulled my hair out in frustration when I've found the question to be closed.

I absolutely fail to see why any question should be closed for being too broad, opinion based, or duplicated. If I've found a broad question in my search, it's because I have a broad question myself, and I am actually interested in hearing a broad array of answers. If I've found a question that is a matter of opinion, it is because I am actually searching for well educated opinions on a topic.

As an expert in Spring, I thought you would understand this, considering that Spring is built on the concept of opinion based default options. If I find a duplicated question, I'm thinking, awesome, now I can click on the other duplications and get even more answers.

So please, stop closing questions, and let it be. You have no obligation to answer every basic question over and over, just let it be, as other people will be excited to answer it even if you aren't.

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    I want to say that this is your mistake, but it probably isn't. Stack Overflow was never intended to be a repository for overly broad questions or topics. But, you don't have any guard rails to tell you otherwise except the moderators who try to keep the place serviceable for others who want to look for answers. As an FYI, Spring Boot is the opinionated variation of Spring with a lot of auto configuration; with Spring Framework, you had to do most of that wiring yourself. – Makoto Jun 21 at 22:29
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    But I suppose this response epitomizes the situation we're in. You're not entirely in-context to what the site is about, and yet the people who want to make it better for everyone are vilified. Your opinion is worth something in these parts, but the real concern is that it's at the cost of the actual expertise of those who have built Stack Overflow into what you use today. – Makoto Jun 21 at 22:30
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    "as they usually provide the best and in depth answers and opinions. ... some hoity-toity arrogant moderator has closed the question because they deemed it too something-or-other..." Have you ever thought that those two things might be related? There are tons of sites, forums and the like for programming questions, but Stack Overflow tends to have the best content, as well as some of the strictest standards as to what will be allowed and what gets closed. I'm of the belief that it's the quality-concerned users who make this site a success. – Davy M went to fund Monica Jun 21 at 22:55
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    Checkout Mysticial's beautiful answer, which would tell you why Makoto is concerned. (Spoiler alert, Makoto, myself and a lot of others on meta are from Camp 1) – Bhargav Rao Jun 21 at 23:00
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    So to those who wish to delete this answer - I'd rather you didn't. This answer actually makes my point. – Makoto Jun 22 at 17:50
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    So DavyM Has pointed out why this site's stricter standards have resulted in better content, but more importantly, if you don't like those quality standards have no fear, because basically no other site has the standards that SO does. You can simply participate basically anywhere else and they won't close your broad questions, your opinionated questions, your duplicate questions, etc. You're free to post questions that won't attract useful content to your heart's content on the sites that want those questions. – Servy Jun 23 at 3:28
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    @SurfingSanta - to your point about closed questions not being removed from search engines...there's a bit of a double-edged sword there. First and foremost, the message about closed questions is that it's a temporary state, and isn't necessarily meant to represent a "bad" question. That stigma hasn't been communicated, it seems. Second, removing questions which are closed from search engines isn't a matter that I think has been broached. There are valid times in which a closed question should be the result found in your search engine. – Makoto Jun 24 at 3:23
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    Read this for an explanation of why we want questions that can be answered rather than just discussed. And I quote: "Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don’t. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning." When I'm searching for information, I want an answer to my question, not just discussion. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Jun 24 at 16:05
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    Also, if you've participated in other forums, you'd understand how frustrating it is to have to wade through 50 feet of "me too!" comments and thread hijacking in order to get to something that sort of answers your question. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Jun 24 at 16:06
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    Also, in a lot of the larger tags, we get numerous duplicate questions that could be answered with a simple search. For example, the Java tag gets up to 5 or 6 questions a day on the NullPointerException. Are you seriously going to tell me that it's beneficial for us to sit here regurgitating the same information over and over when people could already Google this in 5 seconds? – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Jun 24 at 16:12
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    There are misunderstandings in each of the 4 comments you recently posted: "...3 moderators deleted my comment before one of them undeleted it. The moderators are so fixated on their opinions that they can't even handle feedback with an alternate opinion! " Two of those users weren't moderators, and the third vote by moderator Cody Gray was shortly undone by then undeleting the question. Probably because Cody wanted to clear those two delete votes that shouldn't have been cast, and a delete/undelete cycle clears those. There's no evidence to say that moderators are fixated on their opinions. – Davy M went to fund Monica Jun 24 at 17:31
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    “So what DOES closing it achieve?” There are help pages explaining what closing questions achieves, but you seem fixated on the frustration of not finding answers on Stack Overflow to questions that don’t belong on Stack Overflow. You haven’t addressed at all my response nor comments of others that limiting the questions on Stack Overflow to the established guidelines encourages good content to get posted here instead of on other less strict sites. Just ignoring those comments and repeating your misunderstanding doesn’t help a discussion any. – Davy M went to fund Monica Jun 24 at 17:32
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    @Makoto - you said "You're not entirely in-context to what the site is about...", and I hate to say this, but it is you and I and the other veterans that your statement applies to. "We are not entirely in-context to what the site is about now.' The powers that be will never ever come out and say it directly in so many words, but they have said all I need to hear at this point. When they took quality out of the charter is when it began and the fact that they have always actively ignored the quality question with constant redirection should tell you what you need to know as well. – user10677470 Jun 24 at 18:45
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    Just to be clear, I'm the moderator who deleted and then undeleted this answer. As Davy speculated, I did that to clear the two pending delete votes that had been cast by community members. The folks who voted to delete this answer were abusing their privileges. You have every right to disagree with this answer and to downvote it, but no right to delete it, since it is a valid, coherent answer to the question. Delete-undelete is the only way mods have to clear pending delete votes, or even to see who cast them. In other words, I was defending your right to give an opinion I disagree with. – Cody Gray Jun 24 at 19:15
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    And for full transparency, I also deleted a bunch of comments complaining about and speculating about the deletion and undeletion of this answer. Comments are regularly removed when they become obsolete; this is not censorship. If you want your opinion to stand for the long haul, then please edit it into the answer proper. As should be clear from my previous comment, you are entitled to share your opinion, even if unpopular, and I will protect your right to share that opinion, regardless of my personal feelings about it, as long as you continue to do so constructively and professionally. – Cody Gray Jun 24 at 19:16

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