this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I've been contributing on SO for a decade and comments like this drive me nuts.
It was a free self moderating tool and people couldn't even ask question properly for people to do the work for them for free. The entitlement is astonishing and to have the gal to call SO toxic just shows how undeserving some people are of any assistance.
Yes use the search bar and yes lock the thread if people can't spend 5 minutes to form their question there is no saving of these fools. Period.
In fact my main reason for stopping to contribute was dramatic decrease of question quality not the AI. Just try to follow the new section for a day and tell me it's not a problem, I'll wait.
SO did go overboard at times; I've seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being "duplicates" of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.
But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They'd prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.
I'm not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I've ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.
This isn't my personal criticism of the site, it's me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.
I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the "question nazis".