yes its from reddit, but its fairly interesting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hwj0sq/fired_from_meta_after_1_week_prolog_engineer/
They can go fuck themselves. I don’t even post and it’s aggravating how many questions I see go unanswered because they declare it a duplicate or something else to make it invalid. I see it more commonly now when I have more complex issues. Thanks but that post you linked to being the “original” is not the solution. They don’t even gain anything from doing this. Don’t you WANT more traffic by having more questions posted and answered?!
I asked a very good, thoughtful question yesterday and within 5 minutes got a downvote with no comment or explanation or feedback as to why. Ive got around 3k rep, not while im not a poweruser or whatever i aint new to it.
Glad other people engaged with it productively, but yea was a real “this is what people have been talking about”
I assume this is a mix of AI stuff being a more common Oracle for this stuff and StackOverflow clinging to old answers and questions as being forever relevant.
I stopped asking questions there because I usually spend about twenty to thirty minutes writing them to make sure they’re clear and not duplicates. I take time to explain why they aren’t duplicates of similar questions. The I get downvoted and I get my question closed. Then the site tells me to do things and I do them but no one else knows what I’m talking about and I get mocked for not knowing how the site works. That community is toxic as fuck. Genuinely, users spend more effort and energy looking for reasons to not answer something than they do trying to make questions answerable. Heaven forbid anyone give a reason for any of this. Just gotta get their daily stats to rank up.
Seriously, the one thing SO could’ve had going for it in the wake of AO is the human aspect, but they haven’t fixed their community problems in years.
I take time to explain why they aren’t duplicates of similar questions.
Ha yes I’ve found that if you explain why your question isn’t a duplicate of another question and link to it, people are more likely to report it as a duplicate of that question. So stupid.
“An answer to the linked question answers your question, so we’ve marked your question as a duplicate. 💜 Also, a bunch of people downvoted your question too. And we give you notifications of it. And they’re big, scary red numbers! But don’t worry, this helps the site!”
And then none of the answers there answer what you’re asking. 🙄 Which like, if they did, the whole process might have been worth it.
It’s such a good idea at the base level. Reputation allows additional privilege so that the people who know the most on a topic can contribute more than screaming idiots. But the lust for a higher rep score drives toxic behavior. Thus you get people in control that know how to game the system not the actual experts. I’ve had great experiences in that site, and I’ve had terrible ones. Most the great ones are because I joined in the very early days and we were really all trying to help each other. As the rep addicts took over, I bailed. By that point there were you tube tutorials to fill the gap. I’m nostalgic for what that site was. It’s very sad to see what it became.
My favorite ever SO experience was this time I found a dude who had had my exact problem four years earlier. The thread was the only google result for the error message I was getting that wasn’t just random pasted log files, etc.
Two people who had no idea how to fix it gave him some useless suggestions, then crickets.
9 months later, he had come back and posted
I solved my problem!
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=5M
I wish I’d saved the link.
A few years ago I had a software problem, and in the course of trying to solve it I found someone with almost the identical problem on SO, although no-one had posted a solution. Later on, I managed to piece some facts together and come up with a solution that worked for me. Trying to make life easier for others having the same problem, I posted my solution to that SO question, along with a brief explanation of what I thought the underlying problem was, and how my solution addressed it.
I got several upvotes, and one or two comments from people saying it worked for them too, which was nice. There was also a post from someone it didn’t work for, and they outlined why they thought that might be, which was constructive.
Unfortunately there was also some salty grump who weighed in just to tell me that my solution wasn’t “correct”. Not that it didn’t work mind you, just that it wasn’t good enough for them. As far as I bothered to look into their vague comments, my solution may have fixed the issue more as a side-effect than directly, but it did fix the issue. Meanwhile this person offered no alternative instructions of their own.
As time goes on, I seem to run across this sort of – not just unhelpful but “anti-helpful” – attitude more and more often on SO.
This is how the Internet has always been imo. You’re running into the same trolls we’ve been dealing with since we first got on the fucking Internet. Some people just cannot interact with others without being rude as fuck because they’re jaded assholes. So what if you’ve seen the same thing 80 times? Move along if you don’t care.
I feel for you. Being a computer nerd in general, I’ve had to deal with this antisocial behavior forever. You really wonder why they even bother to go to places like this if they hate other people so much. I think it’s just because they want to lord over others because that’s all they have.
