alt Hacker NewsCan someone parse what this blog is trying to say with the whole Joe story at the top? I’m too deep in post-Thanksgiving travel acquired illness to understand what this story is trying to tell me. The StackOverflow links are 404s because they were deleted, which the article oddly acknowledges after the links but without removing the deleted links.
As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?
Replies
Plus the guy's thesis about "aligned interests" is glaringly contradicted by Reddit, where forums presumably coalesce around a common interest but are often toxic shitholes presided over by maladjusted mods who capriciously ban people for no legitimate reason; and even follow them to other forums and ban them there too.
The use of "toxic" to describe online behavior like this is perfect. Reddit actually and its ilk leave you feeling bad in every way.
It's claiming "questions on SO are deleted because people don't understand them", as opposed to the reality that moderation is done by the more experienced users (in this case the least-experienced close voter had 5K reputation).
The deleted question (linked twice, once mislabeled as "mailing list" for some reason) is of the form "Where in my IDE is the option to do X?". While questions about IDEs are not entirely off-topic on SO, they face an uphill battle, and this particular question didn't even have any code.
The question might have become a good fit for SO if the asker had bothered to follow the "edit this question to add ..." instructions ... or if anybody who follows the tag had done it either. Note that deletion only happens after a question is closed for 30 days with a negative score and no answers, and is essential to keep search meaningful.