alt Hacker NewsGood riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.
Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.
Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!
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Funny thing is I could actually deal with the annoying rules as well as all the rudeness and smugness. It crossed the line for me when it became clear they had degenerated to literal deletionism. As in, they don't just close your question now, they actually delete it straight up alongside any useful information it might have contained.
Tried to go back to one of my closed questions to look up a link someone had dropped in the comments, only to find out some moderator had fucking deleted the question for literally no reason, despite the fact there was actual fucking content in there. It actually drove me over the edge and made me go all in on my own domain and my own website. If I ever post anything there again, it will always be framed as links to my own site where their deletionism will never reach. I simply refuse to be erased.
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read
> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.
> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.
Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.
... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...
"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"
Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011
The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.