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Comment by SnarkAsh | Hacker News Reader

Joel has already killed Stack Overflow beyond repair.

Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find a few valuables to snatch for investors.

I don't really use Stackoverflow besides coming across answers in Google like everyone else. Not familiar with any internal community problems, so I can't comment. Can you share the story here?

Not necessarily agreeing with the parent, but here's one recent issue: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/332974/is-se-allowi...

Stack Overflow has a much smaller version of Wikipedia's God-complex moderator nerd problem, where some people with no life moderate and focus on their own vanity metrics rather than the quality of what they moderate.

But SO is still pretty damn useful, like Wikipedia.

Yeah, definitely. A bunch of thoroughly dickish moderation persuaded me to never contribute content again. And honestly, I'm done doing free labor for for-profit companies. I'll still edit Wikipedia despite all its issues, as it's all for the public good. But anybody after "hyper growth" can pay me for my labor.

Was this a moderator for a particular tag or one that oversees answers in general? How does it favour vanity metrics over value? Aren't the best answers chosen by the end users?

I'm genuinely curious, I'm not familiar with SO besides having answered a few top questions and getting some points long ago.

A good answer cannot be chosen by an end user if they do not get to see it because Mod-without-a-life deleted it 15 seconds after it was written.

Saying SO is “useful” is vastly understated. The developer world is filled with memes such as “coding is 99% looking up thing on SO”. World’s one of the highest paid profession is powered by SO. They have rigid community rules that everyone likes to complain but it is exactly what has kept quality standards up.

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say “Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find valuables to snatch”?

I don't know if Joel has done anything, it seems to me that the users have killed SO more than anything. The quality of most accepted and upvoted answers is so low relative to even the worst documentation or IRC channel that I find it barely worth using.

The environment selects the users.

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