Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
However, they didn't really understand what makes a question valuable, or why low-quality beginner questions are low quality, and thus what exactly to expect in order to get higher quality things that could be helpful to other beginners. And yes, they did initially make some gestures towards some threshold of question difficulty, but this was a misstep (and also hard to disentangle from question complexity, as well as whether a question is interesting and to whom). And yes there were experiments like the Documentation project (which I lamented the loss of). And yes the reputation system was a totally broken idea and implementation, inconsistent with stated goals.
It turns out that when you have a critical mass of users and the alternatives are frustrating enough, you can get away with a lot of those missteps.
As for enforcement, that's what happens when the overwhelming majority of it is assigned as the community's responsibility. Misconceptions about the site's purpose compound when some users get away with them and then gain reputation from a single old/popular Q&A. (I had some, too.)
Fundamentally the site failed to figure out how to impress those values upon people before they got too involved. I think this was out of a fear of scaring users away, but clearly this was counterproductive — surfacing the misconceptions and conflicts later on only made things worse. An ideal system would have started questions closed, so that having one closed on you wouldn't feel like a final judgement (despite it not being one); and it would have shielded you from downvotes until question opening (because the entire point of this would be to recognize that questions require work by default to meet the site standards). In other worse, what the half-baked Staging Ground was trying to accomplish (and mostly did, for the small minority of questions the system decided to send there at random).
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276998 lack of knowledge doesn't prevent people from using random biotech keywords as measure against LLM's assisted reverse engineering.
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.
Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.
The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?
Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.
If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.
But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.
You are entirely missing the point of the comment exchange you're responding to. Someone else made it sound like they would ban you just for asking a single question that didn't meet the standards for questions. That is completely and utterly false.
I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.
People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.
No, they absolutely do not.
They propose that you might be having an XY problem because they have seen people commonly ask the same thing before and turn out to have that same XY problem, and they want to help you by making sure that you are asking a question where the answer will actually be useful to you. Or else they genuinely cannot understand why a person would want to solve X.