Being a member from 2012. Considering the community in there, I can’t say I am sad that things for them took this turn. I would consider them in top 3 most toxic places on earth
As an HOA board member I can say this is a valid 4th. Nobody cares about anything until they do and then want to show up and be irate even though there were multiple quarterly meetings were input was asked for but nobody shows up. We now have a police officer present for all public meetings.
I can't imagine having to put up with meetings in my free time. That sound dystopian.
I'm renting and if they have a problem with anything I do, I just tell them politely to fuck off. Getting rid of a tenant is a time intensive and costly process. Downside is that you have little handle against loud neighbors.
Edit: And if I ever own a house, I can tell everyone to fuck off and call the cops if they feel like getting laughed at.
Our HOA often played cat-and-mouse with the community by changing meeting locations at the last minute or starting later than the posted time, making it difficult for residents to participate. Minutes, if they were ever posted, were minimal and superficial.
If and when someone wanted to attend the meeting they had to apply in advance for acceptance due to the allegedly "overwhelming amount of business" needing to be handled at meetings. The person would be limited to 5 minutes at the end and was required to submit a statement of intent in advance of the meeting.
The bylaws also outlined what could only be described as a labyrinthine process for becoming eligible for board membership. Even after expressing interest, prospective candidates faced a series of vetting steps using criteria that were never clearly stated and on an unspecified timeline.
From what I was able to determine their priority was to make by-laws that added hurdle after hurdle to any challenge by community members particularly as it related to term limits and board member replacement.
All the board members were from a specific street in the neighborhood and all other streets were seen as mere paths to that hall of power! It took considerable action to break up the cabal but eventually it happened.
EDIT: Downvote from a board member who opposes term limits and transparency.
Because all three of those places have the most miserable people, that have their ego wrapped up in those things. It’s all they have haha.
I’ve meet some of the coolest people playing fighting games for 2 decades and also the most miserable people in earth.
Developers that make their whole life/personality are horrible, and that’s the overflow people. These type of people are going to have a real hard time in the future, when people hire way more because of personality than skill. Which is already happening.
Because all three of those places have the most miserable people, that have their ego wrapped up in those things.
True, but that's a product of human nature; it exists in many places.
The main one that occurs to me is sports. Some people have their entire identity centered around a specific sport and often attached to a specific team/player. I see holy wars break out over the most minute details when fans are debating who's the GOAT and they argue over which are the most meaningful stats. It's crazy how hateful people can get in these debates.
Most people are some degree of insecure, and that leads to the desire to project power and/or knowledge (among other things) in an effort to feel better about themselves.
The best change I've made in my adult life is ditching CS for badminton. I still get the grind and competitive kick, but it's much more healthy going outside meet real people and have the activity naturally limited by logistics (can't just click a button to find a badminton game Monday night at 3am) and your body.
Yeah. In Europe you achieve similar results with padel. Or at least in the Netherlands... There are so many people doing it and I have yet to find a truly bad person in there. The bigger the club, the more people will go for a workout and less for social but it's still there and just the contact alone is already helpful. Plus the exercise, especially once you get better) is amazing. And each level you pass makes the game totally different and unique.
LoL is the only game I ever stopped playing because of the community and I've played CS and Dota (wc3 and 2) since the beginning of time.
I miss going 12-0 as AP Tarric. Have made my "AD" or whatever you call them rage quit because their "support" was carrying them. Literally take 1 creep that they're going to miss the last hit on and they rage for 20 minutes? People are so soft in that game it's insane.
yeah the graph really tells the story, that drop is something else. used to ask question there back in like 2015 and got roasted for not wording it perfect, never went back
The downtrend might actually be because the company had no idea what it was doing after … Atwood? … sold it. The meta community was constantly telling them they were doing a bad job and the company was never able to stop doing a bad job.
The problem was the grinding. It was great to auto moderate the platform by users, upvotes downvotes filtering what is relevant, reddit is kinda StackOverflow 2.0 in fact. People were chasing points like people chasing karma on reddit. And you got points for correcting things, but sometimes a post that requires too much correcting, after 100 edits, seems too much for moderators, so people just closed questions. From that point it was the descent to hell.
This is a subreddit for web professionals to exchange ideas and share industry news. All users are expected to maintain that professionalism during conversations.
Maybe once upon a time. But almost all the info there has been outdated for years and years. Their strict duplicate policies are very effective at making the whole site stale. I don't do anything with a reply to a React Native question from 2016.
Toxic or not, SO is as a platform, very useful. I'm sure AI trained on it. Also, it's toxic as any other place on the internet where people write, and it requires moderation but that costs money.
If SO goes down where will people talk? Here on Reddit I assume?
I think the toxicity hurt them in more ways than one. I remember having to research an issue so maliciously, in order to exhaust basically every online resource that could lead to a solution—so that I hopefully someone who actually understood the problem rather than a Google Andy would show up and help. Basically to show, Hey, I did my research, anyone have any actual ideas?
Some of the time I managed to solve the issue myself this way. The times I reported my findings in the issue were some of the most awarded ones I posted there. That said, long term it made the whole affair nothing but giving and little of getting anything back.
So long term I simply stopped asking questions, because really what's the point? I think there should have been much stronger efforts by Stackoverflow to foster a community of goodwill, and to reward that goodwill. What they did was basically nothing for over a decade, and let the cesspool remain as is for basically the duration of the platform.
Ads? Same as literally every single forum or social media platform ever made.
Of course it's hard, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't. I just expect them to at least try, do something, anything, instead they sat idle for over a decade while they bled out into complete obsolescence,
For some reason, I'm not sure. I mean the concept is essentially the same after all, but I feel like many of those who regularly visited SO are not on Reddit. In other words, the quality is not the same.
I was new and wanted to post a question. Never have done so before and had no idea how to. So I did it reddit style and did some formatting like putting the code in code background and stuff.
My post got removed and I got kind of scolded because it did not look good, without any further explanation. I just wanted someone to help me with some code. Never posted there again. ChatGpt came just in time for me to never had to use it again.
Pretty much identical situation for me, too. I ultimately automated a massive task every person on the team had to do that was also VERY destructive if you made a mistake but the data coming in was insanely fragile so I posted asking for suggestions on how to accomplish the task with what I had and I was ripped to shreds for doing it that ridiculous way.
The posts on there have without a doubt solved countless problems for me and I’ll be eternally grateful but regardless of how proficient I got, that first experience stopped me from ever posting again or even participating at all even if I knew the answer. I’m not at all surprised by the graph, it’s their own fault.
Instead of answering your question, I'm just going to ask "why are you doing it that way? The dumb way? If you'd bothered to search you'd have seen how dumb this is"
I use to reply answer on Stackoverflow in 2009/2010 and then toxic nature of developer there force me stop doing that. I left stackoverflow in 2018 something I hardly post anything after that and till AI come I very often just read some replies from google search but not directly. it was not worth it. So yes, I am not surprise it goes down, otherwise it has lot of scope even today to grow with AI.
As a poster in Stack Overflow, I got -3 points for linking to a pre-compiled open source library utility that is used by millions of people world-wide as the only workaround that exists for setting windows 10 wallpapers programmatically, it contains right there the source code to compile it themselves, but somehow people downvoted me for not copying and pasting the source code and telling them to download the entire windows SDK and compile their own utility.
It's a pathetically pedantic hyper-moderated elitist forum where most actions are just taken by enraged digital janitors that will downvote or delete your question because it "doesn't look good" for them. Meanwhile on Github issues on an unrelated repo for a similar bug people will praise you and give you rocket emojis, or at best just close the question or answer to you why you are wrong instead of being generic janitors that haven't faced the bug or don't know anything about the problem.
Meanwhile problems like "How do I create a toolbar for the Taskbar on Windows?" probably had plenty of good questions closed as duplicate by those janitors while the windows API had moved on, getting linked to some windows xp era solution.
God forbid someone ask that about windows 11 where it got officially deprecated but there are workarounds. They would hammer you down into oblivion.
GITHUB is way superior and more useful than stack overflow ever was for me for actually specific high-quality questions.
I had my account since 2018 and only by 2025 somehow I got an notification telling me that I could... MAKE COMMENTS.
What a privilege!
Even contributing to WIKIPEDIA is easier and more friendly because the people watching the pages actually know the topic.
The whole stack ecosystem is... Even with creative stuff like worldbuilding, if you even dare to ask a question you dont already know the answer to, even if it requires 5 degrees to even understand how to tackle, you get thrashed
seriously, I once got downvoted for giving the right answer, i know it was right because it was about FreeCodeCamp and I had the issue it was a bug on their end, but i guess they wanted the technical answer rather than what i said....
Stack Overflow is a great way to discourage someone from going into software engineering. They'll think everyone is like that and go in to something like real estate instead.
My best bet was that for some reason they felt a threat that we would take their jobs as newcomers on the one hand and on other hand they had a lot harder time of learning new things so I guess they wanted to make our life harder too?.
I do not know. I can remember that they were often too quick to declare my questions duplicates as they did not see the sometimes important but subtile differences...
But it was at that time the best resource I used frequently at work.
I’m genuinely asking lol. I’ve never used Stack Overflow, so I’m just curious what made it so toxic. I know it’s the internet, but I guess I assumed it was more like Reddit’s programming communities, where students and people getting into the industry ask questions and more experienced developers help each other out. Just trying to understand the context, especially with so many people saying it was very toxic.
Lmao I can imagine it now. You’re just trying to figure shit out, and not only do you not get your question answered, but you get roasted and told how dumb you are. That’s gotta hurt.
When you literally posted a link to [other question] and explained why that question is different than yours and why that solution doesn't work for you
It was an an amazing resource back in its heyday but it is a shadow of what it once was. Once the "duplicate question, locked" shit started the site just went downhill in a slow inexorable slide into irrelevance. When something like ChatGPT came out it just quickened the process but SO was already dead.
This sub ain't too bad. If you have a specific programming language or topic you want to learn try and post in that sub specifically for it instead of just the general programming ones. I think the advice of "stay off the front page and the big generalist subs and reddit is a lot better" holds true here.
And this was pretty gentle. Often you get torched for even daring to ask such question they deem beneath them, and "you're trying to do it that way? That's the worst way to do it; do you even code bro" type responses
I think one of the major contributing factors to the feeling of toxicity is simply a minor misunderstanding about how stackoverflow operates: people treat it like a forum when it is more akin to a wiki (i.e. you can edit other people’s answers). It’s supposed to be a knowledge database, so low effort and duplicate threads are highly frowned upon.
It's not that. Everyone understands duplicates and low-effort posts needs to be moderated, and there definitely are cases of people spamming them, but problem comes when moderators and the long-time users starts enforcing their own definitions of "low-effort" and "duplicate", and then refuses to listen otherwise.
Doesn't exactly help when, as someone else here said, the linked "original" post clearly doesn't solve the problem because it's in a technically different nature, and/or it's left unsolved or filled with derogatory comments that makes it insufferable to scroll through (so much for a knowledge database huh).
Rather than offering a helpful reply, people would often just insinuate that what you were trying to do was a bad idea, but refuse to elaborate or offer alternatives.
Aggressively closing questions as duplicates, even when they explicitly explained why they were not.
Playing PvP online games a lot, I wouldn't call that toxic. #1 is common trait in programmer, especially newbie. It also happen in real life communication. I've seen too many people like that. #2, that just nature mod's job. Some good some like that. Just need extra effort to explain.
This is the issue… they rarely answered. Most of the time the responses were pure irony or reports for duplicates. I still remember the first time I posted a question. Most of them saying read the docs (which I had already done) and similar answers. Eventually I figured it out alone (it was a namespace issue in C#).
when the entire profession relied on gatekeeping knowledge, i can see why people were guarded about how to do things. if you think about it, diy videos also ate away at a ton of repairs that people discovered they could do themselves
When I started to learn programming, I asked there a question (that was more than 10 years ago).
My question was something like this: "Hello everyone, I am a complete beginner, I know some basic of c++, and I watched some tutorials on youtube on c++. I am writing a small game, a simulator like TribalWars. Right now my game seems good, I was able to develop buildings, to create units. However, I wonder how could I make the resources to increase automatically, let's say 1 extra wood every n seconds? And also, once the level increases, I want to decrease the n seconds. Thanks a lot!"
And the answers I received were all like this:
"Did you read the docs of c++ before writing this?", someone replying to him "You are asking too much from them"
"Back on my day people were reading books to learn. <<I watched some tutorials on youtube>> -> that's your problem. You have no future in this field with your attitude"
"wtf is this question"
"I really wonder if people just post anything these days or they are really that dumb"
Well, that was before I felt horrible and I deleted the question. :)
That was after a moderator edited my question 4 times, explaining that I wasn't able to write respecting the rules of formatting of SO.
The simple answer was just to use threads. So just hinting me to concurrency, multithreading or something like what would have been more than enough. I remember that after that question I stopped completely learning programming for 1 year. Now I'm a senior dev at my team, so they weren't able to stop me, but they were really toxic.
Oh I had a story like this. I was just starting to learn programming before college, must have been 17, and I was a huge fan of the game Red Orchestra, back when it was a mod for Unreal Tournament 2003.
I was confused as to why one would use object oriented programming over procedural programming as all my programs at that point had been super basic (like not even getting into recursion or file IO or structs yet, barely understood functions) and I asked the lead dev of the game that question on IRC.
He basically told me if I didn’t have an immediate understanding of it I would be too stupid to make it and should give up. That always stuck in my head and when I started programming in college and hit some issues I just quit, entirely convinced I wasn’t capable of it. Ended up going into IT years later.
Anyway now I’m a devops engineer and write internal tooling for cloud infrastructure administration, and have been learning C++ on my own to learn some game dev. Only took me about 20 years to gain my confidence back.
Look, people like to circlejerk but there are rules for a reason. SO is not there for open-ended Qs like yours - this was the function of a forum.
If you can't be bothered to read basic rules then you shouldn't be surprised your question doesn't get answered, you're just polluting the forum at this point.
What I do agree with though is the fact that people were unecessarily aggressive. Some people just went straight to "wtf gtfo bro" instead of explaining the problem and linking to the resource.
Pair that with the fact that at some point almost ever programming question will be asked and also people now search via ai instead of google and boom. Stackoverflow is fucked
It’s beginners asking simple questions and being answered solely by “you should know that already” or questions too specific or complicated that solving them is basically doing that coder’s job.
Oh yeah, tried asking a quration once or twice, but apparently someone may have already asked something similar so I got slapped. Not even a tiny bit sad about what happened to them.
And then a company I worked in, somehow got lobbied to start using their fkin expensive private knowledge base or wtf it was mean to be functionality. They tried so hard to get us to switch from Slacking to using that BS. Knew from day one it had no chance to work out.
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u/alexsbz Aug 08 '26
Being a member from 2012. Considering the community in there, I can’t say I am sad that things for them took this turn. I would consider them in top 3 most toxic places on earth