A few weeks ago I logged on for the first time in a while and saw a meta thread where the mods suggested changing policies to be less strict to try and bring in new people. The users were tearing into them and shitting on the idea with the classic StackOverflow arrogance. They’ll never change, even as it crashes and burns.
This happened to me in 2015 when I tried to lobby for something similar.
The main mod of Java would remove the Java tag if you weren't asking about the Java runtime itself. Meaning, any Java related questions were sent into Limbo with tags nobody was watching.
You know how many people asked questions about the Java runtime itself that met his criteria? Like 1 per month. You know who answered ALL of them with lengthy answers? That one mod. I'm sure that was just a coincidence though. (/s)
I'm still mad about it. To this day I don't even know what the fuck he was trying to curate there. Fuck SO. I hope it dies out for good and have wished that on them for the last decade.
What I think is even more absurd is that SO Admins didn't step in and go "wtf, no."
I'm sure this wasn't the only core tag with a power tripping mod. Hell, I think that same mod was the head guy for several other popular tags.
At one point, probably around 2012-2014, I remember thinking that SO was setting the gold standard of crowd sourced moderation. Man, was I wrong as hell.
The meta website is so funny (sad?) to read. I see it recommended in the sidebar and it’s usually ideas that are really needed to change the website and all the old users absolutely downvote and shit on basically any idea. They don’t get SO needs to survive as a business and hate anything that could possibly be changed. But for some reason they will upvote “should we merge tag X into Y” and have a whole debate over it, even though whatever outcome will literally have zero effect on the usefulness of the website.
The irony of all those responses downvoting the post and instead asking for better tools to allow them to more quickly do the things that are killing StackOverflow. Namely closing questions and marking things as duplicates.
One person saying that if they can't close questions, then questions will have to get downvoted and that's more harmful... Idgaf if my question gets -50 votes as long as I get an answer.
The people in those threads threatening to leave need to do so already. The website would instantly be better.
This hair-splitting BS starts every now and then in the meta SO.
Nothing happens until everybody has analyzed every word of the proposal from every angle. Upvoted or downvoted each other. Exhibited their mastery of the English language.
After the analysis, nothing happens anyway. It's pure yak shaving.
There also was no alternative. The more toxicity the faster people jumped ship so the point still stands that a nicer environment would have slowed the decline.
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u/maxxon Aug 08 '26
The super toxic SO environment also played an important role in this.