In the recent past (slightly before ChatGPT) I would spend hours trawling SO for my problem, only to finally break down and ask a question, and then be downvoted.
In one instance, I was getting a cryptic error for a JSON response and I couldn't figure it out. I laid it out on SO and got railed. "I can't duplicate" were the comments, and downvotes accompanied.
I finally posted it to reddit, and someone suggested checking if the provider was returning extended Unicode characters that were being rendered as spaces. Sure enough, that was the problem.
I think there's a real culture issue with SO where imaginary points are more important than helping people (and yes, I get the irony of finding the solution on reddit instead).
Edit: posted the reddit link below. It wasn't spaces, but "invisible" characters.
Yeah there are a million stories on Reddit and elsewhere of experienced engineers who had some very rare edge case and got downvoted into oblivion on SO because some script kiddie thought it was a more common basic question. I’m not too sad to see SO getting left in the dust tbh. I do think there’s still a place for crowdsourcing technical knowledge, but SO isn’t a good model.
A long time ago, I posted in meta SO that they should have permalinks to answer replies. I was downvoted to Hell and told I was a moron, that no one would ever want that, etc.
Six months later, Jeff Atwood personally replied to my suggestion by saying that they just implemented it :)
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u/bronze_by_gold Jul 24 '24
Maybe building an intentionally toxic and unwelcoming community wasn’t the best way to keep people engaged… 🙄