rerdavies

So much for the long tail! The rate of decline after the advent of AIs is sobering. From 181,000 questions a month at the absolute peak, to less than a thousand a month now!

You need to go deeper. The problem wasn't shitty moderation; it was shitty gamification.

I've seen that too. Not that common, but it certainly happened more than it should. You get a point for close-dup-ing whether you're right or not.

Ironically, in my experience, the alternatives were crap because the people giving the answers were point seekers. Microsoft Tech Support forums come to mind, particularly. No problem with the questions. But significant concerns about the skills of the people giving the answers. Not sure why that is, and why SO managed to get something right when it came to getting quality answers. For a while, anyway.

> We become masters, by moving through being juniors.

Yes this! I found it painful to watch abuse being heaped upon obviously junior programmers. Points should have beem award for mentoring those on the path, not gratuitously rejecting their questions.

Combined with the problem that more correct questions, that were likely to produce more correct answers were closed for further comments when they were incorrectly close-dup-ed. So often you would find the correct answer in the brief window between when the question was asked, and when a member of the self-appointed moderator class had incorrectly close-dup-ed the question. So frustrating!

My personal hate-on for SO: forcing all answers, INCLUDING the code to be licensed under an awkward CC license. Yes, you were "allowed" to dual-license the code in your answer under a more permissive license that doesn't require attribution.

I tried adding an explicit dual license to the code in my answers; but moderators would any answer that tried to do that.

Not so much that I care about the copyright of my code; but more a question of whether I would find a lawsuit from SO on my doorstep because I had neglected to credit SO for three lines of code that somebody ELSE had contributed to SO. A very real problem, given that SO management after the takeover had shown itself to be not really trustable.

It was trivially easy to close dup a question that looked like it was a dup from the title, but much harder to actually read the contents of the questions, and realize that they were not. And you got points even if you were completely wrong. SO would have been much better if there were no close dups at all.

And even if the questions were actually duplicates, far too often the answers would be so out of date that it would be better if the question (and the answers) were allowed to start again from scratch.

And I agree: the "opinion" close was toxic as well.

A tragic gamification failure, that contributed significantly to my drift away from SO.

I think you also need to distinguish between actual users and members of the gamified moderator class: an entire class of SO users whose primary involvement was gratuitously closing questions so that they could get more points, or picking up cheap points by re-formatting the one or two variables you missed in your answer. Often with no real evidence that they had anything but very modest technical skills. Those people. If you don't want to call them moderators, so be it. But I'm not sure what you would call them if not "moderator", whether they had some magical shield that nobody paid attention to or not.

Easy to spot. Just spend some time browsing through the activity of super users with astronomical point scores. It's pretty obvious that they were doing what they were doing to get points, rather than to make the site better or easier to use, many of whom had quite unimpressive technical skills.

The obvious toxic effects of gamification was a substantial contributor to my personal drift away from SO. But what really killed my interest: the toxic effects of close-dup, which produced rapidly accelerating content rot. It is true that, at some point, they started applying penalties to old answers; but that seemed to have no real effect on the toxic effects of "close-dup".

e.g. Questions raised against Android 14 being close-dup-ed against questions that were originally raised against Android 4.0, where the top thee answers, each of which had 1400 upvotes, was that "you can't do that", even though you absolutely could on Android 14.

That and the fact that I had discovered (as I think many others had) that you actually got much better answers if you appended "reddit" to the start of you google search queries, and skipped over the SO answers altogether.

My final point score on SO: somewhere around 8,000 I think. So not a casual user. I'm pretty sure that about 3,000 of those points were given for an answer that applied to Android 4.0, that stopped being accurate in Android 9.0, and I (shamefully) never got around to updating for modern Android tools.

That is indeed the myth that the 1% would have you believe. It is, however, probably good that you have realized that you must moderate your expectations.

I just finished reading a biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I would not otherwise recommend. However, one of the interesting issues it discusses is how English universities in late 16th century provided an illusion of upward mobility for scholarship students, while actually only providing a path to clergy positions in remote parishes that no sensible second son of an aristocrat would find remotely acceptable. Not unlike the "American Dream", in many ways: a false promise held out to keep the masses complacent.

Is it actually possible to find regexes that use PHP-specific features using grep alone?

Maybe try enrolling on your phone instead of your desktop. I had a mighty battle with AppleTV recently trying to sign up for Apple TV (which I would guess uses the same payment system). I suspect the root issue for me was that my copy of Windows boots off a non-encrypted drive, and was being considered as a non-secure connection. (I'm dual-booting with an older version of Ubuntu).

Anyway. Paying on my phone worked the first time.