This is just another anecdote. But here goes.

My experience was that there was a long period where your complaint was quite true.

I believe that they have heard this complaint enough and have lightened up a little. There are still more and stricter rules than most sites, but the obsession with pruning duplicates seems to have cooled.

And my opinion as someone with high reputation is that letting in silly questions has ruined the site and made me stop using it. SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher, it's a place for interesting knowledge sharing and if the knowledge is drowned in noise, well it's just noise then.

Moderation has ruined the site for me.

Stupid people don't realize they are stupid. When they can't understand a question they conclude there's something wrong with the question, not with them. And since they believe the question is silly, they happily close-vote the question.

This way they close questions which require specialized knowledge, experience, or deep understanding of the subject. Precisely the kind of questions I consider interesting to answer.

Sometimes I managed to undelete such questions, but SO made it easy to delete and hard to undelete.

Examples of the questions where I succeeded: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/57064879/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/57323981/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/65025858/revisions

In many more cases I haven't bothered. Sometimes, moderators killed questions so fast that I discovered that while trying to post my answer.

The first question for example is what would be a low-quality question in SO, and could easily have been a homework assignment. It doesn't show any effort from your side, you just pose the question and expect other people to answer it fully, without explaining what you attempted, why it worked/didn't work, where you got stuck, etc.

> It doesn't show any effort from your side, you just pose the question

You probably assumed I asked that question? If so, the assumption was incorrect, I answered it.

> without explaining what you attempted, why it worked/didn't work, where you got stuck

I don't think any of that is possible to do. The question, and my answer, are too simple to decompose into smaller parts. Not enough runway to start and get stuck.

> expect other people to answer it fully

My expectation was rather different. I wrote my answer on Jul 16, 2019, and expected it to stay there.

Instead, on the next day some people have decided the question was bad, and closed it. Then on the next month, some other people have deleted it, along with my answer.

To close it, 5 people clicked once/each. To undelete it, I spent quite a few hours. Sadly, that's not a rare exception: moderation on SO is horrible.

Ah sorry, if you answered it it's totally different, sorry for assuming the question was yours! Some of my best answers are also on "simple questions".

The question is asking about the best way of doing X, which has a clear substep of "any way of doing X". Not only that, it's asking about a code solution, not just maths/combinatronics. Not a single line of code in a question about finding the optimal (not any) solution for doing some algebra in code is, IMHO, reason enough to close it.

Edit: for example, I'm not asking and so have no stakes on the question but can already try to think about brute-forcing it, which already shows more effort than the author SHOWS at attempting a solution.

> asking about the best way of doing X

To be fair, English is not my native language. But when I see a question “what’s the best way of doing X”, when it doesn’t have any criteria for what’s the best would be, and no other ways of doing X in the question, I consider “what’s the best way” part a redundant figure of speech. I view such questions an equivalent of “what’s a good enough way of doing X”.

> it's asking about a code solution, not just maths/combinatronics

Please read this: https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic According to that article, questions about math which don’t imply a code solution are offtopic on stackoverflow.com. They should be closed, and possibly moved to other stachexchange sites. According to that article, the OP’s question is good. The question was about a specific programming problem, and is a practical, answerable problem unique to software development.

> can already try to think about brute-forcing it

I’m not sure that’s actually possible to do.

Again, they are asking how to solve a math problem, in code. That's a two big-step problem, no attempt to solve it on their own. Big problems:

- Does not show any attempt or willingness to try to solve the problem first on their own.

- Does not even give any indication of where the problem comes from, why it might be interesting, etc., it's just a "how to calculate X?", which could easily be a homework problem.

- It is about finding a (possibly) mathematical solution, and then implement it in C++. Two very big and different problem, asking the audience to do them both. Again no attempt to fix either of these two problems on their own.

- I'll concede the optimal thing might be a language issue.

> I’m not sure that’s actually possible to do.

But that's not my point, my point is that I already showed more willingness to try to solve this problem than OP. And THAT is a big problem. It's not on topic about any of those points, in fact if you remove the bit where OP is asking us to give them the full solution in C++ it could be a good question for the Mathematics SE!

> attempt or willingness to try to solve the problem first on their own… indication of where the problem comes from, why it might be interesting

None of that is required to ask questions on stackoverflow. For details, read “How do I ask a good question?” and “What types of questions should I avoid asking?” help articles. You’re inventing arbitrary restrictions.

Another thing is, “why it might be interesting” is subjective. Personally, I found the question interesting, that’s why I have answered it. You probably think otherwise, but note it only takes 3-5 votes to kill the question. Any question at all is guaranteed to have at least 3-5 people on that site who find it uninteresting, opinion-based, need more focus, duplicate, etc.

> Two very big and different problem, asking the audience to do them both.

Two big problems don’t have solutions which can be both explained in 3 short sentences. As you can see from my answer, the problem formulated in that question has such solution.

> I already showed more willingness to try to solve this problem than OP

You have not. However, you have demonstrated willingness to delete interesting questions based on arbitrary and subjective criteria, despite the question is perfectly in line with the stackoverflow guidelines. Which BTW is very on-topic, because I think that’s the main reason for the fall of SO being discussed here.

> SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher

This, to me, is the mistake that SO made. Developers helping developers is the engine that runs the site, that's why people come.

The body of interesting knowledge is an emergent property of the support forum/peer-to-peer teacher.

Eventually they tried to put the cart before the horse and traffic has dropped.

It's OK that you're done answering "how do I change font color with jQuery" for the thousandth time and are only interested in the occasional very interesting question, because there are people behind you who do want to answer that question. That will help them grow to get where you are.

If we don't allow new generations of users to go through that process we went through, then StackOverflow has an expiration date.

Perl is a good example because it's stagnant. Googling Python or Java? If the result is up to date, it's a low quality content farm. If it isn't from a content farm, it's a page from 2008 that is no longer relevant at all!

Perl has TIMTOWTDI as a core principle so most of its users are not going to complain about doing things the “wrong” way.

"There Is More Than One Way To Do It"?

> stagnant

I would call that "stable" :) Or "good enough, that it doesn't need constant fixing" :)

Fair enough!

I'd suggest 'mature'.

In its mid-thirties and settled down?

Echos my experience perfectly. It's actually impossible to ask a question and get an answer, also impossible to ask a clarifying question on an existing question/answer.

That makes it much, much less useful than it otherwise could be.

I found the people who took on Rust questions to be actively hostile on SO when I started learning Rust. The Reddit community was much better, so I’ve tended to hang out there for Rust q&a. Most of my time in the Stack Overflow world these days is mostly in the more specialized StackExchange sites. tex.se tends to be pretty good, as does latin.se japanese.se seems dedicated to stomping out anything that is remotely a translation question.

Reminds me of being on IRC in 97 asking questions about Assembly. When someone did finally respond it was "Did you read the manual yet"? It's ironic that SO became what it was replacing.

But did you even _try_ to read the manual? Did you lift a finger to figure out what the issue is? Some of the best answers are ones that directly quote the manual and then add clarity since manual language can be terse.

Yes I showed him the exact page that talked about my issue and he never responded. Still a silly response. He could have answered it in 30 seconds and saved me 10 hours.

I think ChatGPT is amazing foe this because you will rarely have to deal with anyone who has this type of attitude when you need help in the future

I was on IRC circa 2002 asking C++ questions. Next year I was the one answering. Weirdly best time of my life.

Bravo. This is the reason I deleted my account. My last post even specified "I am not asking about B,C, or D."

> Closed, duplicate of "How to do C".

ouch. as a former user of 10 years, I felt that. so true.

Honestly still much better than asking a forum. The hostility from forum regulars always seems more intense--less masked as a "terse down to brass tacks" attitude and more-so blatant laziness, misplaced frustration, etc. Also, forum posters tend to waste much more time as every other post is likely to be a joke or a tangent idea, as if it were casual dialogue in a chatroom.

The same mechanisms that make SO kind of brutal have also helped revolutionize asynchronous online Q&A.

I was equating this to the rise of chatgpt