this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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The funny thing about stack overflow is that the vocal detractors have a kernel of truth to their complaints about elitism, but if you interact with them enough you realize they're often the reason the gate keeping is necessary to keep the quality high.
I used to answer new questions on SO daily a few years back and 50% of all questions are basically unanswerable.
You'd also have the nice September Effect when a semester started and every other question would be someone just copy pasting their homework verbatim and being very surprised we closed it in like a minute.
The thing about that is that literally anyone can answer SO questions. Like try and do that. Pick a language or a tech you're most familiar with, filter that tag and sort by new. Click on every new question. After an hour you'll understand just why most questions have to be closed immediately to keep the site sane.
Whenever I see criticism of SO that's like "oh they'll just close your question for no reason" I can't help but think okay, there's overwhelming chance you're just one of Those and not an innocent casualty of an overeager closer.
I remember in my OS course we were advised to practice good “netiquette” if we were going to go bother the fine folks on stack overflow. Times have changed