by zahlman | 2025-05-09 13:52:46+00:00
> Back when I was active on it - in late 00s to mid 10s - I absolutely did "debug code for others" when the problem was interesting enough to warrant it.

Yes, lots of people did, including myself.

When I got tired of it, and then came back years later and seen what had happened to the Q&A, I understood that it had been a mistake to do so, and eventually realized - through extensive research on the site meta, Stack Exchange meta, etc. - that it was the same mistake that the site had originally specifically sought to avoid.

And I saw that there had been years of arguing over the labels for close reasons - leading for example to the retirement of "not a real question", and the more or less direct replacement of "too broad" with "needs more focus", and the rather more approximate replacement of "too localized" with "not reproducible or caused by a typo" - because of a collective realization of the real purpose of closing questions, and of the value of being selective. Not just in terms of answer-writers getting frustrated - because we also discovered that some people just don't, and are happy to spend amazing amounts of time trying to read the minds of people who can barely put together a coherent sentence and turn out to be asking about the same common issue for the N+1th time.

And I saw that there had been years of arguing over whether expecting a "minimum level of understanding" was the right phrasing (it's really about the effect that has on question-writing, not just on whether the OP is likely to be able to understand a correctly-written answer - although that does weigh in the calculation), which led to a trial close reason being implemented for a couple of weeks in 2013.

And I saw that there had been years of arguing over whether question difficulty (in either direction) is a disqualifying factor (it isn't, but we won't write a tutorial instead of answering a concrete question, nor will we complete multi-part coding work to order), or the reason why the OP wants an answer (generally not relevant, but see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/329321).

And I saw that by the time I got back, quite a few things had been more or less settled and reasoned out, but that the general community was not on the same page as the people who had been actually thinking about these things. Obviously I didn't agree with everything immediately, and obviously there are still disagreements among those who are broadly speaking on the same page. But I could see the vision.

And I realized that before I left, I had been using the site without putting any effort into trying to understand it. Like most users, I had been "the general community".

(And then I saw that there was tons of unpleasantness between users and the company itself, and unfit-for-purpose site software, and a totally broken reputation system that had never been properly reconsidered. Which is how I ended up checking out Codidact as an alternative. But most of what I say about Stack Overflow isn't really about Stack Overflow; it's about "the Stack Exchange model" - the "Q&A site" as I understand it - which alternative sites still implement.)

We didn't get here spontaneously. Everything was extensively discussed and the discussion is extensively documented, with carefully considered rationale where possible.

> If that is the current culture on SO, that's very unfortunate.

Obviously I disagree.