Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there so someone may help me".
11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his gang to downvote me as well, some other guy even threatened to deactivate my account. That is SO now, and I no longer try to engage into that community.
Edit: Looking at how the votes in my question are evolving as we speak, I see that some guys still go in and downvote it more. Read out the question, and check out the really good accepted answer, if you don't think that's valuable information for many programmers out there then I'm at a loss of words.
Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted.
And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.
Good Lord. The sense of entitlement it takes to use language like that and _then_ post it here and expect people will be supportive of your argument. This is a side topic but one I see often. I think it's very important that Europeans/UK/Aussie's realize the "c word" is one of the few swear words that doesn't travel well in the US. It's never used here and is extremely vulgar. So I would not use it on the web unless you are sure that your audience is primarily European and specifically the UK. (Grew up in Australia through University. Lived in Europe. Have lived now in the US a long time)
The Web is indeed global which is my point. The word in question has a very different meaning so best not to use it unless you're prepared for the fallout.
If that is all it takes to piss off a mod, they need to be demodded immediately. That really the weakest insult you can throw. [The insults are more annoying than offensive]
To be clear: your position is that SO needs moderators who don't downvote "cunt" because it's not offensive enough?
Anyway, doesn't matter--throwing insults, weak or strong, deserves downvotes. I don't understand why you're defending his right to be a complete asshat on a moderated forum. It's only just barely even related to the topic at hand, since he earned his downvotes.
I’m happy to say that I downvoted you specifically for that! It’s what I always do whenever there’s a rude remark, regardless of question content. Glad to see you’re getting so many votes now, though.
The history of questions is why StackOverflow is so great. If it were like a normal forum with only time sensitive content it would have gone away like all other technical forums.
Your question is shared with all the future people who have the same problem, it isn't your soapbox to complain in. Your experience with SO is probably fairly minor, the moderators have each had to deal with at least a half dozen people breaking questions to suit their own benefits, it gets tiring quickly.
Please note, closed questions can also be removed from the site.
I have a single Gold Badge in the SO world. It was awarded for an answer that I gave which earned more than 100 up votes[1]. Sadly the question to which I responded has since been closed (for years now). When content that I worked hard to create suddenly disappears from the site because moderators deem it to be "not a good fit", you start to feel it's not worth your time ...
I looked back at version one to see what people would have downvoted/closed for:
'I have tried to do that (by overloading operator[], operator=) but it doesn't seem like I'm going somewhere. Can anyone suggest me a way to achieve this behavior?'
You said you have tried, but you didn't post what you tried, or how it didn't work. This makes your question hard to answer, and essentially means anyone answering is going to have to write your code for you.
You then finished it up with a passive-aggressive FAQ section which was entirely unnecessary, and included 'I want to do it this way, even if there is a better way' - which is just a terrible way to go in asking a question.
StackOverflow gets incredible numbers of questions every day, and the reality is people are not willing to help people who actively make their questions harder to answer. That's not people being assholes, it's people getting burnt out trying to help the 20,000th help vampire (http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/).
Everyone who complains about StackOverflow, in my experience, tends to be someone who wants others to do work for them. Yes, SO doesn't do that. That's by design.
>You said you have tried, but you didn't post what you tried, or how it didn't work.
>by overloading operator[], operator=
It's literally there...
>You then finished it up with a passive-aggressive FAQ section which was entirely unnecessary ... 'I want to do it this way, even if there is a better way'
What's wrong with that? I wanted to achieve a very specific thing. Can you please tell me what is wrong with that?
That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need. Have you ever used SO? When you do you'll see that these questions usually get a lot of responses like:
"Just drop C and go for Python, Python does everything for you XD"
"Just throw Boost in there and you're done [and turn your 1s compile time into 10 minutes] XDDD"
> That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need.
1) Answers on questions aren't just meant to serve you, they're meant to serve people that find the question later. It's incredibly important to note when there's a better way altogether to approach a problem.
2) Askers on SO often exhibit the XY problem. Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; it's ignoring (often) good advice that other people are donating their time to give you.
Honestly, your entire interaction on that question is a prime example of why so many moderators go to the other extreme and become trigger happy. Because anybody would get burnt out dealing day in, day out with people having the same sense of entitlement that you have.
I don't support the abusive behavior that has since been edited out, but I totally get that FAQ. Lots of people who only work in the web framework world don't get that not everyone can just upgrade to the latest whiz-bang thing. If he's on a large team that has standardized on X for their shipping software, he can't fix the problem just by upgrading to a new compiler version.
I understand that it is a really nice side-effect that your questions stay there and can be read later by other people with your same problem, however, be aware that it is a side-effect. Let me quote the first few sentences on their own site:
"With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming."
Yup, every question, not just "the ones you think are popular", every one, including mine. Actually, the more specific and detailed your question is, the better it aligns with the SO philosophy.
>Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; [...]
It is not dickish, I'm just not interested, how is that wrong? It is not; if you actually understood what is good for SO questions, you would see that focused questions are much better than fuzzy ones.
Also you called me a dick for no reason, I don't care because I grew out of those things long ago but apparently you (and some other guys here) haven't, so please leave out the vulgar language; you guys should, at least, live by your own standards.
Yeah of course you will downvote, because you can; what you can't do is to actually add to the conversation by posting a reasonable counter-argument to the things I stated. Have a nice day dude.
You grew out of "dick" but not "cunt"? (And you were called "dickish", not a dick, as long as we're being pedantic. Anyway; side debate, and uninteresting.)
One reason people point posters towards more conventional, extensible, canonical solutions is so that following readers/askers understand that what's being asked is on the fringes of what should be done.
Personally, I also believe SO doesn't always make the right call on what content should stay or go, and some of my meta questions attempt to address this. The bottom line is that people that don't work for them are only participants, and we're not the ones making the rules.
> "Just throw Boost in there and you're done [and turn your 1s compile time into 10 minutes] XDDD"
You know this to be hyperbolic.
My unfortunate experience has been that on a larger scale project, people will eventually desire every feature from a boost container, re-implement it in a buggy fashion, leading to a slower, buggier, poorly designed clone of something boost had.
I eventually started fixing container bugs by rewriting them in terms of boost containers...
Yes, I have used SO, and those responses are rare. If they do happen, they'll get deleted or countered quickly. The 'FAQ' was unnecessary and condescending.
You gave a shorthand description of what you did. You didn't post the code, you didn't explain why it didn't work.
If you can't be bothered to ask a question people can answer, why should anyone bother to answer? You claim SO is a bad community because you get rejected - I counter that you get rejected because you are toxic, and you not being on the site makes everyone else's experience better.
There are a lot of replies on this comment, but I just wanted to add my experience and maybe some advice - I'm TA'ing for a CS class this semester, and we have an open forum for discussion kind of like Stack Overflow. Unfortunately it's content like what you posted in your revisions (expletives, open frustration) that make it unpleasant. The plain fact is that saying things like that does affect strangers, no matter how frustrated you might be - no one wants a public forum with that.
I have had questions like yours before, by the way (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24173094/c-polymorphic-in..., for example), and I kind of agree that it shouldn't have been closed like that. C++ is a confusing language and there was indeed a good amount to learn from the answer to your question. But you definitely could have handled it much better; get some feedback and maybe edit or make a new post with that feedback and you'd be good to go!
All this is going to trying to show you that your attitude is a little belligerent (it's showing on this HN thread again, even), and changing it goes a long way. I've come to the conclusion that the people on my class's forum and you don't really realize that there's something wrong with how you're communicating. But being polite isn't very hard, and I think you almost managed to do it in that SO thread. Take some time to work on your attitude, and you will get much further :)
Please don't take this in the wrong way. It's up to you to change if you'd like; I'm pointing out the benefits and you don't have to if you don't want to.
You got the downvotes for editing your question to complain, including vulgarity in a few instances. People bitching in questions is a lot of peoples pet peeves (because it is frustrating to moderate correctly).
I would agree that "off-topic" is completely incorrect and I can't think of a valid reason to close it.
Ruins what? That question is the kind of thing that helps only you. SO tries to be a site where one person gets an answer, and the same answer can later be found by a thousand people who google.
Your question asks people to help you, with no attempt at making this useful for others. I can see why people downvote such questions.
I have also had many stack overflow commenters come to critique my code for style but no one actually answer the question[1], and it can be rather frustrating because I know that what they are saying will not solve my problem. But I would suggest a little patience. Hopefully someone will come and answer the question after the initial criticisms die down. My question was eventually answered after all.
I don't understand what is "membership" in sites like Google/Twitter/Facebook. I thought that it could be when you have an account in there vs you don't; but how then can you be a "non-member" at Facebook, for instance.
Many people regularly use Google without signing in.
Twitter is admittedly more membership based, but they still have millions of people viewing tweets (especially embeds) without an account.
Facebook is indeed primarily a logged-in experience, but if you look at the numbers you'll see that uniques are less than members. So it's essentially a measure of how many members actually visited that month.
Without knowing the methodology used in the OP, I occasionally visit Facebook (eg, most of the cafes in my area are easier to find on FB than their own site, so I can check opening hours; some businesses post articles or information publicly on FB that's relevant to me) but I don't have an account anymore.
