What you see as elitism is mostly simple curating. You can't store everything because it makes retrieving value from the store that much more difficult. It's the same with wikipedia and other public content repositories. People cry elitism and gatekeeping but without curation you eventually end up with a haystack of mediocre looking for a needle.
This “curation” is what is killing SO. Software is soft. It changes. There is no “one true answer for all time”. It’s honestly sad how many times I search for an answer, only to see the exact question I’m looking for closed as duplicate, then when I look at the “duplicate” I see that it’s an out of date answer.
Stack Overflow could have solved the problem of duplication so many ways. Why not categorize and bucket duplicate answers? They could have even had yearly recurring questions with the most up to date answer! Why not add beginner/hobby/expert rankings to questions so that the people answering don’t get sick of seeing beginner questions all the time?
There is so much SO could have done, instead they rested on their laurels and now they’re left with an out of date repository. What use is a curated repository if it will only help me solve problems with solutions from a decade ago?
Who says the solutions from a decade ago are not still correct or the best way to solve a problem? Just because ChatGPT regurgitates something today with the words moved around doesn't mean it contains "new" insights.
I agree in part, but why aren't other moderated outlets where users can ask technical questions given the same label? Reddit, Quora and HN are also curated, are content removals on these site taken as elitist? Even if these places are less heavily moderated, I have no trouble surfacing relevant answers using any search engine's in-site search.
I am not talking about QA quality on any of these sites here, but the elitist stigma that has seemingly followed SO for so long.
> why aren't other moderated outlets where users can ask technical questions given the same label
The exact label aside for a moment, reddit and HN mods often face backlash for their actions. But beyond that, Wikipedia and SO stand out in this regard because of their transparency regarding the curation. Mostly, reddit curation happens in the background, without much explanation. SO and Wikipedia basically spell out their actions and reasoning.
Another difference is that with reddit and HN, you have no real recourse. At least with Wikipedia (I'm not too familiar with SO policies in this regard) you can appeal decisions, open discussions about policies, etc.
I have to agree with GP - people often mistake the 'bureaucracy' of sites like Wikipedia and SO as something unnecessary that the editors force on everyone, but the fact is, it's necessary to create and maintain a high-quality repository of information.
> SO and Wikipedia basically spell out their actions and reasoning
You're able to appeal on SO as well. It's interesting to think about a situation where moderation decisions would be more in 'the background', as you say (like Reddit/HN), and whether this takes away from the perceived 'elitism' some moderation practices are accused of.
In my experience on the above sites, and as a (small) community manager, it absolutely plays into it. A lot of people just instinctively respond negatively to displays of authority.
On the other hand, I think it's an important aspect of a community/platform if the goal of that platform is to be transparent and open, which I think is an important aspect of SO and Wikipedia, and I hope more platforms would adopt that view. I think whatever "elitist" perception such platforms have to suffer is well worth having high-quality, open platforms.
(I will say that no platforms are perfect of course, including SO or Wikipedia; there's plenty of criticisms to go around about specific policies and decisions. See: TFA :P)
This is an insightful observation, and a problem we struggled with for years on Stack Overflow: if you keep moderation quiet and anonymous, there's a lot less criticism, seemingly less hurt feelings... But also very little correction. The Star Chamber works great until corruption sets in; finding a good balance between secrecy and transparency is a challenge.
For years, moderators signed their names to messages like the one cited in the article. After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail... That particular bit of transparency was eliminated - the cost was too high for the limited benefit. OTOH, it used to be very difficult to find your own deleted posts but that has slowly gotten better (including visibility into who deleted them) - turns out the benefit there was substantial (identifying wrongly-deleted posts & curbing over-enthusiastic curators), while harassment has been mostly limited to occasional grousing.
> After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail
This is why I'll never use my real name casually on the Internet, and why the idea of widespread identity verification on the Internet scares the crap out of me.
I actually strongly prefer Wikipedia to SO, on Wikipedia the old now-wrong content can just get edited out, on SO you'll have to dig through all the 300-point popular answers from 2012 to find the new answer that says "yeah none of that is right anymore, instead do this"
Their curation blows. The whole premise of having a canonical answer to a question is dumb. Most programming languages and libraries are always in flux. The whole nature of many questions changes over time.
StackOverflow is a tyranny of mediocrity. It is a bunch middling programmers shitting on newbies, and driving away experts because you get severely punished for not being mediocre.
I had a question closed as a duplicate for being too similar to another question that I directly cited in my question as being sublty different and not applicable. (Because I anticipated some idiot closing my question...and they went and did it anyway)
