Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

eronth@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• bytesonbike@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I was contributing to SO in 2014-2017 when my job wanted our engineers to be more “visible” online.

  I was in the top 3% and it made me realize how incredibly small the community was. I was probably answering like 5 questions a week. It wasn’t hard. For some perspective, I’m making like 4-5 posts on Lemmy A DAY.

  What made me really pissed was how often a new person would give a really good answer, then some top 1% chucklefuck would literally take that answer, rewrite it, and then have it appear as the top answer. And that happened to me constantly. But again, I didn’t care since I’m just doing this to show my company I’m a “good lil engineer”.

  I stopped participating because of how they treated new users. And around 2020(?), SO made a pledge to be not so douchy and actually allow new users to ask questions. But that 1% chucklefuck crew was still allowed to wave their dicks around and stomp on people’s answers. So yeah, less “Duplicate questions”, more “This has been answered already [link to their own answer that they stole]”.

  So you still had the most sweaty people control how things work. And you can’t grow a community like that.

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