> I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors.
I also find that there seems to be a cadre of "answerers" who jump on new questions and then get pissy when you don't mark their answer correct because it doesn't actually answer the question. Your normal question will start getting negative votes suddenly at that point.
I also simply find SO quite a lot less useful than it used to be. They don't have a good solution to the "stale answer"--this was correct 5 years ago but is now completely obsolete and incorrect. SO is really only useful for things that appeared in the last year or that haven't changed in the last 10 years.
I look up answers on StackOverflow. I ask questions on IRC or (sometimes, these days) Slack. I don't think I've ever seen a co-worker's question get answered on SO—seems to be kind of a crap shoot. So are my methods but at least I don't have to tend my "karma" on those to be able to use them effectively.
The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.
Stack Overflow is a vehicle for resume improvement and comparison. Someone with 631 rep must certainly be better than someone with 239 rep. It sets a clear goal for how you measure up against the competition. Remeber to up vote your friends from college too.
Now that you've got a job as a contractor, your project manager is trying to find you contracts and up your billable rate... sending out your resume. He's asking you to get your reputation to over 2000 so the resumes can be marketed as "in the top 10% of Stack Overflow Users" or something like that. Everyone else in the office too. The easiest way to do that is to up vote all your co-workers and make trivial edits (guaranteed two rep and can't be down voted).
Documentation was a bonanza! Just add a few words, toss some code and as long as it is a "substantial edit" the reputation will roll in.
This is even more important for those people trying for the elusive remote jobs that get listed on the side of every Stack Overflow page and attach the profile of the person with it.
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How much of that is accurate? I have no idea. Its a story of a hypothetical social group at Stack Overflow that isn't interested in Spolsky vision or the Atwood vision of what the site should be.
It's also a site that has people who try to make a community site and feel that an upvote is the same as a like on Facebook. Make people feel better by up voting their posts (especially if they are down voted).
There's also the "FreELance" where people get a job for beer money and then post every single problem they have to Stack Overflow.
Without any guidance from SO corporate as the final arbitrator of culture, nor the tools for the core group (see "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy") to clearly define the boundaries that exist, the only tool that people have to get people who have a differing philosophy for what the site should be is rudeness. Compound this with far more things for the core group to curate and moderate (trying to keep it from becoming, in their minds, Yahoo Answers)... and, well, you've got Stack Overflow of today.
I also find that there seems to be a cadre of "answerers" who jump on new questions and then get pissy when you don't mark their answer correct because it doesn't actually answer the question. Your normal question will start getting negative votes suddenly at that point.
I also simply find SO quite a lot less useful than it used to be. They don't have a good solution to the "stale answer"--this was correct 5 years ago but is now completely obsolete and incorrect. SO is really only useful for things that appeared in the last year or that haven't changed in the last 10 years.