You claimed to gain value from discussion that was explicitly against policy, while also claiming to use the site as intended.
> Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.
You were not using the site as intended if you believed that you should be able to get a personalized answer to your question without having to fix it to meet standards first.
> As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now
I'm glad you found something that allowed you to have the experience you wanted. This does not in any way change the fact that, based on the available evidence, you did not use Stack Overflow the way it was designed and intended to be used, but rather - like most people - in the way that you supposed it ought to be used.
> Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-)
I agree. The company keeps trying to mislead people about how the site is intended to be used, in pursuit of profit.
But Atwood and Spolsky were overall pretty clear about this. They were much more clear about describing the kinds of things they wanted to not be.
And the company staff are, quite simply, not the people who get to decide what that purpose is.
Not now that there are 29M users, with 100k of them eligible for basic curation actions, and a separate meta discussion site with 50k Q&A entries (just for Stack Overflow specifically, and another 100k for the network generally, which includes a ton of old Stack Overflow-specific stuff for historical reasons), and a 16-year-long history of a community figuring these things out among themselves.
> “schön sterben” (to die beautifully)
Oh, the site absolutely will die.
Because because the curators are also leaving, because the company continues to be hostile to them - trying to make the site work like another Quora, repeatedly trying to sneak in random uses for AI; repeatedly claiming to have listened to the community in discussion and then doing yet another thing that demonstrates complete ignorance of the community's most basic positions; repeatedly introducing new channels for user-generated content without even thinking about how spammers will use them; seemingly having no awareness of the work the volunteer community does to fight spam (including large-scale third-party automation) despite being repeatedly told about it; hobbling the mods (the two dozen actual mods) from enforcing the rules....
You claimed to gain value from discussion that was explicitly against policy, while also claiming to use the site as intended.
> Oh, thanks, I feel much better now.
You were not using the site as intended if you believed that you should be able to get a personalized answer to your question without having to fix it to meet standards first.
> As I said, I left SO behind and am much better off with what I have now
I'm glad you found something that allowed you to have the experience you wanted. This does not in any way change the fact that, based on the available evidence, you did not use Stack Overflow the way it was designed and intended to be used, but rather - like most people - in the way that you supposed it ought to be used.
> Which is what common people call "bad marketing" ;-)
I agree. The company keeps trying to mislead people about how the site is intended to be used, in pursuit of profit.
But Atwood and Spolsky were overall pretty clear about this. They were much more clear about describing the kinds of things they wanted to not be.
And the company staff are, quite simply, not the people who get to decide what that purpose is.
Not now that there are 29M users, with 100k of them eligible for basic curation actions, and a separate meta discussion site with 50k Q&A entries (just for Stack Overflow specifically, and another 100k for the network generally, which includes a ton of old Stack Overflow-specific stuff for historical reasons), and a 16-year-long history of a community figuring these things out among themselves.
> “schön sterben” (to die beautifully)
Oh, the site absolutely will die.
Because because the curators are also leaving, because the company continues to be hostile to them - trying to make the site work like another Quora, repeatedly trying to sneak in random uses for AI; repeatedly claiming to have listened to the community in discussion and then doing yet another thing that demonstrates complete ignorance of the community's most basic positions; repeatedly introducing new channels for user-generated content without even thinking about how spammers will use them; seemingly having no awareness of the work the volunteer community does to fight spam (including large-scale third-party automation) despite being repeatedly told about it; hobbling the mods (the two dozen actual mods) from enforcing the rules....
... And it won't be beautiful.
But maybe some of those curators will come to https://software.codidact.com instead.