There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.

SO didn't ban you for asking a bad question, either. It just closed the question, and then if you kept doing it you might face restrictions on asking more, which, yes, ended with something far too harsh.

If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.

But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.

But it charges you for both the question and answer.

In a dystopian fufure where a few or ONE AI company bested the rest, the company might banned you from using the AI for coding because the AI thinks you're incompetent or require you to pass a test to activate the coding function, because it's dangerous.

Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.

I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.

I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.

People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

Was it so hostile?

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.