Stackoverflow – gotta love the quick answers, just make sure your questions fall in line with the Stack Nazi’s who will close your questions to get a bit of honor.
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Michael's Techbox 
In all fairness, Kris Erickson is an operative planted by 4chan in operation “FUBAR” a former campaign to smear SO.
The others I’m not sure about, they may just be douchebags but from what I understand there are multiple operatives of FUBAR that have the power to close questions.
The chans are getting ready to launch another massive strike, this time FLOODING StackOverflow with spam, irrelevant questions, and closed questions. From what I understand there is also a planned DDOS that is supposed to last 24hrs.
The date of operation SNAFU, a follow-up of FUBAR is believed to be August 12th 2010.
To be honest SO if a necessary evil to me filled with egotistical people who want nothing else then to force their ideals on how a question should be asked and how people should talk. In fact I hate StackOverflow, I would be happier if the website just went away and died and we could go back to forums.
I have tried and failed in asking questions/ trying to help people in the stack community. It is defiantly not a place for free information sharing and if you’re new to writing code like I am just forget it. Every question I ask is normally referred to as homework and if I try to point someone in the right direction I get slaughtered. I am currently banned from asking questions. I have asked 6 questions and have no down votes on them but since they have not been up voted either I can no longer ask. I don’t get it. They apparently want to increase their user base but they should clearly post a sign “Only geniuses need apply”.
I have to agree. The Stack Exchange websites are billed as a “free and open” exchange of information, but in actuality these sites are overrun with a select few members who are just trying to score points, “badges”, and moderator status in attempt to appear as “experts” and gain freelance work.
For example, check out this member’s activity, which instead of contributing helpful technical answers, consists solely of acting like a judge on other people’s answers:
http://stackexchange.com/users/85265/andrew-barber?tab=activity
If you are a new member and post an answer, expect to receive immediate criticism, edits, and decrees from members like this trying to increase their point level. If you disagree or question them, then they’ll gang up on you like files, including starting a “meta question” where they’ll publicly flame you. Complaints to the anonymous site administrators (aka, the “team”) will just get ignored too.
If you have information to share, you’re better off starting a blog or finding a more impartial, truly open site not overrun by ambitious members trying to increase their elitist status.
they are good with simple mysql, php, javascript questions but they are rookies at best. You actually have to find the correct person at the correct time to get a good hint and not an answer. Your unlikely to find complicated answers. You’ll get a quicker response than most forums and honeslty i don’t even know that many code forums sites except stackoverflow. Will they answer a simple question? Yes. Will they answer a complicated one ? NO. Even if they know the answer they aren’t going to give it to you. I find that stackoverflow is full of rookies whom i had to teach how to do things by figuring out my own answers. They sometimes give me hints but thats about it. Some are good in Mysql questions. Maybe i’ve asked to may hard questions and was and expert while they were rookies but based on my experience they didn’t meet my expectations. Though stackoverflow has a collection of questions that were already created answered by the right person in the past, your unlikely to get new answers unasked. Should you use it if your a beginner AND YOUR QUESTIONS ARE REALLY COMPLICATED, YES-YOU WILL GET YOUR QUESTION answered.
they are good with simple mysql, php, javascript questions but they are rookies at best. You actually have to find the correct person at the correct time to get a good hint and not an answer. Your unlikely to find complicated answers. You’ll get a quicker response than most forums and honeslty i don’t even know that many code forums sites except stackoverflow. Will they answer a simple question? Yes. Will they answer a complicated one ? NO. Even if they know the answer they aren’t going to give it to you. I find that stackoverflow is full of rookies whom i had to teach how to do things by figuring out my own answers. They sometimes give me hints but thats about it. Some are good in Mysql questions. Maybe i’ve asked to may hard questions and was too much of an expert while they were rookies but based on my experience they didn’t meet my expectations. Though stackoverflow has a collection of questions that were already created answered by the right person in the past, your unlikely to get new answers unasked. Should you use it if your a beginner AND YOUR QUESTIONS AREN’T REALLY COMPLICATED, YES-YOU WILL GET YOUR QUESTION answered.
Most of the time they hate new users.
New users just don’t know how to ask questions. They either ask questions that can be already found on SO, are not really programming questions or are just horribly written. A beginner that doesn’t even care to read a book or online tutorial (free) shouldn’t complain about their question not getting answered. Taking the easy route will get you nowhere.
This is why I’m trying a bit to avoid Stack Overflow. They have most of the answers I’m looking for, but the posters always find some way to make it way too complicated (I’m often around C# programming).
For instance, if a guy were to ask “Should I use a string or an integer?”, the post usually contain unneccessary stuff like “if var is a bool, throw an exception and let the user know they f**ked up”. Yes, they are very strict, but you usually don’t get stuff that gets straight to the point there.
Three out of four of you examples where closed by the same person that asked the question. That seems a bit suspicious to me?
Didn’t even notice that, and it is off topic to what is being discussed.
This is anything *but* off topic. Three out four of what you call “Stack Nazis” hate themselves so much they close their own questions. That invalidates your entire point.
I think you get some reputation/awards by closing questions. So some users post a question only to close it themselves after
This is still true as of the last quarter of 2017.
(>.<)
One place I see a tiny bit of light is in the non-mainstream tags. I used to answer Django and Python questions — but realized that I have a lot better time when I answer the more esoteric stuff like "database-design", "postgres", "erlang", "mercury", "graph-database", "rust" and so on. This is especially true when the question has not been tagged with a ton of other mainstream tags — as that only brings the attention of the SO nazis.
Looking over this blog post I was struck by the timestamps. Closed, POW! in like 20 minutes to an hour. I think the times are actually shrinking on SO in certain language tags like Python and Java — though R seems magically resistant to this effect, probably because the people who have a lot of knowledge about R are actually using R and care a bit more about helping someone VS “defending the patch” so to speak.
I honestly don’t get what the issue with closing questions in this way is. I have never had a question of mine closed (with the exception of a few duplicates, in which case I was grateful as I got the answer I wanted anyway), as I have always made sure to look up a solution before asking, and have always made sure to provide sufficient detail. This is true both for SE sites for subjects I am completely ignorant in, as well as ones which are related to my specialty. Is that not what should be done by everyone? If someone is new to programming or any other SE subject, they should be doing that as well. If their question gets closed unfairly, they should reword it so that it contains more detail. It’s just following the recommendations of the famous ESR essay on how to ask questions.
Not only that, but I usually use a guest account for each question or answer, since I don’t really like having a persistent account on any website if I can help it, so to veteran SE users, I am always a new user.
I do agree that there are some questions which are borderline, but probably should not have been closed. They are often borderline enough that they can be fixed just by changing the wording to make it a bit more professional and concise. Perhaps it’d be helpful to have closed questions (that are not duplicates) still be open to answers for X hours/days/weeks, and re-opened if they get high quality answers and enough upvotes in that time period. If they don’t, then have the closed status lock itself, the way it does not. That seems like a good solution to me. I just don’t see the problem as that serious.
Stack Overflow are Nazi lovers… Seriously….
Pronouns get you suspended, Nazi’s are OK: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341214
Censorship: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/341216/checkout-this-censorship
Very accurate. I find the energy of the whole site is just wise-asses throwing sh*t whenever they can. It’s like, for starters, if someone is here it means they are already trying to learn and improve and that’s an accomplishment in itself. People there, in general, have the lowest vibe – only matched by youtube haters type of comments.
Everybody should calm down and not read questions if they’re going to get upset just because someone is not an expert.
Useful page but I hope it gets replaced by a more inclusive and friendly platform that actually cares about humanity improving as a whole.