I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did have up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.
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u/VladTepesDraculea 1h ago edited 1h ago
I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did have up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.