StackExchange is too Pedantic
A couple of my posts have been about how people are awesome. This post? This is about how I just don't understand a couple of things here and there. No intention to hurt the people involved in the image.
Online communities are amazing. Stackoverflow, stackexchange in particular (not mentioning Reddit here). It is quite a feat to have created a tool that has created such a vast community (Jeff Atwood - the creator of SO - read his blog if you haven't, extremely fun to read!) that follow the rules, attempts to fix those that don't abide by them and continues to grow. It's almost like a world of its own - most people are like the average citizen - they answer questions of things they are good at and cause no trouble. A small percent are the troublemakers - illogical people with little sense who post wrong questions/downvote wrongly or are just plain wrong. There are policemen who make sure rules are enforced - they verify and edit questions, write appropriate comments to help new people , and report questions/comments if need be. Very fancy, and it works. (StackOverflow released a large dataset recently and an interactive board that you could play around with. I didn't have the time to do much then though)
Except.
I find it very difficult to understand the SO/SE community. Partly because of how they pay extreme attention to the minutest of details, so much so that it starts to feel silly. Pedantic. Persnickety.
Go through the image I've posted above.
Then go to the meta question here. Seriously, mister? He created a whole new topic to discuss whether this question was tagged rightly (which IMO is). Fun fact - that question has more answers to that than this post. Is this how much it really matters to people to throw in their 2 cents?
Update.
These SO stats are quite an interesting read. (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-in-moderation?cb=1)
Online communities are amazing. Stackoverflow, stackexchange in particular (not mentioning Reddit here). It is quite a feat to have created a tool that has created such a vast community (Jeff Atwood - the creator of SO - read his blog if you haven't, extremely fun to read!) that follow the rules, attempts to fix those that don't abide by them and continues to grow. It's almost like a world of its own - most people are like the average citizen - they answer questions of things they are good at and cause no trouble. A small percent are the troublemakers - illogical people with little sense who post wrong questions/downvote wrongly or are just plain wrong. There are policemen who make sure rules are enforced - they verify and edit questions, write appropriate comments to help new people , and report questions/comments if need be. Very fancy, and it works. (StackOverflow released a large dataset recently and an interactive board that you could play around with. I didn't have the time to do much then though)
Except.
My photoshop skills sort of suck. I agree :P |
Go through the image I've posted above.
Then go to the meta question here. Seriously, mister? He created a whole new topic to discuss whether this question was tagged rightly (which IMO is). Fun fact - that question has more answers to that than this post. Is this how much it really matters to people to throw in their 2 cents?
Update.
These SO stats are quite an interesting read. (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-in-moderation?cb=1)
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