No, THIS IS WAR. I will not rest until SO is defeated.

FWIW - here's what I have gleaned from my experience at SO and my forum posts where all the regs argue with me:

1. There are rules. The rules must not be flaunted.
2. There are roving bands of regs who delete or downvote answers for very superficial reasons.
3. There is no way to know why your status was degraded.
4. There is no accountability if regs degrade a new user in error.
5. There is no recourse for the new user that was degraded, they can only "earn" their way out of degraded status.
6. I am guessing there is some rep incentive to delete or police answers and posts from new users. These guys are obsessed with their rep points.
7. There is open hostility to new users from some regs.
8. Comments on other answers, which you would think is the easiest way for a new user to get involved, are actually some super-sacred thing that is only allowed after you've answered a bunch of questions. But good luck not getting deleted or downvoted. DO NOT be snarky about how you'd really rather just make a comment. Trust me. Doesn't matter if your answer is actually useful and correct. That's irrelevant and never considered.

Imagine if you joined 2p2 and you could only create threads, but not reply to any threads, until your created threads got upvoted 50 times. That's basically what they're doing. Or say you can't post an image until you jumped through some unclear # of hurdles. It's stupid and it's like they've deliberately created rules that make no sense to make it really hard for new users.

Ok I know I'm being insane. And I'm sort of drunk.

But in all seriousness - the whole attitude is just weird. They act like you should be freaking begging to contribute. My theory is there was one or two years there where companies were saying "Show us your Stack Overflow" - which resulted in: a) it all went to their head, b) users started trying to game or spam SO, which caused them to created all these draconian rules.

Ok finally getting to the bottom of all this. Basically I wasn't allowed to comment, so I made an answer politely letting the poster know that their answer here was propagating an obvious typo in the AWS docs:

The last line should be: logout_uri=https://myclientapp.com/myclient/logout

I guess I should have tried to edit their post instead, which I had no idea you could do. So instead of letting me know how to do it right, someone just deleted my answer and then put me in answer jail. They also didn't bother to fix the actual answer or try to understand what I was trying to say.

Note I did submit an edit, which may be accepted by the time you see it if you click the link.

At the same time I was trying to make a post in the AWS forums, but not allowed to do so for some unspecified # of hours - even though I've had an AWS account for months. So naturally I just moved on and forgot all about the issue. But it was legitimately confusing to me for a bit, backed up by SO validating the weird typo.

If you could have been bothered, all this stuff is usually discussed in SO Meta. They are always happy to explain their petty rules in minute detail.

Endless, forensic, minute, detail.

For weeks and weeks.

Oh we got a thread going in meta. My first one got deleted. Next one is going and has 18 downvotes lol: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/quest...ser-experience

But someone magically gave me the commenter badge (even though my reputation is only 19) - just to shut me up probably.

Here's the dude who deleted my answer and didn't bother to tell me or to correct the other incorrect answer:



Dude apparently has no idea what a url is supposed to look like lol. Sick rep points though.

Holy carp at SO meta. That place is legit insanity.

Yeah they are pretty far up their own butts.

Apparently my idea of fun on a Saturday night is to get drunk and argue with idiots on SO meta. Currently re-evaluating my life choices.

Lol at these guys.

Yay open source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQT9d5shwkw

The point of stackoverflow is to google and find the answer to common problems. Don't think I've ever contributed because the answer is usually already provided lol

Anyone else Leetcoding lately? I've started about a week ago. Sick of the politics here. Considering staying another quarter to see if the principal promotion comes through, but doing that just for my resume than interest in staying long term. It's a stupid game but leetcode is the only way to get a high paying gig in the bay area.

Like answering code challenges and providing a public link or something? Thought it was just interview prep.

I'm using it to prep for interviews.

What, like you have to submit your leetcode scores or something? Or are you just saying that you need that kind of preparation to do well in interviews?

Yeah you pretty much need to practice enough so that the "medium" questions are solvable in 15 minutes, and "hard" problems are solvable in 30 minutes.

Same here. But a couple of times recently I saw incomplete or incorrect answers. So I tried to contribute in the ways I was allowed as a new user. But didn't I follow the rules well enough and got smacked down hard for it.

From reading the meta forums, I think their philosophy is the long term regs are the experts and all they need new users for is to ask questions.

I was recently googling for a weird Angular error due to a templateRef. SO had some similar questions but no one answered them properly. A bunch of ppl linked to their blogs and told the user to read about change detection.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...templateoutlet

now I know exactly how to fix this but lol at these answers. I mean, the last answer is ok I guess

holy crap martin james just shat all over you lol. straight up said that you cant program.

heres the thing, programming aint freakin rocket science. these guys act like they are these super important experts but this stuff really aint that hard to learn.

and heres another thing about SO, wtf is with all the ways to respond. they need a flow chart or something to know when to make a comment, edit a comment, propose an edit, propose a comment, propose a competing answer, start a whole new thread. like, that meta is totally insane with all the different rules on how to add content.

Yeah it sounds like SO is serious business. I remember trying to use the site a few years ago and they were gungho about duplicate questions. I mean, this sounds like the kind of thing that computers could solve and not require so much manual curation.

This kind of moderation makes sense in some contexts. E.g. I read reddit/r/askhistorians. I think it's good that amateurs or trolls aren't allowed to post racist, political, religious drivel there but it seems overkill for a topic like computer programming.

Ok am gonna go or an answer. Lets see if they come after me.

There are no answers on that question - only comments. If you don't have 50 reputation points, you won't be able to comment. You can make a new answer though but be careful. They'll put you in jail if it's not up to all their different standards. They also won't give you any feedback on what you did wrong and you won't be notified if your answer is deleted. RTFM noob.

Also his compiler analogy is ridiculous because a compiler gives you a useful error so you can fix your problem. It doesn't just silently delete your code, then forbid you from using the compiler again.

I'd upvote you but I'm not allowed. Well I'm allowed, but then I get a friendly little note that tells me my vote won't count because I don't have enough rep.

It's like a little kid with a play telephone. Oh look how cute - he thinks he's upvoting.

ok I answered. Isnt there something about not being allowed to post code snippets until you have enough rep?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...19656#52919656

its actually a terrible question bc the dude doesnt even post the necessary code. like wtf is that method and where is "user" coming from? is it an Observable?

Code snippets are good. Screenshots are bad. One of my downvote things happened because the mod thought I meant to post code. But really I was posting a screenshot of the panel on AWS API Gateway.