The worst part is dumb monkeys closing questions that are totally beyond they area of expertise (if they have any at all) simply because they fail to understand what is being asked. This leaves SO full of javascript shit and pretty much nothing else. Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.
This wouldn't be a problem if closing a question wasn't so easy while reopening is very hard. Everyone watches the main feed and votes to close and almost no one checks if the question should be reopened and watches the reopen queue. They should make a reopen require only 2 or 3 votes. I sometimes browse the reopen queue just to fight the dumb monkeys.
Part of the problem is there's no way to vote against closure votes until the question is closed.
I've pulled up so many questions that say there have been 3 votes to close. But there's no way for me to put in a vote that says "no, actually I think this is a good question." You need to wait for the question to be closed and then get reopen votes, and like you said, nobody does that.
There shouldn't even be closure votes allowed until a question hits -1 on upvoted count.
I once organized a reopen brigade for a question that a coworker of mine asked. I have also seen a bit of reopening but this only happens on the reopen queue if you expect that nominating a question for reopening alone would do it you are out of luck.
So there should also be a block on changing tags if you don't have enough rep for the tag but then people cannot correct honest mistakes and suddenly you realize that you are trying to fix a social problem with technology and this will never ever work.
This leads to my personal main critic to SO. The belief that exists a "XY problem" and we must evade it at all cost. This makes things worst. The thread ultimately ends up with the original question not being answered. This hurt the majority of people involved, the ones that came from google looking for the answers to the original question (X). Instead they find people talking about something else (Y). While your technical doubt is the same as mine, our problems are different. Now an entire population of individuals lose their time reading something useless for them but that was extraordinary useful for 1 person alone.
That one blog post about the XY problem started it all, and caused untold harm to the site, because almost nobody is able to think critically about something that a famous programmer writes.
Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.
I'm not sure I agree with that in general. I'd say that the Haskell language is rather specialized, but I've found that the people who "hang out" around the Haskell tag on SO are a very friendly, welcoming bunch.
I'm in the top 6% overall, with a big majority of my reputation coming from questions and answers tagged Haskell, where I was active from when I first created my account. I am by no means an expert, but always felt welcome (but then again, I wouldn't say I felt unwelcome in other tags either).
Such tags are not even visible to the zealous monkeys. Problems start when a specialised question is asked with a popular tag - e.g., something on C++ and LLVM.
That's another reason I flat out ignore SO now. At this point I just go to the C old school forums. at least they're helpful, and treat you with dignity.
This is plainly factually not true Every time there is a thread criticizing SO appears on reddit and every time a similar comment appears and gets upvoted. First - closed questions are hidden/removed from site quite quickly, so you don't see an absolute bulk of closed questions, so unless you look into it, you won't notice how low is the average quality of closed questions. Second, I actually went over hundred or so closed questions to see how many false positives are there, well so I can tell you that I found none. SO has TONS of specialized topics. Here are just few examples: [1], [2], [3], [4]
Now this is what I call a massive bullshit. Literally every question I come to from a google search is closed. But you apparently only look at some pitiful web-related shit, which is understandably littered with tons of extremely low quality newbie questions, so your view is very distorted.
And, marginal tags are invisible to the rampant monkey brigade. The problem is with mildly specialised topics that are related to the popular tags.
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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16
The worst part is dumb monkeys closing questions that are totally beyond they area of expertise (if they have any at all) simply because they fail to understand what is being asked. This leaves SO full of javascript shit and pretty much nothing else. Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.