Note: as part of the strike organization, this post is a mirror of a post on MSE
Introduction
As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around
Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit's mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow's failure to address it's promises and provide moderation tools
I don't like it, but I begrudgingly accept that it is kind of useful. There are a lot of people there who are unnecessarily rude af, especially to newbies.
It can be a great resource if you put time into writing really good questions. I've gotten dozens of fantastic answers over the years, and thousands of times I've found the question I wanted to ask already answered.
When someone complains about StackOverflow, I always ask to see their question. What I observe is:
The vast majority of the time, they just didn't provide nearly enough information to answer the question.
A lot of the time people got upset because of perceived rudeness, even though they got an answer to their question. StackOverflow tends to be direct / blunt, which isn't necessarily rude, though it's definitely not friendly
People got upset that a question was marked as a duplicate, when it clearly was a duplicate to me, they just didn't understand how the duplicate applied to their case
However, 10% of the time, the answer really was wrong.
Many years ago I liked the idea of it and thought it would turn out great. It never happened.
While every now and then I do get something useful out of it, most times a Google result puts me there the answers are either wrong, outdated or filled with broken links.