My experience on Stack Overflow is quite different.

I do frequently find that if I start on Google and pick a Stack Overflow item from it, I often find an answer or a cluebat -- and about half the time, they're heavily downvoted and closed due to being "off topic".

Asking the question on Stack Overflow directly is a mixed bag. Most of the time nobody will take the time to answer a difficult question. I am given to understand, after reading many blog articles, that it's part of the problem with the SO culture -- it's all about the votes, so people only take the time to answer something where they can provide a fast answer and get lots of votes.

And the "community" there is apt to go downvote a lot of nodes by anyone where they found one thing worth downvoting, which is reprehensible school-children level behavior.

So I'm hesitant to change anything we're doing differently than Stack Overflow, because the bullying behavior here is limited to a handful of noisy accounts, whereas on SO it seems to be the order of the day, every day.

My inescapable conclusion is this: While we might be able to improve on what we have, we're definitely doing enough things better than SO that, by and large, they should not be our role model, but rather, the other way around.

In reply to Re^4: Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts. by marinersk
in thread Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts. by BrowserUk

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