Especially in my early days venturing into Python (with which I am still only casually acquainted), I’d google a problem and end up on an SO question outlining my exact problem, only see “closed as duplicate” or a bunch of snarky comments about how the questioner didn’t RTFM or whatever.

Why do they hate people asking questions on this site specifically about asking questions? Part of being a noob is not just about not knowing the bare facts of a thing, but not knowing where to look for answers or even what to ask.

While I’m on this soapbox, I hate it when people say “just google it.” because most of the time I see that phrase it’s because that forum post is the first google result.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Then social media happened

    Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:

    • they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
    • it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
    • everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
    • the site becomes hard to maintain as a side hobby, including server costs
    • they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
    • ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the blowback
    • people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
    • ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
    • search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
    • costs also rise because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
    • the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them
    • someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
    • back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and need to be replaced by rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and lousy moderation starts to erode the experience
    • heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too
    • everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but this progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly by hand to select individuals. But this works against exponential growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may go unpaid and necrosis may inevitably set in without more robust growth. One day the site goes offline.