I've found that SO varies a lot by tech/language. In my experience, the C++ and JS subworlds are pretty brutal. C# is middle-of-the-road when it comes to culture. Clojure is very friendly and welcoming, but obviously more niche. This may explain why folks have different experiences on the same site.
I agree. Rust is the worse by far in my experience. There's a couple of really prolific people on there (Shepmaster and Stargateur) who treat it as their personal fiefdom. Shepmaster does provide a ton of high quality answers but I don't think that gives them the right to be so unfriendly.
Kind of ironic considering how the Rust community prides itself so much on being welcoming.
It's the top result for "case insensitive string comparison in C++". It has 372 votes and a ton of useful high quality answers. But it was closed 5 years ago for being "opinion based". Presumably because the author made the foolish mistake of asking for the best way to do it, rather than just a way to do it.
I don't see how anyone could defend that.
That's not cherry picked, and actually the situation is worse than it might seem to a casual observer because when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
That's one of common failure modes for SO. When people ask for "best", they actually mean tell me the options, and the reasons to choose them, and their advantages and problems. It's hugely helpful. But moderators see "best", and automatically close it as "opinion" because there's no objective best. But that isn't the point of it!
So the author made a foolish mistake of not reading the site's rules? I know, I know, who does that? I might be one of very few… Just like I might be one of very few who actually take their time when asking a question, showing respect to anyone who might spend some time answering…
The question doesn't show research effort, it's just two sentences. Sometimes that's all it takes, but if you add a requirement "without converting to lower/upper case", I think it should come with an explanation? I often encounter questions like that "How do I drive my car without using a steering wheel?" - and upon a confrontation I usually hear "well just for fun" or a similar answer - SO is a bad place to ask questions like that. If you're e.g. interested in performance, describe your situation, paste your current code and explain how you're concerned about the efficiency of your current approach.
Also originally the post wasn't not even properly written… Just a low quality post, so why bother improving a question (editing away the "best") that is so bad to begin with, especially as that doesn't guarantee you will avoid the critique (instead of critique of bad moderators who close a question, I would be reading about bad moderators that modify a question changing its meaning).
As I hinted at the beginning, we might be from different worlds: it's beyond my understanding how you could think of pointing out the example is not cherry picked, as if it was some beautiful post, with images, thoroughly explaining the issue, perhaps even addressing (preemptively or as an edit) the "opinion-based" flag, and yet was unfairly closed. Meanwhile it's shit. The revision history doesn't show any real OP's effort to fix the question, other than that meta exists to discuss such things, and if you're not satisfied with answers, you can write a real question describing your case.
So we might be from different worlds, and I'm happy SO/SE exist, because I find them, and their policies - for the most part - useful. You don't, and it's fine, you can use the alternatives.
> when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
