Changelog

Stack Overflow began be telling their community to “be nice,” but over time that proved to not be enough to ensure a safe place for the developer community. Tim Post, Director Of Community Strategy, writes on the Stack Overflow blog: Our CoC is what we call a living document. It’s designed to change over time to ensure that it remains relevant by continuing to meet the needs of our communities. Every six months or so, we plan to find out how folks feel about how things are going by asking both new and experienced users about their recent experiences on the site. Hopefully this change leads to a less toxic experience.

Consumers of Stack Overflow content may not feel this way, but the developers who are engaging, commenting, and answering are being “lectured, down-voted, and leave with an empty feeling of wasted time.” Constantine Murenin, writes in this OpenBSD mailing list thread: The StackOverflow company routinely deletes your comments, questions and answers, often for very superficial reasons (including automatically based on metrics) and without any regard to the individual quality thereof, and effectively without you having any control over the explicitly human-generated textual data that you entrust them with. (Most folks don’t even know this, until they’re already hooked and their questions/comments/answers are gone and unfetchable.) Who likes their own well-articulated notes randomly deleted for superficial reasons behind their backs? Why not let you see what got deleted, so you can decide whether it’s worth reposting in another venue? The content you contribute to Stack Overflow is not guaranteed to be long-lasting immutable content. To dig deeper, click the headline, read this tweet, and read this post