You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem.
Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal.
Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.
At the beginning of StackOverflow there was a very strong opinion held by the founders, particularly Jeff Atwood, that the longevity of a site was determined by the signal to noise ratio. The emphasis at the outset was to eliminate as much noise as possible. Automated systems were put in place that went way too far, in my opinion. The whole Chat system was put into place to get comments off the main pages. Even though Jeff Atwood hasn't been at the company for years, the philosophy still seems very entrenched.
I'm well aware but SO isn't the last word on peer support.
i) We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information.
ii) I believe there is much more human motivation potential to be found in "personal connection" than there is in fake karma. I want to be thanked, I want to know how I mattered, I want to know what the user was building just as much as I want to be gracious and share how much they helped me.
iii) They are trying to use the same rules for wildly different situations. There are two faces to SO: very high traffic questions better directed to maintained documentation/tutorials, and a very long tail of 1:1 interactions that get less than 100 views and no votes. Right now SO doesn't serve either very well: the high traffic do not benefit from 10 years of highly voted bad answers and the low traffic do not benefit from the interventions of jack-booted deletionists.
iv) IMHO you often get a better experience and treated with more respect in a discussion on a GitHub issue. We don't have to turn github issues into a highly constrained impersonal experience to be effective.
We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information
I agree with this sentence, but when actually implemented it often results in fake upbeat corporate marketing cheerfulness niceties that goes in the opposite direction.
To your other points: I think SO should be used when you can reasonably expect at least one other person to ask your question down the line. It's not about your particular issue, the idea is you are entering something into a knowledge bank for easy retrieval by others later on. This is why it's also encouraged to answer your own questions! It's not a discussion site, but a mapping of questions a person may have to the answer.
Indeed, if you want to discuss back and forth, you are better served by the project Github or a project mailing list or the forums of old. If you want to focus on the personal connection: there are tons of Discord servers, Slack workspaces, subreddits, I guess some forums and IRC channels are also alive etc.
The problem that many people have with the new cultural shift is that the expectations are just different. Not everything has to turn into a social site with followers, likes, shares, news feeds etc. There is simply an influx of people with a different culture/value system compared to the original hacker ethos. The problem is, it was the hacker ethos that made the site so efficient, usable and popular.
Sure, hacker culture is also known for its flame wars and shouting RTFM and being unwelcoming, and it should be improved, but the problem is, that you cannot scale personal one-on-one mentoring when the influx of novices is so fast. There is tons of low effort "this code does not work, give me solution plz thx" and a dump of random code from some app. You can't do handholding guidance with everyone. Many of them are not receptive to anything and expect to be served with an answer because they deserve it and if they are told to put in some work, they say it's too elitist.
The thing is, SO's biggest value comes from the contributor base. And as we can see from the meta posts, the contributors are not appreciative of the new direction.
If it's stretched too far, at some point it will come to a fork with some stronger filtering and a different culture and many of the people who take their time to answer questions will move.
You can't force people to interact in a way you prescribe from the top down. It has to come organically from the community itself.
Comments
You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem.
Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal.
Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.
At the beginning of StackOverflow there was a very strong opinion held by the founders, particularly Jeff Atwood, that the longevity of a site was determined by the signal to noise ratio. The emphasis at the outset was to eliminate as much noise as possible. Automated systems were put in place that went way too far, in my opinion. The whole Chat system was put into place to get comments off the main pages. Even though Jeff Atwood hasn't been at the company for years, the philosophy still seems very entrenched.
I'm well aware but SO isn't the last word on peer support.
i) We don't have to dehumanise interaction to present clean information.
ii) I believe there is much more human motivation potential to be found in "personal connection" than there is in fake karma. I want to be thanked, I want to know how I mattered, I want to know what the user was building just as much as I want to be gracious and share how much they helped me.
iii) They are trying to use the same rules for wildly different situations. There are two faces to SO: very high traffic questions better directed to maintained documentation/tutorials, and a very long tail of 1:1 interactions that get less than 100 views and no votes. Right now SO doesn't serve either very well: the high traffic do not benefit from 10 years of highly voted bad answers and the low traffic do not benefit from the interventions of jack-booted deletionists.
iv) IMHO you often get a better experience and treated with more respect in a discussion on a GitHub issue. We don't have to turn github issues into a highly constrained impersonal experience to be effective.
I agree with this sentence, but when actually implemented it often results in fake upbeat corporate marketing cheerfulness niceties that goes in the opposite direction.
To your other points: I think SO should be used when you can reasonably expect at least one other person to ask your question down the line. It's not about your particular issue, the idea is you are entering something into a knowledge bank for easy retrieval by others later on. This is why it's also encouraged to answer your own questions! It's not a discussion site, but a mapping of questions a person may have to the answer.
Indeed, if you want to discuss back and forth, you are better served by the project Github or a project mailing list or the forums of old. If you want to focus on the personal connection: there are tons of Discord servers, Slack workspaces, subreddits, I guess some forums and IRC channels are also alive etc.
The problem that many people have with the new cultural shift is that the expectations are just different. Not everything has to turn into a social site with followers, likes, shares, news feeds etc. There is simply an influx of people with a different culture/value system compared to the original hacker ethos. The problem is, it was the hacker ethos that made the site so efficient, usable and popular.
Sure, hacker culture is also known for its flame wars and shouting RTFM and being unwelcoming, and it should be improved, but the problem is, that you cannot scale personal one-on-one mentoring when the influx of novices is so fast. There is tons of low effort "this code does not work, give me solution plz thx" and a dump of random code from some app. You can't do handholding guidance with everyone. Many of them are not receptive to anything and expect to be served with an answer because they deserve it and if they are told to put in some work, they say it's too elitist.
The thing is, SO's biggest value comes from the contributor base. And as we can see from the meta posts, the contributors are not appreciative of the new direction.
If it's stretched too far, at some point it will come to a fork with some stronger filtering and a different culture and many of the people who take their time to answer questions will move.
You can't force people to interact in a way you prescribe from the top down. It has to come organically from the community itself.