this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Data is Beautiful
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The strict moderation is the main strength of it. Makes it so much easier to find useful answers and for those answers to be refined.
Most of the toxicity I've seen surrounding the site has been from people upset that they were asked to improve their search skills, asked to improve their question to be more useful for those answering them, or simply demanding that people answer to their deadlines.
It's hard to take complaints about the site seriously when so many of them seen to come from entitled arseholes being offended at being asked to not be arseholes.
Couldn't they just merge posts if they were duplicates and avoid the whole toxic environment?
I'm sure they could have coded it like that.
Merge what though? A question that's already been asked and what are likely low-quality answers already present on the existing question?
It's supposed to act as a gentle reprimand and point them to the correct behaviour. Pretty much the same way it works anywhere else if you walk in and disrespect a space.
Yeah, I'm not denying the numbers in the graph, but I've seen people saying Stack Overflow is dead for years, but it's been consistently useful for me, and I don't think I've ever seen any of the hostility either.