On 4/29/2013 11:26, Christopher Faylor wrote:
the "I'm looking for
my keys here because the light is better" type of mentality to be very
counterproductive.
More like, "I'm looking for my keys on this street because there are
bullies on the next street over."
Bullies on SO get downvoted to oblivion or deleted.
The net is full of bad and outdated advice about Cygwin.
Stack Overflow gives you the tools to fix that. Post comments, post
better answers, edit incorrect answers, downvote bad answers, vote to
delete unhelpful answers, and gain reputation to get moderator fu.
Mailing lists give you only some of those abilities, and the powers that
do exist are weaker here:
- Post comments and better answers: Threads go stale and future seekers
have poor tools for judging the quality of the answers. If someone
tries replying to an old post to fix it, they generally get yelled at
here. So, you end up with multiple threads on a topic over time, each
possibly containing the correct answer at the time, each increasingly
outdated as a function of post date.
- Edit incorrect answers: nope.
- Downvote bad answers: nope.
- Delete unhelpful answers: only in the same sense that spam gets taken
out of the archives.
- Gain reputation: kind of, but I imagine it takes a month or three of
lurking here to figure out who the major players are, what their
competencies are, etc. I can do that on SO with a few clicks.
- Moderator fu: Post deletion and unsubsription are limited to a select
few, leaving only yelling and persuasion as "moderating" tactics.
Yelling is a poor tool, and persuasion sucks up a lot of time. (As when
I write this.)
I can't find a "Chris Faylor" on SO, and the four users with "CGF" in
their name all have 0 rep. So, if you don't want to engage with that
world, point me at some bad posts and I'll see about dealing with them.
I have over 10k rep there, so I have nearly full moderator privileges.
And if you don't like one of *my* answers, tell me why here, or in a
comment there, and I'll either fix it myself or consider your edit.
It does you no good to write off a vibrant alternative community. You
can't scorn it away, and ignoring it isn't going to fix anything.
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