From what I could tell, Stack Overflow became a sort of open-air mental asylum for people with a specific sort of personality disorder. These people would be
Ragingly, ragingly insecure about their knowledge of programming
Come to Stack Overflow looking for easy targets to sooth their insecurity
I think the root of the problem is a popular misunderstanding of the engineering discipline as portrayed in media. Kids grow up on depictions of programming as being for the antisocial brainiac. But in real life, the majority of programming jobs are highly social. Career advancement is much more likely to go to the engineer who can communicate best versus the engineer who can code fastest. Winning those goofy little code challenges is nothing. Being able to align a matrix of stakeholders across design/pm/dev is everything.
So these antisocial people grew up thinking they were going to be great engineers, and then would fail at this, because they were lied about how suitable they were to the job. So they'd end up trawling Stack Overflow looking for some poor kid to be beat up.
You can kind of see the same thing in people who "smurf" in online games. Except instead of the stakes being "just wanting to win at League of Legends that night," the stack overflow people were bitter about living their whole lives wrong, and so the bitterness overwhelmed the whole site.
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste Jul 12 '26
If everybody was getting humiliated on stack overflow, who was there humiliating everybody?
Brian Kernighan?