I was discussing this yesterday with some people on IRC, and thought of writing a blog post about this myself.<p>Despite me being a very experienced programmer (I started to learn coding when I was 6 years old), I find SO extremely hostile.<p>Examples: One question of mine from 2010 got vote closed in 2014 (yes, people will hunt down questions even that later!) and now has vote deletes, also the same question the most upvoted answer is a snarky answer (copy paste of the answer: &quot;You can&#x27;t eat your cake and have it too.&quot;)<p>Recent questions: They all get downvoted and vote-duplicate even when they aren&#x27;t.<p>I made some questions about RDTSC, people kept arguing with me about how I was doing something wrong, my CTO is retarded, or that I was retarded, or whatnot... and all I wanted was to fix some games (RDTSC behaviour changed from counting CPU cycles, to count whatever arbitrary frequency the hardware wants, this break old games that rely on it counting literal CPU cycles).<p>Another was when I asked details about some bizarre behaviour of Objective-C in recent versions of XCode, people said it was dupe (not exactly), that I was retarded, that it was all in the fucking manual, or that I could google it, and noone EVER replied with a single official answer.<p>I asked then on Quora, found out that XCode DO have non-standard behaviour (ie: stuff that ins&#x27;t in Obj-C standard, and ins&#x27;t in official distribution of LLVM), and that the Apple manual is wrong, thus no wonder why I wasn&#x27;t finding the info on the manual or on google.<p>I asked about these issues on Stackoverflow Meta, got attacked, downvoted, deleted, etc... no meaningful discussion.<p>I am impressed that some people went to great lengths to argue with me without posting a proper answer, one guy even wrote something I considered an answer in the comments, but lacking details, I asked him to expand in an actual answer so I could accept it, and he replied in the comments: &quot;Nah, that would be a waste of bandwidth.&quot;