After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.
What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one. Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche). So what I started doing was answering my own question (or answering those existing unanswered ones) after solving it on my own. Still, it was fine and I was contributing.
And for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid". Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)! The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year. Not so useless, eh?
Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse. So I stopped contributing to StackOverflow entirely. If I find information there, that's great, if not, I won't go and add it once I find a solution for myself. I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project, bypassing StackOverflow's moderation.
I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly. I'm here to say that what pushed me away was the toxic moderation, not LLMs.
The original idea of SO was building a knowledge repository, and that meant no duplication and pruning it endlessly to make sure it was useful and up to date (which pretty much failed until recently, until its probably far too late) - this core tenet is something the moderators take seriously, and people using the site as questioners (not searchers) absolutely hate.
You can see they are trying to experiment (again probably too late) with how to make question asking easier, more friendly, etc - but that sort of cuts against the core original goals of SO and that's why the mods and the users seemed to be always in tension.
1) People want to ask homework questions (_eg_ on Biology, Chemistry, etc). I understand why that is not allowed, but that doesn't change people's desire to 'just have an answer, now!'. I guess that AI could really take over this niche.
2) Others want to ask very open-ended 'discussion' questions that require back-and-forth to get to the answer, which may be on the edge of known research.
While I do understand why people get frustrated about these things, as you point out - this is not what SO (and SEs) are 'for'.
If the moderation was effective and limited, people would ultimately be fine with it.
What people don't like is having a question closed as "duplicate" even though what it supposedly duplicates is very different, or any of the other myriad complaints.
The same story goes for Wikipedia. Moderators have an agenda, act in frequently erroneous ways, and are actively hostile to criticism.
This is not true as I recall. On Joel and Jeff's podcast, Joel in particular was in favour of having lots of variants of the same question answered repeatedly. His rationale was that if people didn't find the golden original question, there was a reason for that (e.g. it's not a real duplicate, or it's a different frame of thinking about the problem shared by other people), and adding the supposed duplicate would mean that other people who search for it - and would similarly fail to find the golden original - would land on the supposed duplicate. Net win.
But this was in tension with cheap karma farmers. SO was structured as a points economy, but in any case anything with points rewards motivates some people to play the game of collecting points. A cheap way of farming points is to ask trivial questions then answer them yourself, or participate in an implicit network of people asking and answering trivial questions. How do you cut that out? Have canonical versions of the trivial questions, redirect people to them while asking, and motivate deduplication.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
The emphasis on "good" is in the original.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
---
And then, go to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
I would draw your attention to its history and the original version: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1
and the action taken on September 17th, 2011. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
As I said, I strongly disagree with the idea that my questions were unfit for StackOverflow. Every single time their reason was "duplication", it was not AT ALL a duplicate. Two different questions (sometimes obviously very different) with two different answers. Hell, they closed some of those as duplicate even though I posted both the question and the answer, and the answer was completely different from the one they were pointing to.
This is not "I want to ask whatever questions I want". It's bad moderation.
But it often isn't, they just didn't spend enough time to see nuance.
And neither do they see that even if _they_ understand that the question linked to is the same thing, there is no way the asker can understand what the similarity is from their knowledge point of view (or why the linked duplicate question is the same question).
dang doesn't go and delete all the infinite failed submissions to HN, after all.
[1] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Found...
1. First and foremost, it's not a democracy if your turnout is too low. The 2024 election had voter turnout of 2%, which would be a catastrophic turnout in any real democracy. Either too few knew about the election, too few thought their vote mattered, or too few had any idea how to choose between the options. Any of these reasons requires immediate and pressing attention if a democracy is to be called that.
2. Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.
I'm afraid that the largest problem is that democracy is really just a bad fit for this kind of site. By its nature the only people who are likely to vote in this type of election are a small dedicated core, not the enormous number of users that the site actually serves. A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.
I don't have a better answer, but I don't believe democracy is a good fit for moderators on the scale of community that Stack Overflow operates. It's too big to have good turnout, and the problems caused by bad turnout have become catastrophic.
With the usual model, I can just negotiate directly with management and they can tell me yes or no, and we can make a contract (or be a bit vaguer and make promises).
With worker democracy, there's no one I can negotiate with that can tell me anything definitive.
Well... obviously :-)
> Second, the voters may not have been qualified; they did not use the site enough to be able to or care to select one moderator over another.
This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. I think the dedicated core actually does believe this: that nothing is broken, it's okay that the outgroup doesn't vote because they'd just ruin things if they did.
What if moderators had to actually have karma from recently answering questions or they lose mod privileges?
Wouldn't that be a fresh change. You'd have to actually work to be a mod.
...
It shouldn't be controversial. That mods currently make visitors unwelcome is disgrace. :(
That SO incentivizes that behavior is ridiculous.
For a "user-run" site it was pretty advanced at the time - you could choose your level to view at (5 was quick summary of the highlights, -1 if you wanted flamewars about NetBSD), stories were curated enough to prevent slop (at least at the beginning), and metamoderating removed the biggest abuses.
Super moderators are elected, but not your regular "moderators". In stack overflow, regular folks you have enough karma are moderators and can cast votes, or initiate voting on moderation action. Enough votes and the action happens.
The elected moderators aren't the problem, generally, it's that anyone with a bit of karma can go power tripping and if you get enough of those people on an ever growing platform, they reach a critical mass to stifle anything.
So yes, some moderators are elected, and yes moderation is very democratic.
If it is from 2010 and was a relevant question or answer then but has since become irrelevant or even wrong because the framework or language has moved on I actually support this kind of clean up.
There are a lot of best practices that just don't apply anymore that far down the line. Even simple things like whats the best way to use a variable inside of a string in Python would have an outdated (and to most users, wrong) answer if it was from 2010.
I don't understand the idea. Are you also in favour of deleting blog posts that are older than a couple years? There is a date next to the question...
I never said delete anything, but deprecation warnings, closure, and subsequent SEO down ranking of formerly correct but now incorrect/irrelevant answers would be a huge improvement to StackOverflow. Somebody may need to to know the best way to handle permissions in Java on Android 6.0, but it absolutely should not be a top question or answer in 2025 unless somebody is specifically looking for it.
And because recourse is so hard and goes trough the same gatekeepers anyway, they don't get any signal about the accuracy of the maintenance.
One of the reason I've left as well was bureaucrats wrecking havoc to perfectly reasonable answers trying to rack up these points.
Peak of the fenomenon was 2014 when people started publishing their so scores on their resumes, but the platform never really recovered.
This. It is exactly the problem with incentives.
At some point I was wondering why Tor was not offering incentives, which is something Nym was talking about. And I found an explanation on the Tor website that said something along those lines: "we thought about incentives, but we decided that we wanted contributions from people who cared, not from interested people". Makes sense to me.
Could you describe this? A lot of people seem to believe that closing or duplicating questions awards reputation. It doesn't.
The complete list of reputation gain sources is at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation
As I said, those were pretty specialised questions, you can't expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for those.
Having met many SO power users in group settings over the years, I feel that there is very little tolerance for questions that require effort to understand. If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.) The same goes for a deeper technical question where the author gets it all out but doesn't take the time to structure or format it. The volume of behavior like this differs based on the type of question and experts prepared to weigh in.
This gets compounded by the up and comers on the reputation scale. They get their special powers and see this BOFH close behavior and replicate it. Over time it starts to become the norm. I had the ability to vote for reopens and these same people would argue about why this was a bad idea. They weren't prepared to admit they were wrong and felt they were doing God's work by ridding the site of poor questions when some of us even had the ability to make edits to clarify them.
I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks. The Interesting Posts for You question feed is below that and I have to go see how that is constructed. I only ever wanted the firehose of new questions with my tags highlighted.
EDIT: The behavior I noted above is yet example of why I always want to know how a job candidate deals with ambiguity. In my experience, this has a massive impact on the ability to work independently, not piss off colleagues/clients/customers, and make good decisions.
*Later he took over the Flask project and I was still bitter so I stopped using that too.
I have a rep that is based almost entirely on questions, not answers. I learned to ask questions fairly well (to the point I seldom get answers -there's a price to pay, for questions that are very specific).
In some cases, the question is a basic one, and doesn't need a code listing and sample project. It's still a perfectly valid, pertinent, thoughtful question, but not very verbose.
Those questions almost always get closed.
I have found that asking LLMs doesn't always get me the best answer, but I get an answer. In some cases, I can have an iterative refinement, where I keep adjusting the question, until I get a useful answer.
I've never gotten code from SO, that I can use without modification, but I have gotten some great answers, over the years, and have expressed gratitude and respect.
I have gotten quite annoyed with the "attitude" that is often expressed. There's no doubt that folks who ask questions, are considered "lesser beings" on SO. Just look at the question-to-answer ratio of the high-score individuals. Weird attitude, for a site that is pretty much completely reliant on questions.
Basically, I have just given up on SO, and have found LLMs to give me what I used to get from it.
In my opinion, they have killed SO.
This thread was closed because it was too thoughtful, not easily monetizable via ad impressions, and didn’t include a complete reproducible example involving React, or Kubernetes. Additionally, it addresses the Cabal of Question Closers, which shall never be mentioned.
Want to improve this question?
* Add a code snippet or stack trace, especially if your question is conceptual or existential in nature.
* Explain what you’ve tried (e.g., begging mods, crying in the comments).
* Link to a duplicate that isn't actually a duplicate, yet you will still get your question closed as a duplicate with a link to the "dupe" you linked and directly stated as not actually a duplicate.
you're going to have up provide a lot of evidence if you don't think eg:
> Link to a duplicate that isn't actually a duplicate, yet you will still get your question closed as a duplicate with a link to the "dupe" you linked and directly stated as not actually a duplicate. reply
is a) inaccurate and b) unproductive, just because of how I pointed it out.
Why spend your own time and effort adding content to someone else's platform anyway? It's always a much better idea to write an article on your own website than a stackoverflow answer. Stackoverflow just takes a little less effort but that doesn't matter when your effort is likely to be invalidated anyway.
It's common for those to get shouted down based on some policy or other bureaucratic nonsense by those who have no idea what the question is actually about. The problem could be that many of those who don't do, moderate. It attracts different sorts of people than those that are actually working with the things being discussed.
In retrospect it is a case study of a particular enshittification scenario: "benign neglect" Back when they published a data dump I had a project on my speculative list to clean up their database, take only the best answers, etc. For python, the numerous Python 2 examples
print "something"
print("something")
Good. That's the site working as designed and intended.
> What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one.
Then you should improve the existing unanswered question instead, and/or draw attention to it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/265874 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266338). Or, yes, answer it if you can. Thank you for doing so.
> Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche).
That's a big presumption. I got an answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825/ within hours.
> for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid"
This is absolutely not what happened. First off, when your question is closed, you get a banner at the top of your question indicating which of the few standard close reasons was chosen. The wording isn't always a great fit (especially in the cases where people voted for more than one close reason - please keep in mind that we neither write this explanation nor get to choose the text; it's pulled from a database following simple mapping rules, and even moderators have only very indirect influence over that database) but it does normally point you in the right direction.
Second, "I don't know the answer" is not a valid close reason. People constantly accuse (on the meta site and elsewhere) that someone else's close vote was motivated by this; there's never any real way to evidence that, and this kind of accusation is in fact what we consider toxic behaviour (an assumption of bad faith).
> Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)!
The fact that you provide your own answer weighs exactly zero in the calculation of closing a question. It must meet the site standards. Part of the purpose of a question is to index the information in the answer - so no matter how brilliant your explanation of the underlying problem might be, your exposition of the problem is a limiting factor.
> The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year.
The community does make mistakes, in both directions. The meta site exists for a reason.
But part of "fighting to get a question reopened" is editing it. Changes you might think are trivial might be crucial according to our standards. Some questions fundamentally can't be fixed; but when they can, closing a question signals that the OP's perspective is needed to fix the problem, no matter how minor. If we could fix it (without worrying about trampling on your authorial intent), we would.
>Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse.
It's not moderation, but curation. It's overwhelmingly done by a community of volunteers - not by the two dozen or so moderators (also volunteers) looking over an accumulation of literally millions of users and questions.
And it isn't "toxic". Overwhelmingly, people aren't doing it out of any kind of vendetta or a desire to cause you or anyone else a problem. They're doing it to uphold a standard (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/) designed (really, developed over many years by community discussion on the meta site) to accomplish particular goals (https://stackoverflow.com/tour ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770).
> I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project
If it's something that makes sense to handle this way, it probably doesn't also make sense in the Q&A format. We can't do anything about your bug report.
> I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly.
A lot of people think so because the volume of questions has dropped off dramatically, and there's good evidence that people will ask an LLM instead of asking on Stack Overflow.
But this is not at all "hurting Stack Overflow", unless you're a staff member at the company and you specifically worry about the effect of this decline on ad revenue.
If asking an LLM - trained on millions of existing Stack Overflow questions, along with the rest of the Internet - gives you an actually working answer (and you're either in a position where you can deal with AI hallucinations, or are lucky enough not to experience one), then that is, almost certainly, not a question that helps improve the existing resource that is Stack Overflow. It's most likely a duplicate or near-duplicate.
Duplicate questions on Stack Overflow are not inherently bad; sometimes rephrasing a question helps by providing a "signpost" so that people who think about a problem in a different way can realize that it's still the same problem, and there's still the same fundamental question to answer about it. But we want everyone who has that question to find the same collection of answers; and we want that collection of answers to be high quality, not redundant, and categorized under a high quality version of the question. That way, when you use a search engine and find Stack Overflow Q&A, you get the best possible result, as quickly as possible.
Nowadays, there are about three times as many publicly available questions on Stack Overflow as there are articles on Wikipedia. Considering that the scope of Stack Overflow is "practical questions about programming", while the scope of Wikipedia is "literally any noteworthy real-world object or phenomenon", that's clearly too many already. So why worry about the influx of new questions slowing down?
Is there some kind of `IClosableStream` you can implement? That’d give you a `Closed` method, which you can then use to let either your server or stream know that it’s time to stop reading (or the stream reached EOF) - even if it’s done with a flag that’s set when the client disconnects.
Maybe there’s already an optional `Close` method you’re not overriding?
On the client side, randomStream.Close will get called when it's disposed.
On the server side, I'm not sure what I could put into an overriden Close that wouldn't just be base.Close()? RandomStream itself doesn't own any resources that need cleaning up.
I could force WCF to use Session mode, and then add flow-control through a side-channel, so other messages could prepare the stream to internally buffer and then rewrite in requested chunks?
But at that point I might as well just use an apprpriately sized GetRandomBlock(ValueWithSequence[]), and chunk requests that way and abandon using a stream for this at all.
I'll have an experiment with that approach to try to find the best buffer size and whether streaming the buffer actually helps vs just having it as the message and letting WCF control the sending.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.servicem...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.servicem...
Could you use these to cancel the stream?
Interesting point. I'm going to see if they similarly struggle generating VBA code vs generating Visual Basic code.
Another old problem was notable users. There was a guy famous for his presence and answering tons of question (I forgot his name). He was actually pretty good but... he was not an expert in all the areas he'd participate in, but his answers would sometimes win because he was articulate, not because it was the best.
https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Which is also the reason for the ban on GenAI content (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831).
(although I have no idea how active CoreWCF owners are w.r.t this)
This might also be a problem WCF client, which is maintained by others elsewhere in a different repo: https://github.com/dotnet/wcf for the nuget package version.
But this might just be how WCF is designed. I'll try a version of this within .NET Framework, but even that might change depending on whether it's via IIS or started via ASP.NET Core, and whether it uses the built in System.ServiceModel or the nuget version.
( You can probably tell I'm a bit frustrated with MS for making a bit of a mess in the way they hurried away from .NET Framework especially with respect to WCF. )
Seems like an issue with not closing resources properly. Looking at your server code, seems the Close and Dispose methods are not overridden. Try that?
It'll be calling base.Close(), and doing what else?
eterm•3h ago
Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for getting my SO question closed.
And because I know you're all nosy, the SO question is here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79605462/high-cpu-usage-... . Please feel free to point out more ways in which I screwed up asking my SO question.
agos•2h ago
aflukasz•2h ago
eterm•2h ago
matsemann•2h ago
jve•2h ago
eterm•2h ago
wokwokwok•2h ago
1) clearly technical
2) reproducible
3) has a clear failure condition
Not be a suitable candidate for S/O?
Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer?
Hard questions doesn't mean they're bad, it just means many people aren't competent answer them. The same goes for obscure questions; there might just not be many people who care, but the question itself is entirely valid.
Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O?
I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche problems are too obscure or too hard for S/O to be bothered to grace themselves with.
It's absurd.
It just baffles me that a question that might take some effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to S/O.
robertlagrant•1h ago
Is it? What hardware and OS version should I use to reproduce the server?
zahlman•47m ago
The problem is complexity and scope.
We don't debug code for others. We expect them to find the specific part of the code that is causing a problem and showcase a minimal reproducible example. For performance issues, we expect them to profile code and isolate bottlenecks - and then they can ask a hard, obscure question about the bottleneck. Or a very easy one, as long as it's something that could make sense to ask after putting in the effort.
In short: we're looking for a question, not a problem. Stack Overflow "can't be bothered to grace itself with" hard niche problems, or with easy common problems. But it is about answering the question that results from an analysis of a problem. Whether that's understanding the exact semantics of argument passing, or just wanting to know how to concatenate lists.
And we're looking for one question at a time. If there are multiple issues in a piece of code, they need to be isolated and asked about separately. If the task clearly breaks down into a series of steps in one obvious way, then you need to figure out which of those steps is actually causing a problem first, and ask about whichever steps separately. (Or better yet, find the existing Q&A.)
(Questions seeking to figure out an algorithm are usually okay, but usually better asked on e.g. cs.stackexchange.com. And usually, an algorithm worth asking about isn't just "do X, then do Y, then do Z".)
Stack Overflow is full of highly competent people who are yearning for questions that demand their specific expertise - recently, not just in the 2010s.
Most questions I've asked since 2020 were deliberate hooks to deal with common beginner-level issues or close FAQs that didn't already have a clear duplicate target. (I've stopped contributing new Q&A, but still occasionally help out with curation tasks like editing.) But I asked https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 because I actually wanted an answer, and it's an instructive example here.
Answering it required detailed expert-level knowledge of modern CPU architectures and reverse engineering of the Python implementation. Asking it required noticing a performance issue, then putting extensive effort into simplifying the examples as much as possible and diagnosing the exact qualities of the input that degrade performance - as well as ruling out other simple explanations and citing the existing Q&A about those.
But demonstrating it requires nothing more than a few invocations of the `timeit` standard library module.
francisofascii•1h ago
balls187•2h ago
I will say, this is a level of question that is too sophisticated for SO, and likely will only have an answer once you figure it out and go back and answer your question.
Are you confident the code is the issue--have you repro'd it consistently with different versions of .NET? What about reproing on different machines? Locally?
robertlagrant•1h ago
With pleasure! SO is definitely more of a distinct Q&A site and not a discursive, open-ended collaborate and problem-solve site.
zahlman•1h ago
(Edit: it seems people do care about CoreWCF ITT. That's nice to see.)
> Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for getting my SO question closed.
That's fine. Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work. That includes people who don't have a question and only want to post answers. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain because people find the model unintuitive - the UI affords using the place just like many others, even though the site was created exactly to get away from frustrations caused by older models (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107). And the real objective is a synthesis of many not-always-compatible ideas (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). My personal sense is that the community didn't really get a handle on "what SO is" until around the time that new question volume peaked (way back in 2014).
Even then, people can hang around for years and not really get it (e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224) - in large part because the policies have been inconsistently applied on a volunteer basis, and the people who are allowed to e.g. cast close votes are vastly outnumbered.
We generally don't care about people not liking the Stack Overflow model while discussing it off-site. There's far too much of that to worry about. But that doesn't mean we'll change to accommodate everyone else. The entire point is to provide something that isn't available everywhere you look: a polished artifact, an organized repository of commonly-needed, high-quality answers to clear, focused, practical questions.
Do we accomplish that goal? Hell no, not by a long shot. But there are some real gems in there - and a few of them have millions of views. And as the rate of new questions slows, users who put on the "curator" hat become able to keep on top of the incoming queue, filter through for what's of value (and not a duplicate), and even turn attention towards the old Q&A to improve it (incidentally, a lot of that work is rounding up old duplicates that went unnoticed).
> I had forgotten that any external links are a big no-no in SO land, so my question immediately attracted 2 close votes.
The problem isn't simply including an external link (we'll happily just edit those out if they aren't necessary). The problem occurs when a question appears to depend upon the externally linked content. We can't accept that (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254428) because of link rot and licensing issues (someone who wants to answer you often needs to be able to cite the code; posting on-site automatically licenses the content appropriately, per the terms of service) but mainly because of scope - a question that's suitable for the Stack Exchange format would fit neatly within the actual question text.
We don't want to do detailed analysis of the problem you encountered, even if we're capable of it, because questions are for everyone. They need to be able to reflect a problem that other people could a) have; b) plausibly search for; and c) recognize if they found it. Answers to a question need to make sense in general to people who would ask - not just in the specific context of one person's original problem. In short, we want a question, not a problem - and extracting a proper question starts with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) your own analysis.
"How do I do X?" questions are usually much easier to ask in the format, and are very valuable and can end up very well regarded, even when they're on very basic topics. But "what went wrong with Y code?" is not fully refined. What we're really looking for is more like "why does Y' code construct do Z?" - where the specific, exact cause of failure (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example) is extracted from your own debugging session (along with reproducing input and actual vs expected output).
> Two days later my question got it's third vote for closure, and remains unanswered and now closed forever.
This is literally not how Stack Overflow works. The OP has at least (https://stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions) 9 days to fix the question and nominate it for reopening until it gets "deleted"; but even then it's a soft deletion (delisting) which is still reversible - you can find the question from your personal listing (https://stackoverflow.com/users/deleted-questions/current while logged in; or replace 'current' with your user ID), edit and nominate for undeletion.
The established policy is that we intentionally close questions that don't meet standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) as quickly as possible (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). The main point of this is to prevent the sort of people (notice that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271684 is over 10 years old; and the original complaint https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731 is from before the official launch, during the private beta) who would otherwise hang out on a traditional discussion forum 12 hours a day from trying to read the OP's mind, repost the same basic explanation of the same basic idea dozens of times, etc.
(Unfortunately, the incentive system is completely broken - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 - and the company's interests are not aligned with the community, so this is a losing battle.)
And, in fact, your question has been reopened, as of about 3/4 of an hour after your comment that I'm replying to. Stack Overflow is not at all immune to external pressure - after all, many regulars there are also on HN and other usual-suspect sites.
It also looks like your edits have actually improved the question. In particular, adding in a definite conclusion from your profiling attempt.
(We understand that a lot of people in a situation like yours wouldn't necessarily know how to use a profiler and wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with a theory about what's wrong. That isn't our problem. We aren't offering tech support. It's a bitter pill for almost everyone, but Stack Overflow by design is not there to make your code work. It's there to answer questions that arise during your attempt. And a question like yours, properly refined, can help those other people.)