Either make a post on meta about the problem and provide a solution if you have on how to fix it OR make your own SO with your own rules. I'm really tired of seeing these off topic (whining) comments whenever SO comes up. It's useless and doesn't add anything to the discussion here.
There is an endless supply of new users who need to learn, but only limited patience among senior people to repeat themselves. The "safeguards" put in place against repetition, n00bs, decay, etc, really serve the interests of the users who have stuck around, not the users who need to learn something. Newer users talking about getting a different experience than the original users, and not getting the usefulness that the site's reputation implies, is not simple whining.
Any solution has to have the support of the long-term, high-rep community, but the long-term, high-rep community creates the problem - by sticking around so long, they accumulate influence even as their incentives changed. You can see why meta might have a lot of people who don't think there's a problem at all.
The senior-friendly design of SO ignores the fact that the graveyards are full of indispensible people. One huge change would simply be to age out the users who have been around the longest, or have the highest rep. The newest can (and should) be taught by the slightly-more-experienced who aren't yet jaded by the repetition.
I don't understand your first para. New users don't want to ask questions. They want an answer to their questions, and only if there is no answer they want to ask a question.
SO is not just a question-asking site, it's also a repository of already asked questions.
Many (but admitedly not all) questions closed as dupes make no effort to distinguish themselves from previously answered questions.
(I'm someone who thinks there are problems with some of the SO sites. I'm not a fan.)
Yeah man, screw the users! They're just like customers, they're always the problem! You know, except for the little problem that without customers (or users) the entity either wouldn't exist, or would die.
> Such a soviet kind of operating system isn't well regarded in the land of the free
Land of the free? have you been living under a rock? "Land of the free" where everything you do is being spied on by a government agency funded with your tax dollars.
Except when the same information is posted by 6 websites and all 6 of those articles have made the front page, you start to alienate people in the middle who understand all of the current information and are now unhappy with the one sided coverage and angry internet mob of people who already weren't using Windows.
Those are different articles. Your comment is analogous to linking to old Docker article discussions when a new article is posted in order to try to discourage discussion of Docker in general.
They are different articles about the same issue and I'm not trying to discourage discussion about it. It just gets old seeing the same thing on the front page but that's just my opinion and you don't have to agree with it.
Upgrade notification is now adware? are you serious? You don't even have to pay for the upgrade and you'll have a lot to gain from it and for us developers, it's a good thing aswell since it might reduce the number of old IEs/plateforms we have to support. I expected more from an HN user..
You also have to hide the update to prevent WU from reinstalling it for you, but actually not even that will permanently disable it.
This is because Microsoft will release "updates" to that package, with the totally unintended side effect of unhiding and reinstalling the update. So even if you uninstall it, and hide the update from WU, it will still find a way onto your system.
So yeah, like I said and despite the downvotes, it's fucking adware. Bordering on malware.
I consider it adware because there is no way to get the notification to go away. No obvious way, anyhow, and rather than search around for the "correct" way of doing it, I uninstalled the update and hid it in WU.
(Actually I did a brief search, and didn't find anything.)
So at this point, maybe you're right and it's not adware. I'd consider it borderline at least, but fine. Whatever.
However I got a second notification some weeks later, from the same package which I had already uninstalled and hidden remember, after it apparently reinstalled itself because MS released an 'update' to this package. So despite uninstalling it and following all the steps required to clearly communicate that no, I do not want this fucking thing on my PC, MS decided they'd push the update to my system anyway.
At this point it's no longer borderline. It is harassing behavior from something that is very obviously adware.
Is it a "notification" or a longterm limpet on the hull? I looked at a relative's W7 machine and there was a promotional application ("GWX" - Get Windows X?) running permanently with no apparent way to decline its offer or uninstall it.
I'm posting this since the developer is here and replying to the comments.