Hear you on Ye Days of Yore. I never did IRC, but I did try UseNet, and it was basically a public toilet.

Everyone bitches about the Eternal September, but, in my opinion, it actually reduced the hostility and barbarism. Clueless dolts were a welcome break from the malevolent assholes.

Yes, that was part of the point. I hope you posted anyway (after checking for a duplicate, and assuming the underlying problem wasn't just a typo), and provided your own answer for it. That is an explicit part of how the site is supposed to work (but an incredibly poorly communicated one).

> Also a lot of people didn't experience how bad things were BEFORE stack overflow.

SO actually considerably improved on that axis over time. It's just that tons of people erroneously think that being expected to meet certain standards in asking a question (in particular, doing the necessary debugging work to locate and reproduce a problem, or the necessary contemplation to properly specify a task), is the same thing as yelling at people for not knowing answers to easy things. That goes both ways: people get upset when their question is closed, and people think they're helping by excluding easily answered questions because they're easily answered. In reality, the main problem is questions that are easy but complex, i.e. which really break down into multiple separate easy questions or require digging through a code dump to find a trivial error.

I have repeatedly had this experience in trying to craft The perfect question for a consultant who was also a mathematics professor, in finding the essence of the question the answer becomes clear and I never even have to send the email