Post History

Regarding "snark" - it is very hard and subjective to define. Our overall code of conduct says "be nice", but where do you draw the line. On SO, general gruff attitude tends to be treated very differently from moderator to moderator. That's obviously far from ideal.

We would have to be smarter about this than SO was. During the so-called "welcome wagon" they tried to make a push against such comments, but that's just addressing part of the problem. The first person who was rude is usually the one posting a raw copy/paste of their homework assignment and expecting unpaid volunteers to do it for them. That's incredibly rude. 

If we'd then decide to always take the side of the rude homework dumper, like SO did by only remove the rude responses to an even ruder question, people get upset. The wrong people too, because the homework dumpers are rarely ever interested in becoming long-term contributors and community members.

So if we want a zero tolerance against "snark", we must have a similar zero tolerance against homework dumps. Because they _will_ come here sooner or later. It's not enough to instantly remove the homework dump question, it should also be accompanied by 1 week ban from the site, as a suitable first warning against such rude behavior.

Similarly, we must not make the same mistake as SO taking some poorly-considered, naively idealistic stance such as "there are no stupid questions". 10 years of SO experience rather shows that "there are some questions that aren't stupid". The majority of the questions posted there are very bad and should just get deleted.