# Stack Overflow 235 Hacker News commenters recommended Stack Overflow and 499 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 15 years (39 owners). **Verdict:** A vast archive of high-quality, voted programming answers that are quick to find via search, though many describe its moderation as hostile and quick to close questions. ## Why people recommend it - Vast trove of quality answers (9 comments): "I found it quite helpful at times. Learning in my own projects, and some professional things that I got stuck on I found some incredible help at times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286285)) "So many insights in my past came from stackoverflow answers. But it always required reading through tens of discussions and combining solutions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974337)) "SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284195)) - Strict curation keeps quality high (6 comments): "The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964232)) "deletion only happens after a question is closed for 30 days with a negative score and no answers, and is essential to keep search meaningful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46093161)) "The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284826)) - Voting surfaces the best answers (3 comments): "SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483169)) "The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243430)) "in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486975)) - Fast answers from search (3 comments): "I found SO useful because I could find working answers in minutes from search results. Threaded replies are going to make that much harder." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147931)) "finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490241)) "For someone who just wants to quickly scroll to the green checkmark and get shit done, that site was absolute god-tier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301222)) ## What people warn about - Hostile, toxic moderation (12 comments): "SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284195)) "it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716688)) "the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283010)) - Questions wrongly closed as duplicates (3 comments): "SO was helpful many times but also there were many instances where I found someone asking exactly my question only to see the question was closed as a duplicate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286878)) "The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287926)) "Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485066)) - Outdated top answers persist (3 comments): "Stack Overflow lacked a system to deprecate old answers, and for far too long the preferred sort was purely based on score." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531125)) "popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530864)) "The experience i got was that you arrived at a SO question from Google and the accepted answer was from years ago and irrelevant at the present time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532022)) - Engagement-driven redesigns and AI features (4 comments): "Stack Overflow is mostly dead. It lingers on, but every change that is being attempted or proposed in trying to get more "engagement" takes it further and further from being a place where new knowledge is collected and collated." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290162)) "recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974015)) "The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48973600)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [MDN Web Docs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mdn-web-docs.md): 27 recommend - [HTTP Cats](https://hackerapproved.com/p/http-cats.md): 20 recommend - [Unicode symbol reference page](https://hackerapproved.com/p/one-clean-developer-focused-page-for-every-unicode-symbol.md): 8 recommend - [Can I Use](https://hackerapproved.com/p/can-i-use.md): 5 recommend - [Ralf Brown's Interrupt List](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ralf-brown-s-interrupt-list.md): 5 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://stackoverflow.com/questions) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Stack Overflow", https://hackerapproved.com/p/stack-overflow/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).