Stack Overflow

“For someone who just wants to quickly scroll to the green checkmark and get shit done, that site was absolute god-tier.”

“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.”

“The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone”

“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”

“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.”

“A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.”

“The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about.”

“the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer”

“A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions”

“In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated.”

“A few bad experiences when trying to help people was enough of a turn off to stop me from logging a decade ago.”

“So many insights in my past came from stackoverflow answers. But it always required reading through tens of discussions and combining solutions.”

“recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original”

“The company repeatedly attempt to force shitty AI-powered features on the community, and also tried to intervene with enforcement of that policy”

“SO has good, valid questions about general concepts, which are narrowly scoped about the concept despite the broad applicability of that concept.”

“It was correct to make such users 'feel unwelcome', because experience has shown that they typically cannot be reasoned with.”

“The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well.”

“But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.”

“StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants”

“Stack Overflow (which I started using in 2010) effectively killed my need to buy expensive technical books from O'Reilly”

“StackOverflow's extremely strict moderation was probably the #1 reason it turned into a high quality resource”

“SO was fairly mean spirited, but nowhere else has such a vast trove of high quality answers to common software problems been collected.”

“In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.”

“supplemented with specific Q&A from Stack Overflow. I have extremely fond memories learning C++ and Qt that way”

“back when stackoverflow was still good and useful, I asked about some stderr manipulation and learnt a lot from the replies”

“I found SO useful because I could find working answers in minutes from search results. Threaded replies are going to make that much harder.”

“StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge”

“it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users”

“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.”

“Stack Overflow lacked a system to deprecate old answers, and for far too long the preferred sort was purely based on score.”

“popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago”

“the site being taken over by people like that, serving themselves and their own preferences with such vigor that they alienated vast numbers of potential contributors”

“finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer”

“in some answers there are important details and nuances that you only see by looking at secondary answers and comments”

“The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it.”

“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”

“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.”

“The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why.”

“part of what drove people to it in the first place was its steadfast dedication to maintaining a curated knowledge base”

“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”