As the title says, what would happen if Stack Overflow decides to interrupt the service? Realistically speaking how much damage could that do to everyday work?
Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
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Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#2I don’t use stack overflow to much, I usually prefer documentation or blogs
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#3The Q&A have a very permissive license, so anyone can try to host a static version. (This was on purpose, the idea is that people would have been less prone to answer, if the answers were trapped in SO.)
Moreover, there are a few spammer sites that already does this, and one of the problem of SO is to compete with them to be higher in the Google results.
So ... probably you will be able to read the Q&A in other sites, and after a while there will appear SO-likes site for niches.
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#4The app Kiwix let’s you keep a static copy of stack overflow on your phone, it’s only a few gigabytes. It also has Wikipedia!
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#5I don’t use stack overflow to much, I usually prefer documentation or blogs
I find that as I get more familiar with a stack and start solving more "complex" problems, then documentation and blogs are the way to go. But if I'm learning something new and need to change the background color if a button blue then usually stack overflow is the fastest place to figure that out.
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#6I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#7I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway
Finding more stuff on GitHub issues myself, but agree with the general sentiment that more content is elsewhere these days
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#8The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared.
Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#9I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway
Finding more stuff on GitHub issues myself, but agree with the general sentiment that more content is elsewhere these days
Depends. General language questions are amazing on stack overflow. Once you starting getting into the quirks and bugs of individual frameworks, GitHub issues can start to be more helpful.
Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
#10The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirr…
> Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work.
For beginner-level stuff maybe, but there's so much on StackOverflow about bugs, pitfalls, caveats, breaking changes, rationales, use cases, background, etc. that you can't find easily (if at all) in software documentation, if the documentation even pops up in your searches.