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In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before posting.
Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only :)
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
So many of the useful answers are closed. A lot of the stuff from google etc. are from 2009-2011. It seems like now most of people are a bunch of assholes trying to be elitists.
(2015) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442 (1 year ago, 39 comments)
More decline in 2016. Questions are not being answered in general or there are professionals responders who don't really understand what you are talking about. In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other *.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
- The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static.
- Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
- People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.
I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct. So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth. This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how th…
Instead of removing "duplicate questions" we can just refine the details of that section of the wiki with more information.
What most people fail to understand (but was explained very well by Joel in some talks) is that SO is primarily optimized for Google & read-only users just looking for the answer to a common issue. By that metric they are extremely successful. Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually made SO popular in the first place.
I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct. So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth. This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how th…
Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.
I disagree with this. SO helped me with Python, Postgres, and SQL countless times. If we are going to consider the value of SO, I would argue that it is a cornerstone .