The Fall of Stack Overflow

SO has been a great site for me. Not too long ago, it was always my first stop, when looking for correct solutions to difficult problems.

I'm a highly experienced engineer, and a first-class debugger. I always get my bug ... eventually.

What SO would give me, was a correct solution, very quickly. I would ask a question, and have two or three excellent answers, in a matter of minutes.

I could definitely have found the answer, myself, but I would have had to do stuff like set up playgrounds, or even full applications.

Nowadays, they require question askers to do exactly that. In The Days of Yore, I could ask a question, without having to have gone through an hour of debugging and prototyping, and have a great answer.

But, at its heart, it's another wiki documentation site, and wikis don't age well. The WordPress Codex is damn near worthless, and even the great PHP docs are showing their age.

I guess I’ve always interacted with SO in a relatively passive way. There’s just too much toxicity that’s plausibly deniable. And with it, lost much of its usefulness.

Every time I try to look for an answer against knowing better, I still get disappointed.

Either the question isn’t there or someone asked it but it was marked as duplicate with a link to a decade old (and for some reason never more recent) question that is vaguely of a similar topic if you squint hard enough.

It’s silly anyways because some of the frameworks I work with are extremely volatile in the sense that they fundamentally change from year to year, so the chances that an older question is stale are all but guaranteed.

I don’t even bother asking the question myself because I see the copious amounts of pedantry while I browse.

Never mind discussions about “the right way” of doing things, I’m talking about entire comment threads about the right terminology of the “well akschually” variety.

Think arguments about whether something should be called a method or a function or whether MVVM is possible with framework X because the author had intended X, Y or Z, when none of it is even remotely relevant nor helpful to the question at hand.

Other forms of pedantry are entirely rewriting the OP’s question because a variable name or function name was disliked, even though the original question as asked was not confusing in the slightest.

The single time I asked a question, it was genuinely challenging and relatively low-level matter, or as close to it as you get in my field. Crickets, aside from 1 extremely low quality answer that didn’t actually answer anything that is.

I tried to focus on answering people’s questions instead, especially on a few relatively new frameworks that come with new conventions as those generate a lot of questions and I managed to become really proficient in them. I figured it would be a good way to give back to the developer community as a whole since it was that very community that enabled me to become proficient in it in the first place.

But stopped doing that too because it’s useless. Either good questions get closed, mods fuck around editing things around or the high level clique just upvotes each other’s low effort drivel.

SO is all but completely useless to me, it has become my last resort and only if I’m really stuck, and every time I dread it like I dread pulling teeth because every time it proves to be an exercise in wasting my time.

I have no allegiance to SO ownership so when the fake SO sites show up in results instead of SO, usually reading them will just give me the answer more quickly than finding the actual SO source.

This wasnt an issue I remember in the past. I've just kind of drifted away as a result.