On the other hand, another week another JavaScript framework, amirite? There continues to be new stuff to ask questions about, but stack overflow failed to be the default location for new stuff. I guess now there's more discussion directly on GitHub and discord.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".

The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.

I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.

I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.

How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).

Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.

I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.

Not automatically. You could add a bounty using your own points if the question didn't get an accepted answer in 2 days.

Which is kinda cool, but also very biased for older contributors. I could drop thousands of points bounty without thinking about it, but new users couldn't afford the attention they needed.

Stack Overflow moderation is very transparent compared to whatever Reddit considers moderation.

For programming my main problem with Reddit is that the quality of posts is very low compared to SO. It's not quite comparable because the more subjective questions are not allowed on SO, but there's a lot of advice on Reddit that I would consider harmful (often in the direction of adding many more libraries than most people should).

None of those worked as programming tools. I really miss Google Answers though, with the bounties.

Random example:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html

It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.

It was a more innocent time.

Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...

"A Human commented at ##:##pm" "An AI Bot commented at..." "A suspected AI Bot commented at..." "An unconfirmed Human commented at..."

ya but you assume someone worked hard on the answer. there are alot of times when you get garbage top to bottom.

create a new account every few weeks and don't forget to mix you you'er writin' style to fakeout stylometrics. its all against the rules but i disagree with HN terms. internet points don't mean crapola to me. but i like dropping in here every now and then to chit caht. i should have the right to be anonymous and non-deidentifiable here and speak freely. of IP address ---are--- tracked here and you can easily be shadowbanned. but i don't say anything awful, but i am naturally an asshat and i just can't seem to change my spots. 90% of the time i'm ok, but 10% i'm just a raving tool.