a slightly OT comment

Stack overflow was really attractive to me once but gave me a really hard time. Literally for years I really wanted SO to like me and did what I could to that aim, but always in vain. There were moments but you had to be a sucker in love to value those feeble crumbs, man and boy was I. Pretty sad.

These days I barely think about SO since agentism opened up the world -- nay -- universe to me. I've got new and rather impressive homies now; some, like Claude, I've yet to meet.

Life is good. And I honestly wish SO well, no hard feelings.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes that is what happened to SO. They now get practically zero questions, zero answers, zero page views, and zero ad revenue. It is their own fault because they froze everyone out of the site and then once LLMs became an alternative, everyone started asking their questions to LLMs. They are now trying to somehow pivot to AI to make revenue again, starting with Stack Overflow for Agents, and now with wordy vacuous blog posts to show off how AI they are.

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youareinsuffera 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I see that Hacker News has, in its usual fashion, expressed their love and solidarity by downvoting your post.

Apparently you just deserve a life of pain.

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zephen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Apparently you just deserve a life of pain.

Don't we all?

(I can see that you are starting to get downvoted as well. Spread the love.)

Stack overflow was interesting. Its design was the only thing like it at the time, and made it a Schelling point for programming knowledge distribution, but also a welcoming environment for the programming equivalent of grammar nazis.

Some of those programming nazis, of course, had suffered at the hands of previous ones on stack overflow before becoming "enlightened." And thus, the generational hazing began.

It was great if google directed you to exactly the right answer, but god help you if you couldn't figure it out, and posed a question that someone thought didn't contain an MCVE.

Also, a few too many of the high-reputation people would post complete garbage on topics they knew absolutely nothing about.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You can't just call everyone you don't like a Nazi.

	▲	zephen 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The term "xxx nazi" has been around for over 70 years to describe people with sticks shoved so far up their asses that they poke out the tops of their heads. And "grammar nazi" has been around since at least 1990, and the infamous Seinfeld Soup Nazi since 1995. I'm not sure of the etymology of the "not everybody's a Nazi Nazi" but I'm sure you're not the first. But in any case: > You can't just call everyone you don't like a Nazi. Yes, yes, I can. I don't (I reserve the appellation for certain particular kinds of attitudes), but I could if I wanted to.