I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.

1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

This was before LLMs or COVID.

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bulbar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> 1. It was hard to ask any question.

Totally. There were so many safeguards in place, for a newcomer it is quite hard to contribute.

They also never understood a core principle of such platforms. The noise is not noise but what carries such platforms. They even had it quantified, some of their most upvoted questions are off topic because they are opinion based. Bad and good questions (and answers) come hand in hand.

Well, they were the backbone of professional IT/SWE, so of course they did a lot of things right obviously.

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xtracto 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.

First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.

The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.

Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].

	▲	zahlman 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The alternatives were crap. … Asking was still pretty terrible. The alternates were crap precisely because they didn't have the restrictions on posting new questions that everyone complains about. Asking was terrible because otherwise you get the other forms of crap. That's what everyone knew going in and it was a common observation that specifically motivated creating the site in the first place.