alt Hacker NewsIt's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever taken part in moderating the review queue, you would've seen the insane amount of low-quality questions flowing in. I saw probably ten variants of "how to center my div" daily being closed as duplicates. The asker might be miffed about getting their question closed (but with a link to a solution..), but if you want to actually get answers to the high quality questions, the noise has to be filtered somehow.
Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners figure out their syntax errors or how to apply a general solution to their specific issue. And you may not like SO for it, but to not want to be a site for that is their prerogative.
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> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.
Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.
Anyone who uses SO often enough have seen them for themselves. We don't really need proof. Besides which, this isn't court. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to know, not the strangers around them who have no responsibility to them.
> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented.
Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed.
Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to have more people try to nit-pick it again hardly sounds attractive.
> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners
The entire point of the story above was that it wasn’t a beginner question.