alt Hacker NewsEveryone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
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Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead."
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.
Is it possible this is survivorship bias? Maybe other forums with much less strict moderation simply wouldn’t have survived long enough to complain about.
Exactly.
Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.
This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.
So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.
edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.
I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions.
I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.