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.
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.
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].
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.
I feel this is the critical bit. People are quick to dismiss this problem as a moderation problem, but I don't agree. I believe it was a query problem, and the absolute lack of support for tying both questions and answers to specific software versions, or range of software versions. So you'd see answers from ages ago marked as the right answer to a question, even though it was using some deprecated version.
Questions on how to address the same issue when new versions were out where closed as duplicates because literally the question was asked before and answered as well. But the answer nowadays would not be applicable.
Then to sidestep this problem you see the phenomenon where ancient questions end up having multiple answers, with newer answers even out voting the accepted answer. And even those would be deprecated as well.
So SO was designed as a system where a single question can only possibly have a single accepted answer. Ever. And anyone asking similar questions would by design be routed to he question that was asked and answered. But the system was designed over the concept of static information and static notion of truth. Which the world definitely doesn't follow.
I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.
It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.
Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.
I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.
It's kind of sad: I bet there was some excitement around the SO office. Is this it? Are we on the way back? Have people remembered that we're here and now they're returning? Alas, no, they weren't, and they weren't. That must've been rough.
One way that stackoverflow does stand out from the other stackexchange sites is that its half life appears far shorter. On a log scale plot it has a steeper descent than the other stackexchange sites. I'm not sure what to make of that. Another interesting thing is that the math stackexchange initially declines more slowly than the others for a year or two and then decays pretty similarly. You can also see examples in some of the other sites of their decay beginning before chatgpt releases (e.g. drupal). You can also see some sites decaying a decade earlier (e.g. expressionengine). I think those outliers are from their subject being too specific and going out of style.
I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:
DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'
SELECT
site = [$site_name$],
month = DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0),
questions = COUNT(*)
FROM PostsWithDeleted
WHERE PostTypeId = 1
GROUP BY DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0)
';
EXEC dbo.sede_ineachdb
@SQLCommand = @sql,
@IncludeMainSites = 1,
@IncludeMetaSites = 0,
@IncludeMainMeta = 0;Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.