Stack Overflow is in an impossible situation. You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue. Those things have fundamentally incompatible requirements.
Any two of them, maybe.
You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue.
I don’t agree. There is no clear cutout between what means to be an expert and a novice. What content you’re exposed to is the output of the service’s support for user profiling and search. It is simply not possible to get rid of an important subset of your customer base without causing false positives and generate ill-will. Finally, we should keep in mind that yesterday’s novice is today’s expert.
Finally, we should keep in mind that yesterday’s novice is today’s expert.
That I would strongly disagree with, at least with regards to Stackoverflow. My experience with novice programmers is that the majority of them go to Stackoverflow to get copy/paste solutions to rather trivial problems. They don’t go there to learn but rather the opposite, they are looking for shortcuts. Their ideal Stackoverflow experience would be " I have this problem, please someone write the code for me…". On Stackoverflow, this is at least frowned upon. ChatGPT however cares little about your motivation.
In my opinion, the downfall of Stackoverflow was inevitable and also pretty much warranted.
Reddit managed.
