It just occured to me, that I haven’t asked anything on SO for a while now. It might even be years, the last I asked for help.
Most of the problems I come across were already faced by someone else.
Do you guys feel the same?
Never. For the most part i haven’t had a question that hasn’t already asked or that couldn’t be answered from reading the docs or some other source. For the cases i get stuck i ask the question to a more focused group
I find SO too pissy to interact with. If I find something useful there, I’ll copy it, but otherwise I ignore it.
What do you mean by pissy? What do you find so pissy?
I would answer your question, but it’s too much like a previous question, that someone else hasn’t answered yet.
When the number one result in Google is a site answering my exact question with “did you try googling it first?” I have no incentive to interact with that site.
i got that once, except it was my exact question with no response at all, then i noticed it was me that posted the question 4 years earlier.
i used to use stack overflow a lot back in 2007/08 but i cant remember the last time i actually got an answer.
I’ve stopped using most corporate message boards and forums since AI hysteria highlighted their greed and self-aggrandizement.
All of them act like they are indispensable and provide value, when their only value is the network effect, and their “products” are entirely user generated and moderated. It’s only a matter of time until they enshittify and rug pull.
Ha I once googled some question, found a great answer in some random forum and was like about to write a reply saying what a great answer it was when I realised it was me, like 10 years ago.
Funny story: when SO first started, started answering questions in domains I had experience in. The gamification was fun. After a year, questions got repetitive, so stopped.
A few years later. Googling a tech question. Top answer. Checked. Looks good.
Scroll down. It’s my own answer from way back when.
First time I felt old.
Most of the responses on that site are toxic, so I tend to avoid it.
So which one are you using ?
By responses you mean to include comments and moderation, not just answers?
It’s sometimes there, but - from the [limited] use I have - I would certainly not qualify them as “most”.
Never. Don’t have the patience to gather enough points to ask a question.
Oh, and,
Asking, answering, and editing require no reputation.
Last time I asked was in 2019. I’ve asked 30+ questions total, only about half of those are ever answered. I’ve found that, the more experienced I get, the less my questions get answered on SO. Usually because my questions are well thought out, explained incredibly well, and the problem isn’t that I don’t understand something. It’s that my problem is one of a kind. E.g. no one else on the planet is having it. So of course I’m not going to get help for it.
yeah… that’s what I realized too.
If you ask basic questions - “google it yourself” … closed!
If you ask anything specific (like in your case) - it’s just crickets
I asked and answered a small handful of questions in the mid 20-teens but not really much since. I still wind up finding good answers there on a semi regular basis, though.
I just looked in my profile and my last question was in 2017. I received a holier than thou “what you’re trying to do is wrong” type of response and finally solved it with the help of a coworker who actually cared.
It must have been over 5 years ago. It turned me off. The culture there was so painful. People would refuse to answer a question just because they deemed the premise of your question unacceptable. Or even recommend you change your whole project’s language.
It was like that both in questions and in chat. I never tried again.
Very rarely, but if it’s a specific enough question that I’ve actually researched before I usually get a good response.
Sometime between 2013 and 2018. Had to answer it myself. It got at least a couple dozen upvotes and a lot of people finding it useful and asking follow up questions.
It’s deleted now. To be fair it was probably really outdated. But my account seems to be completely gone now. Maybe it got hacked. I haven’t been there in a long time.
You should already know that. It’s such a simple thing. — first answer on StackOverflow
It has been one or two years. I deleted my accounts since then and don’t look anything there anymore (if I can) considering things are quite outdated now.
I forgot that last time was in 2023, although the previous one was in 2016. SO had a lot of moderation drama and point-grinders that (imo) led to community becoming more toxic, to the point where it’s not too pleasant for me to participate in.
To be fair, they still have some good answers, and sometimes they can provide a useful answer, but edge-case rare obscure problems that seemed to be the very reason for SO are rarely answered now, as I see it
A bunch of people that either failed to understand the value of the moderation system or are just crybabies about being expected to follow the rules answering here.
It is easy to use and not nearly as toxic as most of the internet will claim. Research your question, ask clearly, include the code you attempted for a minimal reproduction, and include debugging details. If you don’t do those things, you are the problem, not the people closing your questions.
I use it often per month.
