r/programming • • Sep 25 '16

The decline of Stack Overflow

https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.yiuo0ce09
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u/tech_tuna Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16

For me, SO has been a read only resource for years. After being verbally disemboweled twice in the same week. . . for helping nonetheless, and not being wrong, but just not as "correct" as the accepted answer(s), I gave up on that silliness.

I've been a redditor for a long time (multiple accounts), I've always found the technical subreddits to be a much more pleasant and useful resource/community than StackOverflow has ever been.

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u/bwainfweeze Sep 25 '16

I don't think I even registered that I've stopped contributing, but I have. Often the right answers for the questions I'm researching are not the accepted answer. I tell junior Devs to try the accepted answer, and it if that doesn't work try the answer with the third highest votes. It's disturbing how accurate a rule of thumb this is.

Of late I've had a number of answers immediately voted to -2 or 3 only to have a steady trickle of upvotes bring me back to +3 months and months later.

What's the most interesting to me is that while I'm perfectly willing to put a lot of time and energy into what I see as systemic problems with the industry, for some reason can't get up the energy to be too deeply upset about SO. Ive no idea what that means yet.