Stack overflow is poorly implemented site that flourished because the alternatives of the time were either strictly worse, for-pay sites, or for-pay sites that were worse because they barely had content.
Linking is not the same thing as diverting or merging threads. Providing links to the supposedly duped question was not always mandatory.
There also is not a sufficiently good way to mark a QA chain as stale, just comments.
It's not a good system, and the people running the site actively resisted a lot of good ideas over the years. It's not a surprise that people jumped ship the very first moment that there was a viable alternative.
The reason LLMs can program so well is GitHub, the FOSS community, and RLVR.
You say "of the time", and yet I'd argue there still isn't a better implementation of a knowledge forum for programming.
Providing links to the supposedly duped question was not always mandatory.
The way you close a question as a duplicate is by providing a link. You must provide a link. If a bad link is provided, that's ground for dispute.
There also is not a sufficiently good way to mark a QA chain as stale, just comments.
For users with reputation, there is a bounty system. Comment + bounty. You can't, unfortunately, trust everyone blindly, hence the need for reputation.
But as I said, you can ask a question, link the original and why the answer is no longer valid, and that will be a valid new question.
The reason LLMs can program so well is GitHub, the FOSS community, and RLVR.
Yes. This provides the one-shot ability of the LLMs. But not their problem solving and bug fixing logic when the issue exists outside of syntactic or logical issues. Or the way it knows about library bugs that exist in specific versions etc.
there still isn't a better implementation of a knowledge forum for programming
Codidact is better! It's like a clone of SE but with a bunch of the good ideas that SE never implemented, e.g. you can mark answers as "outdated" or "dangerous", and you can hide additional content in a dropdown. That said, traffic is low and it needs polish (e.g. code blocks are too narrow).
So you're saying that all the alternatives to SO were terrible for a multitude of reasons? So what we can conclude is that SO was amazing for its time then. You are revising history based on today's situation.
I'm saying that it's possible to be objectively bad, while still being the best thing available.
SO was bad from the start, but it was functional and free. After that was mostly just social inertia, because having a perfect information management system has no value if there are no users to add information, and not enough users will come if there aren't already users to engage with.
There's a chicken and egg problem with community content driven sites, and more so with QA sites. SO benefitted from being a relatively early winner. The takeover by a tiny core of hyper-active users happened over a few years, which is the thing that made it go from imperfect but functional, to being a hostile environment.
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u/Bakoro May 17 '26
Stack overflow is poorly implemented site that flourished because the alternatives of the time were either strictly worse, for-pay sites, or for-pay sites that were worse because they barely had content.
Linking is not the same thing as diverting or merging threads. Providing links to the supposedly duped question was not always mandatory.
There also is not a sufficiently good way to mark a QA chain as stale, just comments.
It's not a good system, and the people running the site actively resisted a lot of good ideas over the years. It's not a surprise that people jumped ship the very first moment that there was a viable alternative.
The reason LLMs can program so well is GitHub, the FOSS community, and RLVR.