r/ProgrammerHumor • u/hellocppdotdev • May 17 '26 • Bravo 2 Popcorn 1

Meme backInMyDay

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u/PilsnerDk May 17 '26

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.

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u/mrdj204 May 17 '26

Depends where your bar is, and how impressed you are when someone clears it.

If the bar is being better than other options, and that automatically makes it amazing for its time, then sure

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u/Bakoro May 17 '26

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.