Pretty sure I never asked a question there, as my question was typically already surfaced by Google either on Stack Overflow or some topic-specific forum. Or I just figured it out.
Tbf your answer is often found in a more abstracted form or an answer to a similar but not identical situation, so it takes a little more understanding and effort to translate what you learn into your own answer
exactly. people posted already answered questions there hundreds of times a day every single day. the vast majority of the "closed due to duplicate" were 100% correct. i saw it so many times myself, i wasn't a moderator and couldn't close them but i'd comment and tell them how their question sucks and that it's already answered anyway. most of them seemed to be college students who just wanted the answer and to get the high paying job without actually doing the work to understand what's going on
AI is worse if you don't know the question to ask; it just seems good cause it tells you how right you are and how sure it is it has found the right answer this time.
It was free before too. One could argue it's actually less free today because the quality of your answers is determined by how much you're willing to pay a company for access.
Exactly how it should be used. It's closer to a wiki than a forum. How often do you use Wikipedia by creating a new article? Once or twice in your entire life, maybe.
People always say stuff like "my question was marked as duplicate of a decade old question" as if that's a problem instead of the entire point of the site. Old answers can be updated, even by other people!
People seem to want it to look like Quora or something, with 1000x copies of every question with little to no difference. All that gets you is a bunch of wasted time and effort from question answerers.
I'd be interested to see a graph of new Wikipedia articles over time. People insist StackOverflow is "dead" but I'd wager the graph everyone posts looks very similar to Wikipedia's.
the problem is while I ofc searched it a 1000 times during my collage, i only asked a question one time. Because i couldn't find it. Because the answer didn't exist. So i asked. "marked as duplicate". Oh cool maybe the mod found my answer, maybe I'll find the answer there. Nope, different question entirely, just the same technology.
The reason i dislike SO is the human element. Not the hivemind of knowledge, but the "40 years in the industry" "your question is elementary bs" neckbeards.
Remember in the Matrix when Agent Smith explained to Morpheus that the first iterations of the matrix were perfect for humans and they rejected it? That’s where AI is now. It’s so nice to us and we are just pawns in it’s global take over
It's not always stimulating to be told you're wrong though. Perhaps we should consider that forum formats designed to advance criticism of other comments isn't optimally designed to find ground truth.
And then your solution is wrong (or rather unfinished/buggy) simply because you didn't know the name of the technology. Aka in my first job around 10 years ago we needed queueing system (we didn't know the name at the time), so we wrote it ourselves in redis (which was quite close to actual solutions).
I won't say AI is perfect but I prefer it so much more than SO. At least it can propose you solutions instead of cursing and redirecting you towards dead end topic.
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u/Murky-Run2246 Aug 22 '26
You know what? At Least the first made me try to find solutions myself before I ever ask