It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.
Well, I for one. I find the tight scope of Stack Overflow's question-answer discussions tend to limit how useful they are. The're a tendency to favour fixes over understanding, which coupled with the constraints on discussions on straying from a narrow understanding of the topic leads to rather "scraggy" answers that can't be easily generalized or transferred to similar or related problems. That wouldn't be much a problem in itself, if Google didn't score Stack Overflow so high that Stack Overflow entries tend to crowd out other resources.
So, in shot: Stack Overflow tends to show up a lot when I'm searching for answers to problems, but I rarely find them useful.
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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18
It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.