20+ year programmer and I've never made an account on SO. During the early stages of SO, the idea of making people have to earn a certain amount of SO karma just to ask a question seemed like an odd obstacle to place in front of new users. I get why they may want to do it but decisions like that are already divisive and toxic to being with.
As much of an information resource I think it turned out to be for many of us, it’s one of the worst places to actually ask a question for help. Toxic programmer culture just makes it a horrible place. I’ve been writing code for 25 years and the one lesson that’s easy to learn (and early on) is that there are so many folks out there that see things differently than you and approach problems with a different mindset. Sometimes the answer is plain as day to you, and others, a slam dunk is just completely out of reach but obvious to everyone else. SO as a whole needs to learn to give everyone a bit of understanding and either help the community get better or just STFU.
Searchability is not good within the Fediverse, and most traffic to SO is from Google Search... We might need to work on SEO first or nobody will ever see it
Have to disagree on that hard. SEO is a cancer on the Internet that has compromised usability and usefulness for a quick buck. A dedicated, ad-free search engine for the platform would be much more useful and likely to remain so.
Lemmy is like Reddit, which is used a lot to ask questions and get help. But StackOverflow fills a different niche, it's meant to be useful to as many people as possible and stay up to date. This is why
there's a distinction between "comments" and "answers" (comments can be used to request additional information, and for meta discussion)
both questions and answers can be modified by other users, for example to
add more information, or remove unnecessary details
correct outdated information
fix typos and formatting
rephrase sentences that are confusing
a question can be closed as duplicate, so people always find the oldest thread of the question with the best/most detailed answers
before submitting a question, you get a list of related questions to avoid creating a duplicate question
questions have tags, making them easier to search for
I absolutely hate SO. It’s my last resort when looking for help, and I’ve never signed up.
Between snarky arseholes, the “already answered here” comments even when the question isn’t the same, and people saying “dw i solved it” and never stating how they solved it the whole place can just fuck of.