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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed?

Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?

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Nothing is dying. Our data dumps are live at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange as they've always been.

I had no idea this existed. This is awesome. Thanks for the link.

I wish your older snapshots weren't deleted. Any chance to get them back?

I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.

bruh, put a trigger warning before bringing that up! faints

Yes. I was there. There wasn't even a google. I would stumble along on deja.com in the late 90s until it died a slow painful death and got scooped up by Google [1]

[1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...

Bahahaha. That wasn't even the worst of it. Imagine this scenario, you have to install linux on a pc. There's no stackoverflow, there's no google. The linux distro you're using doesn't even have a package manager. And currently it doesn't have a working ethernet driver either. Also, it's the only computer that exists in your entire house.

Connecting to whatever internet connection I had at the time was always the hardest thing (if all of the other basic hardware was supported).

Maybe I was better off in that I was getting my distro (Slackware) along with the giant 'Linux for dummies' book in which it was included. It still never got me far enough to be able to remove my Windows partition.

I remember installing an early version of Red Hat on a machine that only had a Winmodem, not a real hardware modem that would just work in Linux.

Getting a Winmodem to work in Linux was possibly, but not exactly easy. I couldn't afford a better modem at the time, so I just kept hacking away at it and booting back into Windows and searching the web to try to figure it out. This was 1996 or so; there was far less information on the web than there is today, and search engines weren't exactly great at finding what you needed.

I think I finally got online from Linux after a week or two. :)

I have not-so-fond memories of trying to troubleshoot PPPoE issues.

Copied ethernet driver through floppy disks from another machine.

For values of "another machine" possibly equal to "a system in the campus computer lab at school".

The installation CD for SuSE back in the 1990s had a big how-to PDF, plus another documenting all the kernel compilation option flags ( we didn't have enough RAM then to run fat-and-happy kernels with everything included ).

I printed-out both of those over a long period on the work printers, using the reverse side of single-sided pages recovered from the paper recycling bins. And then settled in for a weekend...

I still remember choosing to include AX.25 in the kernel because it seemed like a cool thing with which I'd want to experiment at some point. Never got around to it!

I bought a book and had some floppies with SlackWare on it. The book didn't have install instructions, but it explained the basics of Unix and Linux. And SlackWare was pretty easy to install and worked well.

Also I was a teenage nerd with lots of time for home computing.

My first compiler was on a disk and I bought it from a video game store.

On the flip side, back then most of the programs I was writing could fit on a few screens and had almost no external dependencies besides libc and the C book was the SO for libc.

Now let's see.. we had Usenet news groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, and eventually web forums on every programming language, operating system, and software package under the sun. You could ask questions and get them answered. What was so cringeworthy about this exactly?

That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.

There was something called experts exchange. Remember that? It was horrible.

Funny you brought that up. I think it was Jeff Atwood who joked about how the domain name read like Expert-Sex-change

StackOverflow was such a welcome relief to this site and Atwood also wrote about expertsexchange in a blog post.

> I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.

Source: [ 2009 ] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/

i remember that expert-sex-change was blocked by our schools filter. thinking about it triggers a vague angry feeling, no specific reason other than, possibly, often repeated disappointment the answer wasn't readable.

It's not dying, I think their recent expansions in job/talent advertising isn't paying off as they originally thought.

Yeah, and it wasn't too long ago that SO Documentation was shut down as well. Hopefully Channels works out better for them.

I don't see why this person's post is downvoted. That was a good question.

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