Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

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> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway.

That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere, but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online.

See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you would get from a good book or teacher, good luck finding something comparable in the often terse official python docs.

Sure, there are a lot of lazy SO Q/As that sound like someone wasn't doing their homework, but that's far from the only type of content there.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100003/what-are-metaclas...

(Edit: another great example is basically anything that concerns advanced usage of matplotlib. That library is so weird and the docs so terrible that working off of SO examples really is the most efficient way to use it.)

Yeah, that's the kind of answer that you don't get anymore on SO, mostly because that kind of question isn't allowed anymore.

Nowadays questions must be much more specific, what has the consequence that the answers are much less generally useful.

There are less and less general questions because most of them have been answered already. If I see a question like that either I give a link to the docs or mark as duplicate. There's no point in writing such long answers if the information already exists somewhere else.

StackOverflow once tried to do an interesting community experiment around replicating documentation on everything but it lacked guidance / self-direction and they cancelled it.

I can't agree this more, once a moderator quoted about this in a moderation room: "I'm starting to become concerned that this room is somehow promoting the idea that all questions need to have an MCVE and/or that debugging questions are the only questions that are on-topic for Stack Overflow. That is not only wrong, it's horribly wrong, dangerously wrong. So I step in and correct this misconception as often as I can."

Some StackOverflow answers are so bad they are the worst resource on a topic.

Some are. That’s where you downvote or report it (depending on what’s ‘bad’)

Some of the bad ones are the most up voted one..

Things that technically work, but are not the best way, easiest or more secure way of doing what the person needed.

Often times when I find a solution to Stack Overflow the one I find most helpful is the 3rd or 4th most upvoted solution not the most popular one

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