Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!"
My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".
It's such a pain in the ass to contribute knowledge there that I just don't even bother trying anymore.
It's a collection of petty tyrants at this point. I can't wait for LLMs to just digest them whole.
It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."
Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.
The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")
This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.
I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.
Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites...
I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?
HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.
Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.