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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

"the whole idea of Stack Overflow is to have answers to general questions, not to everyone's individual question"

But why? I ran a site called WPQuestions.com for 7 years, it was where people paid between $10 to $50 to get fast answers for their WordPress questions. I called it "micro consulting" in that the consultants were answering small questions for small fees. While I get that StackOverflow wanted to be free, I wonder why it didn't commit to being more of a Helpdesk for people in need. Why have general answers, when people have such an urgent need for specific answers to their specific questions? An incredibly wasted opportunity. Even more so, with AI able to answer all of the general questions, the only avenue open to non-AI companies is answering very specific questions that are heavily context dependent.

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Answering everyone's specific personal questions is geared towards beginners and doesn't add any value to others. E.g. fixing your typo doesn't help the next guy understand why their code doesn't work. Explaining the general case is timeless and valuable to all skill levels. There are plenty of sites that do what you describe, but there's a reason Stack Overflow became widely known and used instead: the QA is applicable to everyone working in that space, not just that one person who asked about their specific case.

I think StackOverflow has convincingly demonstrated that “timeless” in programming is about 5 or maybe 10 years.

And that’s because programming languages move so rapidly, whether they need to or not. For some reason I can’t quite fathom there is always a desire to shake up the status quo, that particularly as a mechanical engineer I don’t understand. I don’t want some radical new way to integrate components, let alone new different components, I just want something that’s reliable and will be usable for a long time.

Non-rhetorical question: is it possible to be both? That is: be a support/micro-consulting site and a repository for canonical knowledge and best practices?

Stack Overflow sort of flirted with this idea, I guess, with the concept of attaching "bounties" to your questions. The bounties were just Stack Overflow points, not cash. But AFAIK that wouldn't spare your question from being marked as dupe so you still couldn't use SO for support.

Depends on your use case in terms of the time pressure you're under, but I learnt a lot from SO answers. Having to figure out how a general answer applied to a specific question taught me much more than getting a specific answer to a specific question.

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