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Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

SO is a very beginner-unfriendly platform. Every time I used it, I either did not get any replies or had my question altered, deleted, removed, closed etc. I have no clue why anyone still uses it.

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My 10 year old question was closed as a duplicate of a 7 year old question. I'm still both bitter and amused by this. (This was a few years ago, but it's still closed.)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10181706/working-with-a-...

Yes, this is an unfortunate direction that SO took in the last 5 or so years. In the first 5-10 years of its life it was much more welcoming and a great resource. Now it feels like a static database of (potentially slightly out of date) FAQs.

SO has always been this way, which is why I prefer to ask on reddit, and resort to SO when the question is unanswered or quite technical.

The two options are: 1) no one has had their questions answered on stack overflow, or 2) your questions were duplicates or needed a lot of rewording to make them useful to people in the future.

Asking a question on stackoverflow that is long term useful to the community isn’t a beginner-difficulty task.

Yeah, I guess if you have a very specific problem that you need help with, it's better to ask about it on Discord. But for the general questions that many noobs are likely to face that the blog post mentions ("How do you make for loop in reverse?" or "What allocator to use in WASM?"), I still think SO would be the better platform, if only to avoid trying the patience of the helpful people on Discord too much...

And even for specific questions like the one he mentions after that you really want to have them somewhere in public, because someone will eventually run into a similar problem

It’s beginner adverse site today. It’s got a lot of great existing questions and answers though

It is.

It's very hostile. Sometimes I just want to ask a broader, conceptual question. I don't need someone to produce working code. Just discuss.

Sometimes I can't make a working minimal example because I work with info that can't be placed online and writing something ground up that is similar enough and decoupled from the hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of lines would take me a week or two and may not end up even working out.

They decided to not support those kinds of questions—their prerogative I suppose. They do have meta and software design, architecture sites.

Not that it matters as much any more since SO is slowly dying, they should replace human moderates with AI and involve humans only when AI says it needs help with something

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