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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.

> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.

This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.

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I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".

The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.

I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.

No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.

> No, you don't.

When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).

I do feel like the parent.

If you read parent's comment it's not "I feel like" comment even though he mentioned it. I have been in software engineering for long and the queries to stackoverflow/chatgpt combined haven't decreased for me.

> I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel

Are you being serious here?

> I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself

I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.

I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.

If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?

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