Stack Overflow: When We Stop Asking

Personally I never liked StackOverflow from the beginning. I didn't like the hoops they made you jump through to be recognized. I didn't like it when what should have been a simple question with just one answer became a list of 60 twisty little answers of which maybe 5 were right and 5 were wrong and the other 50 weren't even wrong. The wrong answers that were accepted and have 20 comments screaming underneath them saying it was wrong and should be unaccepted, etc.

You can ask an AI "How do I center a <div>?" and your odds are petty good, ask a SO user and the odds are awful.

By 2014 I thought SO really sucked but not that many people agreed. I thought for routine problems the correct procedure is to learn how to find authoritative answers in the reference documentation. Anything else frankly wasn't allowed on SO, like "Guava vs Spring?" might be the most consequential decision you can make in a Java project but we weren't allowed to talk about it.

If it wasn't for the two-sided market dynamics SO would have had competition a long time ago, that competition might even have made SO reverse many of the bad decisions they made and otherwise improve their community. Thing was they were able to limp along as a lame duck until... it was too late.