Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:
- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).
- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).
- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.
- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.
- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.
Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."
And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.
Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.
Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.
We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.