[pmoriarty]

Now let's see.. we had Usenet news groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, and eventually web forums on every programming language, operating system, and software package under the sun. You could ask questions and get them answered. What was so cringeworthy about this exactly?

That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.

[corpMaverick]

There was something called experts exchange. Remember that? It was horrible.

[justboxing]

Funny you brought that up. I think it was Jeff Atwood who joked about how the domain name read like Expert-Sex-change

StackOverflow was such a welcome relief to this site and Atwood also wrote about expertsexchange in a blog post.

> I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.

Source: [ 2009 ] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/

[stefs]

i remember that expert-sex-change was blocked by our schools filter. thinking about it triggers a vague angry feeling, no specific reason other than, possibly, often repeated disappointment the answer wasn't readable.