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by aepiepaey 2998 days ago
Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others.

If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great.

On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory:

Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that usually don't answer that question).[1]

Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been closed due to being "not constructive" or "off topic".

[1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python's integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices, warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.

3 comments

Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small.

In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later, after I've figured it out by other means.

This is actually one of the use cases I really like. I'll often deliberately add a question with an answer if I think it is something I'll use again in future and is not found somewhere else obvious on the web.
You can often find the people more knowledgable on a particular subject in one of the other stack exchange sites. (For example, a problem with OpenGL or Unity might be better asked on gamedev.stackexchange.com, or computergraphics.stackexchange.com.)
The really in depth stuff tends to be blogged about - SO should really have a team of sockpuppet writers who pose questions and then also post summary answers with links back to the blog posts.
> Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old

“Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!”

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

You should really link to the actual cartoon page instead of just the image. Not only do you get links to the rest of the site but the hover text is almost always worth seeing.

https://xkcd.com/979/