[eterm]

That blog post really hits hard how much Stackoverflow has become hostile to such users.

"please don't ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of stackoverflow" is the mantra the moderators now follow and it's maddening for the same reasons that Spolsky talks about in this post.

The modern equivalent is just stackoverflow itself. It has been very hostile to new users. Questions when allowed are incredibly esoteric and therefore hard to answer or over-specific and therefore not helpful to others.

In fact I'd say that now research by new users is punished. If they research and work on forming an abstraction for their problem and ask about that instead, there is a good chance the question will be closed as a duplicate or trip up some other issue.

If they just go ahead and "post their code" and focus on the very specific issue, there's a better chance it gets past moderation and gets answered.

Now part of that is deliberate on stackoverflow's part, they want people to post the actual problems they have and not post generic or general problems, but it does feel like an odd incentive at times.