| It’s weird he even frames it this way, when the original SO pitch was that it was better than an older, competing website (which they derisively referred to by the disambiguating punctuation in its URL). On the one hand, there is a slice of history in which SO absolutely deserves this much credit, even if this particular hyperbole is anachronistic. Early on, and for several years, SO did genuinely provide a single place to find relatively high quality/trustworthy answers to a huge range of programming questions. On the other hand, I think that shark has been jumped for many years since. At least for my usage, I deliberately avoid clicking SO links until I’ve exhausted other promising resources (first party docs, reputable forums and blogs as you’ve mentioned). Because the quality of SO content is generally not just terrible, but because the gamification design they touted as producing quality can’t keep up with volume or time. Nearly every SO link I’ve clicked in recent months has either been full of garbage answers (with maybe something helpful buried in comments), has an accepted answer years out of date prominently displayed over several more correct answers with no/few upvotes, or tumbleweeds because apparently even moderately difficult questions just aren’t interesting to contributors. And I’m certainly not retracing my breadcrumbs to try to fix that, which would probably make me feel guilty if I didn’t find the whole enterprise of SO/SE skeezier and skeezier as it grew. Honestly it’s a shame. I don’t care a bit for their solution, but it was really great to have such a reliable resource when it was one. |