[moonchrome]

I've noticed this trend for years, basically :

- for reference I land on official documentation

- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code

- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation

- for design stuff I land on blog posts

Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.

The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.

[Normal_gaussian]

I find repo issues generally horrendous to browse/sear h. In particular 'stale issue' bots killing off well written issues with reproduction.

[pocketarc]

Sorry, tangential rant, but, God I hate stale issue bots. The issue is valid, it's reproduced, it's been discussed, nothing's changed, it hasn't stopped being a valid issue just because it hasn't had activity in 30 days, or 6 months, or a year.

Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues.

The only way to fight the stale bot is to constantly spam your issue with "bump" comments, which nobody's going to do (and if they do, surely the maintainers will just complain that you're spamming, and rightfully so).

So if the maintainers don't have time to deal with your issue within X months, it just won't get fixed. They won't even be aware that those issues are still there (because who goes through closed issues looking for stuff to do?).

And so I hit google for an issue I'm having with Project X, stumble upon a "closed" issue, scroll to the bottom, and see "closed by stale bot". WHY IS IT CLOSED WHEN IT IS STILL AN ISSUE.

[lucumo]

Oh god. I recently landed on a Docker issue that exactly described my problem. Many reproductions, all questions answered and then maintainers stopped engaging. So the stale issue bot took over. Somebody untagged it, but a while later it redid it. That went on for months, after which somebody closed it manually.

The bot doesn't really change the outcome (if maintainers don't engage, they don't engage), but it a huge bunch of noise.

[playingalong]

While I agree with this sentiment and share the frustration. Or some sense of lack of cohesion, but...

Remember the stale bot is an opt-in feature. It is the maintainer (s) who decided to configure it.

[moonchrome]

It's not great UX for sure - but the information contained there is usually the best - you can usually get historic context or maintainer views on some issue you've hit.

[norman784]

I think you might find answers of problems that are not converted in the docs, I mostly find stuff about JS, Ruby, css or SQL there, but for example for Rust I default to Github, docs.rs or Discord, it might have to do with the community of the tech you are using.

[moonchrome]

This is also true - I'm mostly in .NET world nowadays and the official reference is actually really good. For JS I default to MDN (SO is full of outdated junk). But when I was looking up RoR or Python stuff I was hitting SO more often.

So like I've said - as the reference docs improve SO loses value.