[pflenker]

StackOverflow originated during a time when finding accurate and up-to-date documentation on the internet was a challenge. Today, however, there is a wealth of easily accessible, hands-on documentation that often includes links to support resources such as Discord.

In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the documentation, and very advanced ones. Unfortunately, the number of basic questions far outweighs the number of advanced ones. As a result, the platform is losing popularity as users become increasingly less willing to answer questions that could have been easily researched.

[PenguinCoder]

Discord and slack and other chat platforms are horrible knowledge repositories. They're not indexed by search engines, there's really no archiving ability, searching them for anything sucks, there's no linking and horrible for long form content and lacking useful formatting.

[pflenker]

True, though it aims to cater the use case for „I need support now“ and not for „I want to archive this question and its solution“.

[arp242]

Stack Overflow was never intended as "I need support now". A significant amount of friction comes from people using it as such, misunderstanding what the site's purpose is. This is understandable, because it's not easy to explain and the on-boarding experience doesn't help with it either.

[devman0]

There are a bunch of people in this comment section asking for StackOverflow to be things that are clearly non-goals for the platform. SO certainly has it's problems but users coming and posting without understanding what the platform is supposed to be for is a significant contributor frustration among users new and tenured.

[pflenker]

I think it is. They advertise with „ask questions, get answers“, which is precisely what users are doing when they are in need of immediate support.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

The advanced ones don't get an answer or are too open ended for the website, which is incidentally why I stopped asking questions, they never got an answer or got closed.

Got better results on reddit

[BlueTemplar]

Reddit is probably even worse though with its auto-closing of comments after a short time, and tolerance for reposts. (Both of which make for netiquette violations !)

P.S.: this is also an issue with hn, though at least dang et al. work tirelessly to identify reposts. It still makes it awkward when the best discussion that you would like to contribute to is locked, or worse, has now bits spread in consecutive discussions...

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I never had a problem with a post closed on reddit and was able to ask very open ended questions, so independently of the rules, it was possible for me to get the help i needed, which wasn't possible on stackoverflow

[BlueTemplar]

This isn't so much about the first person asking the question-

(if they were really the first and not just failing to find previous occurrences of the same question being asked - because of the popularity of Reddit and how it works, the netiquette rule of searching first and avoiding duplicates seem to be forgotten in other spaces)

-but about those coming later with similar questions.