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by PenguinCoder 1241 days ago
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.
1 comments

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“.
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.
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.
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.