[cornel_io]

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.

I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

[gfody]

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.

SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site

this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

[mixmastamyk]

Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy.

[rileymat2]

It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.

There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.

[CamperBob2]

You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).

[what]

> this nails it

I assume you’re taking about the ending where gippity tells you how awesome you are and then spits out a wrong answer?

[foobarbecue]

I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.

[wek]

Me too. I learned a lot from people on SO. Sometimes the tone was rude, but overall, I was and am grateful for it and sad to see this chart.