everyone hates SO for some reason but i found it immensely useful and the, quote unquote ‘Mean-ness’ of the community meant it never turned into a reddit-quippy-like forum. You get in, ask a question and get out. and you better search for your question properly beforehand or just get chewed out instantly.

Like its a site meant for professionals. Can you imagine a doctor version where someone asks to draw blood and everyone not losing their minds, yelling at him to use the search bar lmao.

The old internet is dying, a new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of posters.

Well, yea. Everyone is using llms to ask their questions and the people still asking are getting llm answers anyway.

I remember when Yahoo Answers was a meta-social space with regular posters who all sort of knew each other. Some of the topic pages were particularly dramatic, like the science ones and the one for religion & spirituality. Lots of neue-atheists and people intentionally trolling both the atheists and the Bible enjoyers because come on, it’s fucking Yahoo Answers.

The writing was on the wall for Stack Overflow the moment Yahoo Answers went down. There has to be a comedic foil to contrast with the seriousness of the former, a Pinky for the Brain if you will. (Unserious but this is my head canon)

I still use stack overflow

A lotta of those old posts you see were stolen by the likes of OpenAI and anthropic. And it couldn’t be more obvious.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to accept the biggest normalized heist in history, but that’s not happening today