Thread

1. pech0rin · 1790486019 · focus · HN ↗

   Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.

   It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.

   It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.

   Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.

   1. jjav · 1790495349 · focus · HN ↗

      > It got a lot of hate for the moderation

      I can say that easily over 90% (pretty close to 100%) of the most useful answers I would find in stackoverflow back in the day, were from questions/threads that were locked as bad questions (forget what term they used) by those horrible moderators.

      It was literally a joke. Every good question with thoughful useful answers, was always poo poo'ed by the moderators.

      The only reason stackoverflow remained useful is that those questions and threads remained available and were a treasure trove of useful information. If they'd actually deleted the threads moderators declared useless, there would have been zero useful content on the site.

      It is really a monument to failed moderation policies.

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