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Comment on Stack overflow is almost dead

People seem to be happy because of SO becoming irrelevant. I really don’t get it, I used this website for many years now and for me it is the second (after Wikipedia) most valuable source of knowledge. The UI is clean, no intrusive adds, best answer is the most visible. Threads are well organised and on topic. No spam, no dark patterns, no wasting your time. Discoverability is great, you can easily browse and learn knew things. It is also SEO friendly. Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss!

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mbirth@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?

I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.

That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.

It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.

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- isaakengineer@programming.dev ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  YouTube might be the plague that killed the written web
  
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Endmaker@ani.social ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

best answer is the most visible

no wasting your time

These two points aren’t always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won’t help.

Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn’t been solved

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- paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  get closed as a duplicate of the similar post
  
  I’ve definitely had this happen to be before. It’s annoying.
  
  What I do in that case is proactively say:
  
  I’m facing problem X. I’ve tried searching for solutions. I found post X2 and X3 that are similar, but my problem is actually different because of Y.
  
  Sometimes it helps.
  
  Also, if you see people being assholes you can report them. There’s a flag for “unfriendly or unkind”. I’ve definitely used that before.
  
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brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Agree with you, SO is great for finding info. There are solutions on there for niche problems that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, the type of thing where someone actually took the time to type out a step-by-step answer and it’s now there and searchable on SO. It’s a bummer that so many people seem to hate on the site nowadays.

And lets not forget the whole reason SO came out in the first place, back then web results were littered with question/answer links to sites like Experts-Exchange. I hated trying to figure out if an answer was on there, most of the time you ended up with a link to a question that you think has an answer but oh no you need to subscribe to view an answer that may or may not exist.

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