> Experts' Exchange, which was basically an earlier version of Stack Overflow

Expert Sex Change was garbage, though. If it hadn't been as terrible as it was throughout its life, Stack Overflow wouldn't have taken off nearly as easily or as well as it did. I mean, I like to grouse as much as the next graybeard over how SO has gone downhill - and it has - but it's still miles and miles better than the metaphorical and deeply unmourned Superfund site that predeceased it.

What's your problem with the current state of SO?

It's full of people who can't be bothered to do even the most trivial investigation into their own damn bugs - the same trivial "I didn't configure it lol" and "I have no idea what I'm doing, nor interest in developing one, fix my thing for me plz" bugs that the site already has a dozen answers for. It stays that way because volunteer moderators don't want to wade through sewage all day. So it goes.

The topic-specific SE sites are often better; Emacs.SE, just off the top, is consistently of very high quality, with maintainers of several high-profile packages and Emacs itself regularly active there. But I abandoned any attempt to participate on SO proper years ago, and rarely even check there except on the off chance that some weird exception has an obvious cause that'll save me a source dive on a library or some similar large investment of time.

There are also many questions that I asked myself or googled and that I found shot down by overzealous SO moderators before someone could bring some element of response.

"Just google it"

>First google result

Fair, but that's the point of upvoting questions, no? As someone who uses SO through google searches 95% of the time, I mostly see high quality discussions.

The best discussions are usually marked off topic or 'no good fit" or "not of use for future readers"

And that's OK because discussions tend to lean in different direction, very often, and before you know it you are talking about something completely different. If you are sticking to the topic and have something really important to add, don't worry, moderators won't get in the way.

Yea - that's my biggest beef with SO currently, what I thought OP would say when I asked him.

On SO I pride(d) myself on asking good questions. That is formulating the question clearly and precisely was itself a kind of investigation. Often, the question never go finished, because the work of writing it up caused me to solve my original problem.

Probably SO should have weighted question upvotes at least as high as an answer upvote. Now it would take stronger medicine: e.g. pushing questions by people with low rep down the list.

I feel like you should still ask the question, and then answer yourself shortly afterwards. It'll help others in similar situations, and you might just get a better answer from someone else.

Same. I think I've asked one question ever on SO, and it got no answers - fair enough; I didn't have one, either.

What to do about it, I've no idea. I have the rep for most mod powers, but the Augean stables lack appeal. Beyond that, I wouldn't presume to venture a suggestion.

You could do a blog of your own to capture whatever it is you found out.

One problem is that the correct answers have to change over time and SO does not account for that except by having drive-by downvotes from dweebies who have no business even answering questions.

I used to answer questions on SO, but got so tired of arguing with idiots that I decided it wasn't worth my time anymore. It's too bad, too, because I strongly believe in "giving back" where I can and SO was a way to do that. No more. I still google for answers on there all the time, though.

so sorry to see you go.

> Expert Sex Change

You may want to edit...

Edit: Well; that explains why the service didn't take off

And I may not. That was the constant nickname back in the day, occasioned by the fact that their original domain was "expertsexchange.com". They later moved to one with a hyphen, but by then the damage was done.

(Edit to your edit: It did take off! It was the best we had for years. That best was just very, very bad.)

Remember joking with colleagues back then about sourceexchange.com and how that sounded out loud.

penisland was another famous site from the time with this property.

Edit: It was a site that sold pens; I think the alternative pronunciation of their domain name was unintentional.

Edit 2: I think I was wrong. Snopes says they did sell pens but they chose the name intentionally: http://www.snopes.com/business/names/domains.asp. Some other such names from that link: powergenitalia.com, molestationnursery.com, and whorepresents.com.

Did it ever actually sell pens? I always understood it to be a joke; if it's been anything else, I'd love to know more.

Snopes talks about penisland.net, which is still up now and clearly a joke - a rather disappointing effort, in fact, with a few rather broad double entendres and nothing further to offer.

I was curious about the (presumably) original .com, which is now squatted, and about which there seems no historical information easily to be found.

don't know about the website, but "Pen Island" is/was a small shop on Regents Street in London (not far from Picadilly Circus tube station) that sold high end fountain pens, mechanical pencils, etc. Don't know if it's still there, but it was list time i was in the UK (2007)

And http://www.bigbustycoons.com

Pen island? What was it supposed to be?

A joke - a "domain hack" avant la lettre.

penis land

Here's Peter Norvig explaining this stuff: https://youtu.be/yvDCzhbjYWs?t=24m37s

true . Other such nameswere therapistfinder -> The Rapist Finder Whorepresent -> Whore Present

Not exactly. The innovation of SO was to allow folks to upvote the best answers to bring them to the top, saving a lot of time.

It's true that horrible PHP forums existed before that, but when google took you there the answer was often buried on page 4 of 7, sandwiched between dozens of the "trying to be helpful" posts instructing you to reinstall windows and reboot.

Oh, and expert-sexchange---hated that site with a passion, until I realized you could just scroll all the way to the bottom. Think that's when I became aware of the term "dark patterns."

They are right - SO is a better version, but the majority of impact came from having the information globally searchable at all. Heck, even searchable USENET indices had a huge impact, pre Web.

And SO still suffers from the same basic problems they all had - "good" answers get stale, information tends to clusters around simple/beginner problems, etc.

There were programmer sites/mailing lists before that where knowledgeable people gathered, and today you can search directly on SO, or use DDG as I do. Also, I used AltaVista before google, and often got answers there, though success was less frequent.

Therefore, at no point in time have I been dependent on google, though it was helpful about five to ten years ago. So, my impression is that SO was the bigger innovation, though YMMV of course.

I hate to think what it would mean to be dependent on SO.

I think overall we are agreeing. USENET and various sites were a huge jump from the state of things before hand, when your available resources really depended on location. SO is a more useful interface on top of that stuff and easier to access, but the real innovation was made decades earlier.

Yes, though the "cat is out of the bag" now with SO, so it could be replaced if/when it falters.

The next version might implement a versioning strategy, say questions/answers get archived every five years or so.

The nice thing about Usenet is that you had access to real experts. If your question was good enough, you could get an answer from someone that wrote the drivers for the OS you were struggling with or whatever.

Before that, you'd get books out of the library and get a pad of paper and hand-assemble 6502 code and read Byte magazine and if it took a long time, you learned it very very solidly. So I'd say I got a level of deep understanding from hand-assembling code for 6502 that I (as a fogey) doubt I would ever get from any amount of SO reading. Tho my general work flow once I start typing is to google every thing that I can't instantly fix; weird compiler error, cut and paste into search bar, optionally add "stack" to the end and read.

Yes. There is a lot more information out there now, but the average quality is a lot lower. This isn't unreasonable given the growth of the industry, and the number of people who do at least some programming as part of their job but are mostly doing glue programming. These days that's the majority of a much larger group, thought it used to be much smaller.

> There were programmer sites/mailing lists before that where knowledgeable people gathered

Agreed. I remember using https://www.codeproject.com/ a lot, back in the day. The quality was often variable, but being able to search for function-names and see them in use was very useful.

Especially when the only alternative was years-old MFC books in the local library.

The total number of posts used to be so low, the "social" aspects wouldn't have mattered much. Not everyone used to use the internet for that sort of thing (manuals and books), and there are far more people writing software now.

> Another difference is that documentation is essentially annotated today. If the documentation is confusing or misleading, it's usually clarified in a stack overflow or some other forum. Before Google, if documentation was confusing, you were stuck guessing or hacking. That was very time consuming.

I would say that one of the reasons why php (the language) took off in the early 2000s was because of its excellent docs pages: each doc page for a specific function had a comment section where you could find the actual examples of said function being used, by actual people. Pretty similar to what one can now find on SO.

It's like when they say "X dev's are too lazy a new language". More likely, your documentation is garbage.

"Programming became a lot easier when you could just type a question into Google and it would find that someone asked the same question in some forum or newsgroup."

Programming became easier with altavista, which was an excellent search engine that supported complex, boolean search operators and respected (((multiple) nested) "parens with quotes") ... and other such complexities.

Google dumbed this down and to this day is very difficult to accurately and precisely use.

There is no effective and consistent "expert mode" with google - even using the "expert" symbols and keys (like allinsite:) result in "related" and other useless results.

I miss altavista every single day.

> Google dumbed this down and to this day is very difficult to accurately and precisely use.

I'm not sure that this is so much AltaVista versus Google; I remember when Google first came on the scene (or when I first became aware of it?), I found its 'expert' options better than AltaVista's. They have, as you say, become much, much less effective over time, but it seems sadly plausible that the same would have happened to AltaVista. (It does seem that DDG is doing its best to fill in the "search for techies" gap that Google now leaves open, but I don't remember AV well enough to compare them.)

Of course google is trying to help ordinary perple - the sort who type a few words into the search box, get zero results, then add some more search terms assuming that being more specific will help the search engine find what they are looking for. So, default AND becomes default OR along with other 'improvements' but to the detriment of self-declared power users...

yep, google had a better indexing of the net and also had exact string search. Altavista only had exact string search (which was better than yahoo). Since then, google no longer reliably gives you exact string searches.

I've noticed Google is pretty good about finding exact matches when you put the search terms in quotes.

Used to be better.

Pretty much this, before stack overflow forums were very popular for asking questions, so you would traverse forums finding someone who's asked the same question as you. Although half the time their question wouldn't be answered.

I find Github to be just as valuable today btw, whenever I search for a problem the top result is a github issue with many comments already on it (and sometimes a workaround)

The real difference: When you found a crappy workaround, you learned. You were frustrated, felt stupid but you learned. You made the same experience every child has to make once: Dont', just fscking don't, touch the hot plate.

But, you learned. That's something neither SO-driven nor google-driven development can provide. I firmly believe that every detour I took (mostly FreeBSD userland sources or any port I never installed but fetched and extracted just to read the source) was invaluable to help me become a good programmer.

Don't get me wrong: Being able to scan SO/google results for a solution to a problem is important, it's important enough that if you are unable to do so I won't hire you. But: The time saved by constantly referring to SO or google is effectively education skipped. So. if referring to those sites is your MO, I would not hire you either.

> The real difference: When you found a crappy workaround, you learned. You were frustrated, felt stupid but you learned. You made the same experience every child has to make once: Dont', just fscking don't, touch the hot plate.

Surely every educational innovation is greeted with this sort of lament? (I'm a teacher, and I know that, if I listen carefully to myself, the "good old ways" whose loss I am bemoaning are the new-fangled ways of a few years ago.) For example, when programming was done by hand translation to assembler, you learned what every line of code was doing, but now with compilers people don't really understand the invocations …. I'm reminded of the XKCD cartoon tracing back through hundreds of years the lament about how people don't write like they used to do.

Uhm. No. I am not lamenting an "educational innovation", I am saying that being presented a solution is not education at all. Education for me means understanding, understanding requires thinking, thinking requires time and taking wrong turns (because we only understand that the turn was wrong after exploring it).

> I am not lamenting an "educational innovation", I am saying that being presented a solution is not education at all.

For what it's worth, that was exactly what I meant. I don't think that anyone says, or even thinks, "grr, these kids and their ways of learning that aren't exactly like mine!"; but rather that one sees these kids and their ways of learning that aren't exactly one's own, and says "grr, these kids aren't really learning!"

This isn't to say that it isn't true, as I'm sure that sometimes it is, but that I think that most of the time it's a reaction that's likely to fade with time. However we learned looked, almost assuredly, like "not really learning" to some of those who came before us. Again, to appeal to my own experience, I have become a lot more relaxed about the use of calculators in math classrooms; I initially felt that they were taking away from students' calculational facility (and have not changed my mind about that …), but now feel more that they are clearing away the computational drudgery to allow more room for conceptual exploration. It is believeable to me that being able to Google the answers to things that are already known is a great way to get as quickly as possible to the things that aren't already known—although, of course, it is a worthwhile argument whether, or how much, preparation it offers to deal with those unknown things upon reaching them.

Reference books, MSDN CD's, newsgroups, etc. That's what was really alluring about Amazon in the early days: they had the latest computer books. I have a bookshelf that's over 6' high full of old computer books. Probably $5K easy.

I remember downloading open source projects that I found online and combing through their source code to find out how they did something. Back in the mid 2000's I was working on a video game and I would spend hours looking through the games on pygame.org for examples. Painful process.

I miss those simple naive days of the unhyphenated internet, when you could find the answers to difficult questions on ExpertsExchange.com, and order tools that were mightier than the sword from small bodies of land surrounded by water on PenIsland.com.