I've been programming since 1983. The internet opened up publishing to the masses, which means that non-professional people could also publish, resulting in much more documentation than ever before.

But now the amateur documentation writers are competing with the professional ones; the quality of the professional documentation is still as high as ever, but it can be drowned out by the amateur quality documentation.

All in all, finding the information you need is MUCH quicker via a search engine, but the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.

The quality of Microsoft's own documentation has also fallen considerably; the latest nail in the coffin is that docs.microsoft.com thing that started to replace MSDN several years ago, that created tons of ridiculous fuckups in the "migration process". While doing that they also "open sourced" their documentation on GitHub, which to me sounds more like they're just trying to rely on free labour from the "community" to fix the mess.

One of the more memorable WTFs I've seen is this, which is still wrong as of this post:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...

Compare to the old version of the page on MSDN:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080828050103/http://msdn.micros...

See what's missing? The newer version is not the correct one... in "migrating" the document to the new site, for a reason that completely defines all rational explanation, the return type of the function declaration became void. There are plenty of pages on the new site with this serious error, and they've remained unfixed for well over a year. People report such problems on their GitHub, and they get fixed --- individually --- as they're reported, but it still boggles the mind how such a blatant and widespread error could go through (and the old, correct, content deleted flippantly) without someone in power shouting "STOP!":

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-driver-docs-ddi/iss...

MSDN was a gold standard in the 90's. Now you have tragedies like social.technet.com

The low quality of the technet "answers" are mind-boggling. Why doesn't Microsoft pull the plug on this?

Also, what's the purpose of the people who will answer nearly any question with a very low-quality (but wordy) answer? What are they getting from this effort?

There must be some reputation game there.

You see it on SO too, people answering basic questions 2 seconds after they're postedd with long pastes from documentation that are sorta related to the original question.

So much this.

It depends on which docs you are looking at, but some are very broken, with broken links, broken tables, broken text formatting...

Do you know of any way to get a handle to the old docs or perhaps a full MSDN dump of 3 years ago or so? (other than the web archive)? Perhaps the latest MSDN offline release or something?

I don't even mind paying.

I still miss the old MSDN offline help system. Once you got the hang of it, most of the time, you could find what you needed right away by typing the right thing in the Index.

Also, putting your cursor on a keyword, hitting F1, and getting the right result immediately. If I let myself I get so frustrated and angry by the massive regressions we've made over the last 20 years.

I work like this every day in my game that I am building. I’m almost the only one using the engine, and 90% of my work is in lua. I use the source code and the lua 5.1 reference for everything.

I hardly google something in a week of work, since there is nothing online about anything. It is like heaven compared to other ”google driven” programming things I have done. I feel very productive pretty much all the time, even when debugging mysterious real time issues.

In fact, sometimes I work with wifi off just because it creates a special peace of mind — and then I have to turn it on to do git push :)