> The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound.
The real clean answer is usually a mildly upvoted comment that scolds the answerer for violating a standard or using a bad practice. SO is still useful when that happens.
The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound.
As such when I use SO these days it’s usually not for wholesale solutions to problems but rather to add to a greater body of examples of APIs in action which I can then abstract and use as needed. It’s decent for this use case.