Second this. Specialized Stack Exchange sites are pretty helpful. The Emacs one specifically helped me many times, and people there seem to be quite knowledgeable.

> lots of people hate on Stack Exchange

count me as one of those.

Of all the popular social networks, SE has by far the highest percentage of annoying little pedants. They must recruit their users exclusively from dungeon masters of online D&D games and fired Reddit mods.

Just how bad does a Reddit mod have to be in order to get fired?

I've seen people here boast about how they overthrew mods in certain subreddits. I don't know how they pulled that off -- maybe one of them can tell us?

typically they get arrested irl before there is any consideration of firing

SE isn't a social network. Trying to "socialize" on SE is like trying to start conversations with random strangers on the New York City Subway. That's just not what it's for.

Thanks for illustrating my point.

Yeah, I generally agree with this. After accumulating about 15k points over there across 2-4 sites about 10 years ago, I now treat StackExchange's network as read-only. I never comment or contribute anymore because of the moderators and users. It's now just a repository of stuff that I click on when I Google for results, and I know what kind of site I'm getting. There's value there.

I actually almost posted something this week due to some weird segfaults I was having with a third-party library, but the github maintainer was active and responded in his issues list. So, crisis averted.

Same, I moderated https://blender.stackexchange.com for seven years from inception sinking many many hours into flushing out the community and amassing a proper resource for users. The closest thing to a community back then ~2013 was IRC and blenderartists which was really for showcase but in the later years kept getting distracted with people being offended, tiptoeing on eggshells around certain members of the community/mod team and just random crap all around not related to QA or improving the community. Got exhausted, left and haven't looked back.

One of my funniest stories from my time there is how I once closed a question as off-topic (it was) and several years later googled to find one result which was the same question flagged by yours truly (it was still off-topic but the irony wasn't lost).

A lot of it has to do with scale. Stack Overflow currently gets ~7k questions every day. This is actually lower than it was a few years ago when it was more like ~9-11k every day.

The Blender site gets ~50 questions a day. The Emacs site gets ~6 questions a day (with a total of 25k questions in eight and a half years, only about a fortnight of Stack Overflow).

It's just a completely different thing at those scales. It's the difference between a forum with maybe a few hundred people and Twitter.

Looking at "new" in Python isn't particularly interesting, but I almost always end up on SO when googling an answer.

So calling it "surprisingly bad" isn't fair. I still think it is surprisingly good.

> StackOverflow [...] doesn’t really have good new questions

What does that mean? Do you browse new questions for entertainment?