Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
by BrenBarn on Monday May 25, 2026 @08:32PM
(#48273573)
I thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relevant and useful to them although they never posted their own question or even made an account on the site.
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Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
by Scoundreller on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @12:48AM
(#48275119)
> Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again.
You’ve just described a large chunk of Reddit.
Their poor internal search doesn’t help.
Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
by BrenBarn on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @03:23PM
(#48284687)
Yeah, to the extent that Reddit is filling the role of StackOverflow it's clearly worse.
Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
by mixmastamyk on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @03:26PM
(#48284736)
Yes. People forget it was a response to abominations such as Yahoo Answers, which quickly devolved into a cesspool of mouthbreathers, haha. Also expert-sexchange/quora which tried-to/often-did hide the answers.
Without its "tough love" Stack would have had a similar trajectory. Maybe a few policies here and there were problematic but overall it was and continues to be a huge benefit to the developer/IT community.
Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
by hellojesus on Thursday May 28, 2026 @12:23AM
(#48304472)
Yahoo answers gave us MBMBAM. For that I will always be thankful.