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What's wrong with Stack Overflow? Honestly, somebody asked how to do something that should in most practical cases be avoided. I provided an answer and here comes the downvote army for no reason. I explicitly said it should be avoided but for the sake of experiment I posted the solution because I think people should explore what they can do with the language instead of feeling constricted to a set of standard recipes.
I don't buy into claims that this irrational elitist moderation is necessary for SO to be useful.
In the end, even their search sucks and most of us find it easier to search SO using Google instead of their native search.
I remember when I was a student at a programme which admitted both people with linguistic and computational background how hard it was for the linguists to even start writing code and I would always try to help them and relieve the frustration.
For me, it took years to start writing a high quality code and more than 6 years to become productive while writing quality code.
Do we forget we all began somewhere? I honestly don't care about building an immense "objective" problem solving tool for someone else to earn money at the expense of treating people the way SO community does.
I think it would be way better if SO managed to distribute questions in a more relevant manner and stopped holding onto their "objectivism", which is in itself a questionable concept.
Even simply separating questions into how popular they are could move the useful ones forward without radically cancelling and hurting new people.
I like to see people thinking differently and see their questions reveal what they know and what they don't. There's nothing wrong with pointing people to already answered questions, correcting them etc. And I get that there are many people being annoying when asking, but I never forget there is a person on the other side and I would never want to destroy their potential just to massage my ego and "reputation". And heck who cares about their reputation? Show your Github, CV, talk smart in an interview and you'll get the job. And in the end, wouldn't you feel greater inner joy from helping a person grow instead of seeing only your reputation?

Comments
  • 1
    Dude fuck stack overflow. Exclusively have had terrible experiences and I’ve only seen shitty people defend it and ignore its problems. I only use it for reference I’ll never post on that shit again
  • 3
    If you want a piece of advice, don't answer posts that already have been downvoted or have been flagged as duplicate. This is often seen as an easy way for new users to get easy points without contributing to the "knowledge", since you are just repeating trivial things that are already been posted. For this reason, it's often discouraged. This approach is opinionable, but this is how the platform works. If you really want to help the OP just use comments, edit the question or link the documentation. Also, don't see downvotes as a punishment. StackOverflow is not a forum, it's more like a free-to-contribute distributed documentation.
    Also, as a person that often answers questions, I can guarantee that sometimes the same question gets posted hundreds of times a day
  • 3
    I'm not justifying SO, I'm just explaining my trip on the platform. I got downvoted hundreds of times before understanding that
  • 0
    Wait, SO has a built in search engine? 🤔
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