If this and Reddit are going downhill, where will we look for our tech questions?! (/s, there will always be others)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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As alluded to by comments here already, a long coming death.
Will probably go down as a marker of the darker side of tech culture, which, not coincidentally (?) manifested at time when the field was most confused as to what constitutes its actual discipline and whether it was an engineering field at all.
People isn't considering that documentation has greatly improved over time, languages and frameworks have become more abstract, user-friendly, modern code is mostly self explanatory, good documentation has become the priority of all open source projects, well documented open source languages and frameworks have become the norm.
Less people asking programming related questions can be explained by programming being an easier and less problematic experience nowadays, that is true.
I don't entirely agree that more and better documentation removes bugs, problems, questions, concerns, or cuts too much into a 50% drop in site usage. Having documentation is just another tool in the toolbelt, to be used alongside community forums.
Discovery process for myself and many of my coworkers has always been; Look up obscure errors, problems, etc. to get an idea of what I'm dealing with, and then off to the documentation.
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Of course, when I post a question there, I either get 30 downvote, zero answers or my post gets deleted. So of course, I will not use that site.
As long as a LLM doesn't run into a corner, making the same mistakes over and over again, it is magical to just paste some code, ask what's wrong with it and receiving a detailed explanation + fix. Even better is when you ask "now can you add this and this to it?" and it does.
I routinely skip SO unless I've already exhausted most possibilities. If it was ever a good place to get answers, I frankly didn't see it. What I did see was infinite amounts of bitching about "bad" questions, non-duplicate duplicates, lazy-ass people who just wanted an excuse not to answer, and assorted people tripping on their little iota of perceived "power".
Hell, even the indexed results on Google etc. just stopped being even remotely useful a few years back. After that, most shit I searched for ended up in an unanswered and possibly locked question with some passive-aggressive bullshit remark. It's got the culture of helpfulness of a 2003 gaming forum - except the people telling everyone else to go fuck themselves are mods, not pubertal kids. (Although if the mods were pubertal kids that would actually explain quite a bit)
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Perhaps it's easier to ask copilot or chatgpt. A quick but slightly inaccurate response might satisfy the user better.
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