It’s a growing issue for the platform as the community prefers to direct people to existing answers, and Google tends to reward older URLs that still attract traffic. The result is that a lot of searchers are learning how things were done years ago, instead of how they are best done now.
Platforms change, APIs change, languages change. That means the “answer” to how to do things changes too.
Imagine asking “what would happen if libraries threw away all their outdated computer books?” Obviously they do, and it’s good for their patrons as long as there are updated books replace them.
If Stack Overflow went away tomorrow, one of the many other places where people can talk about coding would become the go-to place to get answers. A more ephemeral approach to answers would probably be better in the long run.
Also, there are literally hundreds of SEO-ptimized copycats built from those data dumps: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter/blob/mai....
Only the location of info will change. The same info will be available because the same people will have the same questions and answers and desire to share. The public good is the sharing, not the platform. The people will still be around.
The next platform will be better in ways and worse in others, but that's the same that can be said about any platform supplanting another. Personally I've always stayed away from SO as a contributor because its whole reputation game turned me off. Maybe the next platform will make me more likely to contribute help rather than only consume.
As for losing the history of data, there's good and bad there. I highly doubt anything important would be truly lost. It would be rebuilt. And in the process, a lot of noise (ambiguously obsolete/incorrect info) would get cleaned out, as a benefit.
1) There were no better alternatives.
2) The community was welcoming and willing to help.
Nowadays, 1) most open source projects put some time aside to write good technical documentation, when they don't, many of them make use of Github Issues, at least.
And 2), SO stopped working for people looking for answers. It is an extremely hostile community that was taken over by each of their sub-communities' pretentious mods. They expect you to know a lot of things before you ask, but don't have enough IQ to understand that if you knew how to do stuff, you wouldn't be at SO looking for answers.
The promise that the data would be available and licensed for reuse was a crucial factor in its success. Its UI has never been anything world-changing. There have been other QA sites that have come and gone. Many of the original contributors would not have spent so much time without the assurance that their material was not owned by the company, just hosted by it.
Perhaps it'd even be for the best one of the numerous SO open sourced clones[0][1][2] would emerge as the replacement. Most likely though it'd be that Quora undergoes some necessary changes to become the main alternative
Here's a shortlist of possible alternatives:
- [Codidact](https://codidact.com/) - open-sourced and non-profit
- [Scoold](https://scoold.com/) - open-sourced and self-hostable
- [TopAnswers](https://topanswers.xyz/) - open-source and non-profit
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-...
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/313483/is-stack-ove...
For example you want to check if a file exists and contains a string in bash, but you don’t remember the syntax. You will search it in your favourite search engine, ignore the SEO spam, click on one stack overflow link, see that the question is closed because it’s a duplicate, check the other stack overflow question, scroll the answers, find the right one, copy paste it, adapt it to your code.
With the AI completion you write a comment # check if the file exists and it contains the value. Next line is suggested with the bash if statement, the correct file variable, the correct content variable.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange ("Stack Exchange Data Dump")