When was the last time you visited Stack Overflow?

About an hour ago.

At least six months ago.

I always thought it was crap and that the social mechanisms for sorting good answers to the top "just didn't work". First you have to work your way through the question which is usually poorly posed and rambling and has confusing comments, then the right answer is frequently the #7 or #24 answer, sometimes the accepted answer at the top is wrong and has a long thread of comments begging the original posted to unaccept it. You can't cut and paste Python answers because they are written in Python 2 and say

  print "something"

instead of the Python 3 equivalent

  print("something")

and in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that, as the system prevents the question from being re-asked and getting a better answer. Even worse you're just not allowed to have discussions about many of the most consequential topics for which other people's experience is crucial such as "What framework should I use for X?"

But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a

?" it's your place.

Back when they published a public data dump I thought about making some automated system that cleans it up, deletes all but the best answers, etc. It would be much easier in the age of AI, but that dump is long gone and the world has moved on now that AI can operationalize that kind of knowledge. Had Stack Overflow realized that it sucked 10 years ago it might still be relevant, but the logic of two-sided markets kept it alive long after heat death.

Been almost a year -- the last time I found it useful was trying to work out a capricious error that an API threw that gave virtually no information. Now that I think of it, today I would probably ask an LLM to search the internet for answer if it didn't know and then it would visit stackoverflow on my behalf.

I honestly don't remember. It's been a long while.

This morning. Wanted to refresh my memory abiut MultiBinding in WPF. But only because the site was the first hit on Kagi. Haven't interacted with it for quite a while.

10 minutes ago [0]. I needed to git diff two files that weren't in a repo.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-betwee...

I do visit it from time to time, when chatgpt gets stuck and I lost my patience. It’s either SO or github issues, whatever google throws at me.

Yesterday. It still comes up every now and then in my searches. This despite never having been a user there.

Today. I was getting a TLS certificate resolution error making an internal call from a Java application that did not exist outside that application. Stack Overflow had the answer.

It was yesterday when I looked it up for some QEMU problem.

I end up there sometimes due to search engines. What is most embarrasing is when I find my own answer and it was correct.

Yesterday! For a question about sockets. I have started asking AI to provide sources for its answers so that I can make sure its not hallucinating. A lot of the time it points me to stackoverflow. AI has been incredibly useful but I also firmly believe that other people will always be our best resource.

More than 2 years ago. LLM's are good at explaining things that I do not understand. And I do not need to vist 10 pages to search for the answer.

[delayed]

Years ago (15 years ago) I posted a simple question after I failed to find the answer through Google search. Was made fun of, berated, etc.

Never opened the website again. F*ck the SOF.