I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.
You must have been using SO different to me then. For me it was more like a Wikipedia for specific language errors, compiler/IDE issues etc.
Never once saw anyone discussing how to implement CRUD or claiming one framework was better than another. That was the point - concrete answers not opinions.
Most people's problems aren't the cutting edge of computer science. They're "what does this log mean" or "how do I do X in Y framework". These are answers LLMs are great at regurgitating based on a big corpus like Stack Overflow.
As the underlying software evolves the log messages will change and the APIs will change and the answers won't make sense anymore.
In fact, I think this is part of what lead to the downfall of SO.
The moderation could be very aggressive with "duplicate" posts getting closed fast. The problem is sometimes the "solution" in the duplicate was either irrelevant or dated. Things like telling someone to us jQuery in 2020.
If you lookup how to do any sort of standard front end operation there's a good chance the top SO answer will reference jQuery or some other outdated approach. I don't typically save these cases for future reference but have seen them many times and expect most people who have spent much time searching these topics have as well.
> The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude
Are you saying that because you don't like web apps or the frameworks that people use to make them, there shouldn't be a way for people to publicly ask questions about programming?
