Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.

It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.

It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.

Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.

Maybe I'm remembering a different Stack Overflow.

Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:

- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).

- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).

- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.

- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.

- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.

Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."

And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.

Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.

Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.

We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.

On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.

AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

the sense of community on the internet from 1995 to 2010 was incredible. industry devs running into tricky situations and just asking for help on irc, newsgroups like comp.lang.*, then forums, places like expert-sexchange and gamedev.net - the people that helped were like heroes and mentors and the urge to pay it forward was real and strong. stackoverflow was cool when it first launched - then something happened to it, like someone unleashed a hundred thousand pent up devs from an underground cave where they had been torturing them with mind games where they're forced to sabotage each other and stuff like collaboration and encouragement was punished - all rushed in at once like a lethal injection and the sense of community was soon dead

I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet

We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here?

I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.