r/programming • u/kolorcuk • 35m ago
I liked stackoverflow
stackoverflow.comHello. I really liked stackoverflow >5 years ago. There were many people asking about easy-to-medium problems to be solved, and it was a great way for me to learn C/C++/Bash/awk/sed/cmake/Linux/whatever by solving real-life(!) mediocre problems and also helping people in the process and also being criticized and corrected at the same time, from which I learned triple as much.
Now stackoverflow is dead. My almost 150k reputation means nothing. Finally they added a "advice" type of questions which is way way too late.
Now I lurk over reddit for typic-specific type of questions, but reddit is more a social network then help-me-with-programming-problem site, and the "help me" part is anyway so easy to solve with an AI. It was great back then - the feeling of learning something new and at the same actually helping and actually feeling like an expert in something. I learned the C programming standard by heart by answering really niche questions about C program behaviors. This was really fun for me. I enjoyed the specificity of stackoverflow - the idea of being "exact", answering only the question asked.
There are just no questions nowadays on stackoverflow. There is a void now. And AI. There are topic-specific Discord chats, as a modern replacement of IRC, but I always assumed they are used by developers, not for noobs. I know the times without AI will never come again, but the internet, the thing connecting people across the whole globe, just feels more empty, more robotic and like an advertisement nowadays.