> Choose ownership by invested communities instead of faceless gamified interlopers.
This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem was that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.
Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?
As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.
Even if my question has been asked and answered before, what would it take for the site to realize that the answer that references, say, React 15 from 2016 is not useful in 2025?
Unfortunately the sheer scale of updating that is not possible by just the mods etc, it usually comes down to someone who has searched the problem, come across the question, realized it's too old to apply, figured out a fix themselves, and THEN had the decency to update the question with an updated answer.
It's just unsustainable depending on the goodwill of users, especially when SO score means very little these days.
Edit : It might be very doable by AI.. But they would have to sacrifice their "no ai answer" policy. (maybe they have already)
It would take someone who actually knows React writing an answer that explains how it is different. Usually newbies are not in a position to understand when version differences are relevant and when they aren't.
On SO, it's often best if questions are somewhat version agnostic, and different answers address different questions.
> On SO, it's often best if questions are somewhat version agnostic, and different answers address different questions.
Yep, this is their 'way' but what I think @fragmede is getting at is, how can you know your question will be redundant next week. I prefer the 'duplicate' idea, where the user actually links the old question and says "hey this didn't work because X Y Z", then (in most cases) people will engage with the question as it demonstrates a level of effort.
This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem was that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.
Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?
As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.