Technology

As more and more libraries are open source on GitHub or gitlab or sourceforge or whateverthefuck, asking questions on the libraries themselves (as an issue) is often the right thing to do, too... Less centralised than SO but also the only people who care about how to do things in a lib are people using the lib, so.....

It's not like discord is any better than SO. It's a closed platform, often with no read access if you don't want to register, and it's not searchable in the slightest.

I would take SO any day over discord.

The snake eats its tail and it all degenerates into slop. Happy coding!

You are assuming that people act in logical ways.

This is only a problem right now if you think about it.

The need for the service that SO provided won't go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.

That's why people should be posting on fedi and never post on corporate web.

When corporate tells you its a parasite, believe it

Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?

I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.

That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.

It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.

best answer is the most visible

no wasting your time

These two points aren't always true in my experience. On more than a few occasions, I have encountered posts that look similar to the problems that I am facing, but because of a slight nuance (on the surface), the answers suggested won't help.

Usually, my search would hit a deadend here. At this point, I guess the best course of action is to create a new post. Unfortunately, these new posts would then get closed as a duplicate of the similar post - even though the problem in that particular context still hasn't been solved

Agree with you, SO is great for finding info. There are solutions on there for niche problems that I haven't been able to find elsewhere, the type of thing where someone actually took the time to type out a step-by-step answer and it's now there and searchable on SO. It's a bummer that so many people seem to hate on the site nowadays.

And lets not forget the whole reason SO came out in the first place, back then web results were littered with question/answer links to sites like Experts-Exchange. I hated trying to figure out if an answer was on there, most of the time you ended up with a link to a question that you think has an answer but oh no you need to subscribe to view an answer that may or may not exist.

Hey look everyone it's that retard from stack overflow!

the whole XY Problem

lol. I hate this. Just answer the damn question or don't. I'm not asking you to validate if what I'm doing is weird or not. It's weird! I know! That's none of your business. Just answer the damn question or don't. Simple as.