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Stack overflow is almost dead
(blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Programming
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I guess the main issue here is that we let some group "own" all of the questions and answers, giving them the opportunity to sell it whenever they wanted to cash out.
Maybe a better solution is some kind of decentralized version of StackOverflow that prevents one person from owning everything. Something like Lemmy and Mastodon, but for questions and answers specifically.
How do you sort through the trash though?
The thing about SO is there really is a ton of poorly phrased or poorly researched questions asked each hour. So, how do you find quality questions to dedicate your time answering? How do you search QA when there's a number of similar questions asked?
That's the thing StackOverflow was trying to solve.
There's millions of people with programming questions that think their problem is unique or they simply don't understand how to research their issue, so you end up with a ton of bad or duplicated questions.
Yeah, that's a fair point. After I posted my previous comment, I realized it probably wouldn't work since the entire point of SO was to create canonical answers to canonical questions. But how do you decide what "instance" gets to have the canonical answer to a given question? Having a central authority host everything makes it a heck of a lot easier.