Every now and then I peep at social media to see what’s going on. I’ve not interacted with anyone, but I do this just to stay informed with the happenings. Today was one of those days and what I saw floored me. People are spreading this weird lie that AI is killing Stack Overflow. Then I am seeing posts about people being sad over the demise of Stack Overflow! Why!? Stack Overflow is quite literally a forum full of those Linux assholes who ruin any chance of there ever being a year of Linux, but instead for every programming language possible. I am happy Stack Overflow is dying. Yes, I will explain why I, and quite a few of my friends, have all stopped using the site and are waiting for the day where we can say, “Rest in piss”.
Stack Overflow is a site full of fucking assholes. This is one of the most important things to understand. About 10 years ago the site was actually useful. However, it quickly turned into pedantic replies and just lost all usefulness. You could ask a question and some of the first/top replies would be a link to let me google that for you. Others would be replies to threads that seem related but aren’t, clearly showing no one was reading your post. You would be lucky to actually get your answer if it was a highly specific issue. This is why Stack Overflow is dying. The community is a bag of dicks. Sometimes mods will flat out lock your threads if they didn’t see the usefulness of it, or if they thought it was a repeat. There was no way to properly dispute this either. If you reposted it, even stating that the thread you were linked to didn’t help, they would just lock it again for being a repost.
This is why Unity now has a super active Q&A board. It’s active because if you act like you’re on Stack Overflow you get banned for being a cock. Before some retard thinks this is me being pro-censorship: No. A Q&A board isn’t a spot for you to go on rants about whatever political ideas you have and shouldn’t be full of assholes. You answer the question, or ask more questions to understand their question. Reddit has also picked up numerous Q&A boards for different languages and specific programming niches. You’ll find the Reddit boards that acted like Stack Overflow are all dead now, people don’t want an Q&A community of assholes. Even services like GameDev.TV/Udemy will offer their own Q&A board, and they allow repeated questions. There are now tons of places we can go instead of relying on the assholes at Stack Overflow. Hell, Rizon IRC, LainChan, and /g/ are now friendlier than Stack Overflow. When /g/ is friendlier you’ve got issues.
I’m confused why everyone who has been bitching about the community of Stack Overflow for years is now crying over its death. Nah, fuck that. They brought this shit onto themselves. There’s supposed to be a few Stack Overflow alternatives on the market that have rules against being an asshole too. I’ve heard about these from others, but haven’t used them. Right now they’re fighting to steal the Stack Overflow user base, and it looks like they’re winning. Instead of mourning the death of Stack Overflow with crocodile tears, let’s just go there. When the assholes go to a new site they’ll have to be nice, or finally fuck off.
I’m also confused why Stack Overflow users act like this. Yes, I understand how annoying it is answering what seems like a simple question to you. Yes, I understand slowly losing your patience helping people. However, this shit isn’t your job. You’re doing this for the community. If you are finding yourself becoming jaded just stop. Wait until you’ve calmed down and then get back towards helping people. If helping people no longer makes you feel good then stop. You don’t have to do this. You’re only doing this to fill some weird void in your life, for those sweet updoots, or because you want to feel like you’re smarter than others who are having issues.
The main reason I, and my friends, stopped using Stack Overflow is because of the community. One time I asked a question and people replied with RTFM. Hey, fuck off and how about you RTFP. I actually got in trouble for telling people to read the post, but it was okay for them to reply with RTFM. My college had weird restrictions because we all had to compile all of our code on the same server. This meant certain things were banned at our school because it would crash the server. It was a common senior prank to crash the compiling server every time a freshman class had a project due to teach the students a lesson who turned stuff in at the last minute to stop doing that. I disagree with this because a lot of the freshmen had jobs, especially in my class. We were working full time while going to CSE and most seniors didn’t. We also found out that the seniors doing this were very active on Stack Overflow to mock our questions.
One of the things the school banned was pointers. Yes, pointers were banned at my college. You were never allowed to use them because the server would refuse to compile any code with a pointer after someone completely destroyed the server due to a pointer error. Fuck securing the server let’s just ban one of the most important things. This doesn’t mean we didn’t do things with references and addresses, no we still did. We just weren’t allowed to use pointers. I asked on Stack Overflow how to do one of our assignments because we had to use private variables and functions, while having other functions manipulate the data. We had to send over references, but we weren’t allowed to use pointers. I’m sure people will say “getters and setters!” but they were banned by the assignment’s rules. I detailed a lot of these restrictions and the replies still told me to use banned things, RTFM, or just called me a liar on these restrictions. Even accounts who weren’t the seniors.
Almost everyone I know has a story like this with Stack Overflow. People would act like fucking assholes for no reason because they want to feel a power trip. We didn’t come to hear you educate us on why we’re wrong for asking a question on a project we need to do because of school. We came for answers, or at the worst, “Sorry, no clue.” This is the real reason why Stack Overflow is failing. AI may be taking away some of the simple questions, which who knows that could have accounted for tons of their traffic, but it’s not like the community was answering those questions. You’d get insulted and linked to threads that weren’t even tangentially related because people weren’t reading.
There’s no way AI is taking any “serious” user of Stack Overflow. Anyone who is using AI for more important coding is fucking retarded, to say the least. What’s happening right now to the site is people are finally tired and have other options. My last post on Stack Overflow was about getting Chinese to work in Unity. Everyone claimed it was impossible/pointless. That I would need to manually put in every character and mocked me. However, on the Unity Q&A board one of the people showed me how to import a Chinese font and to fully use it. It worked flawlessly and let me make a nice little Chinese quiz game. Not only was Stack Overflow rude a shit, but they were wrong. It bothers me that every time I use Stack Overflow I walk away with a negative story. However, with Reddit/ Unity Forums/ individual Q&A boards I do not. One of my friends just calls the site Cunts Overflow because it’s overflowing with cunts. I have quite a few friends who will do whatever they can before attempting to go on Cunt Overflow. The only people I know who like the site are cunts. So, excuse me while I don’t join in on the crocodile tear campaign because it’s cool to hate on AI. Fuck Stack Overflow and may it rest in piss.