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Comment by zajd | Hacker News Reader

What decline? Are you talking about your own personal perception or like actual data about the site and the way its used?

Personal anecdote: StackOverflow continues to be one of, if not the, best sources for solving programming problems, and I know of literally 0 alternatives that even come close. Quora? Are you kidding me?

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Yes, Quora pretty much exists to validate the strict moderation policies used by other sites. There are occasional good answers, but they are buried under a mountain of idiocy:

Questions that could have been answered with 5 minutes' worth of googling.

Completely opinion based questions: https://www.quora.com/Who-sang-My-Way-better-Elvis-or-Sinatr...

Endless duplicates of stupid questions: https://www.quora.com/search?q=lyrics+prank

People who serially produce horrible translations of answers, probably using software, presumably for clout chasing.

And long, detailed, stories that most likely were made up (That's the genre that made me give up reading notalwaysright.com: Too many stories of people who behave horribly until a 7'5" Marine shows up to save the day).

Right now it dominates and prevents other similar forums and QA sites from starting up. People who have had issues with SO/SE sites have moved to things like Gitter. This sucks for long term archiving. But that's the state of things on the internet right now.

(Also, my rant form a long time ago was mentioned! That was a pleasant surprise)

Anecdotally: I've found that I now reach for documentation first, coworkers second and stack overflow only as a last resort, where as in past years it used to be the first place I looked. I also find myself more often disappointed with what I do find and leaving the site with the same unanswered question I started out with.

The last two years, all of my hard questions have been about AWS or an AWS manager service. Luckily, I can take advantage of our business support contract and just open a ticket and start a live chat.

If I didn’t have that available, I would probably use Reddit or the local tech Slack group.

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