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Comment by outsidetheparty | Hacker News Reader

Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good.

But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission:

> ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.

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This hasn’t been my experience at all and I’ve found that chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO.

I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing “duplicate” answers.

It’s hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods.

It’s a tough place to be and I don’t think it’s possible to make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original founders sold a few years ago.

> a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods.

Tell me you don't know how Wikipedia works without telling me you don't know how Wikipedia works

The mods of Wikipedia operate very differently than the mods at SO. I think there are more rigorous rules with SO than Wikipedia and they also have their tiers of users who upvote messages. Wikipedia has nothing like this.

Unless you are living on technologies edges, ChatGPT gets it right plenty of times and isn't a rude brick about it.

If it gets it wrong it usually is pretty apparent quickly and normally gives enough hints for avenues to explore.

At least my SO use (and programming related googling) has fallen dramatically...

When I've tried using it I've generally found that it leads me in circles between incompatible versions of a framework or tool -- it'll give me syntax that's correct for one version, but wants to use it to call a function that only exists in a different version, that sort of thing. They're not even hallucinations, each step is technically correct, but can't be used successfully with the other steps.

Another thing I found is that it can have "obvious omissions". As in: the answer is correct, and it works, but it's a bad solution and there's a much more obvious and better way to solve it.

"Technically correct", but also not good.

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