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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners

This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.

Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.

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Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.

As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.

I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.

If it's so many, surely someone should be able to provide some example of them being treated unfairly soon! But seriously, I'm fine with people not liking SO. I just don't think the discourse on HN around it is very fruitful and mostly emotional. SO have clearly done something wrong to get that kind of widespread reputation, but I'm also allowed to be disappointed in how it's being discussed.

I think you are seeing emotional response is because SO has really fucked with people’s emotions, it is by far the most toxic place for SWEs to have ever existed and nothing is close 100th to it. expecting a non-emotional responses from SWEs about SO is asking too much (for most)

You may think you're making some kind of point by repeatedly asking for examples of vitriol on SO, but all it shows is that you haven't looked, or haven't sincerely reflected on what you saw from the perspective of a regular user.

Doesn't help with how often it is wrong, but if you preface every question with "terse answer please" at least you don't get the superfluous text tsunami and it sticks to the point.

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