alt Hacker NewsI thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relevant and useful to them although they never posted their own question or even made an account on the site.
Replies
Scoundreller • today at 4:48 AM
> Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again.
You’ve just described a large chunk of Reddit.
Their poor internal search doesn’t help.
Yes. People forget it was a response to abominations such as Yahoo Answers, which quickly devolved into a cesspool of mouthbreathers, haha. Also expert-sexchange/quora which tried-to/often-did hide the answers.
Without its "tough love" Stack would have had a similar trajectory. Maybe a few policies here and there were problematic but overall it was and continues to be a huge benefit to the developer/IT community.