> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile.
I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.
> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on.
"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on."
It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help.
However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.
Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.
That was far more the nature of Google at the time though. ie effectively broken.
The years immediately pre-SO were the height of the 5 page adsense spam site. Put anything into google and you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads.
I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.
My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.
Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent.
On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.
It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!
I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.
Or just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer...
What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.
Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...
Yes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.
Bullying? I'm not sure if you are trying to say SO has bullying (it doesn't - yes, newcomers have their questions rejected a lot - turns out asking good questions is hard. Saying this is bullying is like saying that it's bullying not to publish every author's book), or that you really thing bullying was the problem I was referring to in the past.
It wasn't, the issue was the content was useless. To find anything you had to wade through pages of off-topic stuff, and try to get a sense of the value of the given answers. It was terrible. That and the paywalling and other stuff that used to go on.
I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.
> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on.
Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.