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> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.



At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"


Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on.

Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing.

Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange:

Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to".

A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.


The "that's a XY problem" guys always seem to think they're the smartest in the room.


imo this was the single worst problem with SO, people always searching for the XY problem in every question instead of taking it at face value


Mostly I'd say their downfall was that they encouraged copypasta material and actively discouraged any kind of behaviour that would have built a community.


I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.




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