[Sembiance]

Ahh, stack overflow. Hugely popular thread with a lot of engagement? Lets lock it. Wouldn’t want to encourage behavior that doesn’t match our narrow minded “vision” for the site. Still though, an improvement over the early years where they just outright deleted countless pages with countless contributions. In the end it’s their site and they can run it however they want, but it’s sad to see such massive potential squandered through a policy promoting deletionism. Hindsight is 20/20 though and it’s not like I’ve gone and coded a better one, so I should probably just delete this comment and move on.

[ChrisSD]

I do like that they are focused on being a collaborative Q&A site, nothing more and nothing less. Some sites care so much about "engagement" that they try to be all things to all people and end up simply becoming yet another generic forum.

I have other issues with SO but having a USP and sticking with it isn't their problem, IMHO.

[nyanpasu64]

I adblock Hot Network Questions because it always distracts me when I'm looking for programming help.

[martin_a]

Pleae be nice to the 2374568234th user that could not manage to read any manual or just google for his error message before opening a new question!

[httpsterio]

It's not always that simple. Half of the time when I run into errors, there's no one solution that either works or 100% applies to my case so it's a lot of trial and error. I'm also not the most skilled developer and manuals are often way too verbose and difficult to parse if they don't contain very clear examples.

Sometimes, we just need someone to help translate our needs into a different wording and everything clicks into place. I'm sure that this causes a lot of repeated questions, but that's why when someone links a relevant question, it might be enough to solve the issue.

[ma2rten]

No it doesn't if you make well reasoned arguments.