Popular useful tools and platforms can cause addiction and become a single point of failure in our workflow when we rely too much on using them. I ...
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My favorite thing about StackOverflow is not the answers, but the discussions under an answer. You can learn A LOT by reading some not-so-friendly arguments over a subject if it is popular enough to bring that amount of attention.
That article is a masterpiece. I do like the part about reading more offline books, but this could be applied to some general topics or to build a skill. I am not sure one could find a solution to a handy topic quickly in a book.
Let´s not dismiss SO for the wrong reasons. AI is no better alternative! But the alternative alternatives are. Books, experience, logical and scientific thinking, paired with intuition and creativity, especially if you´re a front-end developer.
StackOverflow continues to become an obsolete library of outdated advice while its community and its leadership fight each other and occasional new users, while most other devs now prefer "artificial intelligence", i.e. coding assistants and chatbots, mostly because they are always polite, even if they aren't actually helpful.
Google isn´t doing much better, except for trying to win the AI race, but both Google Search and StackOverflow have been declining and deteriorating long before (LLM-based, generative, post-2021) "AI", due to various reasons. Many people reported that they experience Google search results getting worse and less relevant, which might have to do with SEO and marketing, but maybe also with prioritizing paid advertising customers over genuinely relevant organic sources.
Concluding, both remind me of the music industry pushing CDs and digital products in the 1990s, when the masses still preferred classic vinyl records with their large printed covers, when computers had no CD players and MP3 hadn't been invented yet. But they kept pushing perceived progress to kill their own business model for no obvious reason.
Please, don´t follow hypes, don´ t stop thinking, read a book, write notes, write code, and keep experimenting and learning!
I have some issues with "Reasons not to use StackOverflow", the most prevalent being that
Yes, outdated, but that's a problem with every source, things get outdated, and I'd say that that's actually one of SO's strong points; answers get constantly updated, and modern answers rise to the top. And yes, there may be biased voting, but people grossly overestimate it; as a long-time SO user (full disclaimer I'm an SO user) I've never seen or experienced such. I think the moderation/reputation system works perfectly.
Some topics got frequent updates and have become valuable Wiki pages, but others haven't. I have stopped suggesting edits after getting "the edit queue is full" messages when trying to save. Maybe StackOverflow is easier to use with a lot of reputation and privileges. Of course, it's still better than AI, but it feels like an old public library where some of the books have become too dusty.
StackOverflow has discussed various changes and innovations recently, including a staging ground for first questions asked by new users. Senior community members have questioned if it makes sense to incentive more user activity, some argue that StackOverflow should be used passively like a library, and that SO could profit a lot from those kind of users as they are likely to see more paid ads on the page.
StackOverflow has also released their latest annual developer survey, but they didn't do a great job in data visualization in my opinion, so I didn't manage to read it. I expect the upcoming State of JavaScript, State of CSS, State of ... to do a better job again. I also plan to release my own subjective State of Development Technologies this year.
I particularly relate to your "Thinking" section to this article. Those principles that StackOverflow is well known for enforcing has made me a better developer.
Maybe we should all RTFM :-)
And in this list, please do not miss the Electro Organic QA:
electroorg.com/qa/
It is a very good alternative to stackoverflow.
I didn't know about web.dev... thanks for sharing!
The monopoly really needs to be broken
You can also use
wpuniverse.online/
A custom search engine for WordPress and web developers. It collect and summarize dev related query for you.
but it's almost scary to ask something on stackoverFlu narcissists!
Gosto muito do tabnews.com.br/
I find discord communities centered around frameworks, languages or CS in general to be the go to