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I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get. You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See th

I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get. You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See the people who said they learned to program with SO in this thread, or otherwise find the material there useful. They're the target userbase, not you. I suspect the audience is not limited on purpose. The work required to answer questions, and incentive system seems to select for questions that are already google-able but the person asking just doesn't have enough domain knowledge to productively google for that answer. The only time I get a useful stack overflow google result is when I've jumped headfirst into an area outside my skillset and need to do a common operation but the toolset doesn't make obvious. The kind of questions where I'd be desperate enough to ask SO are either complicated and - at best - get "don't do it like that" answers. Or I'm looking to better understand the technical considerations going into a design decision, which is too opinion-based (or whatever SO calls it) to be asked.

coryfklein 10y ago
> Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices I can understand this belief in that the most prominent content on the site is that which gets the most upvotes, and by statistical necessity the number of novices voting must be greater than the number of experts voting. But when you get into the niche topics or tags, that's when the expertise really comes through. Try browsing the [scala] or [haskell] tags, they may not have a giant community, but the general level of both questions and answers hardly fits your generalization of "novice". If we were just talking about the "hot questions" of the month (http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month) I could understand why it would seem the site is mostly useful for novices, but there is definitely a place for expertise in the community as well.

coryfklein 10y ago

> Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices I can understand this belief in that the most prominent content on the site is that which gets the most upvotes, and by statistical necessity the number of novices voting must be greater than the number of experts voting. But when you get into the niche topics or tags, that's when the expertise really comes through. Try browsing the [scala] or [haskell] tags, they may not have a giant community, but the general level of both questions and answers hardly fits your generalization of "novice". If we were just talking about the "hot questions" of the month (http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month) I could understand why it would seem the site is mostly useful for novices, but there is definitely a place for expertise in the community as well.