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"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning." Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years ago. Anytime I h

"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning." Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years ago. Anytime I have any programming question I immediately google it and odds of a StackOverflow answer are very high. I started iOS dev when it was fairly new and it sucked. So many bugs, gotchas, and misc shortcoming of the dev environment, Obj-C, or the SDK. Every single issue I ran into has now been cleanly answered on SO. Things I wasted dozens of hours on then would take me mere minutes as a new dev today. I sympathize with it not being as fun to answer questions today, but I have no idea how you can say it was more useful then than it is now.

hasenj 14y ago
I meant useful for getting answers to new questions. Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO. But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and answers that it hosts.
- wilfra 14y ago
  "if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO." I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.
- joelthelion 14y ago
  Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question. Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.
megablast 14y ago
He is clearly talking about it from the answering questions side, that is why he is talking about it as a game. Clearly SO is a great resource. But I am guessing you never found iphonedevsdk.com, it had all the answers before SO did. Although SO has better explained answers.

hasenj 14y ago

I meant useful for getting answers to new questions. Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO. But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and answers that it hosts.

wilfra 14y ago
"if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO." I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.
joelthelion 14y ago
Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question. Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.

megablast 14y ago

He is clearly talking about it from the answering questions side, that is why he is talking about it as a game. Clearly SO is a great resource. But I am guessing you never found iphonedevsdk.com, it had all the answers before SO did. Although SO has better explained answers.