I tried to use StackOverlow to get an answer when I was learning how to code. The place was so hostile, I literally hired a developer on Upwork to be my personal “tutor.” AI now gives any willful student an on demand tutor or teacher. It’s up to the student to have the thirst for knowledge.
For a couple of months I tried to ask a very tricky question involving Linux sockets API and its strange behavior in some cases causing unexpected slow-downs. The tricky part was that I used my own programming language to interact with sockets and thus examples provided were written in it. Since it was my first question on Stackoverflow I decided to create my post in the playground (or how it's called, I don't remember). The answer of a couple of gatekeepers was shocking - they said that it's likely a problem with my language and not with Linux sockets API and I should rewrite my examples in C instead. I never did this for obvious reasons. One of suggestions was to update my OS, since it was somewhat outdated, which isn't that good advice too. Later I have found myself what was the problem - it wasn't something wrong with my programming language, but I just managed to hit some connection limits in the kernel.
I presume this happens nowadays frequently. All easy questions are answered by chat-bots or have ben already answered and hard questions don't pass gatekeeping.
The main problem before AI was that the community on SO was quite corrosive and many questions were shot down or deleted with no recourse. Post-AI, the only thing SO would have going for it would be the community, which it doesn’t. Maybe it would be useful for niche questions and truly hard problems, but I wonder how many people have just given up on it for the community aspects alone.
I presume this happens nowadays frequently. All easy questions are answered by chat-bots or have ben already answered and hard questions don't pass gatekeeping.
On the site itself, the opinion seems to be that stackoverflow is not dead and it's okay if there's reduced traffic and questions to the site.
Yet off site, the opinion is that stackoverflow is dead and added to that, the community isn't very friendly anymore.
It's just really interesting to see the perspectives between the two.