Despite the title this is less a directive and more a description of what has already happened, and how I came to realize it.
Still, there are many who remember StackOverflow as a revelation in the mid-2010s and think some vestige of those times remain.
They think if they make an effort to distill their confusion into a question and post it there they will be rewarded.
Perhaps some scarce few will, but a better way exists.
Well, I’m happy that it’s dying as well. That place got horrible. When AI first arrived, I was happy I don’t have to spend much time on SO.
I have accrued a fair amount of points on there through the years, I really liked the concept. But around 2020 or so I pretty much stopped answering because it got more and more hostile.
Like, when someone closes a question because it’s a duplicate of a vaguely related question from over a decade ago in a version that’s been out of support for a decade and the relevant API doesn’t even exist, you know it’s not a good place. And that happened extremely often.
It used to be good, then it got shitty and got replaced with something else. Not as good as StackOverflow at its best, but much better than StackOverflow at its end.