Say what you want about overzealous moderators, it is an incredibly useful resource. It's easy to take it for granted but I remember the days before SO and it was much harder to find good answers to programming questions.

In theory it could be replaced with something else but good moderation and a very product-oriented leadership (mostly programmers, not MBA types) is what made SO what it is. These intangible "soft" qualities are the hard part - it would be easy to duplicate its technology.

I’ve found Stack Exchange to be an amazing resource overall; be it StackOverflow for programming questions, rpg.stackexchange, or working out some issue on math.stackexchange - having the ability to quickly search across thousands of questions that were asked in the past has helped me immensely. I still remember my early days of asking VB for A questions and getting some great help there

Since it's closed-source software, why even discuss it among FOSS enthusiasts when there are good open-source alternatives available?

https://codidact.com

By the way it's @entropicshart@lemmy.world fault that I answered to a post this old. He's the necromancer.

I get most of my code from StackOverflow. Sometimes from the answers too.

;)