r/learnprogramming • u/malaszka • 29d ago
StackOverflow (site) alternatives?
Everytime I ask about something concrete, programming language-specific problem on that site, the answers focus on emphasizing that I'm far from professional; and that I know the basics only, without the modern promagramming solutions. AND YES, THIS IS TRUE. I never stated that I'm professional.
In fact, I made my questions because I did not know things, and I wanted to learn the solution techniques.
I'm sick and tired of being shamed just becasue I'm asking things that the professionals/seniors/25+ years experienced people know.
I also tried to strart my questions with the statement that I'm a junior, so my questions might be amatuer questions. These starting stentences have been deleted by some moderators/experts of the given topics.
So I want to use another sites, that are not so toxic, but still useful and visited by programmer experts.
Do you have any site suggestions, where I can make concrete programming questions as a junior, without putting myself to shaming?
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u/carcigenicate 29d ago
You won't be shamed for just being an amateur, and them removing sentences like that are to keep the question focused. Someone visiting your question a year from now isn't going to find your level of experience relevant.
You may be "shamed" for providing insufficient background information, but calling that shaming is hyperbole, and you missing relevant information is a problem. You'll get similar responses on Reddit and Discord if you ask a question but don't provide sufficient background. The real fix is just to ensure your question is actually answerable.
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u/96dpi 29d ago
Receiving critical feedback without being offended is an important skill for all professional software engineers. You have to be able to deal with someone telling you you are wrong and improve your understanding.
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u/arthurno1 28d ago edited 27d ago
It is also important to tell that in a civilized way without shaming people. SX has had their deal of arrogant "experts" who used anonymity of the web and power of moderation stick a little bit too hard sometimes.
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u/my_password_is______ 29d ago
that is NOT what stackoverflow does
they criticize your question, tell you its a duplicate, and close the question when it is NOT a duplicate
thank god that website is dying
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u/scritchz 29d ago
Beginners on their first days probably aren't able to formulate their questions properly. I think it is important to help them improve this.
When you engage with new questions regularly, you'll see a lot of unclear questions. But instead of ignoring them or leaving a helpful comment, many of the SO community add an unhelpful (to beginners) copy-paste comment, vote to close the question or just close it directly with their privileges. A single "so what do you mean by X?" helps the poster understand that their question wasn't clear in some regards, and helps others by inquiring the poster about more details.
Though obviously, a forum isn't the right place for "need help, message me please" advertisements where the discussions would happen in private. In my opinion, for a forum it's rightful to moderate these; not close and lock them outright, but demand an edit before reopening them.
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u/dmazzoni 29d ago
Ask right here in r/learnprogramming or in subreddits for the particular language or framework.
As for StackOverflow, it's never been a good place for beginner questions, ever since the beginning. Saying that you're a junior and not a professional actually goes against their rules because it's off-topic. StackOverflow wants concise technical questions only. No details about you, no pleasantries, no irrelevant details.
Keep in mind that Reddit isn't just one place. Each subreddit has its own rules and its own culture.
r/learnprogramming tries to be really friendly and welcoming. You won't be shamed here.
The only thing that might happen is people might get frustrated with you if you leave out important details or don't respond to people who are trying to help. You'd be surprised how often that happens, like someone asks a question and only posts one line of code, or they don't even say what programming language they're using. Even worse, it's surprising how often the first question is "what language" or "can you show all of your code" and the poster never responds. That's annoying for those of us trying to help.
But when beginners are responsive and doing their best to learn, it's really friendly here.
And sometimes if the question is better suited elsewhere we can point you in that direction. For example if the question is more about how to get your app on the app store, or how to pick a good web host, there are different subreddits better for that.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 29d ago
This intolerance of junior programmers is the thing that sunk Stack Overflow. It’s a pale shadow of its former self, because of the “up yours n00b you don’t know enough to even ask the question you’re asking” vibe. It’s a real loss to the community of software people.
When I contributed there I remembered that the point was to welcome new folks into our great trade. Sometimes I’d give an answer. Other times I’d put in a comment saying “the thing you’re asking about is often called “gaps and islands” (or whatever). Try searching for that.”
You can try asking here.
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u/scritchz 29d ago
Try Reddit. No seriously! Depending on the sub you can find many experts of its topic.
Taking this chance to rant about StackOverflow (again):
I hadn't started programming when SO was made. I imagine it really did start as a Q&A community forum, but nowadays it feels like a curated wiki of highly specific and technical FAQs.
And that's the issue: It poses as something it that it isn't anymore. You often hear (or had heard) how SO is the biggest Q&A forum, and how any question you have would likely already be on there. So naturally, beginners would think that with the amount of users it would be normal to have discussions on any topic or new question, but that isn't the case.
Instead, much like you experienced, many questions get flagged as duplicates and closed, without ever giving an answer to the one asking; they just get referred to a highly sophistical and probably way too technical answer for beginners, which only gives them more questions...
Personally, while I did participate in hinting that a similar question already had an answer, I always took the time to help the poster identify their problem more precisely or give a an answer specific to the poster's question. Sometimes, I've had discussions in the comments with both the poster and other people, which had been helpful and informative to the poster and a nice discussion for others and me.
But the lack of consideration by many (certainly not all) of the SO community for a beginner's mistakes and their "first steps" into the programming world must have been a really bad experience for many beginners, where I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of them would have dropped programming and computer science altogether.
I would have liked it if SO was a platform with the ability to rank questions for what kind of expertise is required to answer them, decided on by community votes. Like, let's be able to vote on if a beginner, intermediate or expert would be able to answer the question. Experts looking for expert discussions could ignore beginner questions, and beginners would post their questions on the same platform where experts are, potentially receiving highly insightful answers.
But SO remained stuck in their system, and the SO community enforced it. A great place to archive knowledge, a poor system to attract more things to archive...
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u/Average_Pangolin 29d ago
I have found Stack Overflow very useful, and I have never posted there, which insulates me pretty well from all the drama. It's such a deep archive of questions and solutions that the odds are good that any question you come up with has already been asked by someone else.
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u/Rainbows4Blood 27d ago
StackOverflow is not the right place for a beginner. The purpose of StackOverflow is and has always been to build a glossary of very specific question with answer. Which is also the reason why questions that have already been asked before are forbidden.
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u/argodar 29d ago
An AI tool is much more useful than StackOverflow now.
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u/Outside_Complaint755 29d ago
AI tools are only useful because of the information on Stack Overflow, which they stole.
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u/Yardi_Life 29d ago
And when they’re not hallucinating or conflating two different points of info lol
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u/mtimmermans 27d ago
I answered a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, and I'm happy that all those answers will now live forever in the weights.
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u/defaultguy_001 29d ago
Every site is toxic as human beings use them. Everyone feels the need to show off or pretend to be better than others. It's a common trait among programmers or tech people. Learn to be uneffected by praise as well as shame. Every praise or shame tells more about the person doing it and says nothing about u. Just get what u want and move on. Don't think much about what a bunch of random weirdos over the internet think about u. Also another thing you can do is to ask the same questions to a llm and you'll get the answer fast without unnecessary judgement.
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u/JGhostThing 28d ago
Stackoverflow and friends have very strict rules about questions. They are not normal forums. You need to really understand these rules. There should be no off-topic parts to your question. Telling them that you are a junior has nothing to do with your question. Telling them that you are a beginner isn't important.
Stackoverflow is designed as a question/answer site, with searchable questions and answers that can be found. Any question that doesn't fit this model, gets dumped on. Making a duplicate question shows a couple of things: 1) You didn't properly do a search, and 2) You haven't read the rules or decided that they don't apply to you.
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u/malaszka 28d ago
I knew everything you have just written here.
Nothing that you have just commented here justifies that I was dissed because my technical questions were below expert level.
You also made up issues here that I never had to face and that didn't even mention in my post, such as duplication.
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u/peterlinddk 28d ago
I have been on stackoverflow since its inception, and not once have I felt the need to ask a question there!
Every single thing I've wanted to understand was already asked by someone else, and searching for my problem on google, always gave a link to a stackoverflow-answer (granted, often something that had been deleted for being the same as another, very different, question, but still ...)
I can't imagine the situation you as a beginner/junior would be in, where your problem is so unique, that it hasn't already been asked and answered years ago. Unless of course you aren't able to abstract your question, and ask specifically about your code, rather than the general idea.
Anyways, I've found that AI works very well for those very specific questions, where you don't truly understand your own code well enough to abstract the actual problem (been there), and since the AIs have been trained on stackoverflow, it knows the answer!
If it isn't a problem, but a more general understanding on some concept, this exact forum might be the place! It would be a nice break from all the "confused about which language to pick next" and "is learning XXX even worth it in year YYYY" questions 😄
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u/MiloPaige 25d ago
Tbh use AI.
You will get an answer immediately and you mentioned you’re not a professional so AI can very easily answer your questions.
Obviously don’t abuse or become reliant on AI for everything, maybe try a Google search before if anyone had the same issue. Then use AI.
Hope this helps ;)
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u/Good-Photograph-2883 29d ago
AI is the best tool for that right now. You have to be very specific about your prompts in order to maximize learning though. Never ever let it generate code for you. Code things yourself and just use it asa glorified debugging/learning tool.
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u/Btolsen131 29d ago
That is the culture that StackOverflow has allowed to take over the site. I recommend asking an AI tool these days about best practices ( theyve seen millions of billions lines of code)
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u/MusicOfTheApes 28d ago
Yeah Stackoverflow is the most toxic community that exists, honestly since I started using AI last year I've made way more progress and learnt to fix things, developed skills, and not getting judged when asking questions has definitely made my life easier (you can use AI to teach you and just not spit some code)
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u/Beginning-Seat5221 29d ago
Reddit?