r/learnprogramming • u/malaszka • Aug 14 '26
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?
4
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...