Hey everyone. Sorry for the editing issues with this video and me appearing twice sometimes. I’m not sure what happened but it seemed to just not render properly. 🫠 unlike stack overflow, I will do better next time and make you all happy! Thanks for watching

Nothing drove me nuts more than finding a post with the exact same question I had only to see one comment "why would you even want to do this," adding zero value to the post.

It's been terrible for years. The admins are pedantic narcissists.

StackOverflow on job interview: -Why do you want to work for us? Candidate: -What a dumb question to ask! StackOverflow: -You are hired!!!

Once I asked a question there, some high rep dude came with this not here for doing your homework attitude, then some time later I answered my own question that I figured out how to solve the issue, then the guy edited my question and said that my own solution did not answer the question. And he was rigth, since he modified my own question the way that the answer no longer covered it. Cool huh?

Stack Overflow will make money from their deal with OpenAI, but it seems like that might be the last money they ever make.

They are a step away from being forgotten. Nobody likes being treated like a noob for asking a question. They are rude, impolite, and absurd. AI is just the last nail in the coffin.

from the newbie's point of view it used to give the impression of an exclusive club, an elitist group with a purity culture.

The top answers that you are referred to if you search on a search engine, are more often than not closed as a duplicate. If you then go to the question that SO refers to as the master question, it is often only vaguely related, and has a lower quality in the answers, and even of the questions itself.

I got scolded for not having the latest version of the R programming language even though the question was valid regardless of the version. The person didn't stop and went on with the rant about the evil of not using the latest version. My company had a licensed version that was always some versions behind and he refused to understand or acknowledge that. It was water off a duck's back for me but for many new developers the hostility is intimidating.

The reputation system works against people who generally stfu but have expertise in a few topics.

A few years ago I saw a question on SO about piece of Linux interface that I’ve written. I’ve created an account just to answer it. As an author of the interface I could provide all the necessary details. My efforts were rewarded by being downvoted by people who had no idea what they were talking about. I’ve closed my account soon after and never been tempted to contribute to SO ever again.

My favourite gripe is the inability to change the “correct” answer. Often the answer is ambiguous or wrong and it often stays as “correct”

StackOverflow lost me when the moderators started power tripping … no thanks …

Unfortunately, all of these problems have been apparent for years, as shown in the video, and they still haven't invested anything into solving them, so I don't see them solving their actual issues. Instead, they've invested all their time into growth tactics that make no sense because these tactics are only growth tactics, not stuff that has to do with the user's experience and what they perceive as valuable. Gamifying the experience is only a growth tactic when it doesn't improve anything and it's just there for user retention. This is a huge reason as to why most gacha games don't last more than 2 years. Gacha games are literally developed with user retention in their core and that's why they all shutdown so fast as they have no base to expand on for the unachievable user retention rates these companies aim for based on no true unbiased data and stats

Another issue i have noticed recently with SO is people editing your question purely for a bit of rep, like they will edit it in such a way that it doesn't improve the question in any way, they just found a way to re-word it so they can say they edited it, or they edit it so much it actually changes the question. I had this recently and when i reversed the edit, i suddenly got a downvote (I'm assuming from the user that edited my question, he then edited it again, which i again reversed, then i got an email from a mod saying Im not allowed to undo edits, despite this mods edits making no sense. So after 30 mins fighting a mod I deleted the question. I have used the site for 10+ years and have circa 10k rep, Im not a new user I know how the site works, its just frustrating when people try to just piggy back on your question to get some rep for doing nothing of value.

Consistently going against the core userbase's interests has killed quite a few platforms over the years. And it will kill StackExchange, if they continue going this way.

I used to use SO all the time, but would never dare ask a new question. Now I’m using Gemini Advanced, and I love the writing tone of the good information (and code).

You can see their past comments. Go to activity, then filter it to "All Actions".

There is nothing more discouraging than asking a question and being made to feel like an idiot by someone you hoped could help you out! This is one of the major problems with SO. This is why it is used as a last resort. I even went so far as to avoid asking questions and would just try to do searches for similar questions with hopefully accurate answers.

16:00 I have been writing to SO quite a lot and before you can write *anything* to SO, you have to accept that all your content is licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0. This was the requirement way before any version of ChatGPT ever existed. So SO or nobody else had no reason to ask anybody for a permission before using all the data as AI training material. If you publish stuff to any social media site without bothering to read the license, don't claim that the company doesn't have right to do stuff that you *agreed on* in the EULA. And the attribution part of the CC license only applies to verbatim copying which falls under copyright law. If the AI simply explains the same idea, that would be covered by patents only, not by copyright. And CC license explicitly says "Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License." 19:00 After you have licensed your content with a perpetual license agreement such as CC BY-SA, you cannot take it back. Even trying to do might be contract breach and therefore illegal.

I started calling them Snark Overflow🤡. Plus a lot of the arrogant star users give terrible long winded BAD answers.

Absolutely agree. One Admin closed a question I wrote that was helping lots of people with lots of upvotes. Eventually this Admin got so much abuse from other commenters saying it should have stayed open he gave up and made the question open

the negative scores for asking a question at 2:42 was so triggering! God I hated those negative scoring for stupid reasons!

It was sliding for years. AI just delivered the death blow

This is why developers need platform cooperatives.

Hooray for chatGPT, since it can answer all my trout related love questions

One of the best things about AI is that it’s going to help a lot with NOT having to deal with poor teachers (as much).

This great deletion makes me a bit worried. It makes me feel that I need to write myself a proxy for SO that would save every single question I see to my local computer so that I can read it years later if I need.

SO locking questions is the worst. Especially if the answer is not immediately forthcoming but can be answered years later. I have accumulated enough points to actually be a moderator but I can't stand SO policies, so why would I inflict them on anyone else?

I hope AI will one day replace SO completely and they will bankrupt from the lack of traffic. I have had to ask few questions because AI didn't know and google didn't know either and it got downvoted without even explaining what was wrong so I have no way of asking the same thing better or edit the question. I would be happy to see AI getting to the point where I never need to visit SO.

Did anyone think that they didn't open source their SO answers, implicitly?

So many times Ive seen interesting questions which people obviously want to engage with, which are deleted as too general, opinion-based etc. I dont think it profits them to delete every such question. I tried to ask a question of my own, quite specific but a little complex to explain. (It was about an algorithm rather than a specific issue I was having). It was deleted almost immediately. I edited the question to improve the clarity, but it did no good. It was a complete waste of my time.

If everyone moves to AI generated content which is based on original human content, how are the next generation of AI models going to learn new things if communuites like SO are destroyed by first generation AI? Likewise, where will developers go when they have new questions the AI can't answer and no human communities willing to share answers because they don't want to contribute to future AI models? Ugh...

I was barred from Stack Overflow for the crime of telling the person whose question I was answering, what opensource project of mine the answer came from. Stack Overflow charges advertisers $10,000 US per month minimum, and doesn't want you leaving their ad revenue to see an opensource project. I am glad AI has forced them to layoff staff.

Is there an actual stack overflow alternative?

I dont know why would i ever use that, S.O will be the internet archives of coding, also it was full of prima donas, their life purpose was to mark a question as possible duplicate

Interesting. I remember a time when Stack Overflow outright banned anything AI related stuff from their website.

The “I want to know why you’re trying to do this” isn’t necessarily meanness. The user might be thinking that the person asking the question has narrowed the focus of the expected solution too early, and a different solution to the real high-level problem might be superior.

The number of times I search for a question and find someone with the exact issue i have only to see they had their question shut down and pointed to and extremely old answer that was either - Not at all the same - Only partially relevant but not truly the same and was either mostly or entirely unhelpful - Worked but was obviously overly complex - Worked but had little to no explanation of how the code worked - Worked but had a far to technical explanation of how the code worked (AKA the explanation is only useful if you have a higher level of proficiency)

As an example, I noticed most Qs related to java-springboot are answered for versions before 3. There are very few new questions for version 3. Even when the question specifies the version, the answer does not work 😢 And same has been happening with less and less content related to new technologies or approaches

19:30 btw it was impossible to delete popular answers way ago before AI arrived. I know because I tried to replace my really up-voted but really outdated answer(was not marked as "a solution" btw) with most up-to-date and did not want to edit initial answer into something completely different. Makes sense, every answer and question can be direct-linked from the outside.

I was active on this site ten years ago. I used it to learn to be a better programmer, by answering questions. I would mock up the question, then write and test the answer.

Agree with all you say. I rarely use it but when I do it’s usually because I can’t remember the name of the PHP function I want. I search on a description of the function and the answers are always a page of code written, and upvoted, by people who don’t know the function exists.

Let me get this straight. Quality answers were developed by highly a knowledgeable group, who left because corporate didn't value their expertise and mistreated them, thereby driving them out, only to be replaced by AI. Now, AI works by reading older expert data and spitting out new answers, but the older data is aging out, and nobody wants to waste their time taking a trip down the time wasting rabbit hole, but corporate decided to double down on AI, which cannot actually develop new accurate and correct answers by itself for the foreseeable future... Yes, I think I see the flaw in corporate's plan.

I've mentored quite a few people and I have to say that your calling out someone for asking "Why do you need this" might be calling someone out for being helpful, not mean. (even if their tone is off) When your teaching you need to get to the root cause and not the high level issue the student is facing. Allot of students will try multiple angles to approach an issue, often starting with the most practical approach and then trying less practical issues as they become frustrated. By the time they come to you they may have discarded many practical solutions and become focused on something entirely impractical. What I try to do when I'm mentoring is gently walk them backwards, using a 5 whys style approach until we get to the core issue, and then we fix that Then if we have time I'll try to show them why the other things they tried failed, and maybe talk about which solution works best. If I just give a simple solution I'm doing a disservice to my student, and ultimately failing to be a mentor.

Being patient is a skill. Consider in the workplace if you often have to train up new people. Those new people are going to all be asking the same questions you've heard before from previous ones. Sometimes they may seem obvious to you, the skilled person. Maybe you think they should have been able to work it out for themselves, or that you pretty much told them already. But if you're impatient you will create immediate bad feeling in the trainee, and a sense of hostility. You will put them off asking again, then maybe they won't ask something for fear of your response, and screw up instead. So you really have to be patient, and kind, and make it clear that this is a "ask any question you have" environment. You must remember that the person asking this for the hundredth time is not the person who asked for the 99th time or the 98th or the 1st, and you probably asked this, or similar "obvious" things, when you were the trainee. People offering answers for free on the internet, who may be short tempered, in programming or other nerd skills, where they may well be neurodivergent, are probably not good at this. It's an inherent problem.

What about those models behind? Are you also a model maker? They look nice.

I usually would find stack overflow answers via Google searches. So I would click and see something idiotic like "we're not here to answer homework questions".... Or what was also annoying were all the moderator junk like "This is being asked in the wrong forum" or whatever. I just wanted the darn answer I didn't care. Nowadays if I ask GPT it just gives me the answer.... And stack overflow wonders why they're losing relevance. You nailed it in this video.

As a dev with 20 years of experience writing low level framework and backend code I can tell You the elitist behavior and calling users stupid, locking questions and linking outdated answers is the reason I will only ever go to stackoverflow after exhausting like 2 pages of google results. probably visited it like only 10 times since 2016 because of this.

It's always the same. You are new, ask a question, and most people only say: RTFM. Very encouraging.

90% of the time, if I find that someone already asked the same question I have, there's no answer or a single answer with a score of 1 or 0, so I still don't know if the answer is good or not.

Reading comments, one has to ask if what really happened to stackoverflow was the phenomena of "Trolls". Those who get a kick out of just angering people, mucking things up deliberately, being destructive, trashing things, as their only source of getting their sick jollies? Is it possible this was part of the overflow cultural change? (In addition to being bought by a commercial entity.)

Your analysis seems pretty-much spot-on. Just one very small point. If you want to see comments posted by an SO or SE user, just open their profile, click on 'Activity', and then select 'All Actions' on the left of the screen. You can now select comments (I think it's the 5th option on the list above the actions display).

It won't work it's ALL been archived and Uploaded ALL of Stack Overflow. Too late

Stack Overflow actively blocking people from removing data could be a violation of gdpr laws

i know that there are chapters but i dont know where is the actual answer for the topic and/or conclusion

What always gets me with the "did you Google it?" answers is the number of times I have a problem, I Google it and the results I get say "did you Google it?", "did you Google it?", "did you....." GAAAH!

Some people are just arseholes, and some of the arseholes have just been allowed to get away with it.

I left one community and removed all the key words from the text and left word salad, another community that would not allow mass deletion I replaced the text with dots and white space. I have a feeling if users were clever about it they could edit these in such a way no one noticed until it was too late to fix it. Also wonderful channel, I subscribed after seeing your video on the Failure that is Agile.

What is the little box with the stroked 0 you are wearing around your neck? A throat mic?

Lets be honest though, eventually you would post your question and it would get closed because it was to similar to something that was answered with 10 year old solutions.- it's a dead horse, so the owners are getting what they can for it at the glue factory.

Maybe the impolite and condescending answers a result of drop in quality of questions. When SO started it was a place for developers to share expertise. With getting more and more famous the community got diluted and high school kids or lazy college kids got onto SO and stared exploiting the very experienced developers.

If SO wasn’t so snarky then perhaps there user base would not be declining

Stack Overflow is not a way of life, it is just an online forum where people ask and answer questions. Firstly, most the time you ask a question you either get awful answers, rude answers, or it gets closed and redirected to an old post that does not adequately answer the question. I hate to say it, the AI will do a better job than their users have..... unfortunately for Stack Overflow I can access the same level of AI answers from my browser's search bar and as such won't need to visit their website at all to get better answers. It won't affect me at all, since I rarely use stack overflow anyway. AI is slowly taking over the internet. The internet for years has largely been a consolidated corporate world of bots and astroturfing. Very little creative or genuine content still exists. The Dead Internet Theory was only partially correct a decade ago or so, but it is getting more true by the minute.

I've lost count of the amount of questions I've seen or had marked as duplicates that were just up-to-date versions of questions that had outdated answers on them.

Yup! These are all reasons why I refuse to ever participate. I've had a few very negative experiences on the platform so I only use it for reference. I never ask or talk to anyone because of this. Even the mods were pretty rude and unhelpful. I've even been redirected to answers that didn't actually answer my question...

Once when I searched, found no answer, asked the question, I was told the question had been asked before but there was no reference to the previous question. Having already failed in the initial search, I still had no answer. Another time when I searched, found no answer, asked a question, I was the question had been asked before and there was a link to the previously asked question, but it didn't answer my question. But I still get upvotes on a couple of questions I answered years ago. Got one an upvote two months ago! These days, I might search Stack Overflow, but I'm more likely to use one of the AIs. They seem to be good at answering simple and weird questions like "what is the syntax of that c# thing where you can embed the variables in the string". (Having not used c# for 6 years, I forgot the syntax)

In think 80% of the time we do a question in stack overflow is a dummy question If stack overflow is a toxic environment for newbie questions it will lose A LOT of users for chatgpt.

thank you! I am "passive" user of SO for so many years and I was always happy with finding my answers

Stack Overflow had it coming. If you have a shitty attitude towards your customers, you can't expect to stay in business. I would not ask a question if I was an expert. I don't mind researching a topic but sometimes you just need a pointer in the right direction, not a shit answer.

Yesterday I posted a very specific question on Stack Overflow and it was soon closed as duplicate, and linked to a very general question I was supposed to have found and read first. But this was not the part that bothered me most, but the mocking comment of a user, and the fact that his comment was the most upvoted. I closed my account! I don't want to be part of a community like that. There's so many other sources of information like blog posts, videos and documentation that I'm probably not going to miss it!

I thought SO was annoying too after trying to post some questions in the past. Glad it's not just me. I basically only view it nowadays if google returns a link to it as a possible answer to my question.

i never used it. even the very first time when i tried to post a question, i had to add dummy text to make it past automatic filters. i could not ask clarifying questions, was redirected to similar but not quite the same topics etc...

Working in an area I'd not been in before- writing an instrument plugin in the Steinberg VST2 stylee with its poorly documented API, I found ChatGPT invaluable, it acted like an eternally patient tutor. Sometimes its answers were wrong but I could find that out very rapidly rather than the very slow human response time of a website like Stack Overflow, and it never called me an annoying idiot.

Stack Overflow usually leaves me with more questions than I had from the beginning. Easier to type a question in Copilot and get an answer.

Don't forget that a ton of devs were let go from their jobs in this sector during the past couple of years. They aren't searching SO because they can't get a job in the sector anymore.

I don't use Stack Overflow anymore. I just use an AI chat, where I get an answer fast, and is not judged. An I am an experienced developer. So quite often, I don't even receive an answer on SO. Perhaps because there is no easy answer, or nobody knows about the specific issue.

The answers there are definitely high quality and less repetitive as a result so I don't mind.

when i was newer to coding and very excited to get involved in stack overflow, I was belittled and even temporarily blocked by admins. It made me consider quitting coding. I ultimately kept learning but still do not consider stack overflow a worthwhile investment of my time.

Video closed as duplicate.

I've never used any AI stuff to help me. I go to stack overflow often though. And yep I find that the answers often are not what I'm looking for and are outdated. But I still often find useful info and solutions. What really bothers me though is when documentation is hard to decipher. I've wasted a lot of time, many times, due to poor explanations. Then hours or days later I finally figure out how it works and it's like "why the hell couldn't they just say that?" Like, if the people writing the documentation just put a few more minutes of effort to be clear, it would save me hours or days. Multiply that times how many other people have to go through the same shit and we could be talking years of time saved.

My first interaction with SO, was in 2013 I was in the first CS courses and had back then what might have seemed like stupid questions to experienced engineers but I was new to the field. I can't even remember what I asked but I was basically publicly berated and humiliated made to feel like an idiot for not having a masters level understanding of CS as a 1st year student. Even the feedback was moronic like the expectation was to essentially answer your own question and upload the answer .... This became the excepted culture on SO, and turned a lot of people away especially with the owners actually condoning the toxic culture. ChatGPT doesn't suffer from this fatal human flaw called EGO. I've always hated the SO platform it was everything thats wrong with the whole culture surrounding software engineering.

Pretty interesting, thanks for the insight. I'd noticed that SO doesn't show up as much in search results and even when it does the results don't seem as helpful as they used to.

Chatgpt has been replacing and my goto for questions. I think Stackoverflow forgot their vision and got pased by technology. The lack of innovation and vision lead to their decline in the past years. Like you mentioned, AI was just the technology bump that overthrow the company due to lack of direction and entity. My expectation is that they will slowly fade away in the history of the internet as they got technologically overthrown. The current decisions they have been taken trying to 'save' rather then to innovate are exposing a true mismanaged company which eroded his valies for growing profit.

I like the video thanks for the insight, I am going on to comment on two different things, one what the video is about and also the internet as a whole with the direction it is going in. I do think stack overflow is a great source of information, but at the same time it is not very friendly to new users, the obvious problem is a new user cannot post a comment, they can only post a question or an answer. This is very flawed because you might want to respond to an answer or a question with something that should not be posted as an answer, it is a very bizarre limitation for new users. This can lead to lower quality answers from new users, who will be of course unable to ask for clarification from the person asking the question and being desperate to raise their reputation. I once asked a question which was then edited by a moderator because they felt I didnt ask the question properly, but the problem is they then made it into a different a question, which to meant they interpreted my question incorrectly, but who am as a new user to fight a moderator of the site? In my view in that instance the moderator is overstepping what they should be doing. I also agree with you on the duplication problem, this issue exists on other communities as well, I understand preventing duplications of very recent posts/questions, but its going too far if the duplicated contents is several months or years old, and of course I agree with the reasons you stated where the old answer may no longer be relevant. Reddit has a similar problem of overly strong moderation. Of course I agree that users on such a site should not be replying telling someone to google it, I myself have e.g. been told to google something, when I have already done so, maybe I suck at using keywords in google, but to assume I havent searched before asking is a bit insulting, and if I get this kind of reply often, I will be driven from a community. Now moving on to your final point with people deleting answers, because they not happy with the answer being used by AI, this is a problem on the wider internet, a lot of communities are now moving to Discord, and the problem with Discord is none of it is indexed by search engines, its kind of like a modern form of IRC, where its isolated from the wider internet, but even worse because there is no way to search for Discord servers, you have to be aware it exists and have an invite link to get on the server you want. Discord in it self is very unsuitable for archival of questions and answers aka knowledge sharing, its primary strength is live chat. We are already seeing lots of game developers and modders moving to discord and that knowledge is getting locked away, it would not surprise me at all if we end up with the parts of the stack overflow userbase that doesnt want their answers becoming part of an AI site moving to discord knowing that their data wont be able to harvested on a private discord server. I dont like this direction the internet is going, as for me the prime function of the internet is to share information. My background I do work with developers and occasionally I have gone to stack overflow and similar sites to try and resolve issues or to help me write a script, I also have done as a hobby game modding primarily in Final Fantasy 7, the point being here, is that much of the reverse engineering for fF7 is on a website, which in the 2000s and 2010s had a very thriving community that shared information with each other, now game modding communities are largely done over Discord, and finding ways to create mods for the games in question is really difficult as all the information is locked away. The internet in a decade is going to be even worse and far more hostile than it is now.

This is completely backwards.. SO could've used AI to go through the question/answers/comments to generate a metamap of the site and then used that knowledge to redirect users to (actually) related/duplicate issues where people post(ed) answers.. but no, instead it's still people that are locking the threads, and it's AI that's responding..

AI may be wrong sometimes but it doesn't scold you for asking a question that someone else has asked.

There's also a fundamental mistake that the users of all "community" sites make again and again. It's the belief that the "community" site exists for the purpose of building the community... this is not the case. "Community" sites exist to maximise the financial profits of their owners. We, as users, may not like this. We may wish the opposite was true. But, no matter how hard we wish, it isn't going to change.

I've been a user since the beta, but I come and go (under 2k rep). There were complaints about it getting bad for a long time, and I thought the community adapted. But lately, it has gotten noticeably worse. It used to be that a lot of new questions were randomly downvoted with no comment... then new, solid questions would get downvoted. Recently, bots are now auto-closing and hiding these nicked questions. Recently I noticed that several questions I asked were removed, and it doesn't even tell you when you are scheduled, but when it is deleted, you get a -2. For context, I've probably asked about 150 questions over 10 years, and maybe 5 or 6 were marked dupes or closed. This year its ~75%.

Even as someone that wants to answer questions it sucks because either the question is way above my skill level, or it is closed so it's hard to build reputation

Have not used it for years.

Instead of asking very basic or noob questions, people need to search it in official documents and tutorial pages. Stackoverflow has to have some level

Thank you for this interesting overview! Btw: You CAN see the comment history of a user (even publicly without being logged in): "Activity" tab under the user image in the user profile, then "All actions" tab under it, then "Comments" tab on top of the actions list. The particular user isn't consistently mean or impolite. I don't find his "Why" question mean at all either. The "Why" has been asked even twice in the comments. And isn't that a weird question indeed? Every developer learns to encapsulate their code into many small functions to reduce repetition and improve readability, and the questioner wants to do the contrary. I was active til 2014 answering questions, and I could imagine to have asked "Why" as well because I had had the suspicion that some other problem or misunderstanding lies behind the question. I probably had added a guess like "Do you want to improve your code's execution performance by inlining function calls?" or something, just because a plain "Why" COULD sound offensive. (We are in the Internet and don't look into each other's face.) If the answer would have been "yes, that's the reason", maybe somebody would have explained that excessive inlining is counterproductive for performance. (I have actually no clue.) Which might have been valuable information for the questioner, maybe more than an answer to the original question. But the user didn't answer the "Why" or replied to any other comment to the question. I would not have questions for clarification or context left unanswered, that's impolite, if I expect from somebody to invest their time in answering my question. But yes, in general, I agree that the overall tone has become worse on SO over the years. "We are not here to do your homework" is an unneccesary sentence (how could we know this for sure?).

Awesome video content, and also cool stuff behind you :D Is that all Lego sets? I don't recall Lego having Concorde in their offer, but It's been a while since last time I've checked :P

The reason people answer questions on SO in comments instead of posting actual answers also has to do with toxic behavior on the site. Comments can only be upvoted, not downvoted, so you can gain points by writing good comments, but you will never lose points just because someone doesn't like your answer or the fact that you answered a question or you personally. Answers, on the other hand, can be downvoted, and you will lose points when that happens, and quite often it's not because your answer is bad, but just because someone is trying to troll you, or people don't like the fact that you answered a question they don't think is worth answering. Yet comments don't even show up when you visit SO on your smartphone, as the mobil version of the page shows no comments at all!

I'm pretty sure Stack Overflow stopped caring about developers in September 2008 when they chose to launch with terms of use actively toxic towards anyone seeking to learn anything

6:30 You can see the comments of any user by going to their profile, choosing Network profile and then Activity.

I first started to learn coding in 2016. I still have little reputation as I just keep Googling. Basically you can't comment as a new or user who hasn't posted but then the question is already there with answers so you can't add a comment when appropriate. Yet if you post it as an answer that's the same but a small change I don't post it because I know it will be removed as a duplicate

Yes, your observations about old answers is very frustrating. I am not a guru of JavaScript, I've been doing a little bit for many years. I wanted to find out if there was a newer browser compatible way to do something but SO just listed ancient answers. I like the site but if the answers are out of date then how can I learn? As for the snide comments, well let people report them and deduct reputation points.