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"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning."

Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years ago. Anytime I have any programming question I immediately google it and odds of a StackOverflow answer are very high.

I started iOS dev when it was fairly new and it sucked. So many bugs, gotchas, and misc shortcoming of the dev environment, Obj-C, or the SDK. Every single issue I ran into has now been cleanly answered on SO. Things I wasted dozens of hours on then would take me mere minutes as a new dev today.

I sympathize with it not being as fun to answer questions today, but I have no idea how you can say it was more useful then than it is now.



I meant useful for getting answers to new questions.

Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO.

But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and answers that it hosts.


Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question.

Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.


"if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO."

I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.


He is clearly talking about it from the answering questions side, that is why he is talking about it as a game.

Clearly SO is a great resource.

But I am guessing you never found iphonedevsdk.com, it had all the answers before SO did. Although SO has better explained answers.




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