The philosophy behind the site creation seemed nice, but in actual operation it is straight up evil and frustrating.

I stopped posting answers because I fundamentally disagree with the way the site is managed.

Today I broke that just to answer a stupid beginner question, and after spending maybe 20 minutes and posting a nice answer the question was deleted.

Losers.


_{^{Waste of <explicative> time}}

It's mods are ruthless. IMO it's certainly no place for beginner-type questions or for questions which have been asked previously sometime in the distant past as the mods have very long memories. It seems it's only interested in 'expert technical' questions which haven't been answered elsewhere for which expert technical answer(s) can be provided. I've never signed up to it.

I read it, if it comes up in a search for a question I have, but in decades I think maybe 4 or 5 times it actually had a working answer, pretty low bar. I won't ask nor answer there, its not worth it. Its not the only forum like that, but its the worst of the type.

SO has more than a few pissant tyrants, thinking they are sharks in the ocean instead of small fish in a medium sized pond.

If I do a 'net search regarding computer programming generally or C/C++ and even WinAPI specifically SO is at the top of the list with multiple links. Even answers that could be worthwhile aren't as usable since they're far out of date, the language standards have been updated and revised in the years since.

I'm honestly surprised it gets any new questions at all, given how hostile they are. Oddly enough, the StackExchanges are much friendlier. Shout out to the guy on superuser who helped me with the FFmpeg command line to decode The Lion King into PNGs: https://superuser.com/questions/1804837/extracting-frames-with-ffmpeg-yields-low-resolution-color/1805120
An equivalent question on StackExchange SO would have been closed for being too specific, or some other nonsense like that.

An equivalent question on StackExchange would have been closed for being too specific, or some other nonsense like that.

Oh??

I'm honestly surprised it gets any new questions at all

More and more I think much of the new activity is AI in an echo chamber.