So stackoverflow have indulged in a bunch of user-unfriendly actions. All taken together it’s a site I’d rather not use any more, if I can avoid it.
What alternatives are any of you using? Whatever your reason for using an alternative I’d be interesting in trying out the alternative.
Let’s pass on relitigating StackOverflow’s management, it’s not needed for the on-topic question of what good resources exist.
There is no meaningful alternative. Not today, anyway, and there hasn’t been for some years.
Not everybody uses the Stack Exchange network. Some who do only use part of it and don’t grok what “the network” is. Not everybody who uses it even knows what the ‘user-unfriendly actions’ mean. (Heck, I myself saw a list the other day and I only have a personal intimate understanding of two of them.)
Sysop says don’t re-litigate. Ok, ok.
Well I’ll stay on topic, then. There’s no alternative, just like there is no meaningful alternative to Wikipedia.
I’m not saying nothing must change. …Quite the opposite!
Which is bigger, the Stack Exchange Network, or Wikipedia?
I don’t know… I mean, my gut instinct tells me it’s SE by a long shot, but I really half expect somebody to immediately tell me that I’m off by an order of magnitude or something..
I’ve got some numbers in the links below, but.. The second link is only for English Wikipedia, so we’re already comparing oranges to apples. Not to mention, the difference between a “contributor” and an “editor” is not exactly the same as the difference between a “user” and a “moderator”.
All of this is just to say that SE is really big and really a community and one does not simply .. replace it.
I think the question is really what specific thing are you asking? There might be a smaller community specialized in your field. Like for the D Programming Language, there’s the dedicated forums and IRC channel you can go to (mostly the same people who watch SO too).
I’m not particularly involved in anything else so I don’t personally know about others, but I would expect a lot of little programming communities to have their own similar niches.
I’m not aware of a dedicated competitor (Quora comes to mind, but is of course walled if you don’t join and has its own community issues.)
There is Reddit’s AskProgramming forum and CSCareerQuestions, but both are more focused on lifestyle than actual language questions. Individual language subreddits may have better results.
Otherwise, there is the mighty DuckDuckGo/Google “My question” and seeing what pops up. 90% of the time it will be a Stack Overflow answer, but you may also run into Medium articles answering.
Dev.to allows you to post questions, but it is more of a blogging alternative to Medium than an answer to Stack Overflow.
Anyone have any other suggestions?
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I think its warranted. Stack Exchange employees have been making user hostile decisions for several years now. It was only a matter of time before it boiled over.
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