this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Programming
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I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I've found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying "look it up" is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that's discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who "don't get the site" to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it's valid. I wonder if that's why they're pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.
I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It's the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it's less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn't need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don't bring value to SO's database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.