Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.
AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.
When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.
This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.
I just looked it up, and "Note: This tag is currently blacklisted and can no longer be used." lmfao, what a braindead site, so glad I left years ago, after many years of greatly reduced activity. Source (at the top):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf?tab=New...
You do realize that they made an entire site for CodeGolf that is reasonably active (and has its own culture... and lead to the creation of specialized languages for it... and even pushed the bounds of OEIS a few times - https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5318)?
I am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site.
>The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design
Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.
AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.
When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.
This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.