I’m trying to find a place where you can ask broader development questions, not just specific error messages.
StackOverflow and Codidact are way too restrictive, if your question isn’t a precise technical issue with a reproducible example, it gets shut down immediately. Reddit and Lemmy seem more focused on news and memes; actual questions and discussions tend to just sink without engagement. And honestly, the kind of specific error-driven questions StackOverflow excels at are things AI can solve instantly now.
What I’m really looking for is a community (forum, Discord, whatever) where you can get help on broader topics related to software engineering.
Does anything like this still exist? Somewhere with actual humans willing to discuss the process of building software, not just fix syntax?
There’s a lot of people who come to fedi looking for this spot — maybe it makes sense to see if programming.dev is willing to host such a community?
It would make sense on piefed, since you can mark responses as “answers”
PieFed communities have a setting that can turn them into stackoverflow. https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523157/what-if-stack-overflow-except-federated
Don’t most languages or frameworks have community boards? Maybe not the mailing lists more like old school forums
The Software Engineering Stackexchange has a broader remit than Stackovrrflow, but still has the requirement that questions are not purely opinion based
Though regular StackOverflow has started to allow opinion based questions via a poorly labeled type dropdown on the question form. The active community hates it, but the company is going forward with it anyway because they want to be more like reddit without the slop problems
The company is going forward with it because the “active community” killed their site and now they have no choice.
If they had done it before AI became a viable alternative they might still have some users.
I agree, I think it’s a big shift that’s coming too late. One of the staff members posted a long explanation about it that I thought sounded reasonable though, so we’ll see
To be honest I suspect they wanted to do this before, but the power mods wouldn’t allow it. I definitely remember the staff posting a proposal to allow second chances for closed questions, and it was downvoted to hell by the mods. They presumably got scared because they were getting a lot of free labour from the mods (even if it probably wasn’t exactly the kind they wanted).
Now StackOverflow is dead the mods have no power, so they are free to make changes.
As unfortunate as that is, most of these seem to have dwindling user numbers since the emergence of LLMs. Users just don’t ask on boards when they can ask an AI (and get a potentially wrong or unhelpful response).
SO in particular had it’s question volume drop by I think like 90% or something in recent months/years. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but search the net or associated communities here for details. Shouldn’t be hard to find.
I have found a few communities on Matrix that fit that bill to some extent. For some reason they don’t devolve to “general chat” as quickly as most software related Discord servers do, in my experience.
Maybe here on the fediverse? Community possibilities are pretty broad, and you could even create your own.
