This blog post is supposed to be an exciting news that I have decided to return to StackOverflow after being inactive since 2014. However, after trying again to participate in the site again, I have finally decided not to join Stack Overflow again. While the site itself is still enjoyable with millions of software developers. But please mark my words: Everything in Stack Overflow is a duplicate of everything in Stack Overflow. Here's the thing. The number of users and questions over Stack Overflow seems to outpace the development of many programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. And this, at least, has been proven true for some programming languages such as C and BASIC which is way slower to have new language features compared to those in JavaScript and Python today. What does this mean? This means that the yield rate of new unique questions deriving from that programming language, framework, or library are getting slower and slower over time. And, in layman's terms, what does this really mean to the future of Stack Overflow website? Theoretically, in the future, you won't be able ask new questions since they'll be closed as duplicate no matter the things you ask. In this blog post I will also discuss how the general Stack Overflow community compares to an Indonesian-based community over Kotakode.com, a Q&A site which works similarly to the ones at Stack Overflow. While I myself have been appointed as one of the moderators of their official Telegram group, this blog post is not an endorsement of and by the Kotakode.com company (PT. Kota Digital Nusantara) as well as the broader community. Regular Expressions: A Simple Example. One day, an user on Stack Overflow asks a new question about PHP and regular expressions. The user would like to replace the following batch of text: ?DEMO - 92?JOHN AAA?DEMO - 11?JOHN BBB?DEMO - 34?JOHN CCC?DEMO - 55?JOHN DDD?DEMO - 73?JOHN EEE into this: JOHN AAAJOHN BBBJOHN CCCJOHN DDDJOHN EEE Of course, this would be easy with Regular Expressions, right? And I know that preg_replace() would be the perfect job for that. Hence I suggest the author to use preg_replace('/^\?DEMO - \d+\?/', '', $str);. The author of the question thanked my by marking my answer as the correct one. Hey, that's good! At least I get an additional 25 reputations for that. But soon I realized that this is just a dream, as a couple of minutes later someone with a gold badge of PHP closed this as a duplicate. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69592918/parse-texts-with-php/69592967#69592967 Of course, I would be thankful to mickmackusa, Nigel Ren, and oguz ismail, three of the substantial amount of StackOverflow users out there who have emotionally influenced me to never visit StackOverflow again. At least, asking and answering questions on the site, as expected by their community guidelines: Get used to answering and editing and asking questions first, so that you have a better feel for the local culture and get to see your own work become a part of the site. (Voting and comment and deleting things are all secondary activities on Stack Overflow) Learning from Quora In Quora, all answers deriving from questions marked as duplicate will be merged instead into the referring questions, allowing other users to view different opinions and even upvote the answers. Furthermore, Quora shows the original question which the user was originally answered for, if the question has been renamed or merged with another one. Quora knows that many of their questions tend to be open-ended, so this would be the best choice to keep the community alive. And it worked well! However, Stack Overflow seems to expect that their answers are close-ended. And they thought closing duplicates this way could be better. This is also the reason why many long-time users are angry when someone asks an open-ended question, like, "Is HTML a programming language?". To quote from theirs: As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance. I personally feel that the well-educated users of Stack Overflow have created a barrier of entry for newcomers. Whether they're visiting Stack Overflow for the first time, or even just got their hands in programming for the first time. Imagine a place where you're blamed for not hearing people's past discussions on that place, and Stack Overflow could be one of them. This is a problem not just for Stack Overflow, and this could affect millions of people who visited the site. Meanwhile, at Kotakode.com, our mission is to build and empower an inclusive community of Indonesian programmers and software developers. So seriously, what would be the point of that if we always mute and kick those newbies just because they are asking questions which have been answered years and even months ago? How do we handle things differently in Kotakode.com? Now, if you're visiting Kotakode.com, you'll notice that the site is generally written in Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia). This is because the site is dedicated towards Indonesian-speaking software developers, and the lack of a similar Q&A site for them have become one of the motivations behind building it from scratch. Even if you're familiar with the language, asking and answering questions over Kotakode feels different than the likenesses of Stack Overflow. Some questions over Kotakode are open-minded, and we even have specific question tags such as #referensi (lit. references) to mark questions which could be filled with opinions and arguments - something which is discouraged otherwise in Stack Overflow. Now, of course, Kotakode is still new, and we're just about 1 year old. However, what will happens if Kotakode face the same challenge as Stack Overflow today? There are many things which are needed to be discussed at first (e.g. duplicate policy), or we might end up splitting our sites for newbies and advanced, just like the CodeNewbie Community forum which is now separated from the larger DEV.to. At the end, again, I won't be motivated to participate in Stack Overflow again. Enough is enough.

bluejack.binus.ac.id is finally accessible on iOS and macOS!