Stack Overflow has always been a shit service clogging up the search results and providing shit answers that confuse the hell out of beginners and annoy veterans. Sure I’ve gotten tons of quick answers from it, but only because it is always the first or second hit for questions. One of the main reasons the Knowledge Exchange Grid (KEG) is needed is because of Stack Overflow’s dominance in results. I want control over the search results algorithm. We all want that. But good luck ever getting that from any of them. Today you have to have the “unbiased” DDG or the mysterious SRE algorithm of Google. But corporations should not be setting our search criteria for us. Perhaps now the world will see what a bad fucking idea it has been to let the mob upvote the truth. Now — please God in Heaven — Prosus is going to put up a paywall blocking all those hits. One can only hope.
This is a good thing because it is yet another wake up call, like when Medium bait and switched millions as well to put up blogs there and they did a “psyche!” and forced everyone using the service to have an account to read anything. People have to realize that companies are always going to act in the stockholders best interest, that the people providing the content are the product, not the customer.
The same is true of GitHub. I only pray that we can come up with an open alternative before Microsoft decides to put a pay wall up in front of all the world’s software. I serious doubt they would be that stupid — especially given all the competition and how easy it is to host Git content, and all the open source possibilities already. But for now, there is no better place to put all your notes, you know, the answers that you are so happy you never invested time to get onto Stack Overflow, ‘cuz bubye content. I’ve never been more pleased with my decision to host all my content very simply and searchably on GitHub, but this does make me uneasy about giving in and depending on a service for searchability. The KEG still needs to be built. Just have to make time for it.