Where is everyone?

yes i forget how much i use youtube. I don’t tend to use it for coding as i find video of the cursor moving around a screen pretty annoying and it normally takes ages to know if they are going to answer the question i’m trying to answer.

I use it a lot for when i get stuck taking something apart as i work a lot on my cars and house and it is massively useful to see how something comes apart etc rather than having someone describe it.

Another thing to add generally is that there are a lot of templates and frameworks available now with much better documentation than in the old days so perhaps there are less questions as things are easier to setup or find the information from the documentation?

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Very good observations here. I would like to add that I notice a tendency to lose interest in programming among people doing web development. Years ago if you wanted to put up a web site you had to learn to program and then you usually would have many questions to ask. Nowadays, web development is done by choosing Wordpress or another CMS and tweaking it more or less. So in this area programming is becoming restricted to a small group of people developing CMS’s and frameworks. I manage a simple server with about 30 sites for various clients and now it’s very rare that anyone would install something other than Wordpress, Joomla or something alike. I feel like one of rare dinosaurs whose all sites are programmed.

I notice the trend of shutting down forums also in areas other than programming. I remember being part of large communities gathered around web sites about certain topics of interest and they were all very alive. Now I see them replaced by boring Wordpress pages and the forums are simply gone. Internet looks like a deserted place in this respect.

Facebook is very popular, I don’t use it but sometimes I have to go there for some information and it really amazes me how user-unfriendly this whole system is - it’s primarily designed for quickly digesting of newest posts from your friends and liked profiles. Its messenger really s**cks.

But it also amazes me how such ancient tools like newsgroups are still alive, maybe not as much as in the old days but they keep chugging along better than forums. For example, PostgreSQL community is basically newsgroups and they are pretty alive. And from a longer perspective it looks like a wise solution because forums and other social communication media come and go every couple of years while newsgroups are there all the time and provide a stable platform for communication.

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Nobody knows how to think for themselves anymore.

Everything is pre-made.

I completely agree that in the past you had to learn everything.

Now all people do is “configure” software.

I also think there is the factor that we live in a cold world filled with millions of shallow people with no desire for anything other than self-promotion. :unhappy:

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lol omg that is such an extremely negative perspective :exploding_head:

Yes it’s true that in the past you had to learn everything yourself. It’s literally true - only privileged individuals with money and an education could ever hope to develop products and services. Now you can - and do! - have kids in 3rd world countries developing software that makes it to the top of app stores.

Also, everything is most definitely NOT premade. Sure, there are premade themes and turnkey solutions to help a person get started quickly but you still need to learn an enormous amount to take things to the next level (I’d actually argue more, since these “premade” things enable you to do so much more). I challenge you to try and build a service right now from scratch and I’ll sit here and wait for your questions on where to even begin!

Saying “millions of shallow people with no desire over anything other than self-promotion” is also extremely negative (I actually laughed out loud). You’re acting as if in the old days you could build something and it magically reached an audience - it was much, MUCH harder in the old days to ship a product and it was NOT free…the concept of “things going viral” didn’t even exist until recently meaning you had to spend enormous amounts of money to market your product/service!

I honestly don’t even know how anyone can actually believe this. The amount of things you can actually do today is pure magic to what you could do in the old days. It’s literally magic - it would be literally impossible to achieve some of the things people do today with the technology that existed back then.

I wish this was true, otherwise I wouldn’t have spent the last 7 months working around the clock with no hope for revenue for at least another few months!

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@labofoz

And you are how old?

Old enough to remember a time when I had to spend a summer learning how to use iframes to communicate with each other to develop a real time applications, because AJAX wasn’t even thought up of yet.

Old enough to remember watching my father struggle to build a Bulletin Board System so that he could share ASCII based games with his friends in a spare bedroom with like one server that made the room 100 degrees.

Old enough to remember having to read through dusty manuals with coffee stains to reverse engineer what commands I needed to use because the Internet wasn’t mature like it is today.

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Don’t quite understand what did you mean

I agree…

@Labofoz, you’re not connecting your points together very well at all…

For example…

That makes no sense.

What is the logical connection between “Nobody knows how to think for themselves anymore” and “The amount of things you can actually do today is pure magic…”?

Ok so now we’ve switched from trying to use my age against me (for whatever reason) to nitpicking my responses. You seem to have a very negative perspective on things and I was just pointing out that, no, actually people are far less stupid than you claim (“nobody knows how to think for themselves anymore”) and less cold than you claim (“millions of shallow people with no desire for anything other than self-promotion”).

The connection is that not only can we think for ourselves, but we can create things today that would blow the minds of the bleeding edge researchers of yesteryear. It actually says quite a lot about the rapid progress we’ve made that you can actually sit there and make these claims with such negativity.

Also:

You might want to start by being less negative. It’s OK to have a difference of opinion, it’s not OK to try and start an argument.

You are confusing “configuration” with “creation”.

Being able to use Grammarly doesn’t mean one can speak coherent English.

Being able to use Squarespace doesn’t mean you have a clue about coding or design.

Being able to use a mobile to do doesn’t mean a person could survive if they had to do it when their mobile app goes down.

Finally, just because there have been some pretty neat inventions in the last 20 years, doesn’t mean the average citizen has a clue.

All of these things are observations of how the world is not entirely a better place than it was in the past. Of course, if you have only ever experienced the modern world, it is hard to comment on how things have been over time.

It seems that a lot of people agree that many of the things that made online forums great in the past have been lost. And I added that I think narcissim plays a role in this where it’s “every person for him/herself”.

It’s not negative to talk about real changes one has experieced by living in different eras…

“community” has become a field of study in its own right.

Things have changed a lot (for better or for worse) from the time when “build it and they will come” might have been enough. There are things to consider such as attraction, engagement, retention etc. I find it both interesting and confusing, But then, at times I have enough to do trying to figure out where my head is at let alone trying to analyze where others are.

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Discourse is far and away the best platform I’ve experienced, so far. It is leaps and bounds multiplied several times better than what Adobe Forums uses, which is Jive. I cannot stand Jive.

V/r,

^ _ ^

slack.com?

V/r,

^ _ ^

SO is nothing but a poorly-contained popularity contest with a lot of downvotes just for the sake of downvoting. Granted, there are correct answers given, most of the time; but it’s more of a “I’m downvoting your answer just because” place than anything else.

V/r,

^ _ ^

Stackoverflow. But just be aware that not only do they not suffer fools, they could give a sh+t if you’re a beginner. In my (limited) experience posting there the odds of your thread surviving are 3 out of 10 (or less). If your topic is even remotely related to dozens of others already posted — with or without answers — the first thing you’ll see is how many people voted you down.

The more likely the code you’re asking for help with is (eg.) HTML, CSS, Javascript, mySQL, or PHP — the easy languages; the “internet” languages — the more likely you’ll be pilloried for daring to post it here in the first place. This is where programmers in the commercial versions of their product hang out (eg.) C, Cobol, Visual Basic, Fortran, and SQL, to name a few.

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Hi everyone,
I love SitePoint forum, I always find nice people that really want to help with their answers.
I also believe forums are still the best place for this kind of conversation and Facebook is a terrible jungle

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SO is nothing more than a popularity contest, and all the users who have been there from the beginning are the only ones who “win” the contest. Anyone else be damned.

It’s rare that I’ve found solutions to my issues, there. I avoid SO as much as possible.

V/r,

^ _ ^

don’t you like this forum?
it’s quite active.
there are also many other good forums for webmasters.

Not sure why people ask questions and then after people have started to help they just disappear, but it happens all too often these days, and it kills the spirit of online forums and conversations.

Combination of ADHD and being inconsiderate of other people’s time.