You touched on what made it great, along with other forums where devs helped each other: It was a pleasure to read and try to answer other people's questions.
NOT for the points! Because you found out so much about the problems other people were trying to solve, parallel to your own. The good questions forced you think
what would I do in that situation and become a better coder yourself.
I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.
I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.
A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.
I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.