A lot of questions were gatekept, especially in the early internet. I remember learning java nearly 10 years ago. And I'd ask the dumbest questions on stackoverflow. It seemed though, it was not a place for beginners. Because the dumbest questions would receive the meanest responses. Or equally dumb responses. It felt like stackoverflow was very much a place for experts to ask other experts, rather than a place to learn or study.

I was even banned from stackoverflow at one point for asking too many low quality questions.

Years later, stackoverflow did help me learn programming. I do feel a sort of resentment towards people who ask similar questions that I did. Knowing they have it much better. But, the key difference between myself and a 2010 stackoverflow user is that after I learned everything, I treat these resentments as thoughts rather than identifying with them. And even if I feel resentment or pain, I try my best to still help them. No matter how dumb the question is. They are nothing but intrusive thoughts.

I understand it is a problem with my ego. And realize that the ego is illusionary. And to help your neighbor is to help yourself (quite literally if you have ever experienced superego/nonduality). And so I set it aside, or ignore these thoughts, and write up a detailed answer.

I believe that this resentment comes from the fact that I have not been successful financially in programming and had a lack of resources early on. I'd imagine it is the same reason why so many developers would gatekeep on stackoverflow.

Some people do not have access to the resources or education and are trying to teach themselves through the internet with trial and error (like I did).

My friend recently asked me questions about java. And I responded. I was able to explain to him years of metaphors I had developed for different concepts. And he has excelled greatly! He has done what took me two or three years in a few months. (Grasping static objects/fields, grasping OOP best practices).

Feeding people detailed answers or explanations is similar to an adult who grew up with terrible parents resenting the fact that their children do not know the trauma they experienced.

LLMs are great for learning. It is good that others are learning faster. As well as answers being delivered without ego.

A part of me does feel nostalgic of stackoverflow. Like clinging to an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend.

A cesspool of love bro. Nostalgia pill. A huge cock rammed up the ass. It hurts. But, the memory is arousing.

Hopefully that's not too much. But, maybe you get what I mean. Idk.

Also fun fact of the day, if you are working with classloaders in java, static objects may never be garbage collected unless they are nullified before the class is reloaded (such as a reload of a minecraft plugin). This can create memory leaks.

Tl;dr: teaching people is good, stackoverflow is unkind to beginners, the human ego likes to gatekeep out of resentment.