It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users.
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
It's very good for C++, and pretty good for CUDA thanks to two very diligent and committed individuals. Also for bash. But - I don't agree about JS, or at least - not JS everywhere. If you're doing, say, Thunderbird extension development, you probably won't get far.
But - it may be difficult to know in advance whether SO is good for a given language.
> and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
Tangentially, every time I google/ddg a problem, it's almost never taking me to good blog posts addressing the substance of my issues. I usually find those after two or three clicks, like e.g. an article mentioning a blog post.
And it's sad because there's a myriad excellent blog posts out there, somehow unreachable at least without 10 minutes of browsing the search results pages.
What's wrong with Medium? I find lots of good tutorials there. It helps me with going from 0 understanding of a framework to having some boilerplate I can build on.
The content is good. From a user side you have to log in to view content. From a content creator side, why would you want your post to be under the control of Medium instead of your own domain?
Isn’t that the same thing? Lisp hasn’t been on the hype cycle since SO was launched. Personally, yet another reason not to focus on less popular technologies.
As far as MacOS, I’ve heard too many horror stories about developing on Apple platforms from people like Marco Arment and other well known developers caused by Apple’s poor documentation, I’ve also avoided it even though I am rabid consumer of Apple products.
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.