03 — Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange

Stack Overflow was the C help canon for a decade. Post-2023 it has changed — traffic down, LLM-generated answers up, moderation stricter. It is still useful, but the way you use it must change. Use it as a searchable archive first, a Q&A forum second.

The good tags

Tag	Link	When to search here
[c]	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c	Anything C-language
[c11] / [c17] / [c23]	tag URLs analogous	When you need standard-specific answers
[pointers]	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/pointers	Aliasing, restrict, arithmetic UB
[multithreading] + [pthreads]	tag URLs	Concurrency in C
[undefined-behavior]	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/undefined-behavior	The Hall of Fame for signed-overflow / strict-aliasing questions
[gcc] / [clang] / [llvm]	tag URLs	Compiler flags, -O2 mysteries, warnings
[gdb]	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/gdb	Debugger recipes
[valgrind] / [address-sanitizer]	tag URLs	Memory-error tooling

How SO has changed since 2023

• LLM answers. A visible fraction of new answers are ChatGPT-cleaned; some are subtly wrong (bad printf specifiers, missing NULL checks, wrong ownership semantics). Rule: verify against cppreference before pasting.

• Traffic decline. Question volume is down (Stack Exchange has published traffic dips post-ChatGPT). Fewer new answers, but the archive from 2010-2022 is still enormous and mostly good.

• Moderation stricter. Duplicate questions closed fast. Beginner questions redirected to r/learnprogramming or the docs. This is fine — the archive absorbs them.

Related Stack Exchange sites

Site	Use for
codereview.stackexchange.com	Post working code for structural feedback. Excellent for “is my C idiomatic?”
softwareengineering.stackexchange.com	Design/architecture discussions. Occasionally useful; often opinion-heavy.
cs.stackexchange.com	Algorithms and CS theory, not language help
unix.stackexchange.com	POSIX behavior, shell, kernel-adjacent questions
serverfault.com	Sysadmin, when your C program is failing because of a Linux config

Codereview.stackexchange specifically

If you post one C project for review in M4 and one in M8, you will get free senior-engineer-quality feedback. Post an entire small program (100-300 LoC), not a snippet. Include your Makefile and a README.md describing your goal.

What most people get wrong about SO in 2026

They still Google → SO first. In 2026 that’s often not the best path for C: cppreference is faster, more accurate, and versioned by standard. Reserve SO for “how do people typically structure X” — which is where the archive of high-vote answers still crushes.

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