I would agree with the OP. Every single time I am training someone new in Elixir they struggle for a day or two because they assume that the Elixir forum is “just some forum” and not the central community discussion place and where you’d generally go to ask for longer form troubleshooting help or discuss nuanced ideas.

I have also similarly had people use the volume of SO interactions to discount Elixir. It also is where new people go automatically when trying to figure something out.

Since the thread a couple weeks ago about how to bring in new people as a language and community, I think having a serious presence on SO would be the best way to do it. I like this forum and I want its culture to continue, and think we should consider it continuing on a platform that has better SEO and discoverability in the wider tech ecosystem/Internet, even if that means we’re not hosting it

I was active on SO for a long time, and I can say that this forum is superior to that format in every way and most of the contributors that were active there moved on pretty much.

I think the collective is just a marketing move, so that companies like google, amazon can pay to show their logos on tags and market their features and services, never saw it actually being used for something useful.

Yeah. There’s a part of me that just wishes SO would do some sort of federation and allow searching across platforms like fediverse style apps