60 Stack Overflow Jokes for Every Developer Who Has Copy-Pasted an Answer

My question was marked as a duplicate of a question that was closed for being unclear.

The accepted answer is from 2014. It has 4,200 upvotes. It recommends a library that was archived in 2017.

I spent six hours on a bug. The fix was in a comment with three upvotes, below an answer with eight hundred.

Top answer: long, detailed, beautifully formatted, completely wrong. Second answer: "Just restart your computer." Correct.

I asked a question. A moderator closed it as off-topic. I asked the same question on Reddit. I got my answer in nine minutes and a recipe for chili.

The bounty was 500 reputation. The bounty got one answer. That answer was "have you tried Googling it?"

Comment chain on the accepted answer: 47 deep. The useful information is at comment 39. It is in a language nobody else in the thread speaks.

The question has one answer. The answer is from the asker. The answer is "nevermind, I figured it out." That is the entire post.

I am being downvoted by a user with 540K reputation. I am being upvoted by a user named xX_d3v_Xx with seventeen.

The answer is a single link. The link goes to a 2012 blog post. The blog has been replaced with an ad for hosting.

The answer is code, no explanation. The code works. I have no idea why and I am too afraid to ask.

"This question has been asked before." The link goes to a question with no accepted answer and a 2009 timestamp.

It is 2026. The top result for a React question recommends jQuery.

The moderator left a comment: "This is a code review question, not a help question." My question contained the word help.

The author of the accepted answer deleted their account in 2016. Their code is in production at three Fortune 500 companies.

I copy-pasted an answer. The answer works. The variable names are in German. I committed it anyway.

Stack Overflow: where you ask a question about Python and learn that you should have used Rust.

The fiddle in the accepted answer is a JSFiddle. The link returns 404. The fiddle was the entire answer.

Reading the comments under an accepted answer is like reading a divorce filing where you only know one of the people.

I gained reputation today. I lost it tomorrow when a moderator merged my answer into a duplicate of a duplicate.

"Use map instead of forEach." Forty-three upvotes. No explanation of why. I changed it anyway.

There is a sentence on Stack Overflow that no human has ever typed in private: "I am also having this problem."

The question has 1.2 million views. The accepted answer has been edited 78 times. The current version no longer answers the question.

I asked why my code worked. It was closed as "primarily opinion-based."

The user with 540K reputation has not written code professionally since 2009. He is currently the third Google result for every React hook.

Stack Overflow is the only platform where the correct answer arrives nine years after the question and seven years after the language version it targeted.

"Did you try Google?" Yes. The top three results were this thread.

I downvoted an answer. The author left a comment asking why. I explained. He edited the answer. I upvoted it. A moderator locked the post for excessive commentary.

Question: How do I parse a date in JavaScript. Accepted answer: Use Moment.js. Edit, 2020: Moment.js is in maintenance mode, use Luxon. Edit, 2024: Use the built-in Temporal API, which does not exist yet.

The asker added a comment in 2017 saying "thanks, this worked." I added a comment in 2026 saying "this still works." Two more developers will pass through before anyone updates the answer.

My question was closed as "needs more focus." I edited it to ask only one thing. It was closed as "needs more detail."

The accepted answer says "this is not the right way to do it but here is how you do it." Six hundred upvotes.

I have been a member of Stack Overflow since 2011. I have asked six questions. Five were closed. The sixth has 320,000 views and pays my mortgage in passive reputation.

Reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2013 is archaeology. You are reconstructing a civilization from broken Bower files.

The third answer is always the one you want. It has no upvotes. It is from a user with a default avatar. He has not logged in since the day he posted it.

The moderator badge on a username is a warning, not a credential. It means this person closes more than he writes.

I answered a question. Two minutes later it was closed as a duplicate. My answer remains, frozen, like a fly in amber, helping nobody.

Half of senior engineering is knowing which Stack Overflow answers to ignore. The other half is finding the comment below them.

The question is from 2010. The accepted answer is from 2010. The most recent comment is from yesterday and reads "this saved me, thank you."

The codebase at my last job had a comment that read // see SO link below. The link was gone. The function was load-bearing. We left it alone.

Stack Overflow taught me everything I know about programming and nothing I know about asking for help.

Every accepted answer ends with "hope this helps." It did. It helped me ship a bug to production with full confidence.

My question was closed as off-topic. The reason given: "this question is more suited to a different Stack Exchange site." The link 404s.

I asked a question. It was closed as "too broad." I split it into three questions. All three were closed as duplicates of the original.

The question is a screenshot of the error. The error text is selectable in the original IDE. The screenshot is blurry.

The answer is the single word "this." It has 38 upvotes. It is the third comment on a thread about pointers.

There is a meta.stackoverflow.com thread where two users have been arguing about the close reason on my question since 2019. I am not in the thread.

I earned the Tumbleweed badge for asking a question with no answers, no upvotes, and no comments. I have earned it eleven times.

The accepted answer has 2,400 upvotes and is subtly wrong. The correct answer is four down with 4 upvotes. It was posted six minutes later by someone who never returned.

Comment under the accepted answer: "this answer is outdated." The comment is from 2018. Nobody updated the answer.

The question has one comment, posted in 2015: "thanks for the answer." The question has no answers.

I closed my own question after solving it. I posted my solution. Someone commented "wow it was so simple." The comment has more upvotes than my answer.

The question is from 2009. It is the top Google result for the query. The language version it targets has been end-of-life for seven years.

Every question with a negative score has the same comment: "to the people who downvoted, please explain." Nobody ever does.

The tag wiki for the framework I work in daily was last edited in 2014. The framework's name has changed twice since then.

There is a user who has answered every question on a niche tag with a variation of the same paragraph for six years. He is the only expert. The paragraph is wrong.

I posted a question. It received a downvote within nine seconds. The downvote was from an account named QualityBot_42.

The comment under my answer reads "this should be a comment, not an answer." The comment is longer than my answer.

The duplicate link goes to a question that is itself marked as a duplicate. The chain is four questions deep. The final question has no accepted answer.

The spam-flag review queue offered me a question to triage. The question was mine, from 2013, asking how to install Node on Ubuntu. I flagged it as low quality.