[HN Gopher] The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?
___________________________________________________________________
The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?
Author : cryptoz
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-07-31 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.devmoh.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.devmoh.co)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Regardless of how you feel about Stack Overflow's users and
| moderators, running a site like that is not cheap.
|
| StackOverflow runs _on less than 25 servers_ , its infrastructure
| is incredibly cheap considering just how much traffic they serve.
| And their UI, thankfully, hasn't changed much over the last
| decades either.
|
| [1] https://stackexchange.com/performance
| whalesalad wrote:
| interesting to see how underutilized all of that hardware is
| ... "peak 1%, peak 2%" etc
| toshk wrote:
| Staff is much more expensive then servers, especially in the
| west.
| resolutebat wrote:
| The vast majority of moderators are unpaid volunteers though.
| byw wrote:
| I'm guessing they're doing some aggressive caching since it's
| read-heavy?
| adventured wrote:
| Yeah it's very aggressively cached for read purposes. You
| could write most Q&A pages to static html files if you felt
| like it. Stack has a similar age-toward-zero outcome that
| Wikipedia has (the % of new content as a total share of all
| content on the service chases toward zero over time); the
| more you fill out the site, the balance of aged content to
| new content inverts to an extreme, so mostly what you end up
| doing is serving up cached reads on older content.
|
| They're fairly well over-provisioned on server capacity. It's
| so relatively light to operate on the infrastructure side
| that they could safely further reduce the server count.
| There's no need in their case however, since infrastructure
| cost isn't one of their big problems.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| I think this article (and other online discourse) overestimates
| the value of StackOverflow to ChatGPT's training data.
|
| Sure, it's in there - but so is all the library documentation
| ever written, billions of lines of code, and millions of
| tutorials. StackOverflow is just one small part.
| acdha wrote:
| Stack Overflow has tons and tons of things which aren't in the
| documentation and almost all of them are questions from people
| who couldn't find the answer in the documentation - exactly
| what ChatGPT needs since it also doesn't understand anything
| about how a given program works, only what patterns are common
| in public examples.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Probably "unpopular opinion(tm)" but I feel like the ban on
| "opinion-based" or recommendation questions also didn't help. Not
| everything can be answered purely objectively, there are many
| situations where people just want to ask "what are the options
| for generating a PDF in python" or something. Stackoverflow
| removed itself from that process which has driven people
| elsewhere.
|
| Answers are also often more focused on the cosmetic aspects than
| actually answering a question. Just see the example in the
| article. The questioner asked about a lambda reference to a
| public field, and they got told "just don't use public fields
| lol". That's not help, that's just being a condescending asshole
| and not actually answering the question.
|
| Combined with the toxicity and elitism rampant, I am not
| surprised.
| ciupicri wrote:
| For this kind of questions there's Software Recommendations
| https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/
| shagie wrote:
| The ban on opinion based and recommendation questions grew out
| of the inability for people to make sure that they didn't
| overrun the entire site and crowding out the information / goal
| that Jeff and Joel wanted the site to be about.
|
| It is so easy to post a "{background}, what do you think?"
| which is more of a discussion than a Q&A format... or "I'm
| looking for XYZ" and getting a page of recommendations... and
| then people keep adding them without checking for duplicates.
|
| The administrative / curation time requirements of such content
| then grows faster than the number of people willing to do it.
|
| There are other, smaller, SE sites where such questions are
| allowed because with the slower amount of daily activity they
| are able to handle every question every day and a post suddenly
| getting an abnormal amount of time isn't _that_ much more time.
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=...
| isn't a problem when they get 38 questions per day... while
| Stack Overflow gets 100x more, but doesn't have 100x more
| people doing curation.
|
| The result of that is that the question types that are most
| time consuming for doing curation and moderation get cast out
| and it becomes the easier, more objective ones that remain.
|
| As to answers... gamification hurt it there. While its part of
| the onboarding / understanding the site, people went after the
| numbers and so _any_ answer, no mater how poor was ok. The
| culture became one of "don't remove an answer if it is _any_
| attempt to answer _a_ question (not the question) " and getting
| 10 points for an upvote and only losing 2 points, unless you've
| written something awful, as long as you get one up vote its
| typically a positive point gain.
|
| The example question that is in the article is from 10 years
| ago.
|
| The current attribution of the comment is: a
| -> a.id. Why are you using public fields in the first place? -
| JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:27 @JBNizet, I like
| public final fields in classes which are data structures. They
| don't implement interfaces or have deep hierarchies. - Daneel
| S. Yaitskov Dec 14 '14 at 9:31 You're making your
| own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown
| by your question). This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't
| respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and
| unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which
| expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected. I'd
| really not do that if I were you. If generating getters is what
| bothers you, then use a decent IDE, or use Lombok to generate
| them for you. - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:42
|
| There is no "lol" in that comment.
|
| The question is
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-referenc...
|
| The screen shot is _old_ (
| https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline - it was at
| +29 by Dec 14th, 2014).
|
| In the article this is described as:
|
| > For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary
| Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on
| the forums not through just voting, but also through people
| commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you
| dumb.
|
| I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster
| dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the
| problem.
|
| The "7% of comments are unwelcoming" - if there's a problem,
| flag them. If a pattern of unwelcoming comments from a person,
| they can get suspended. Not taking action on unwelcomeing
| comments perpetuates them.
|
| I would call out that calling someone a condescending asshole
| for asking about why public fields are being used is more
| unwelcoming than asking why public fields are being used.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is a multi-year trend and doesn't explain the sudden and
| significant decrease.
|
| The article points to Google search algorithm changes for the
| first big drop, and ChatGPT release for the second one.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Slowly, then all at once.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, it can explain a sudden and significant change. Just
| because something changes slowly, it doesn't mean that the
| effect will appear slowly too.
|
| The article points at two causes that coincide in timing with
| the change. But even if it's correct, it doesn't mean that
| those are the two only causes or even the most important
| ones.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Things work.... until they don't. A bunch of things can
| accumulate and not be a problem until it suddenly is.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| They need at least one forum where people can ask questions
| that challenge the accepted status quo in software development.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > there are many situations where people just want to ask "what
| are the options for generating a PDF in python"
|
| You know what I'd love? Framework or language authors
| publishing a curated set of FAQs and "best practices". It can't
| be that hard to get a list of the most common tasks people
| google for, and provide links to the commonly used libraries as
| well as code examples.
|
| AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's
| rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these
| days, although I would love to see them publish some curated
| Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to
| manual actions.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform
| examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual
| actions
|
| I imagine they'd rather you use CloudFormation?
| scubbo wrote:
| :s/CloudFormation/CDK/, but yes :)
| evantbyrne wrote:
| My $0.02 cent is use boto3 if you're working in Python.
| It's gross, but stable. When I built my CD service I went
| with boto3 because CDK had 10x the issues on GitHub. Not
| an exact comparison since the CDK repo seems to include
| more than one language, but still. Skipped Terraform
| because it took three months to merge a two line bugfix I
| submitted, has a similarly massive number of issues, and
| to this day it still doesn't seem to support some
| critical API endpoints.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I would contest that claim, honestly. If you mean the
| Terraform AWS provider, that has very good documentation, as
| do all the Terraform Hashicorp providers, but AWS itself is
| all over the place. They have way too much. Run into nearly
| anything I can't figure out and have to go their solutions
| architect for and I get links to 15 different blogs that
| aren't even part of the main documentation. Been fighting to
| figure out how to authenticate a AWS VPN throug Azure AD for
| weeks, though to be fair there, the defect is mostly on
| Microsoft's side, not Amazon's. I just spent the entire day
| today getting rsql to finally work for querying Redshift on a
| M1 Mac and their documentation seems to just be flat-out
| wrong. All the paths they think Homebrew installs stuff into
| are not the right paths. They offer a arm ODBC adapter, but
| rsql itself only comes in x86 for some reason, so they fail
| if you try to use them together and you have to get the x86
| ODBC instead.
|
| Also, not Amazon's fault, but I consistently get annoyed that
| when you web search the documentation for awscli, the top
| links always take you to the awscli v1, not v2.
|
| To be fair again, I don't even know that it's a solvable
| problem. AWS offers too many services, too many ways to
| access them, and makes changes too frequently. They can't
| just unpublish anything because someone out there is still
| using some combination of each version of server and client
| side services. But it makes it very hard to find exactly what
| I'm looking for. Probably made all the worse by some of the
| subtle differences in GovCloud, but having very little
| GovCloud-specific documentation.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I think it's a genuinely tough problem. Keeping documentation
| up to date is a Sisyphean task - it's great that Amazon has
| managed to to some extent, but it's hella difficult for small
| teams.
|
| There's some amount that can be answered by providing a
| 'beaten path' for people to walk, but a) discoverability is a
| problem - people often don't know the right keyword to search
| for to find what they need, and b) people are often subtly
| off the beaten path, and need some adaptive guidance to their
| particular situation.
|
| AI answers are great for both of these problems.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| It is worth noting that this article only uses one of the four
| graphs in the original articles to fit the narrative it is
| ChatGPT that is responsible for the decline. Other metrics show
| that the decline set in earlier.
| glenstein wrote:
| I know they sometimes change links at hn, but the article I'm
| reading is emphatic that it's not due to Chat GPT.
| bombcar wrote:
| The decline set in earlier _such that that GPT Chap could
| swoop in and be "as good"_.
| the_af wrote:
| StackOverflow set out to be a place for Q&A without "debate",
| to varying success. It's a fundamental part of its mission that
| questions that are really prompts for debate ("what is your
| favorite...?", "what do you recommend for...?") are not
| accepted.
|
| I agree with this decision. It's not as if there's any shortage
| of other places to ask for opinions and debate.
|
| StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is
| Y". Again, with varying success and not always consistently,
| but it'd be even harder to accomplish if it accepted "what are
| the best things about X?".
|
| edit: example, from the article:
|
| > _If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can't! Because you
| don't have enough karma._
|
| This is by design. Comments in SO are meant for correcting
| minor details or asking for clarification. They are not a form
| of "engagement" or debate; extended discussions are a symptom
| of impending flamewars and usually get promptly moved to the
| chat section of SO, where they belong. If you lack karma to
| comment, focus on asking & answering questions instead -- the
| _primary active_ use of SO (other than just looking for
| answers, that is).
| hn8305823 wrote:
| > StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X
| is Y"
|
| StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted
| for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or Y
| is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that way,
| why would you even ask that?"
| glenstein wrote:
| >StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted
| for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or
| Y is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that
| way, why would you even ask that?"
|
| I think that's true, but lateral to the point being made
| above. Stack Overflow banning opinion based questions was
| done for good reason and not part of the reason for its
| loss in traffic.
| sedatk wrote:
| The problem is, by removing humane parts of interpersonal
| communication (remember, even thanking or greeting was
| forbidden on SO), you essentially encourage inhumane
| communication. When you treat users as Q&A bots, people
| will treat them as bots too, forgetting that they're
| people. I observe this on Wikipedia too. Your
| contributions are merely regarded as automatically
| materialized prose instead of work of a human because
| Wikipedia's format also forbids "staining" the content
| with your individuality.
| wtallis wrote:
| > you essentially encourage inhumane communication
|
| Yes, because StackOverflow--like Wikipedia--is not about
| interpersonal communication. Neither is intended to be a
| forum. They're intended to be repositories of reference
| information. Nobody wants their encyclopedia or
| dictionary to engage in idle chit chat with them.
| the_af wrote:
| Sometimes. Not always. I do know I almost always find the
| answer I need, and someone has already asked it, so no need
| for me to write anything. I also don't care if it's closed
| as a dupe, since all I care about is whether it answers my
| question, not about reputation or status. I even
| contributed some useful answers!
|
| Did I get into pointless back and forths with aggressive
| users (and of course, sometimes I was the one in the
| wrong)? Sure! But so have I here on HN. I'd say of the last
| 5 years or so, the worst, most aggressive, and draining
| flamewars I've been involved in were here, in HN. Much
| worse than StackOverflow.
|
| Would you say HN is useless or failing because of this? I
| wouldn't!
| pwagland wrote:
| I have never had this experience though.
|
| It does appear to be incredibly unfriendly to a lot of
| people, but honestly when I look at some of the questions
| that get downvoted, it seems that a lot of the questions
| that do get downvoted are "help me, I've done no research!"
|
| That said, it's pretty hard to get a good answer on the
| site these days.
|
| And, as a volunteer, most of the questions on the site, I
| don't have the inclination to answer. Most of the rest I
| don't have the requisite skills to answer. Which ends up
| meaning that I don't spend much time answering questions
| anymore either.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| The comments thing can be annoying. When an answer isn't
| really clear, becomes outdated, or anything else, there's no
| way to follow-up
| j45 wrote:
| Nice comment, resonates.
|
| There should be other was to get karma.
|
| Maybe through writing a post about how something existing
| helped you.
| rg111 wrote:
| In Mathematics SE, you can ask the community which are the best
| books on Point Set Topology or Linear Algebra. But you can't
| ask about the best Algorithms book in SO.
|
| This was a bummer.
|
| You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in
| topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is
| stupid.
|
| Math SE is a much nicer community and I have enjoyed
| contributing there and also got a ton of help there.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in
| topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is
| stupid.
|
| That's the best way I've heard it worded. Any rationalizing
| about policies and manpower is a distraction from the fact
| that it's a stupid situation. None of that changes the fact
| that for a while you'd search "recommendations for x" and the
| first thing you'd get in your Google search results was a
| closed SO thread from someone asking for that thing.
| shagie wrote:
| Math.se gets 1/10th the questions per day and 1/100th the
| visits per day of Stack Overflow. (
| https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday )
|
| It is able to handle the wider scope more easily. The fewer
| questions per day and the more people there to help guide a
| not-quite-right question to become more useful the more that
| variation in scope can be handled.
|
| Stack Overflow has the difficulty that as they scaled up in
| activity, the number of people willing to spend the time to
| curate and the corresponding tooling didn't scale with it.
| This resulted in a reduction of time that can be spent on a
| question to help it be a good question and so people do the
| least friction fastest action as they can.
|
| If, for every person in
| https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats you got 10
| people to show up in
| https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats it might be
| feasible to have a more similar level of topic deviation.
| Note that Math, a small fraction of the size of Stack
| Overflow has done as many close vote reviews today as Stack
| Overflow.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| You keep saying that about effect of moderation on fact- vs
| opinion-based questions. You haven't proven it, though.
| Let's look at an alternative.
|
| They could've created different categories of questions
| where some are fact-based and some are opinion-based. Then,
| focused moderation on the precise questions that need
| higher quality. Their search engines can also put them
| ahead of opinion-based questions.
|
| In that way, they keep the questions they prefer at a high,
| quality level while others are hit and miss. The latter are
| still there to benefit people. Users will then go where
| they prefer to go. StackOverflow would have both types of
| traffic.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming
| community is much nicer._
|
| Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown.
| It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got
| downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times
| it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something
| strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what
| keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the
| review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the
| community has to deal with.
|
| What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the
| leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers
| for a long time. And with no stewards, it _will become_ toxic.
| And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.
| [deleted]
| josephcsible wrote:
| > It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got
| downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the
| times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or
| something strictly off topic.
|
| Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along
| the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for
| a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it
| myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.
| xmprt wrote:
| > 99% of the times it was really a dupe
|
| I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most
| of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in
| 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening
| the question because there's probably a better answer in the
| last 6 years.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest
| update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question
| because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.
|
| Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should
| instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old
| question.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| How does that work for a question asker? Can I revive an
| old question that I want a modern answer to?
|
| As far as I know the original asker owns the question, so
| I, modern asker, can't edit it asking for a modern answer
| or de-select the selected answer for being now wrong or out
| of date.
| bjornasm wrote:
| How can you post a new answer when you are asking the
| question?
| sushid wrote:
| Why? Why not just answer the damn question and link it in
| the old question if you're the mod? There's now countless
| ways to center a div in 2023. It's unreasonable to link to
| a 15 year old post. I guess SO will find out the hard way
| that people like updated answers on updated pages.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That doesn't help if you're a person trying to _get_ an
| answer rather than a person trying to _provide_ one.
|
| Though SO has made some small progress on this problem
| recently by changing the default sorting algorithm to no
| longer prefer old, entrenched answers over new, better
| ones.
| palata wrote:
| Are you saying that in order to ask for a new answer (from
| someone else) to an old question, you should post a new
| answer yourself?
|
| Really if I want and answer, I usually ask a question...
| I'm confused.
| ebiester wrote:
| That doesn't satisfy the use case. How do you edit a
| question that isn't yours? If you are looking for an answer
| and don't have one, how do you trigger the question to be
| re-answered? How does the new answerer get the points?
| kickopotomus wrote:
| How would that work? If I just comment on some 8 year old
| question that the answer does not apply to $LATEST version
| of $FRAMEWORK, how would anyone with the know-how discover
| my question?
|
| This truly is a new question because what is really being
| asked is what was the breaking change that occurred in
| $FRAMEWORK between the original question was answered and
| this latest version.
| bjornasm wrote:
| If everyone feel it is toxic, while you don't, you might want
| to consider the thought that it is actually toxic.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _If everyone feel it is toxic_
|
| Citation needed. "Everyone", really?
| zer8k wrote:
| Nah, SO is really toxic. There are plenty of examples and
| probably dozens of blog posts illustrating it. It took two
| seconds to find two of MANY meta posts [0][1]. In fact one
| answer to the posts here illustrates what looks like at least a
| dozen similar posts. ChatGPT is just hastening an already well
| deserved death. I have not heard a positive opinion about SO in
| my professional network in years. Everyone passively consumes
| SO but a community built on contribution can't live on passive
| consumption. If the community is so high huffing it's own farts
| it drives away the exact thing it needs there's no good end for
| it.
|
| [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-
| about-t...
|
| [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-
| rudeness...
| bink wrote:
| > ChatGPT is just hastening an already well deserved death.
|
| If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API
| access, where will it gets its answers from?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Probably by doing the thing that can be used to answer 95%
| of all questions programmers ask each other: reading the
| manual.
|
| Over time I've got used to it, but my colleagues tend to
| use me as a personal StackOverflow because I actually read
| the manuals for things we use/depend on. I regularly
| "amaze" them by answering obscure questions and when they
| ask how did you know that, the answer is always some
| variant on "by reading".
|
| Now I just accept that most programmers hate reading and
| will prefer either just splashing around until they stumble
| on the answer by accident, or asking other people. It's
| frustrating but just how it is. I've had a senior
| programmer at a well known tech company tell me that now
| LLMs exist they+their team suddenly feel like writing
| documentation is worth it, because something will actually
| read it, and he was serious! They work on the assumption
| that if they write docs, _zero_ programmers will read them!
| I don 't think that's literally true but it might be
| directionally true.
|
| I don't quite understand the assumption that LLMs are
| learning to code by reading StackOverflow anyway. Sure, it
| sounds plausible but we don't know how ChatGPT was trained.
| But it seems irrelevant now. GPT-4 has clearly learned
| programming to the level that it could generate self-
| training material just by reading the docs, writing
| experimental programs to try things out, and then
| summarizing its own findings which can be fed back into the
| next training round. At the moment it's not wired up to
| programming environments closely enough to do this, but it
| could be.
| zer8k wrote:
| I think this is unnecessarily reductive. When your day
| job is programming and you have strict sprint deadlines
| you don't have the hour or two it might take to leisurely
| stroll through manpages. Quickness is a result of
| industry demand not because it's correct. But that also
| doesn't make the programmers "hate reading". I have never
| had a PM/manager/TL/etc budget "documentation reading"
| into sprint points. I will hazard a guess and say you
| haven't either. So if you're not reading manpages in your
| free time Google/ChatGPT/SO/whatever is usually the best
| option.
| matsemann wrote:
| Did you read your own links? I feel they explain it well.
| Strict moderation isn't toxic. It can feel harsh, but it
| isn't toxic. The rudeness is people joining a forum, spending
| zero effort to understand the rules or etiquette, and then
| demanding others helping them for free without putting any
| effort in.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Strict moderation isn't toxic.
|
| And yet, the site died _exactly_ because of that ...
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I don't think strict moderation is inherently nontoxic,
| it's really quite toxic in a format like SO where no one
| knows how much effort may have gone in and what level
| people are at. Strict moderation usually works in
| conjunction with exclusivity to not just traumatize random
| members of the public.
|
| When someone reaches expertise are they going to
| participate in your forum? For many people, I think SO is
| understandably something they will never participate in
| after their early experiences being told off over things
| they couldn't yet distinguish.
| greedo wrote:
| This view is exactly why SO is dying. It's elitist and
| exclusionary. It's the same as the grognards who autoreply
| RTFM to everyone.
|
| SO could have been a place where someone could post a
| question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers
| from previously answered questions; if it was a unique
| question then it could be opened to answers. Instead, SO
| decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a
| question by answering questions posed by others. That right
| off the bat excludes a ton of people who don't have the
| time to wait for a question in their domain, and answer it
| before 1000 other people.
|
| Sure, it's the Eternal September for tech sites. Comes with
| the territory. If you don't want people to visit your site
| (and contribute moderation and content for free), be
| hostile to new users. Reward aggressive closing of
| questions. Sure is a good way to drive away anyone but the
| most pedantic control freaks.
|
| I used to refer people to SO when they would come to me
| with a question I couldn't answer, (I even have an SO
| t-shirt hanging in my closet) but now I'd only do that to
| my worst enemies.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting
| a question by answering questions posed by others_
|
| This is false. You can post both questions and answers
| without any rep.
|
| How people get the basics of SO wrong and still have such
| a strong opinion on how it works baffles me all the time.
| zer8k wrote:
| The rudeness stems not from moderation but drive-by insults
| in comments and rapid dupe marking. That's covered in one
| of the several answers to the topics.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Rapid dupe marking is not rude.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown
|
| "overblown" == "who ya going to believe, me or your lying
| eyes?"
|
| At Google I interviewed a refugee from Theranos, when they were
| still around. (It was just lunch, so I wasn't expected to ask
| him anything.) Still, I mentioned the bad press, and he said
| the news was "exaggerated."
|
| When people mention something again and again, it's usually not
| "overblown" -- it's real.
| matsemann wrote:
| No, you can't know without knowing the ratio of good to bad.
| With more popularity comes more negative experiences as well.
| And as with everything in life those with an axe to grind
| keep harping on forever and everywhere, making it more
| visible than the silent enjoyers.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "silent enjoyers" -- examples wanted? Some people never
| complain; they just leave. Others persevere because they're
| insensitive.
|
| If I look at Yelp reviews, one or two bad reviews are
| standard. But if there are 30-40, all different, then I
| suspect something's up.
|
| It doesn't matter about "the ratio of good to bad." If
| you're pissing off a lot of customers, you are bad. Period.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| I think this shows that people need a place to talk about the
| same topics even when there is an answer somehere on the site.
| SO is not that place, but we need it. Like the old IRC days (in
| some channels, at least).
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I don't think it's in dispute that SO has to deal with a lot of
| identical low effort questions. What people don't like is that
| the moderators and power users are entrenched against
| duplicates in particular in a way that makes the site hostile
| by default to questions that are not outstandingly original,
| but are nevertheless legitimately different.
|
| Subreddits deal with the same issue (tons of identical basic
| questions) but have better processes to divert them and educate
| the user while still letting legitimate mid-level questions
| live by default.
|
| There are bad subreddits where moderators make it hard to get
| help, but since redditors can move to better communities on the
| same topic (and duplicate all the content!) users don't feel
| stuck with the current moderation in the same way they do on
| SO, which doesn't let competing Q&A communities exist for the
| same topic.
|
| I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues
| in the last few years and want to credit that too. That work is
| another indicator that there is a problem.
|
| I also agree that leadership-moderation relations are a problem
| on SO.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown.
|
| It's toxic enough that neither I nor any of the programmers
| that I personally know would ever dare to ask a question there.
| We see how other questioners get treated.
| eth0pal wrote:
| StackOverflow is one of the most toxic places on the web. Glad to
| see it is being replaced by a AI tools.
| Scofield67 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cratermoon wrote:
| Google the rentier
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's unfortunate because the people who most want to answer SO
| questions often _are_ completely obsoleted by LLMs because they
| just don 't have unique skills. Usually, they try to bucket into
| questions they know the answer to. Sadly, this means that an
| actually hard question will just result in their not knowing the
| answer and confusing it for an easy question they know the answer
| to.
|
| The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this
| at a trivial point.
|
| I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a
| natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else.
| You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based
| on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO /
| everything.
|
| Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things
| right:
|
| - prioritize questions which have clear answers
|
| - gated functionality
|
| - CC licensing
|
| - data dumps
|
| I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.
| password4321 wrote:
| _Stack Overflow 's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 (5 days ago; 290+
| comments)
|
| _Overflow AI_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 (4
| days ago; 97 comments)
| j45 wrote:
| When technology can solve a problem equivalently well in so many
| ways discussion and debate is the way to learn from the
| experiences of others to help navigate your own course.
|
| When it comes to adult learning, some people with some topics
| prefer to only know the answer of what they're after or other
| times want a bigger picture.
|
| Last but not least learning to read the code and system design
| decisions of others are both required for competent software
| development.
|
| The part that stack avoided is maximum value comes from is
| understanding that decision making is the key in a lot of the
| underlying intent of users coming there ... not just a snippet of
| code in system design.
|
| Not know what you should be looking for or if there's other ways
| to do things is a big lose in the development of software
| engineers.
|
| How do I know this beyond my subjective interpretation and
| preference?
|
| I was an early user of stack overflow.
|
| It was a heavy time of software development, and I could easily
| spent 4-6 hours a day on it. So I decided to write. I learned so
| much, and shared anything I could. It really was a great early
| community.
|
| I really disliked Experts Exchange and it was one of the major
| inspirations for SO to happen.
|
| Little by little, I noticed some of my posts of hard earned
| lessons attached to a solution, started getting locked down.
|
| People deciding how things should be interpreted one way.
| Correcting answers they don't understand.
|
| Answers started getting rejected. Context had no value. That's
| not a great recipe for success.
|
| The strange thing is I still sit in the top X percent of stack
| users for not having answered anything in a while, and still get
| upvotes and comments.
|
| How to schedule multiple parties to ensure eveyrone has dace
| tkme?
|
| Sorry, explaining steps in English is not code or acceptable. It
| apparently can't be translated to different programming
| languages.
|
| Software is for people in the real world, not strictly a
| technical pursuit.
|
| SO started their network of other sites but the bar to entry was
| too high. There's lots of extremely valuable but esoteric design
| knowledge that remotely being aware of or having access to can be
| tremendously helpful.
|
| Stack overflow didn't understand or care it was helping system
| design to be better.
|
| Architecture goes bad in hand with code and I don't know how you
| can talk about either effectively on the whole with the ability
| to refer to the other. With out it the trees don't always become
| a forest.
| tedivm wrote:
| >Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it'll get
| marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is
| absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a
| question that was never answered.
|
| I experienced this just last week. I answered a question that was
| never asked before, and one of the "powermods" closed it as a
| duplicate while pointing to a question that was similar but
| vastly different.
|
| Since I have enough karma there I was able to start a reopen
| vote, but it took a week before it was opened again. The user who
| asked the question was justifiably upset, and probably not going
| to come back. At the same time the community lost access to an
| actually useful question without any real reason.
| alextingle wrote:
| Love the punchline at the end.
| stupidcar wrote:
| The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much,
| which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has
| become too dated.
|
| Most of my questions relate to web development -- how to do
| something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find
| a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and
| the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they
| recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards.
|
| For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top
| Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting
| to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer
| 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack
| that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.
| Syntaf wrote:
| This is especially true when you're working with popular
| frameworks that been around for awhile, e.g. rails or even
| django at this point.
|
| Most accepted answers I come across for questions I have with
| rails are a mix of:
|
| * Use this niche gem I created, which btw has no license and
| hasn't been updated in 5 years
|
| * Use this approach which depends on rails internals from 4+
| major versions ago
|
| * Use this rails helper which has been long-deprecated and
| removed in modern rails
|
| At this point I just use Phind [1] -- it's quite good at niche
| rails questions and I can specify that I want "Rails 7.0 or
| Edge" answers only so it won't give me an answer from 2011 or
| 2013.
|
| [1]: https://www.phind.com/
| sedatk wrote:
| That's why SO has shot itself in the foot with its attitude
| towards duplicate content. Duplication would have allowed
| modern answers to bubble up. It's impossible to do that on SO.
| [deleted]
| padolsey wrote:
| > Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming
| community is much nicer
|
| Is this true? Wondering if there's a more objective way to know
| than endless anecdotes. I think programming communities
| stereotypically are pretty mean. I don't really see reddit as a
| "safe place". But maybe there are smaller subreddits where being
| wrong doesn't make you feel awful?
|
| > You can even go to ChatGPT, where it'll give you a confidently
| wrong answer that looks so correct that you'll spend another 7
| hours debugging
|
| I'm quite perplexed by this same talking point being
| regurgitated. These LLMs do indeed hallucinate. But I've found,
| with coding problems, that it's very easy to see it's wrong _if_
| you 're working in a domain you're familiar with. I am doing a
| lot of react development with chatgpt(gpt4) as a kind of intern-
| on-steroids and it's working really well. I can usually identify
| when it's being silly as I've worked with react for a few years.
| Ofc without that it's hard. But even if I'm in unfamiliar
| territory I can ask it to write tests to confirm its code works.
| I can also hand it stack-traces and it'll usually be very helpful
| at debugging its own code.
|
| An e.g. I am not competent at shell stuff but it's been such a
| boon at helping me hack and pipe stuff together. Actually two
| days ago I wanted to generate a big bird's eye grid of a huge PDF
| document. I had no idea how to and asked it point-blank to write
| some code. Within a couple messages it generated a python script
| w/ PIL and a pdf2image imports and shell commands to get things
| installed and $PATH properly configured. One cycle of debugging
| because I was missing a dependency, and boom, done. Took me 5
| mins. Would have taken 30mins or more otherwise (and a tonne of
| pointless cognition/research/rabbit-holes).
| tuetuopay wrote:
| My first interaction with LLMs for programming was asking
| ChatGPT about one of our interview questions: sending a request
| in tcp, sending an udp packet, and an icmp request. It
| confidently wrote code using TcpSocket (correct), UdpSocket
| (correct) and IcmpSocket (hallucination). Further attempts to
| tell it that it was incorrect ended up with more and more
| incorrect code. Guess that Rust is not common enough for it to
| know it well.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| GPT-4 is my one-stop-shop for 80% of programming-related
| questions, and I get _much_ more useful feedback as I am able
| to have a live conversation and drill into anything and
| everything.
|
| Every interaction with GPT-4 makes me a better programmer. It's
| also obvious when things aren't right: The problem isn't
| solved. So I also become a better mentor as I try to coax the
| right answers out of GPT-4. I ask it to explain its reasoning,
| I ask it to go over pros/cons of different approaches, I ask it
| to give me security reviews of provided code. GPT-4 really
| shines in filling in the gaps for old/new APIs where I haven't
| RTFM.
|
| But I don't rely on it for correctness. That is my job as an
| engineer. I am just seeing the same stupid arguments play out
| that got played out over IDEs, higher-level languages, etc.
|
| Anything that makes me a faster and better programmer is worth
| it, even if it comes with caveats.
| padolsey wrote:
| Very much agree with what you've said here, and I love the
| idea that it makes me a better programmer/mentor. Hadn't
| really thought of it that way!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| For what it's worth, I actually laughed out loud at the idea of
| Reddit programming being nice at all, let alone nicer than SO.
| My wife has plenty of horror stories when she was learning to
| program.
| arkitaip wrote:
| The problem is that SO is so toxic that it makes Reddit's
| toxicity seem rather tolerable.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| The few times I've tried using ChatGPT or another LLM as a
| coding assist, the "confidently wrong answer that looks
| correct" was the entirety of my experience. (Mostly the failure
| mode was mixing up incompatible instructions from various
| versions of the framework or toolchain: even if I specify a
| version number it'll still often want to use syntax or
| functions that don't exist in that version.) I did not find it
| to be a time saver.
| padolsey wrote:
| Hmm fair. It's strange that our experiences are so different.
| Can I ask what types of problems you ask it to solve? FWIW
| I've had to take quite a lot of time figuring out how to talk
| to it in a way that gets good results.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| The one where I struggled the longest was trying to put
| together the right webpack configuration to generate
| multiple static files based on input in markdown format. It
| kept switching which plugins it wanted me to use, or mixed
| up functions from conflicting plugins, and often mixed up
| syntax from different versions of webpack itself.
|
| I finally gave up on that one when it got caught in a loop
| somehow where it apologized for giving me the wrong line of
| code for an import, gave an obviously wrong explanation for
| why it didn't work, then "corrected" it to the exact same
| line of code.
|
| Another attempt I was asking it to compare different ways
| for measuring the amount of difference between data trees
| -- it did give me the names of a couple of different
| algorithms, and very wordy, plausible-looking descriptions
| of how each of them worked... neither of which was terribly
| helpful, because they both boiled down to "recursively
| examine the tree and tally up the differences."
|
| Asked for an implementation example, it gave me code that
| expected input arrays of pre-calculated edit costs, and
| suggested I write my own function to convert the tree data
| into that array format.
|
| So that one was extra weird, in that it wasn't _wrong_ ,
| just _unhelpful_ , like here I'll do the easy part for you
| and leave the thing you asked about as an exercise for the
| reader.
|
| I dunno, maybe with practice I could learn how to drag it
| towards helpfulness, but for now RTFM still seems easier.
| [deleted]
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most
| impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a
| tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting
| to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being
| the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the
| publishers.
|
| I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend
| to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs.
| moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack
| Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's
| just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the
| company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel
| like an icky place to be.
| rg111 wrote:
| It could have been a community, like Quora, but focused towards
| CS/IT.
|
| But it absolutely missed the mark on that one. It is a high
| pressure, toxic, unwelcoming place.
|
| I contributed a lot of Math and CS content to Quora where I had
| ~1.5m views on answers. I really liked engaging there. OTOH, SO
| felt like a toxic exam hall on a bad day.
|
| Every year SO asked in the survey if I felt I belonged to the
| community or something similar, I chose the most negative
| response from the list- _every year_.
|
| If SO behaved like a community, then it could have had organic
| growth, and organic visitors, not depending so largely on
| Google.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive
| gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part
| of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both.
| Both is good.
|
| But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives
| to SO is worth the whole price of admission:
|
| > ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it'll give you a
| confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you'll spend
| another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn't work.
| prepend wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience at all and I've found that
| chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO.
|
| I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over
| time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing
| "duplicate" answers.
|
| It's hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be
| better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn't rely as much
| on opinionated mods.
|
| It's a tough place to be and I don't think it's possible to
| make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original
| founders sold a few years ago.
| oezi wrote:
| Unless you are living on technologies edges, ChatGPT gets it
| right plenty of times and isn't a rude brick about it.
|
| If it gets it wrong it usually is pretty apparent quickly and
| normally gives enough hints for avenues to explore.
|
| At least my SO use (and programming related googling) has
| fallen dramatically...
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| When I've tried using it I've generally found that it leads
| me in circles between incompatible versions of a framework or
| tool -- it'll give me syntax that's correct for one version,
| but wants to use it to call a function that only exists in a
| different version, that sort of thing. They're not even
| hallucinations, each step is technically correct, but can't
| be used successfully with the other steps.
| arp242 wrote:
| Another thing I found is that it can have "obvious
| omissions". As in: the answer is correct, and it works, but
| it's a bad solution and there's a much more obvious and
| better way to solve it.
|
| "Technically correct", but also not good.
| rurp wrote:
| One point I'm surprised this article didn't include was hostility
| towards users and mods from SO staff. I wander into Meta
| stackexchange on occasion and it's shocking how often the top
| threads are full of well reasoned posts from established users
| being ignored or bulldozed by SO employees.
|
| Maybe I've just happened to look on bad days but I have the
| strong impression that SO is a platform that I absolutely don't
| want to get more invested in, despite a lot of interesting and
| knowledgable posters. It reminds me to the disdain Reddit has
| been showing towards its power users lately.
|
| An established platform can get away with that sort behavior for
| a while, but is utterly toxic to its longterm quality and growth.
| acdha wrote:
| I saw a related aspect of this years ago trying to incubate a
| professional sub-community. It wasn't a huge group (thousands
| of people, not millions) but important and long-lived, and the
| SE community was active, but it was closed for not being active
| enough.
|
| Years later, that conversation still happens but not on SE
| since everyone got the message that mods only care about
| advertising metrics. That's a common business decision but it
| seems short-sighted for what SE wants to do.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension
| over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy
| user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and
| connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff
| Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like
| 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really
| liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a
| victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted
| the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow
| seems to have hit the same problem even harder.
|
| Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask
| a question to get an answer, or a repository of information?
|
| There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to
| be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all
| remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations
| in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation
| because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered
| that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort
| repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells, and now we see
| posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for
| Business") this way.
|
| StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At
| least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds
| of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which
| were very much curated and written to an audience of people who
| want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of
| work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers,
| etc. The most prominent public resources for programming,
| websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The
| equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with
| this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo
| Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase
| in a Wiki-like way.
|
| And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users
| (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and
| expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want
| to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to
| the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who
| ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's
| not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat
| ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic
| and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around
| the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a
| _forum,_ it 's a _resource,_ and that means the "questions" are
| supposed to be evergreen, curated references.
|
| Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange
| headquarters settled on their answer: _aggressive_ removal of
| duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new
| moderation tool that _gamified closing questions,_ sending
| moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow /destroy decisions
| that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize
| wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the
| direction of "if in doubt, close the question."
|
| From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the
| websites that _the best way to maintain a high-quality
| information resource is to close as many questions as possible._
| A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated
| reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the
| perspective of running a Q &A website? absolutely not!
| StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A
| websites that were _openly hostile to people asking questions._
|
| I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things
| can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora,
| which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other
| direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being
| just _extremely weird_ and frankly right on par with Yahoo
| Answers for quality.
|
| Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as
| a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems
| to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale.
| But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account
| on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is
| going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I
| always wanted.
|
| My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their
| private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that
| it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty
| obvious why. No one knows what it's _for_ exactly. If you want to
| ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team 's Slack
| channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice
| information for people to look up later, you put it in the
| documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-
| between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated
| than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And
| frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's
| Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization
| at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain
| documentation.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > having conversations in Slack somehow becomes documentation
| because you can search for things
|
| It was probably oversold like that, but in my daily life, the
| old threads i find in slack people troubleshooting similar
| things from way back when, that can be life-saving. Totally not
| a replacement for proper docs, but still an improvement to have
| those past threads around.
| shagie wrote:
| > I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension
| over the fundamental purpose of the website.
|
| That tension existed in the announcements for the sites...
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
|
| > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the
| tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as
| questions are appropriately tagged, I think it's okay to be off
| topic as long as what you're asking about is of interest to
| people who make software. But it does have to be a question.
| Stack Overflow isn't a good place for imponderables, or public
| service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
|
| > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange
| (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine
| gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by
| programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of
| collectively increasing the sum total of _good_ programming
| knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you
| use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming
| is our goal.
|
| (note: good is italicized in the original text too)
|
| And the history of this question:
| https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline (note revision
| 1: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 )
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I have noticed their SEO drop.
|
| That may not even be their fault. Every day, I see more and more
| garbage sites trying to capture coding questions with blocks of
| text.
| criloz2 wrote:
| A community that is unwelcoming to new users, is dying? who would
| have thought?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| It's worth reading right to the end, for the joke about Overflow
| AI. Enjoyable article. I don't know enough about the subject
| matter to form an opinion on the accuracy, but it's well written.
| kristianc wrote:
| One of the biggest features of ChatGPT, for me, is that it never
| asks "Why would you want to do that?" when you ask it a question.
| belfalas wrote:
| "ChatGPT, where does John Lennon live?"
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Interesting. But one of the _faults_ of ChatGPT is also that it
| never asks "Why would you want to do that?"
|
| There's a place for asking that question - not as often as SO
| asks it, but more often than never.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _The Fall of Stack Overflow_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 - July 2023 (781
| comments)
| dvt wrote:
| Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the
| moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1]
| but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago)
| because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of
| closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive
| nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the
| community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad
| answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on.
|
| The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity
| contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up
| injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site
| just to score visibility points come community voting time.
|
| On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of
| cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are
| asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones.
| Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming
| more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of
| a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack
| Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco
| gsich wrote:
| Those search examples is the reason why Google also declines.
| EGreg wrote:
| What about the other StackExchange sites, though!
| boredumb wrote:
| A big take away for anyone reading this, if you have a massive
| digital asset that relies on google you should probably be
| planning and leveraging yourself for a 50% drop in traffic and
| revenue over the weekend at random.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I used to be mad at SO but after some time now (haven't been
| there in years) I understand is just another instance of an
| Eternal September.
|
| At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was
| mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot;
| people who, in general, _loved_ technology. Anyone who really
| enjoys what they 're doing usually enjoy helping others who know
| less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding
| conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those
| people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply
| from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular
| topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was
| completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the
| internet is an amazing place.
|
| With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join
| and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance,
| there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do
| my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for
| myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO
| community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the
| way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual
| mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on
| others all over the site, just because they were after some
| imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some
| emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial
| amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is
| something that happens to all online communities that need
| moderators, at some point.
|
| At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO
| being run _de facto_ by knowledgeable and passionate people to
| being run _de facto_ by these kind of moderators who completely
| missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most
| of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people
| sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the
| initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by
| an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was
| still a Q &A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and
| it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around
| 2014, maybe a bit earlier.
|
| To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not
| the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this
| happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that
| led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were
| looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too
| big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they
| saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do
| anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just _couldn 't_? SO fell
| into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones
| to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced
| their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down
| from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining
| ventures.
|
| Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him
| talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the
| point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever _use_ SO?. Compared to
| Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite
| personality, I 'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual
| line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least
| he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or
| whatever.
|
| Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its
| place in the future (which, btw, I don't think it is ChatGPT).
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA
| slashdev wrote:
| I rarely ask questions on stack overflow anymore. When I do, the
| question is usually closed for being similar to something else or
| off topic or whatever. Whenever I forget why I don't use it, I'm
| quickly reminded. I find the moderation and some of the comments
| very unwelcoming.
|
| It's still great for finding information though. It's likely the
| most visited site for me from Google search.
|
| Edit: you guys are not too welcoming either sometimes... I don't
| know why someone feels this is worth a downvote.
| ElemenoPicuares wrote:
| I quickly rose to the a top contributor role of a non-programming
| stack exchange site. I had more technical subject matter
| expertise (including formal training) than seemingly anyone else
| there, was friendly, thorough, empathic, upbeat, technically
| competent, and prolific. Not too long after getting involved, I
| just got too sick of unhelpful, pedantic, self-important
| moderators nitpicking at my posts and making passive-aggressive
| edits, so I just left. That was _years ago_ and I still regularly
| collect points in upvotes and get positive comments from people.
|
| Many people in those roles claim they're uptight because they
| want to maintain the quality of the posts. Well, I assure you
| that particular SE, at least, is much worse off for it.
| lolinder wrote:
| Point #1 (May 2022 Google analytics changes) completely undoes
| the argument that this isn't caused primarily by ChatGPT. With a
| 15% drop in traffic from the cookie change, the new school year
| baseline should go down from 20mil to 17mil, and the summer
| trough should go from about 17mil to 14mil.
|
| In 2022 we see the trough stabilize at 14mil, then climb back to
| 16mil before plummeting again in November with the advent of
| ChatGPT. That looks very much like the initial decline was the
| combination of the cookie change with the regular summer drop,
| and ChatGPT killed traffic before it could quite get back up to
| the new baseline.
| hcks wrote:
| I never really got stack overflow. When I look for something I
| know, I find all the most upvoted answers kinda bad and/or
| suboptimal. Sometimes look like written by experienced beginners.
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