[HN Gopher] Stack Overflow is documentation, not Q&A
___________________________________________________________________
Stack Overflow is documentation, not Q&A
Author : lifefeed
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-04-11 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (landedstar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (landedstar.com)
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| StackOverflow has become a mess. Half the time I search the
| answers are outdated and there is no incentive on the platform to
| improve old answers.
| jasode wrote:
| _> At some point that "helpful" vibe changed. Stack Overflow
| ceased being a question and answer site, and begun calcifying
| into a documentation site. Questions are answered with "see this
| other answer"._
|
| _> Maybe it's the fate of all Q&A sites to eventually become
| documentation sites. If you answer the question "correctly" once,
| why bother repeating yourself?_
|
| You have misunderstood the editorial intent of Stack Overflow
| because it was always meant to be "documentation" more than a
| service to answer _any_ questions including repeated /duplicated
| questions. This misunderstanding isn't your fault because most
| people visiting that site misunderstand it.
|
| I wrote a previous comment citing co-founder Jeff Atwood's
| reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438
|
| StackOverflow seemed to be "more helpful" in the beginning
| because the volume of content (aka "documentation") was still
| being seeded and built out by the new questions. Being helpful
| was a _side effect_ of the site not having much content.
|
| But now that there's a ton of content, a new question is more
| likely to be cross-referenced to a previous answer and therefore
| _" Closed as duplicate"_ or some other reason. Yes, that seems a
| little rude and "unhelpful". And people don't realize that's the
| way Stack Overflow is designed to work.
|
| EDIT to also add comment from co-founder Spolsky: _" In our
| equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will
| be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project
| more like wikipedia"_ from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is correct. It's also a problem. SO is still useful, but
| its utility has seriously diminished over time because of this
| approach. Too much of what's there is incorrect, outdated, or
| questions that aren't addressed elsewhere are unanswered
| because someone mistakenly thought it was already answered.
|
| So would be much more useful if there were some effective
| mechanism to get rid of or correct entries that were answered
| incorrectly in the first place or have become incorrect or no
| longer relevant with time.
| jasode wrote:
| _> So would be much more useful if there were some effective
| mechanism to get rid of or correct entries that were answered
| incorrectly in the first place or have become incorrect or no
| longer relevant with time._
|
| Sometimes, the community will "fix" that by having a newer
| answer get upvoted beyond the "accepted" answer. E.g. a
| Python 3.2 answer with more modern syntax in 2014 gets
| upvoted above the Python 3.1 accepted answer in 2010:
|
| - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2331592/why-does-
| datetim...
|
| But that type of "correction" only happens on popular
| questions. The more obscure questions and answers that are
| wrong will remain wrong because there are not enough eyeballs
| and/or widespread expertise to fix them.
| arp242 wrote:
| I answered a popular-ish Ruby on Rails question in 2014 and
| it's still 3 votes shy from overtaking the outdated top
| answer from 2009. I don't even know if my answer is the
| best today because I haven't done Rails in years.
|
| I definitely think this is a major pain point in the
| platform. I don't think that doing away with duplicates is
| the answer - instead there should be a way to downrank
| outdated stuff. Or something. I think they were
| experimenting with some approaches, but I haven't really
| been active in the last few years.
| lifefeed wrote:
| I've read that, but I disagree. Stack Overflow would be better
| for the community if it allowed repetition. Repetition isn't
| harmful, and it lets the next generation learn how to answer
| questions, which is a legitimately hard skill, and I'm arguing
| is more useful than creating a static repository of
| documentation.
| jasode wrote:
| _> would be better for the community if it allowed
| repetition. Repetition isn't harmful,_
|
| The "community" also includes the _people who volunteer to
| answer_ the questions. The _answerers_ don 't want
| repetition. Jeff Atwood wanted to prioritize the SO
| experience for the _answerers_.
|
| To paraphrase JA's reasoning:
|
| - asking questions is _easy_ which can lead to an increasing
| volume of bad questions that degrades the site for the
| answerers
|
| - answering questions is _hard_ and more valuable for
| StackOverflow so optimize the site for them. (JA wrote, _"
| >We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not
| answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A;
| system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to
| maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers."_[1])
|
| I do understand how you would want SO to work differently and
| I'm not debating your opinion. I'm just relaying how the
| cofounders wanted StackOverflow to work.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-
| pearls-....
| DowagerDave wrote:
| Also note that all products, especially successful ones,
| change (anyone used Excel lately?) and the cofounders are
| all long gone. They built something that was temporally
| valuable, (rightfully) cashed in and moved on.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| > answering questions is hard
|
| I think this assumption is not true anymore - ChatGPT can
| give an answer in less time and (human) effort than it
| takes to formulate and devise a question. So it really is
| about creating a set of curated question-answer pairs,
| where both the questions and the answers can be auto-
| generated. In this context, asking the same question
| different ways is really helpful to an AI. And there is no
| such thing as a bad question, there are just Q-A pairs that
| do not contribute significantly to training the model
| ("boring" questions). I've noticed Quora is experimenting
| with ChatGPT but they aren't at the point where you can
| flag the AI's answer as incorrect or misleading and fix it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > chatgpt can give an answer in less time and (human)
| effort than it takes to formulate and devise a question.
|
| Can it? I mean, you still have to spend the time and
| effort required in order to ensure that ChatGPT's answer
| is correct and complete.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| Well, the question-asker should be able to tell if
| ChatGPT's answer is incorrect. Most obviously, for
| software, they try it and it doesn't work, or for
| scientific questions, they look up the references and
| they don't exist. It is probably even possible to
| automate such checking to some extent. But similar issues
| apply to checking human answers - at some point, the
| answer is correct because it sounds plausible, not
| because it has been verified.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If people are posting answers that they don't know are
| correct, putting the burden on the asker to do that
| vetting, then the entire point of the site is moot.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| News flash, but a lot of stackoverflow answers are
| garbage - incorrect, out of date, etc.. Does this make it
| useless? No, you just have to sift through.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Repetition _is_ harmful. I 've seen it play out on many
| expert forums (including an M:tG forum with several Level 2
| Judges): sooner or later, depending on the person's stress-
| resistance, but _always_ , they get too tired of answering
| the same questions over and over and over and over again. And
| manifestations of that phenomenon aren't pretty: they either
| leave the forum entirely, or turn quite acidic in their tone.
| In either case, their usefulness as the anwererers becomes
| quite low.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Repetition is harmful, stale answers are harmful, growing
| the results forever is harmful, searching for good old
| answers that are still valid is difficult, prioritizing
| newer answers means that the good old ones are harder to
| find, etc., etc., etc. Every forum, wiki, and growing
| documentation base eventually stagnates, overflows, or dies
| some other way. Wikipedia is one exception that mostly
| stays up-to-date.
| arp242 wrote:
| Serious question: how many answers have you posted on Stack
| Overflow?
|
| Because people standing from the sidelines telling me what I
| should and shouldn't be doing with my spare time leaves more
| than a little bad taste in my mouth.
| lifefeed wrote:
| Asked a few, answered a few, same as most people I suppose.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "as designed" is one of the dumbest answers.
|
| "We _intended_ to be a bunch of a-holes, one-upping each other
| and downvoting new people so they can 't take our place."
|
| So what? OJ _intended_ to kill his wife and her friend and then
| get acquitted. That doesn 't excuse him (and yes, I know he
| just died).
|
| the other response, that it's good for new people to give the
| same answer that the older people are tired of giving, because
| they learn something, is the correct one.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > This misunderstanding isn't your fault because most people
| visiting that site misunderstand it.
|
| And the reason few people understand it is because it's not
| logical. If you want documentation, read the documentation, and
| in most cases, that's what they did before asking the question.
| Anything more than cut and paste of the official documentation
| is discussion. "Well what is usually done to make this work in
| practice..." Nope. That's discussion, and to 99.9% of people
| asking for help, it's why such a site exists.
|
| Do I have evidence? Sure, look at all the questions that have
| moved to Reddit, Discord, etc.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Stack overflow exists because no one is teaching people how to
| use documentation properly. Many, many questions people have,
| have great answers, including context and further reading, if
| they actually found the documentation.
| kbolino wrote:
| First-party documentation quality varies wildly, and in general
| has fallen off a cliff from the days when everything had a
| comprehensive, multi-volume, doorstopper manual.
|
| There's also a lot of tinkering and breaking things that is
| necessary to develop a deeper understanding of a piece of
| technology, without which the manual is far less useful.
| Knowing where to look in the official documentation is half or
| more of the battle. Modern attention spans, planning
| expectations, systems complexity, etc. are not geared towards
| developing this deep understanding.
|
| Moreover, the number one tool developers who cut their teeth
| over the past ~20 years have relied on to help them find the
| right answers, Google Search, has degraded massively in quality
| lately. Stack Overflow arguably breathed new life into search
| engines for a while, until SEO-hacked junk overtook it. Who can
| forget the classic forum posts "I fixed the problem [no
| details]" or "Why don't you Google it [even though this is the
| only meaningful Google result]". Even Stack Overflow runs into
| those issues, sometimes, though.
| constantcrying wrote:
| For many large software projects there is great, searchable
| and comprehensive documentation. If you know where to look,
| te answer to your question is most likely already there.
|
| Of course there are questions not answered in the
| documentation, which is where stack overflow can shine.
|
| I think the real problem is google, if it was a great search
| engine it would give you the appropriate documentation page
| for your problem and many, many people would never visit
| stack overflow for the answer.
| vundercind wrote:
| "Goddamnit, I forgot the syntax for doing a for...in and
| assigning both key and value in this language, yet again,
| and my first two guesses were wrong"
|
| _Searches, clicks docs page, greeted with 20,000 words
| about flow control in the language, only the eighth example
| of for loops has what I want_
|
| _Searches, lands on SO, what I need is one screenful below
| the fold, done_
|
| The only strong counterexample to this pattern I can think
| of is everyone's least favorite language, PHP, because of
| its combo of narrow-focused docs pages and community posts
| on each filling in any gaps and pointing out any weirdness
| or features that exist but should be avoided.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Very curious. To me the opposite happens, if I forget
| syntax all I want to look at is a simple example, which
| is often easily found in the official documentation
| kbolino wrote:
| Even when the quality of official documentation is high,
| there are other uses for an SO-like site, I think:
|
| - Handling corner cases that the original software
| developers never thought of, or their technical writers
| never thought to document, at least.
|
| - Contextualizing, summarizing, and rephrasing the official
| docs in ways that people at different levels of familiarity
| and from different backgrounds find easier to understand.
|
| - Providing errata and implementation notes that have been
| discovered over time by the users, before the official
| source is able to add them, or especially if the official
| source refuses to add them.
| constantcrying wrote:
| I don't deny this. I even said this was the case.
|
| But many, many questions on SO have a good answer in the
| official documentation.
| jdsully wrote:
| All I see everywhere is autogenerated docs with function
| prototypes I could have just looked at in the code. Nobody
| is explaining the "why" anymore.
| constantcrying wrote:
| To be honest I don't. Of course documentation takes
| effort, which some projects won't spend, but most stuff I
| have to deal with has high effort docs.
| kbolino wrote:
| One of the biggest problems with Stack Overflow, and this applies
| to Reddit as well, is that it's not a viable business model.
| There's nothing monetizable about the "core business" of asking
| questions and getting answers. If there was, Quora or Experts
| Exchange would have prevailed instead.
|
| Finding the right nonprofit structure to handle this need is
| difficult. And you could always end up like Wikipedia instead,
| which seems to spend 90% of its donations on things other than
| its operations, and yet cries that it will shut down if you don't
| donate your next latte (but I don't drink lattes...).
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| A serious problem with Stack Overflow is it allows only one right
| answer. As time passes, in cases when the question author haven't
| specified an exact version of a library in the question title
| (which is the case more often than it is not), better solutions
| become possible. And the old solution can become impossible. Yet
| the initially accepted answer to the question remains chosen
| forever.
| ryandrake wrote:
| StackOverflow is a great resource if your question is "How
| would I have done this particular programming task back in
| 2012?"
| nneonneo wrote:
| Sure, but there's more than one answer listed. If the right
| answer isn't clearly up to date, try a different one, or sort
| by recency if you want to see newer answers.
|
| And, if the accepted answer is hopelessly outdated, suggest an
| edit to add that caveat so others know to skip it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Does anybody actually pay attention to which answer has the
| check or not? Upvotes is by far the most useful signal.
| shawn_w wrote:
| Thinking the accepted answer is the "right" answer is a common
| mistake made by people who aren't aware of how Stack Overflow
| works.
|
| >Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final
| statement indicating that the question has now been answered
| perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer
| that worked for them personally.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer
| nneonneo wrote:
| As someone who was very active answering questions on SO, I can
| say that duplicate or low-quality questions were a pretty big
| issue on the site. It might be fun to answer "what does * do in a
| Python function call" once; it's quite another to answer that
| same question a dozen times. "Mark as duplicate" is an important
| way to keep the workload down, and to centralize questions around
| a single high-quality source of answers.
|
| People also forget that answers are not set in stone. Answers are
| editable - if an answer needs to be updated for the latest
| version of a framework, or it's been obsoleted, _just add that to
| the answer_! Low-rep users can suggest edits, while higher-rep
| users can just go in and edit them. Its not uncommon to see the
| top answer have an edit pointing at another answer for some newer
| version.
|
| Centralizing around a single deduplicated answer also has a major
| benefit: multiple answers can gather on a single question. It's
| not always the case that one particular answer works for
| everyone, so try different answers and see what works (and upvote
| the ones that do work!)
| Izkata wrote:
| > if an answer needs to be updated for the latest version of a
| framework, or it's been obsoleted, just add that to the answer!
|
| Depending on how much of a change it is, that might also be
| discouraged. Adding a disclaimer about being for an old version
| is generally fine, rewriting it for the newest version is a big
| no-no - that's when it should be a new answer.
| Neikius wrote:
| Kinda hard to get rep nowadays though.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The real problem is that genuine questions get dupe hammers.
|
| Yes this was the right solution in the Python stone age
| version, but no longer the right solution in the current one.
|
| Of course I can give an alternative answer on an old question,
| but it will appear very low on the page and will get missed by
| regular users.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Answers are editable - if an answer needs to be updated for
| the latest version of a framework, or it's been obsoleted, just
| add that to the answer!
|
| Yeah, I tried that, and they've always been reverted without
| explanation. Best you can do is comment and hope someone reads
| it. I think that's more common today, since it doesn't take
| long to realize the comments are where the useful information
| is found.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Best you can do is comment and hope someone reads it.
|
| When I use SO these days (which getting much less common over
| time, I admit), my habit is to read through the comments
| first because of this problem.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Plus, if the change is significant, it's essentially a
| different solution entirely. There may be alternative
| solutions which would vote higher and comment
| relevance/quality would be impacted, etc. It starts to become
| unwieldy at a certain point.
|
| Better that solutions can be versioned and possibly linked
| together for findability.
| arp242 wrote:
| Stack Overflow was never about helping people out; right from the
| start.
|
| It was a response to searching the internet trying to find a
| solution to your problem, ending up with a forum thread with
| three pages of discussions, and the OP coming back with "nvm i
| figured it out", but no solution. It was always about long-term
| documentation. Go read some of Jeff and Joel's old stuff from
| 2008-2009; it uses exactly those kind of examples.
|
| And stuff like this:
|
| > I think repetition of answers is healthy.
|
| Yeah ... try answering questions for a few months and come back
| to me on that. I was never on Stack Overflow to be an unpaid
| tutor, to "teach the next generation", or to be a free debugger-
| as-a-service. Most people aren't.
|
| And no doubt Stack Overflow is far from perfect, and that at
| times people interpret the rules (far) too strictly, but this is
| the same ol' bollocks that's been doing the rounds since 2008,
| mostly propagated by people who have rarely spent any time
| answering questions.
| rerdavies wrote:
| The biggest problem with Stack Overflow is that both the
| questions and the answers age poorly. A question that was asked
| and answered for Android 7 is no longer relevant for Android 14.
| As a result, many, if not most top answers are no longer
| relevant.
|
| I find these days that the answers I'm looking for are
| increasingly answers that have snuck in during the brief period
| before questions are flagged as duplicates. For most original
| questions, the top ten posts are so old that they are no longer
| relevant.
|
| StackOverflow would be so much better if questions that were
| flagged as duplicates were not closed for further answers.
| Flagging a question as a duplicate should be an advisory, not a
| death knell.
|
| There's also a huge problem with questions that are not
| duplicates being flagged as duplicates, because there's no
| penalty for editors being wrong, and no easy way to appeal that
| decision. Determining whether an answer is a really duplicate
| often involves close reading of both the original and the new
| question -- something that seems not to happen in the majority of
| cases. The problem is compounded because editors have a direct
| incentive to flag non-duplicates as duplicates. And so, the
| quality of answers continues to decline.
|
| As a concrete example, my StackOverflow account has accumulated
| about 5,000 points for an answer I wrote for Android 7 that
| describes diagnostics that were changed in Android 8.
| Nevertheless, it continues to accumulate about 100 points a month
| even today. I can't be bothered to fix it, because it would
| involve significant research. The contents of the diagnostic
| results aren't documented. I had to go to Android source to
| figure out what was actually being reported. And it's not a topic
| that particularly concerns me at present. If someone were to go
| to the trouble of analyzing Android 14 sources to update my post,
| I doubt they would ever be able to overcome the very significant
| number of upvotes my answer over the last 8 years.
| bonton89 wrote:
| This explains why the only currently functioning answer to many
| questions I have often has 0 votes and is half way down the
| page.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| I've found the version issue to be significant on SO and in
| documentation in general when accessed via a search engine.
| Sometimes, it's "does this solution still work at all?". Other
| times, it's "is there a better or preferred way to solve this
| in later versions?"
|
| For SO, seems a "version applicability" option could go a long
| way to solving this.
| wwalexander wrote:
| So true. I feel like I used StackOverflow so much when I
| started programming, and now it's rarely even the most useful
| result on Google for the question I'm trying to answer. I
| struggle to imagine a scenario now where I'd want to rely on
| fossilized SO instead of GPT cross-referenced with official
| documentation.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > fossilized
|
| Another choice of vocab: ossified
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I think it's easy to forget that as we get better at
| programming, we tend to get better at either avoiding
| problems or finding our own answers in which case SO is also
| less useful because we've learned to fish.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| SO has basically been obsoleted by LLMs at this point. Why even
| visit the site? They are clearly not interested in improving
| the UX for either questioners or responders, or the 'Closed as
| duplicate of a question that somebody answered poorly 8 years
| ago' policy would have been changed or scrapped long ago.
|
| One obvious question, of course, is how the LLMs are going to
| keep themselves up to date. It's not as if Stack Overflow is
| doing that, given the points raised by the parent. It seems
| that we're headed for stasis unless a new developer Q&A
| paradigm emerges.
| nailer wrote:
| LLM are trained on stack overflow.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Um, yes? That's kind of my point. LLMs trained on SO
| answers from a time before SO sucked as badly as it does
| now. Where will next-gen LLMs get _their_ training, without
| a good open Q &A site to leech from?
| ourmandave wrote:
| They do a sort options:
|
| Highest score (default)
|
| Trending (recent votes count more)
|
| Date modified (newest first)
|
| Date created (oldest first)
| nailer wrote:
| > A question that was asked and answered for Android 7 is no
| longer relevant for Android 14.
|
| SO power (top 0.07%) user here. Here's how I handle that:
|
| - If adding a new answer to an old question, add a headline at
| the top of your new answer explaining that it's new for Android
| 8, post 2017, ES6, whatever else.
|
| Here's a JS vs jQuery answer. 'Trending' shows the 2014 (new)
| plain-JS answer before the older (2011) jQuery answer:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2276463/how-can-i-get-fo...
|
| - Generally this should be enough to handle fixing things, but
| if you still use SO and are aware you have an old answer, and
| don't want to update it, add a headline saying 'This is for
| Android 7, pre 2017, ES5 and older' etc.
| adr1an wrote:
| And that's why I use it so much for getting my way around the
| Linux shell :)
| renjimen wrote:
| Implement half life on upvotes.
|
| Tech changes (faster now than ever). This will allow newer
| answers to float to the top and make older questions more
| obviously replaceable, providing space for beginners to ask
| questions better couched in today's problem/solution space.
|
| Personally, I find so many of the package-specific answers for
| Python are out of date. They don't work and/or are not written to
| current best practice.
| sefrost wrote:
| You can sort the answers by "Trending (recent votes count
| more)".
| awkward wrote:
| This seems like a rose colored look at SO. I'm sure the candor
| was a little bit more pleasant than usenet, but I'm not sure it
| was ever a free flowing Q&A. From the beginning the founders were
| pretty clear that a "read the faq" culture was worth encouraging
| on the site, not coincidentally because that aligns well with
| SEO.
| cletus wrote:
| Up until 2010 or so I used to be pretty active on SO. It was Jon
| Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me on the top users. I stopped for a
| variety of reasons, some of which are completely unrelated to SO
| but here were several big issues I could see then (and I
| commented about on Meta SO at the time):
|
| 1. Moderators were already getting out of control. They had
| decided among themselves that questions without a provable answer
| needed to be purged from the site despite them having clear
| value. A question like "Should I use Java or C++ for X?" can have
| an answer like "These are the benefits of each and things you
| should consider". By 2010, that was an automatic "closed, not
| constructive".
|
| 2. Users didn't understand what was and wasn't a duplicate. Two
| questions may sound simimlar but one important detail can
| ccompletely change the answer.
|
| 3. SO had its most value when all the information was current but
| as time goes on answers become no longer current and I didn't
| know how that would be handled. A correct answer in Java 7 might
| be incorrect in Java 14. I believe this is still handled
| haphazardly and is a huge problem with, say, Android;
|
| 4. The system rewards low-hanging fruit and pretty much
| discourages any complex question or answer. A complex but
| legitimate question might be closed as being too specific. It's
| less likely to find an answer and fewer people understand the
| answer so won't upvote it (or, worse, will upvote the wrong
| answer that sounds right).
|
| 5. It suffers the problem that all sites do that require users to
| effectively to rank answers (be that with upvote/downvote, liking
| or whatever) and that is that people vote for what they like, not
| what it is correct. Post an objective question about an issue in
| C++ and a provably correct answer that is perceived to be
| negative of C++ will attract downvotes from C++ devotees. This
| applies to SO, reddit, social media sites, HN, etc. This is a
| pretty negative experience for the answerer.
|
| Forums suck because they're time-ordered. SO's big value was that
| answeres were net vote ordered so the top answer was often (but
| not always) the best and/or correct.
|
| I wouldn't necessarily call SO "documentation". "Ossified
| opinion" would be more accurate in a lot of cases.
| bena wrote:
| I remember your username.
|
| But StackOverflow suffered the issue _every_ site that relies
| on user contributions /moderation does: it ultimately caters to
| those with the most free time, not those with the most
| expertise.
|
| And I don't think there's an easy way around the problem.
| cletus wrote:
| The quote I come back to repeatedly is "the bureaucracy is
| expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" as
| it perfectly describes the Moderator Problem.
|
| There are people who ask questions. You need questions but
| questions come with an audience. You can argue a well-crafted
| question is better than a bad one but it's not really an
| issue. The site only has value if the answers are there and
| they're good. This is the real value of answerers.
|
| In my mind, moderators are the janitors. Yes, that job is
| important. You need to clean up tags, fix misspellings or bad
| grammar, remove low value questions and answers but the scope
| really is pretty limited. But there is a certain personality
| type that gets attracted to moderation that, if left
| unchecked, is completely toxic. Instead of cleaning up
| answers they decide to set policy. "Subjective" questions
| were one of the first big targets.
|
| It requires constant vigilance for the moderators not to get
| completely out of hand. Wikipedia is a really great exmaple
| of this.
|
| Toxic moderators love solving imaginary problems. The
| argument for closing "subjective" questions was they didn't
| want it to descend into a flamewar. Thing is, that _never_
| happened. And if it did, you just delete the relevant
| comments and answers. There is absolutely no need for a site-
| wide ban on "subjective" questions. It's a complete non-
| problem.
| rhelz wrote:
| Stack Overflow is training data.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| The problem I see is the SO is a substitute for well written
| documentation, rather than an incubator for quality technical
| writing.
|
| It depends on open source docs being poor so noobs need experts
| to educate them. But it does not place a burden on the experts to
| improve the original docs.
|
| For example, Python peps and standard library docs are often
| painfully and needlessly laborious, such that it's often easier
| to just read the code. Similarly, the git manual is written to
| induce episodes of acute madness.
|
| The SO solution? Read a thousand piecemeal SO answers, get the
| job done in a slapdash way, get paid. Don't worry about the
| inaccessibility, waste, and exponentially accruing technical debt
| of the whole enterprise.
|
| Priests of this cult often avoid reading the docs, and never pick
| up the responsibility to improve the awful docs.
|
| The SO high priests will gladly regurgitate their knowledge like
| mother birds, often in writing as bad as upstream docs. Typically
| defending and normalizing the inaccessible upstream docs.
|
| It's an accessibility nightmare.
|
| You end up with millions of inefficient and insular tidbits whose
| sum is somehow less than the whole. It's designed to make users
| dependent, rather than free them.
|
| It feels like there was a time where SO could have become more.
| But doing so would have lessened use reliance on SO, and required
| answerers to improve upstream docs. They chose to be self
| contained and derivative, rather than transformative to upstream
| projects.
|
| It will be dismantled.
|
| Now SO has so much entropy that it's only good for AI
| reprocessing into docs for upstream projects.
|
| Thankfully much of SO knowledge is now bundled into LLMs. So
| getting actually legible docs is usually as easy as pasting the
| project docs and asking for an organized and straightforward
| docs.
|
| The challenge I see is closing the loop and ensuring upstream
| docs improve. The culture of inaccessibility is too entrenched
| for SO to do this - the org's revenues would have to collapse.
| But AI can work to the advantage of an accessibility focused
| upstart. They can liberate, mobilize and reintegrate the captive
| knowledge of the SO corpus. They can push it back into open
| source project docs.
|
| And in cases where upstream prefers bad docs? The upstart should
| fork the project and take responsibility for project
| accessibility.
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