No,SO is not declining. All the common questions have already been answered. The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.
So the next step is to add AI to answer duplicates automatically?
The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
41–50 of 304 posts
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#42People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
I agree.
For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years.
Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.
It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success. - The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are st…
What evidence do you have that SO is in decline?
No evidence. Just observation based on unscientific measurements. I could be very much wrong.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many of the useful answers are closed. A lot of the stuff from google etc. are from 2009-2011. It seems like now most of people are a bunch of assholes trying to be elitists.
It's especially irritating when these elitist types clearly don't know as much as they think they do.
seems like a good outlet for nerdy power fantasies.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#45> However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions. With this article, I’m exploring the likely reasons for that very, very low percentage.
This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#46I am not sure why but I am very luck with StackOverflow, almost always. It might be due to the fact that I ask detailed questions that are 99% of the time valid questions and I am using languages that has welcoming nice community and usually not extremely popular so trolling is minimal.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#47I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct. So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth. This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how th…
I think the accepted answer causes a lot of problems, I personally think that after 3-6 months it should no longer pin it as the top answer, votes should. Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.
It has been discussed, and fairly recently: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-...
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#48I'm a top 4% user for the year apparently, I've asked 40 questions & posted 318 answers. SO is a minefield.
It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage, leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#49Let's be honest, Stack Overflow and that network of sites has been in decline for years. Sadly it has turned into a vast and wide content farm and SEO ploy that is full of search spam and and users who copy/paste material from legitimate sources. To top it off, Stack Overflow uses "nofollow" on the outbound links to make sure the true source of material gets no credit in the eyes of Google, Bing, etc. Rinse and repeat for years, and spammers have taken over the asylum, with some trolls for good measure too, and that's unfortunately much of Stack Overflow today.
How did this happen?
In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their primary complaint was about other content farms scraping their content.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google...
http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-tur...
>> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques, so they actually rank higher than us.
>> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?"
>> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of fixing this sort of problem?
>> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be working on that problem that has not been delivering."
Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286
What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-of-search Stack Overflow. For example:
https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-marketing/sear...
>> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.
That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly spammy/promotional posts from around the web.
From the outside looking in, it appears that Stack Overflow has become exactly what they once actively complained about.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#50Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…
Absolutely. On the top of that you have very different communities. If you ask a question about something in OCaml or in Javascript your experience will be very different. The only thing I don't like is the new user questions that cannot be answered, usually down voted very fast though.