Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 304 posts

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#171

Post by anexprogrammer »

jerf wrote: post #81
reitanqild wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > 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. People keep saying that and I keep wo…

"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on." It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally th…

That was far more the nature of Google at the time though. ie effectively broken.

The years immediately pre-SO were the height of the 5 page adsense spam site. Put anything into google and you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#172

Post by bsder »

The bigger problem I have with SO is that it's answers are static--they are stuck in amber for eternity.

This is not fine for something like Rust which has changed significantly within the last year or two. Many of the highest voted answers are now WRONG, but there is no way to dislodge them.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#173

Post by ourmandave »

makecheck wrote: post #59

While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects. Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small poin…

There's a lot of people that don't care about points or badges.

They like to answer questions for the challenge or to learn the language themselves.

And they are being actively discouraged.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#174

Post by gotofritz »

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #170
gotofritz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you are on about. I am not pissed off with SO, nor do I know anyone who is, and I certainly have no intention to go somewhere else, especially since there is no saying the same problems will not occur there

Some people in this thread are saying SO's issues are inevitable in a community of that scale, but is it really true? Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?

I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#175

Post by sklivvz1971 »

user5994461 wrote: post #167
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: 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…

> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevent…

> How do you intend to prevent that?

Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval).

If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#176

Post by rodgerd »

vram22 wrote: post #145
rodgerd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying You certainly never visited c.l.p.m back in the day, or you'd know exactly how bad the alternative could get. I wonder how many people Abigail alone drove away from perl?

Who was Abigail? and is c.l.p.m the perl.misc newsgroup?

Yes, and Abigail was one of the more notorious posters for terrorising people with what she considered to be "wrong" lines of discussion.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#177

Post by shagie »

exstudent2 wrote: post #117
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means. This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro... Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.

First of all, if someone wants to answer that, more power to them. I'm talking about stuff like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/378959/is-there-a-static-... Good work closing that one! > Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting. You don't know who I am so I'm not sure why you think I wouldn't know about community management or content generation. I'm simply tell…

The Q&A format poorly handles the ever growing list of libraries that can do something. A wiki format is better for that. Maybe the documentation / examples that exists now. But sifting through dozens (this was closed before it got there) answers is more noise than signal. People aren't bothered to curate and clean old broken answers in such a format. Try slant.co for such a question instead.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#178

Post by wruza »

mekoka wrote: post #158
vram22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>help vampires What is that?

People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how the…

SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the community, force newcomers to think The Right Way.

SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#179

Post by pbhjpbhj »

grecy wrote: post #42
Latty wrote: post #3

People 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.

The biggest problem for me is which SO site to search. If I've a problem with a bit of bash script to control KDE on Ubuntu then is that Superuser, Unix, SO, AskUbuntu, or ... I don't understand why the site is split up in that manner.

So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search.

Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexchange - searching at AskUbuntu (I use Ubuntu with KDE on top) will return zero results and won't even suggest results from other SO sites. SO itself has the best result but seems the least appropriate of the silos to place that search in.

Then there's having to register at each of the different sites on the network. The siloing of the site is PITA IMO. The only reason to do it this way I can think of is to separate computing resources, it seems there are probably better ways around that issue too? Why not a unified site with hierarchical tags such that you can choose a tag as a preferential search term?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#180

Post by oliwarner »

hellofunk wrote: post #162

A bizarre problem I have had on SO is that, after years of gaining reputation into the 5 digits, now if I ask a question on a topic that is new to me, I often get the response that I should know better if I have a high reputation. It's weird. If I have my colleague ask the same question, a guy with much less reputation, the answers are helpful. It's as if the quality of the question is judged by how much the asker mu…

Never feel afraid to take people to task for stupid comments, if only to point out that their comment only managed to waste both your time.

I completely agree with you though. I find I have to be very defensive with my question asking these days. I spend time explaining what I've searched for. You still get people telling you it's so obvious a monkey could have found it, but there's generally less talk of me being lazy. Just stupid.

FWIW I'm a moderator on another big SE site and I try to put those sorts of people in their place. It's completely counter productive to be so combative with question-askers... But some people just want to moan.

Post reply on HN