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Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

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Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#41

Post by Netcob »

dd_roger wrote: post #22

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

My experiences with Stack Overflow until recently:

- Using it as a useful resource for small issues

- Seeing memes about how programmers essentially just copy/paste code from Stack Overflow all day long

- Reading comments about how Stack Overflow is severely outdated and any question will be shut down immediately

And then I had an issue with library A which was using library B but had a small inconsistency in how it used it that made my use case very difficult. So I posted a question. The developer of library B appeared, agreeing that it's a problem. Followed by the developer of library A, who agreed as well and said the fix would be in the next release. 2-3 days later, my bug was fixed by updating library A.

With a sample of one, that doesn't really say anything, my view of that website is a bit biased now.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#42

Post by bena »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #33

Funny enough, the inception of stack overflow was because another Q&A site called "Experts exchange" suddenly put up a paywall.

They had had a paywall for a while. They just had a bunch of bad answers and no way to judge whether the given answers were actually useful or not.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#43

Post by ksm1717 »

fiftyacorn wrote: post #6

I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway

It would be nice if those blog posts were as easily aggregated as stack. I know many have tried to solve the problem, but it always feels like great luck when I find a good blog post

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#44

Post by rovr138 »

ArtWomb wrote: post #39
nonameiguess wrote: post #8

The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirr…

>>> The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow I feel this is a prudent idea. Not necessarily for a full blown start-up, but a community-funded resource. If you stripped out all the extras. And just cloned the questions and top 2 answers. The text based data set itself is very managable. Several gigabytes in scale. Not to mention its applicability for ML/NLP/codegen research ;)

Maybe you can use their dataset, https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stackoverflow

Source is here, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#45

Post by gpanders »

herodoturtle wrote: post #14

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days. I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A s…

IRC is the first place I go if I can’t find an answer in the documentation or a search engine. If that doesn’t work, I’ll turn to a mailing list.

Personally, I find both of these options have less friction than starting a new question on SO.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#46

Post by ajfjrbfbf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #31
svara wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere , but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online. See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you wou…

Yeah, that's the kind of answer that you don't get anymore on SO, mostly because that kind of question isn't allowed anymore. Nowadays questions must be much more specific, what has the consequence that the answers are much less generally useful.

There are less and less general questions because most of them have been answered already. If I see a question like that either I give a link to the docs or mark as duplicate. There's no point in writing such long answers if the information already exists somewhere else.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#47

Post by rovr138 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #34
svara wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere , but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online. See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you wou…

Some StackOverflow answers are so bad they are the worst resource on a topic.

Some are. That’s where you downvote or report it (depending on what’s ‘bad’)

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#48

Post by knighthack »

CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a pers…

Completely disagree, and you're wrong.

Depending on the area you're looking into:

1. Many Stack Overflow answers do not exist in documentation at all.

2. Some answers are especially valuable because they touch issues in actual production (which are not foreseeable by documentation).

3. Answers (chronologically given) help ongoing document changes in APIs, which many documentation don't do or make it very difficult to do.

Take Python's Tkinter for instance - a lot of answers in in Stack Overflow supplement many things not covered by the official documentation. You'd either have to look at Tcl's documentation (but have no idea where to look, or how to read it), or figure out the source code yourself which will be confusing since the official documentation does not actually document every part of the library that it's sourced/ported from even though they exist for use.

4. SO answers often point you in the right direction, or to third party explanations and sources, and often compare between different semantic versions. (E.g. answers for D3 in JS often compare changes between APIs in the different versions 4, 5 and 6.) While official documentation sometimes chronicle their API changes, comparative usages/change in idiomatic usages are not always elucidated and it is in Stack Overflow that many of those are found.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#49

Post by robntheh00d »

If it’s that important to daily work it sounds like there’s a fundamental issues with documentation, training, and education in the world of software development.

Federated messaging seems popular these days. Maybe federated documentation is a good idea?

Perhaps git could be leveraged to distribute docs, examples, and questions?

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#50

Post by herodoturtle »

gpanders wrote: post #45
herodoturtle wrote: post #14

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days. I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A s…

IRC is the first place I go if I can’t find an answer in the documentation or a search engine. If that doesn’t work, I’ll turn to a mailing list. Personally, I find both of these options have less friction than starting a new question on SO.

100% agreed.

I also just simply enjoy lurking on IRC to assist other programmers in need. I learnt so much in those channels when first starting out, and these days I have a bit more spare time, so I enjoy "paying it forward" by helping others much like I was helped back in the day.

Plus there are a bunch of really nice programmers hanging out there, so there's a social aspect to it as well.

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