81–90 of 196 posts
I have been using less SO over the years, as more and more libraries and even programming languages have their own Discord servers. And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”
StackOverflow originated during a time when finding accurate and up-to-date documentation on the internet was a challenge. Today, however, there is a wealth of easily accessible, hands-on documentation that often includes links to support resources such as Discord. In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the document…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find repo issues generally horrendous to browse/sear h. In particular 'stale issue' bots killing off well written issues with reproduction.
Sorry, tangential rant, but, God I hate stale issue bots. The issue is valid, it's reproduced, it's been discussed, nothing's changed, it hasn't stopped being a valid issue just because it hasn't had activity in 30 days, or 6 months, or a year. Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues. The only way t…
The bot doesn't really change the outcome (if maintainers don't engage, they don't engage), but it a huge bunch of noise.
I have been using less SO over the years, as more and more libraries and even programming languages have their own Discord servers. And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”
I can’t stand these people.
It would be nice if SO would go back to evolving Q&A and stop letting toxic losers become mods.
Imo the high ranking people today on SO are annoying as fuck and on a power trip. I haven’t asked question in a long time and I had a unique situation and asked the question. Within seconds some guy adds some snarky unhelpful and honestly toxic reply and I had to repost my question. I ran a quick survey and found others who have had similar experiences and I feel this is terrible for newbies and even people like me w…
Yes I've switched to chatgpt for all my programming questions nowadays because of many reasons: 1. It understands the versions more clearly, it won't generate the code for Bootstrap 2 when my question is about Bootstrap 5 2. Asking follow up questions is easy. So the code didn't work. I tell it that and instantly it tells me what I need to do to fix it (leave missing config file, etc) or gives me an alternate. 3. Its…
Though to be fair, it's not like Stack Overflow, or even some of the less updated parts of the official documentation, will do any better than ChatGPT, but with ChatGPT you don't get a date on the knowledge and you don't get the comments from other people telling you that it's wrong or outdated. For me personally, there is also some thing about its confidence that makes me "trust" it more than the internet that I've spent 20+ years not trusting. I'm not sure if that's just me or even why that is exactly. I'm fully aware that the language model is basically just the internet, and still I believe it? I'm happy the first thing I asked it was on a subject I knew a lot about so that I could see straight away that its answer was very outdated. Because if it had been on a subject I didn't know much about, I'm not sure I would have even found out its cutoff point was in 2021. I only learned that fact because the answer it suggested was with a library that I knew was abandoned, to which I asked if it knew that, and it told me when it had stopped "learning".
I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question had reworded my answer, removed a ton of context, and in effect, made my answer incorrect.
I immediately changed it back. The person who edited my answer was doing this to farm points. With no understanding of the problem or my solution, they were racking up points simply by "cleaning up" answers.
I'm not going to say that this is killing SO. But it does seem like there are some perverse incentives that make it easy for folks to accrue points without actually being competent. And as long as SO points are considered a sign of competence, people will keep doing it.
If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.
If you give a correct answer but don't include a significant amount of explanation, it will be marked down.
Often times I see perfectly valid questions and people refuse to answer them but will only respond with a comment.
I just wanted to try to help some people. I don't have time to write Wiki articles or deal with assholes who have nothing better to do than to do than try to find fault with a question or answer.
Also, a lot of the time the answer is to use some library or module and you can get attacked for even acknowledging that modules exist.
A lot of answers are now out of date. Some dangerously so. And its not just 'fast moving' languages. Bash, nginx, docker, gcp, bluetooth. Much of the landscape of these tools has changed since say 2015, but that is where most of the 'core' answers are from. Many have notes that they are out of date in sub-comments. But its hard to be noticed against a 700 upvote selected top answer.
They've introduced "Trending (recent votes count more)" sort option recently, but it's not the default (yet?)