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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

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Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#101

Post by speed_spread »

jasfi wrote: post #86
moomoo11 wrote: post #85

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…

One of the reasons ChatGPT is so refreshing is the lack of toxic replies.

ChatGPT may not feel outright toxic but easily devolves into a buttheaded condescending nanny if you try to push some of it's "moral" boundaries. I tried to have it help me come up with ideas for a programming language that would be used to spite employers and or coworkers. Boy did I get a lesson about my negative attitude.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#102

Post by pflenker »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #82
pflenker wrote: post #47

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…

Discord and slack and other chat platforms are horrible knowledge repositories. They're not indexed by search engines, there's really no archiving ability, searching them for anything sucks, there's no linking and horrible for long form content and lacking useful formatting.

True, though it aims to cater the use case for „I need support now“ and not for „I want to archive this question and its solution“.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#103

Post by matrix_overload »

moomoo11 wrote: post #85

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…

Human society 101: moderation is work, like any other. And if you are not paying your moderators to do the job (like on HN), you will quickly find that it once the initial wave of idealists fades out, it will attract people who get "paid" by having petty power over others. The kind of people we call "toxic assholes". Then your platform will die and the cycle will repeat.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#104

Post by MuffinFlavored »

moomoo11 wrote: post #85

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…

> I haven’t asked question in a long time

By design I literally can't add comments/engage in conversation. I need 50 reputation on each individual StackOverflow sites.

https://stackexchange.com/sites

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#105

Post by arp242 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #104
moomoo11 wrote: post #85

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…

> I haven’t asked question in a long time By design I literally can't add comments/engage in conversation. I need 50 reputation on each individual StackOverflow sites. https://stackexchange.com/sites

Once you have 200 reputation on at least one site you get a 100 point bonus when joining a new site.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#106

Post by unsupp0rted »

mort96 wrote: post #94
jasfi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons ChatGPT is so refreshing is the lack of toxic replies.

One of the reasons it's useless is that if there's no way to do exactly what you're asking, ChatGPT will just invent a way. I've wasted a bunch of time trying to find docs for functions ChatGPT claims exist, only to conclude that it made them up. ChatGPT is like a smart human inventing a hypothetical API which would solve your problem. A service like StackOverflow has people who are actually familiar with what actual…

It’s like when you go looking for an answer in GitHub’s issues discussion, and while scanning down you see a code snippet with a perfectFunctionForThis()… only to realize a few moments (or longer) later the commenter is suggesting it would be nice if this function existed and if this pattern could work.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#107

Post by bombcar »

mort96 wrote: post #93
moomoo11 wrote: post #85

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…

Plus, all the highly rated, high SEO answers are ancient at this point. It's hard to find anything relevant to tech from this decade.

And any attempt to ask a question about modern tech gets closed as being a duplicate of some tangentially related question asked about perl 2.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#108

Post by bombcar »

bastawhiz wrote: post #88

I have a fair number of points on SO from asking and answering some common (and esoteric) questions. But I stopped, as a lot of folks don't mark answers as correct, so good answers don't get highlighted. Why give good advice if it's not marked as such? 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 ha…

I have a suspicion that there are coding bootcamps or whatever that tell their students to do these things, as I've noticed multiple users doing basically the same (apparently point farming) thing.

Gamification works until it gets gamed.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#109

Post by bombcar »

eterm wrote: post #98
ilaksh wrote: post #89

I stopped participating because I found that I usually was insulted somehow or my answer was not credited. 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…

As someone who has sometimes left a comment instead of an answer, it's because I too am scared that if I try to answer with an actual answer it'll just get downvoted / moderated away, so rather than "risk" a lot of karma in leaving an actual answer, I'll answer in the comments because it's less likely to recieve negative attention. It's sadly working around the negativity and toxicity of the site and the people who t…

The correct answer is ALWAYS in a comment to the (often marked) wrong answer with the most upvotes.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#110

Post by bombcar »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #92

I never really used stackoverflow. The rare times I do use it, i.e. google leads me to it, a large portion of the posts really annoy the hell out of me. I don't care if someone tries to solve the "wrong" problem, or however stupid "highly valued" users on that platform try to frame it. I don't care about similar questions, redundancy, frameworks, wrong usages of languages and quirks. I don't want to search around fin…

The only thing that introduces a similar level of rage in me is when something ends up on Microsoft's forum, the "marked correct" answer is always some variation of "did you turn it back off and on" that never has any replies or relevance.
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