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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

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Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#111

Post by arp242 »

pflenker wrote: post #102
PenguinCoder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“.

Stack Overflow was never intended as "I need support now". A significant amount of friction comes from people using it as such, misunderstanding what the site's purpose is. This is understandable, because it's not easy to explain and the on-boarding experience doesn't help with it either.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#112

Post by arp242 »

everyone wrote: post #42

That makes sense as the site is almost useless now. It's been entirely taken over by people who do nothing but farm karma. The current situation... If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality.. If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuance…

Stack Overflow was never intended for "noob who's learning". It's not a free tutoring service.

If your question is hard or highly specific then you're indeed less likely to get a lot of responses, because, well, your question is hard or highly specific. People on Stack Overflow are not omniscient.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#113

Post by devman0 »

arp242 wrote: post #111
pflenker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“.

Stack Overflow was never intended as "I need support now". A significant amount of friction comes from people using it as such, misunderstanding what the site's purpose is. This is understandable, because it's not easy to explain and the on-boarding experience doesn't help with it either.

There are a bunch of people in this comment section asking for StackOverflow to be things that are clearly non-goals for the platform. SO certainly has it's problems but users coming and posting without understanding what the platform is supposed to be for is a significant contributor frustration among users new and tenured.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#114

Post by whoami_nr »

I genuinely think code snippets as a "thing" is going to die. I just wrote a web scrapper while knowing absolutely nothing about the language or the syntax of the library by just asking GPT and feeding back the errors the interpreter was throwing back. FWIW, I was writing a scrapper to compile all PG essays into a txt file to train GPT. I still don't know the syntax of Beautiful soup or the nuances of Python. But I got a working snippet which I can use for training nanogpt based on Karpathy's videos.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#115

Post by FeistySkink »

matrix_overload wrote: post #103
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.

So you're saying we should clone dang?

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#116

Post by the_only_law »

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…

I quit because my questions just weren’t getting any answers anymore. As much as they love to complain about people asking questions that could be solved with a google search, they’ve failed me pretty hard when google has already failed me as well.

There are other SE sites I still like though. I tend to have an interesting time on the retrocomputing SE site, for example.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#117

Post by noodleman »

bombcar wrote: post #110
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.

Maybe I'm making it up, but I swear I've read somewhere that the answers are shit on purpose so you to go to their paid support.

Sounds Microsoftian enough to be plausible.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#118

Post by Ghoyome »

A workflow like this:

RTM -> SO question (not found) -> IRC/Discord -> post question on SO.

As opposed to this:

LLM -> RTM -> SO (maybe post a question)

Simply has SO earlier in the pipeline. The later does not render it obsolete (yet?) from what I can tell.

If a simple annotation to how the LLM got the answer is deployed I think that is where SO will be visited only to ask questions rather than find an answer (still not obsolete).

P.S. this is speculative at best at this stage. SO can be rendered obsolete by some hidden side effect of LLMs/search engines

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#119

Post by listenallyall »

robocat wrote: post #62

Aside: earned reputation seems to last forever. I got to top 10% about ten years ago, mostly through basic questions and answers that you could easily do when StackOverflow started. I haven’t touched my account in years, and I am now in top 8% with about 5000 reputation, because old questions and answers keep getting upvotes. I would think few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation, so wh…

This isn't an aside, you identified the main point. You're entirely correct, all rep lasts forever, further, all the easiest "deposits" have long ago been mined. Early adopters like yourself answered basic, universal questions and earned thousands of points, some tens or hundred of thousands, for providing knowledge that was easy to find or that almost any programmer already knows.

2 things: earning points is exponentially more difficult today, you have to answer quite specific, detailed, niche questions -- and are rewarded with just one, or a a handful of points. Very unlikely you'll get hundreds of thousands.

> few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation

Totally correct. After 15 years, people have realized the points don't have any value. It was fun and cool for a while but at this point, who cares? Would you ever put your SO point balance on a resume? There's simply no benefit, and it's much harder to earn, so why waste your time?

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#120

Post by greazy »

bombcar wrote: post #108
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.

I find the gamification on SO overwhelming. So many badges and stars and points for things I don't really understand because I haven't investigated.

Badges are dumb.

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