Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#11

Post by jjgreen » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

I feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example", presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.

Of course I deleted it. I'll take the issue up with the Clang people directly at some point.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#12

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

andrewfromx wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I reached a similar place with SO a few years ago. These days, I rarely bother to go there, although I don't block it in my search results.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#13

Post by Izkata » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:43 PM UTC

They only gave two examples of their questions that have been closed, and the second one is obviously of a type[0] that hasn't been allowed for over a decade (long before they made their account). Nothing bad sticks out to me from their description of their first example, but the other indicates their understanding isn't as good as they think it is.

[0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on a Q&A site where a single answer gets selected by the asker.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#14

Post by mgkimsal » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #6

uberman wrote: post #3

I enjoy answering questions but like the poster, I kind of hold my breath any time I do. Toxic downvoting is not just a question thing. There are people who will downvote any and every answer even a correct one to a question they feel is unworthy of an answer.

I think a big problem is voters are not shown and verified. If you upvote or downvote a post your id should show and you must provide a reason why the vote.

It might likely need to be an additional thing and phased in.

Current voting can carry on as is, but 'verified voting' would be a secondary mechanism, and... over time people could choose to ignore the non-verified votes, or the non-verified votes could be phased out altogether.

I like the simple up/down vote mechanism, but it definitely seems to be abused, and I would prefer more weight be given to votes with a public reason. Votes without an explanation should end up weighting less.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#15

Post by kstrauser » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#16

Post by RomanPushkin » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached.

I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#17

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #13

They only gave two examples of their questions that have been closed, and the second one is obviously of a type[0] that hasn't been allowed for over a decade (long before they made their account). Nothing bad sticks out to me from their description of their first example, but the other indicates their understanding isn't as good as they think it is. [0] List questions have no single correct answer so don't work on a…

They only gave two examples of their questions

How many examples would they have to post in order for you to be satisfied?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#18

Post by rcfox » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or articles get drowned out.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#19

Post by rurban » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #5

reddit is a lot more frendlier so I'm using SO mostly read only.

Quora is the better variant of SO. Not the toxic cesspool, that SO became.

But same mailinglists are much worse.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#20

Post by mistermann » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

andrewfromx wrote: post #2

[flagged]

As someone who listened to every single Stackoverflow podcast as it was being built, I would love to be a fly on the wall eavesdropping on Jeff and Joel's conversations (preferably with a bit of alcohol in them) about what Stackoverflow has become. Jeff especially was absolutely hardcore on perfection, I can't imagine he wouldn't be freaking out on some level with this nonsense.