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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#81

Post by labrador »

I recently silently rage quit a subreddit because it got a new moderator who is not very bright and deletes my posts as being off topic when I'm clearly on topic to anyone with a greater than room temperature IQ. I quit after several months of getting my posts deleted. I remind myself they do it for free, which was why I was silent in my quitting. The article isn't about AI writing code instead of using SO, but a follow up will probably be forthcoming.

Moderators: Can't live with them, can't live without them.

Edit: Note to moderators: If a post has garnered several thousands of up votes overnight don't come along a say it's not a good post in the morning when you wake up. You don't know more than thousands of people who have invested a lot of time in knowing their subject.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#82

Post by shanebellone »

"Stack Overflow is a toxic cesspool that is utterly useless outside of historical answers. That begs the question, what fills the void? It seems like Reddit, mostly."

The irony is too much. Reddit is wildly toxic. Though, there are a few good communities. With that being said, SO isn't super useful when languages like Python have awesome documentation.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#83

Post by LastTrain »

fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

If that is true, wouldn’t it be more effective to use noindex so as not to curtail interaction with the site?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#84

Post by anderspitman »

I think it's highly dependent on the individuals in the various programming language communities on SO. I've found answers to my Rust questions to be very helpful and welcoming, while I'm not sure I've ever managed to avoid a Golang question being downvoted (disclaimer: I write far more Go than Rust). Most languages are somewhere in the middle in my experience, with the default being not getting an answer at all.

That said, as a search resource for common problems SO is invaluable.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#85

Post by mellosouls »

Unfortunately this doesn't really have much to do with StackOverflow, beyond it having the success that gives it

a) A large community.

b) Unpaid moderators who include people and cliques who feel self-worth in gatekeeping and other forms of "power".

It's always been this way in most fora; the more success, the larger the community, with a corresponding increase in inappropriate moderation.

See also, Wikipedia, Reddit, everywhere else of this ilk.

HN's acclaimed moderation - apart from being in a much smaller community, doesn't fit that model at all; perhaps it's not scalable though.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#86

Post by Aperocky »

silversmith wrote: post #74
Aperocky wrote: post #55

I wonder if the amount of reputation had an outsized effect. I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K). I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more of that to offset the overzealous folks if I…

Counter-ancedote: my 13 year old, 9K rep account gets the same treatment as original poster. I've given up on participating (after latest and particularly upsetting episode of "question not good enough"), and use the site only through google. Shame, it used to be easy access to expertise.

Interesting, can you reopen your own questions?

I'm quite OK with duplicate close if the reference actually solved my issue. But I've never had a question outright closed on me, I'd be fuming.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#87

Post by indirecTid »

phpisthebest wrote: post #53
dietrichepp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers. The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted. The editor argued with me and linked to…

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#88

Post by nmilo »

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered my stupid questions from years ago like "why does my program crash when I put a 1MB object on the stack" and "please make this CMake setup work for me," and if they didn't, they point me to a duplicate question that does. Just set aside your ego, fuck karma, and you'll be fine. I really don't see how people can find this site toxic.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#89

Post by at-fates-hands »

I haven't used SO for about 4-5 years now.

In the past, it was the first place I'd go. The last few questions I asked were downvoted and closed or told to reference answers from another question that didn't have anything to do with what I was asking for. I just gave up on it being a useful resource when I got stumped as a developer based on the last few questions I asked.

The last few years I've gotten better answers from Reddit, Discord and various forums I visit from time to time. I've even started using ChatGPT to get answers which has worked surprisingly well.

I don't want to say its outlived its usefulness, but even the small dev circles I run in, none of those people have used it in a while either.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#90

Post by stuff4ben »

BeetleB wrote: post #56
kstrauser wrote: post #15

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?"

I'm not sure what your problem with downvoting is. It's not an attack on you, but to let other readers know that your solution is not the best solution. It may have been so in 2011, but readers like me don't want to be led astray if it is no longer a good solution. Likewise for their comments.

But then you lose the ability to participate in the community because of your "reputation".
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