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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#102
post #77

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.

I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments. Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped. I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, b…

You've struck at a the heart of the matter - in the glory days there were so many people involved that a few "TLDR" questions (or answers) wasn't a problem, but as the quality of the questions goes down, the discouragement for the answerers goes up, until you have a wasteland populated by "how do I make the cupholder come back out of the computer" questions and rabid answer zombies searching for another good question to chew on (and being perpetually disappointed).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#104
I haven't used SO for anything other than a read-only reference for probably over a decade at this point. It's always seemed incredibly hostile to me. But it's also about the only place you can find the answers to esoteric programming questions, especially specific error messages, so I keep clicking the links if they come up in a google search. But if I could do my job without using it, I would.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a GPT summary?

I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary? I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!

I think we need sort of an etiquette code to disclose when a piece of text is AI-generated. Like when we say "Full Disclosure" or "IANAL"

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#106

soon maybe the same will be said to reddit?

Unlikely. Reddit has subreddit built right into the ecosystem, so if r/developersneedanswerstotoughcodingquestions gets taken over by an SO style mod mob, you can just go start r/fucktheolddeveloperreddit and the cycle will start new.

Reddit has a lot of flaws, but stagnation isn't exactly one of them

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#107
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit. That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.

more and more you have to treat "reddit" as if it were an "internet" and have a separate account for every subreddit or group thereof.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did roll back, and the user started an edit war with me and I flagged it for moderator intervention. I didn’t see a response from a diamond mod.

You usually won't see a response, the moderator will either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.

Interesting. I dug through my inbox and was able to find the answer, and evidence of the edit war itself is gone, except for the actual edit history. The comments have been removed. (Good riddance, but the process is less transparent for me.)

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#109
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit. That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.

And yea, that's why read-only on reddit this days and feel no desire to contribute.

I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that work".

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#110

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.

14 years, 5 months, 71 answers, 7 questions, ~5.6m people reached. Top 10% reputation overall.

The toxicity started before it was even out of beta. I was fairly vocal early on about how certain attitudes were not conducive to community.

And here we are.

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