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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#121

Post by tbyehl »

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?"

> It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it.

And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.

SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#122

Post by HeavyStorm »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #95
chrisan wrote: post #67

Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good... > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO. > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. Th…

I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct). But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is tha…

That's a GREAT discussion to be had... SO purpose is to be a kind of encyclopedia, so it makes sense to try to categorize duplicates (eventually fading them into obscurity). But is that the best experience for the user? Is it supposed to serve only readers, or those who are actually asking questions?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#123

Post by stuff4ben »

DelightOne wrote: post #37
rcfox wrote: post #18

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.

Those can be answered by ChatGPT. Only question is where to integrate it into peoples' workflows. Maybe into the post-creation interface? Maybe into the SO question-creation dialog.

Interesting... I wonder if this is where knowledge sites gravitate to? Of course if the AI isn't smart enough to answer the question without it's training not having covered it, I'm not sure it would work...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#124

Post by chrisan »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #95
chrisan wrote: post #67

Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good... > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO. > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. Th…

I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct). But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is tha…

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.

You are 100% correct. SO clearly has an issue as this comes up time and time again.

I wonder if a ChatGPT like front for it would serve everyone better?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#125

Post by stuff4ben »

labrador wrote: post #81

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 fol…

That's gotta be frustrating. I'm sure you tried reaching out to other moderators. It's almost like Reddit needs a mod committee for mods so that users can petition their cases.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#126

Post by jotaen »

What I find off-putting about StackOverflow is their crowd-sourced moderation system (which I got access to at some point due to karma threshold). It’s based on pre-categorised moderation queues with flagged submissions that you can (have to) go through, and it’s designed in a way that you mostly choose from a set of pre-fabricated standard responses to “resolve” the issue. The eventual moderation decision is “democratic”, so when 2 or 3 moderators happen to come to the same result independently, then that’s what it is.

To me, that “moderation process” mostly felt like a robotic assembly line which isn’t designed to genuinely help people, but it’s primarily optimised for throughput. The frustration expressed by end-users is a direct consequence of this design that’s not really surprising.

What’s most bizarre is that the system intersperses phony test submissions every once in a while, just to verify whether you as moderator are “doing it right” (or, are still alive, for that matter).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#127

Post by weinzierl »

> "SO was incredible when it came out."

Amen to that.

> "That begs the question, what fills the void?"

ChatGPT or another language model.

StackOverflow started with the vision of not being what made Experts Exchange so terrible - that was a brilliant plan at the time and SO did many things very right.

Now, many years have passed and not only have we seen SO grow into the whole plethora of QA sites that are Stack Exchange but also a couple of other QA sites. None of them are great, none of them are nearly as useful as the original SO was. I think it is save to say, that this approach simply does not scale.

I might be wrong and maybe, some day, someone comes around and nails QA at scale. My bet is that with ChatGPT the humanly curated QA site is as dead in the water as the humanly curated web directories were when Google came around.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#129

Post by cmh89 »

egberts1 wrote: post #115

Meanwhile, Old Reddit was recently shutdown. Do not care for the New Reddit. Goodbye, Reddit. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34885234

I'm pretty sure that was just a technical difficulty. It seems to be up now. New Reddit is straight trash though.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#130

Post by BeetleB »

stuff4ben wrote: post #90
BeetleB wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

From https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation:

> Reputation is entirely optional

> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!

Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.

Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.

At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.

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