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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#161

Post by fishtoaster »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #52
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…

You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?

What makes you think I agree? I certainly am saying what the SO owners have said. I'm repeating it here because I think it's a useful way to understand why SO is the way it is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead, optimizing around a different goal entirely.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#162

Post by the8472 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #92
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…

> 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." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And whil…

> no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".

I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#163

Post by Quarrelsome »

nmilo wrote: post #88

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 m…

25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians got out of control and it no longer was about helping people but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge where most users started to be categorised as problematic to that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at expressing themselves in English.

Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answers over time (not only swearing but also quirky phrasing or choice of metaphor), librarians would close discussion topics that were useful (e.g. what's a good tech choice for this usecase today?"), or librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking (e.g. poor English).

Since the days of newsgroups I was seeking a place to pay off the knowledge debt I'd obtained through the glorious advice that luminaries such as Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino had given me in the past. SO stopped being that place after all the basic questions had already been asked. There was a kindness and endless patience that the newsgroups programming crowd had, that I feel like we lost with the SO librarians.

I appreciate that I had a different perspective on what I wanted SO to be than the founders but I really perceived the frustration new users had with the approach to moderation and it made me upset to the point of not wanting to use it anymore.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#164

Post by artificial »

_fat_santa wrote: post #92
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…

> 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." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And whil…

Where’s your preferred JS forum?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#165

Post by heisenbit »

digianarchist wrote: post #40
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.

Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website. The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.

I posted a story which provided unique background from a reputed web site on staffing decisions in one political party. It got pulled with two formal reasons both obviously wrong e.g. me having headline edited which was not the case and it also did not change in between. I took it up and wrote a polite request even providing reasoning why it was a good fit (which was not the reason it was pulled). Next thing happened was a two word message: "off topic"..

I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories are just small stories with only little life in them. Why squash them - time will rank them down - so why?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#166

Post by svachalek »

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.

What would be really cool is an AI interview. "So this looks like the same problem, do the answers here help?" "Oh, why not?" "I see, so what else have you tried?" "I see we still haven't resolved the issue, so I'm going to rewrite this discussion in our standard format and post it for our expert community to solve."

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#167

Post by wahnfrieden »

nextaccountic wrote: post #59
wahnfrieden wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?

How can you not agree that the SO goal is to achieve whatever the owners of SO want it to achieve?

I didn’t disagree with the goal. I question the owner’s stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If latter then describing the site that way reads more like an ad. Like taking musk‘s statements on what Twitter is “for” at face value

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#168

Post by DrThunder »

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.

I don't know what kinda person actually considers Reddit a go-to for answers. It's absolutely abysmal for that sort of thing. SO isn't perfect but it's leagues above any subreddit I've ever used. Almost all subreddits succumb to getting too popular (if they're good to start with) and eventually the amount of actual help you get from them becomes exceedingly rare in my experience.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#169

Post by fishtoaster »

ROTMetro wrote: post #120
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…

This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.

I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc).

[0] https://xkcd.com/979/

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#170

Post by AndrewPGameDev »

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 we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on SO is toxic (with regard to that context).
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