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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#181

Post by aeturnum »

I haven't exactly had "bad" experiences on SO - but I do feel like it's generally a waste of time to ask questions on it. Basically - SO is very good at general knowledge questions (kinda ChatGPT territory) but bad at corner cases. A good example was this fiddly CSS / font question I had that had some constraints from a static site generator where you could inject custom CSS[1]. People really wanted me to accept answers that would not work for my constraint set, and I think the implicit answer is that the combination of formatting tools does not support what I want to do, but the whole thing was frustrating.

I mostly think that, once you get to a certain level of proficiency, you're going to lose time on SO rather than gain it. You will spend a lot of time crafting a detailed and clear question that does have an answer - but on balance if you just read the docs / source / whatever you'll get the answer you need faster.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66619732/can-i-write-css...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#182

Post by michaelt »

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.

I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how rarely they provide links to the questions?

If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the primary evidence?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#183

Post by ranting-moth »

Rant: I stopped flagging content on SO when my flags were moderated "unhelpful". They were not, and the content would later be removed or fixed (presumable after others had flagged it).

I do get it that moderating a site like SO is a massive effort. But there needs to be a check on rouge moderators.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#184

Post by autokad »

fishtoaster wrote: post #169
ROTMetro wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-forgotte…

the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#187

Post by revskill »

Seriously i can't register new account on Stackoverflow. There're similar sites.

The bug is simple: You previously registered using gmail.

Now you register new account with same email but with password.

Instead of merging my account as before, they said account exist.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#188

Post by Gud »

fishtoaster wrote: post #169
ROTMetro wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-forgotte…

This was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#189

Post by moremetadata »

arp242 wrote: post #175
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…

One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all. It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was. But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never ver…

I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments to solutions reminded me of this https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#190

Post by m463 »

> It's been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn't closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted for good measure

sigh.

How can these kinds of jarring experiences be eliminated?

This was my experience years and years ago. I think the quote was:

"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"

This just made the site about as interesting as hanging out at the DMV. (actually, the DMV might be more interesting, because it's full of people)

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