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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#191

Post by jjoonathan »

the8472 wrote: post #162
_fat_santa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#192

Post by noodles_nomore »

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…

It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#193

Post by watwut »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #167
nextaccountic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But the stated goal is consistent with actual behavior in case of SO.

Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#194

Post by politician »

(Programming) SO is done, and should be dismantled. Its historical answers have been indexed into GPT, and the recent content circa 10 years ago and since has been this constant fight against moderators.

I’ve had the same experience as the author, but haven’t blocked it from my hosts file. I think that I will.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#195

Post by stevenhuang »

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…

I find those who bash SO to be either help vampires or generally using the site wrong (asking an opinion based question, asking newbie questions without searching or not knowing how to form the right search queries, ...)

Inevitably when their questions get moderated they'll feel personally slighted without dispassionate consideration of the situation (because why would they; they have a question and they want the answer NOW), thus to them SO is now "toxic".

Many just don't have the right mindset for SO, it's unfortunate.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#196

Post by arp242 »

mdmglr wrote: post #34
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big problem is voters are not shown and verified. If you upvote or downvote a post your id should show and you must provide a reason why the vote.

Perhaps downvotes should not be allowed at all.

How would you distinguish between "poor quality" and "just hasn't been viewed by many"?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#197

Post by ranting-moth »

My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer.

I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar pit. But sometimes there aren't that many options. You get 5 different opinions and you pick the best one for yourself.

I've sometimes thought there would be a place for a "Stack overflow overflow" site - banned on SO but allowed on SOO.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#198

Post by ryandrake »

tsgagnon wrote: post #60
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. The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers. My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle g…

SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#199

Post by stuartd »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #192
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…

It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup , not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works rema…

> What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation

They tried. It didn’t work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#200

Post by [deleted] »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #171
Someone1234 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO is stagnant directly due to this policy. Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful. SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out…

It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)

[deleted]
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