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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#281

Post by DelightOne »

svachalek wrote: post #166
DelightOne wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Something like that. Especially when the Chatbot then corrects the small usual mistakes it already knows by itself (as ChatGPT can).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#282

Post by jjgreen »

Izkata wrote: post #248
jjgreen wrote: post #11

I feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example", presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed. Of course I deleted it. I'll…

> As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed. > Of course I deleted it. It was closed to prevent guesses from being posted as answers while you worked on the minimal example, if you'd just edited it in the question would've been put into the reopen queue.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm not spending my time working on a closed question.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#283

Post by everyone »

When is someone gonna make a new similar site without the crippling modern SO problems? I know similar sites exist, but they seem to have a tiny fraction of the users and not much activity. SO badly needs a successor everyone currently on SO can move over to.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#284

Post by kerkeslager »

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 just the deletionists vs. inclusionists debate from Wikipedia in the 90s/00s. The deletionists are still winning and the deletionists are still wrong.

The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly.

My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#285

Post by mise_en_place »

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…

People like to point out how incorrect ChatGPT or Copilot are, but in recent memory, SO has just been plain wrong for certain questions.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#286

Post by nullc »

ChickenNugger wrote: post #279
bombcar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Careful. I did this more or less by accident, with a main account, a porn account, and a goof off account. I didn't maintain a list of which ones had been banned from where and there were subscription overlaps. One morning all of them - including the one that was 9 years old and had awards from participating in the first ever reddit gifts - got banned for "ban evasion". Now I just make a new one every few months and…

meanwhile, there are tons of people who are relentlessly ban evading, posting threats and harassing material where reddit won't do anything about about.

Worst of all worlds.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#287

Post by everyone »

I have had the same experience with programming SO. Anything you ask no matter how specific, novel, and well researched and written just gets insta-downvoted. And there are people who dont seem to know anything about your question's topic just spamming useless answers all day.

I posted a question on physics SO recently though.. and it wasnt a good question. It was a complete noob question, but the thread it spawned was amazing, and my question was answered incredibly satisfactorily in multiple ways.. I even gained karma by asking the question.

The difference is shocking.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#288

Post by nmilo »

metabagel wrote: post #206
stevenhuang wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ans…

Well, here is my question which was marked as a duplicate. I'll never make the mistake of posting a question to SO again. Total waste of my time. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...

... that's because it is a duplicate. If you have a SocketAddr, and you want to access the SocketAddrV6 variant, remembering that you may also have a SocketAddrV4, you need an if let:

    if let V6(sock6) = addr {
         // use sock6: SocketAddrV6
    }
The first-linked duplicate answer will answer your question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9109872/how-do-you-acces...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#289

Post by zerocrates »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212
michaelt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prima…

Ask, and ye shall receive: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968

I don't see what's not to like about the interaction on that URL scheme question (apart from the close vote), it looks like you got a perfectly good answer in 10 minutes.

Am I just missing the condescension here? Maybe something that's been removed or I'm not looking in the right place?

SO definitely has issues but I just don't see it on this one.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#290

Post by eYrKEC2 »

wendyshu wrote: post #247
exabrial wrote: post #241

What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and attributing it to me. For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they locked the post. So yeah, desp…

That sentence is redundant noise on the page. Show your appreciation by upvoting answers instead.

Being polite is "noise" in the real world too. It just so happens that the noise serves to lubricate the interactions of humans by adding the frills of niceness and respect.
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