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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#291

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

packetslave wrote: post #231
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing. What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture. Marketing is all a…

Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble, break things, troll people, 'shitpost', or some combination of the above." And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."

Thing is, if it weren't for marketing I'm not sure this idea of "spreading filth" would even be much a thing, but marketing is such a social contagion that it has destroyed our ability to relate to people in a way other than as a means to promote something.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#292

Post by romwell »

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…

>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 individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."

Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#293

Post by mdmglr »

arp242 wrote: post #196
mdmglr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps downvotes should not be allowed at all.

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

Well right now on all social networks downvotes are used to silence others and in no way is indicative of quality.

HN seems to due alright. Things people engage with "bubble up".

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#294

Post by philipwhiuk »

stuff4ben wrote: post #125
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.

It's more accurate to think of subreddits as a bunch of kingdoms with an order of succession than parliaments or such like.

Top Mod can remove bottom mod. Not vice versa.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#295

Post by philipwhiuk »

m463 wrote: post #190

> 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 questio…

It's a Q&A site, not a meet-and-greet.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#296

Post by bityard »

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'.

By contrast, Reddit is the exact opposite... Most subreddits that I read get several posts each day that could be answered in a heartbeat just by searching existing discussions or looking at the first result in Google. But most mods, in an (understandable) effort to be newbie-friendly, accept this as the cost of running a subreddit. As a result, most subreddits on some technical topic, are mainly populated by and useful to newbies.

It would be nice if there was some place on the Internet that tried to strike a middle ground.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#297

Post by labrador »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #294
stuff4ben wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more accurate to think of subreddits as a bunch of kingdoms with an order of succession than parliaments or such like. Top Mod can remove bottom mod. Not vice versa.

> bunch of kingdoms

Funny that many of the sidebar rules read like decrees from a King

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#298

Post by shagie »

metabagel wrote: post #268
shagie wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you asked for was https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/60824493/1 which finished with: > I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction. And then in a comment: > @Lukas, I had seen your solution, but you didn't actually explain the syntax, and I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I tried again today, and I think I have something which appears to be working, although I still don't understan…

> I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction. This is standard polite phrasing indicating that I would be happy with any response, regardless of how minimal. I wasn't asking for a tutorial. I don't recall SO requesting me to strip out polite extraneous wording when I made my submission, but perhaps I missed it? Lukas' solution didn't answer my question. So, yeah, there's going to be back-…

You got a response - that the problem that you have is the same underlying problem as "Unwrap inner type when enum variant is known" (and two other options).

Your edit suggests that it did solve the problem, though it didn't answer the "I don't understand" aspect of the question.

If the solutions given in the linked duplicates didn't work, then specifically applying and showing how they didn't work would be the next step.

> Edit: Based on @Lukas solution, the following seems to compile, but I don't yet know whether it is doing what I want.

Stack Overflow itself is poorly suited for the "explain" type questions - especially if it is going to involve back and forth. The comments are intentionally poorly designed for that. The thing that SO comments are trying to avoid is the forum like "the real answer is buried deeply on page 10 of 15 of 30 comments per page on a phpforum". If the understanding is only uncovered after 50 back and forth comments, then the question and answer themselves are a poor fit for SO.

If you are after that type of interaction and a "here is the answer" isn't going to suffice then other formats may be better for your question. The corresponding difficulty is that Stack Overflow's framework can't be made to handle everything well. It handles Q&A well and doesn't try to handle conversations well.

Your question was marked as a dup because the solution that you are after is in those other Q&A sets.

If you need back and forth of explaining the syntax then /r/rust may be better. Alternatively, if you have something that works, get it reviewed on https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rust or if you are after a more real time back and forth conversation, https://discord.gg/rust-lang

You will note that if you are trying to find an existing match to your problem, /r/rust and discord are poorly searchable and you might have to scroll through a bunch of comments to try to get the context around the problem... and that is what SO tries to solve.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#299

Post by Laaas »

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...

Is SO really the best place for asking the most basic questions when it is covered in almost all basic documentation?

Searching "rust enum" gives me https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/custom_types/enum.... immediately.

Perhaps it is worth it to put it on SO, but it's akin to asking "how do I access the field of an object in JS".

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#300

Post by Quarrelsome »

kapep wrote: post #273
Quarrelsome wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 answe…

Using quirky metaphors and swearing can be problematic for people who aren't fluent in english though. I think the removal of all greeting lines and thank you comments is a bit over the top, but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.

quirky metaphors and swearing are about top answers I've crafted to existing questions that editors are slowly blandifying until its no longer my contribution anymore. The English is about people phrasing questions poorly and the mods immediately closing them, while muggins here has crafted a detailed three paragraph answer that now has nowhere to go.

> but generally pushing a consistent, impersonal scientific writing style does help a lot to make SO more accessible.

I mean you can argue that, but I think you can also argue that the dictionary is a difficult read sometimes, in spite of its existing style.

Point is the founders made a choice and it was a choice that pissed some people off, so I'm answering the "I don't have a problem with SO" comment to point out that I did because their choices made me dislike contributing.

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