Most of my questions on SO have wrong answers, didnt-read-the-question answers, no answers, my self answer, or "hey did you ever figure it out?"
Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
311–320 of 352 posts
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#312Someone 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…
That’s not really fair. The UX of the site is actually very persistent in reminding you how to post a good question and listing suggested duplicates. When posting questions with low reputation you can’t bypass these reminders without clicking accept several times.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before you can ask your first question you're shown https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing. Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more in…
I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site. To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the sit…
I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#314[dead]
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#315The javascript and CSS community on Stack Overflow has always been toxic, interesting to see that its overflowed to being useless now.
Other programming languages on the main Stack Overflow are much more collaborative. But if you ever get into a new niche, you never know what will happen.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.
They didn't answer my question, so I don't regard them as dupes. I had my question answered in Discord or IRC somewhere, I forget exactly where.
I would say based on the linked conversation that they linked answers do answer your question. Or at least, from an outsider perspective, they should have allowed you to reach a workable solution (though maybe without directly answering you actual question).
I've had similar questions where I'm told it's a duplicate or that the error message says exactly what the problem is, but I'm just so uncomfortable in the language that I can't recognize it. It feels really bad when people roll their eyes and link you (or tell you to go back to the documentation, which is the ultimate "fuck you" from someone you've asked for help) to something that you also don't quite understand. If I "got" it I wouldn't be here asking this question.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#317I 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.
I’ve found the criticisms regarding accuracy to be curious, not only for the reason you mention, but also because the apples-to-apples comparison isn’t ChatGPT vs Google so much as it’s ChatGPT vs an expert working on a test in a faraday cage with no substantial penalty for wrong answers.
With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that. But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.
The issue of "hoping for an answer back" is because too many people have questions and it has scaled poorly over the years. https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day). The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when…
Its really nice to see the community numbers declining, I think that another site that encourages engagement rather than whatever stackoverflow is now can flourish.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#319I 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 q…
By quality they simply mean lack of 'conflicting information' not 'correct information'.
Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
#320Do 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…
> The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma.
For trivial questions/broad categories maybe. Ive asked a question 8 months ago for a very specific issue and it has nearly 50 views and no comments other than mine itself when i thought i found solution.