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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#331

Post by RugnirViking »

shagie wrote: post #262
mananaysiempre wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you can see it’s a bit fuzzy on what the thing actually is , very possibly because they themselves weren’t quite clear about that. The feel-good wording could sort of be made to fit a forum if they wished, but ultimately they didn’t. (Or possibly the homepage of SO at the time was the place that contained the actual description.)

Part of the difficulty is that Jeff and Joel weren't in agreement for what it should be. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th... Note the first revision and its author https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 Then look at https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (both pages, but the key part is on the most recent one) with the closed, locked, and deleted actions and who did them.…

wow, that question really exemplifies the debate here I think. It's a simple and answerable question, which will be an exremely common question from beginners. And yet it was almost instantly closed despite being posted by one of the founders of the site.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#332

Post by kapep »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #300
kapep wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 writin…

I also think immediate closing is bad because it can waste your time like in your case. Maybe some grace period before closing would help, then closing also wouldn't be perceived as so bad

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

Dictionaries can be difficult to read but I would compare SO more to Wikipedia in its writing style, which is very readable. Wikipedia is much more strict and without those style guidelines it would be way less useful.

> Point is the founders made a choice

Unless you mean recent choices, I would say the founders choices made SO so successful. There are a lot forums/platforms that are better suited for getting help, were discussions and expression of individual personalities are welcome and beneficial for community building. But at the same time those forums mostly help the people who are asking questions, but not people who google their issues, because long threads are less searchable and answers are harder to find. That's were SO shines, it scales because it prioritize people looking for answers instead of people looking for individual help. I too used to contribute in such forums, but knowing the limited reach of my answers there, I stopped helping individuals and choose to contribute to the much larger audience of SO (even if that means being subject to occasionally questionable mod actions or a few downvotes)

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#333

Post by knighthack »

_gabe_ wrote: post #202
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…

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions,…

I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago".

I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact.

So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#334

Post by the8472 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #191
the8472 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#335

Post by tomrod »

junofan wrote: post #313
tomrod wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#336

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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.

My favorite was one where the top answer was:

> No, there is no such feature, so I made a custom hotkey: Ctrl + `

And then a few years later Microsoft implemented the feature and made the default hotkey Ctrl + `

---

I felt a bit of trepidation editing a top answer with >1k votes, but I did it: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions

Probably they need a deprecate-answer feature instead.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#337

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

metabagel wrote: post #210
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…

Yeah, typically there is always a better place to ask a question than SO. IRC, Discord, email list, etc. - wherever the experts and enthusiasts hang out who work all the time on whatever it is you are trying to wrap your brain around.

...but then, once I get my answer on discord, I like to ask and answer your question on SO so that it's searchable.

Somehow that lone upvote after five years of silence feels much more meaningful than the popular answers do. Like I'm glad if I can save 100 people 5 minutes, but even better is to save one person a week.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#338

Post by benjamoon »

andrewfromx wrote: post #38
benjamoon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a GPT summary?

I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary? I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!

Sorry, I was the person who asked, didn’t mean to get you told off by the attribution police!

I think attributing GPT every time you use it is as stupid as attributing spell check when you use it. It’s a tool, not a person.

Soon it’ll be a click away in the browser and it’ll be used everywhere exactly how you used it.

In fact, pretty soon anyone saying you have to attribute text to GPT will probably be a GPT powered bot! :)

For some reason though, your summary stuck out like a sore thumb. I work a lot with GPT3, I think you get accustomed to how it writes (obviously you can change that with some prompt work).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#339

Post by autokad »

snthrow wrote: post #278
autokad wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.

the questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#340

Post by kapep »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #163
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…

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…

> librarians would close new questions I was in the middle of penning a non-trivial answer to because they'd misunderstood what the user was actually asking

By the way, if you don't want your answer go to waste in this situation and the question was on-topic, you could open your own question (reword the original question if it wasn't clear) and then immediately self-answer it.

About half of my questions are self-answered. Many because I found a solution before anyone else answered. Some because I found a solution while preparing a question but didn't submit it yet (this happens quite a lot to me). Some I even planned as self-answers from the beginning, when it took me a lot time to find a solution an issue that wasn't on SO yet. All of those questions were well received.

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