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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#341

Post by motbus3 »

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 agree with you, but it is not a "free" exchange. People share there knowledge and helps SO to be alive and in exchange they can get answers. Their curation should be better like pointing to the correct answer before marking it as duplicated and then blocking it. I know it is as is because people are lazy sometimes and they expect to get it ready with no effort. In that sense, chat assistants are the biggest threat to SO as it does not complain to answer the same thing a thousand times.

I am curious to know what they think about it

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#342

Post by arp242 »

tomrod wrote: post #255
arp242 wrote: post #235

Earlier 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…

> To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous.

So what do you expect? A "tagparagraph" to describe all nuances? You're all fixating on this tagline to an unreasonable degree.

As I said, plenty of people have been VERY clear about all of this right from the start, over ten years ago, and you get a full page before you can ask a question which describes all of it. Again, the communication could be a bit better, but it's not "disingenuous"; that's just a nonsense accusation; almost everyone on the site actually contributing answers subscribes to this view to some degree (there are some nuance with this).

Not wanting to answer low-quality questions or being roped in to being an unpaid programming tutor answering the same beginner questions over and over again is not "gatekeeping".

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#343

Post by shagie »

worthless-trash wrote: post #318
shagie wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are after engagement based Q&A, you're going to find Reddit and Facebook style systems that require a larger portion of the user base giving answers rather than "I can search it and find the answer" that Stack Overflow provides.

Those sites (and they exist now) typically suffer from having enough people providing correct answers (unless they're the type who enjoy answering what a Null Pointer Exception is again and again). You can try seeing if https://www.coderanch.com/forums fits what you are after.

The library based model requires fewer people and so scales better - but it still scales. The issue with the library based model is that the curation work needs to be relatively low friction - something that Stack Overflow has been failing at.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#344

Post by jmartrican »

matsemann wrote: post #150
jmartrican wrote: post #145

In the beginning, I've had questions downvoted. But after a while, I learned how to ask questions. I can say that this is not something I struggle with. One issue I did have recently was with having one of my questions deemed a duplicate. And it was a duplicate if you only consider the fix or root cause. But the original question did not have the error message that i was getting, and hence never came across the origi…

If the other question solved your problem, it's considered a duplicate. However, a duplicate isn't necessarily bad, and getting your question closed for it shouldn't be taken as a slight. It's just another angle (as you had a different error) to get to the same answer.

But the original did not have the error message in it. So one would not come to that answer if they are searching for the error message. That's why I wanted it opened back up. Not because I thought it was a slight. The fact that after a short period of time my question got 10k views and a gold badge shows that people were coming to my question which had the error people were searching for.

So why does this matter? Well SO runs on points. If its ok to remove points from SO and still have a functioning site, then yeah I agree leave it a duplicate. But if SO's point system does matter, then leave it open and allow it to generate points for the person who asked the question that is helping many people stuck at the same place.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#345

Post by wyclif »

arp242 wrote: post #235
_gabe_ wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 currently have 41 reputation on SO. 1 silver badge and 5 bronze badges. Almost all of which I recently earned by answering an obscure Vim configuration question.

And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.

Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#346

Post by grey-area »

pixl97 wrote: post #229
grey-area wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think it’s useful you’re stealing the work of GPT by posting without attribution, if you don’t you’re wasting our time.

This is where I want to make an omniscient bot that follows you around and gives you a severe electric shock every time you use potentially copyrighting material snippets (I'll be nice and give you a 3 second window to declare fair use). I will be happy the day copyright is dead and buried under a mountain sized gravestone. As much as you think it protects the small guy, it enabled the rich to buy up portfolios and e…

The OP deliberately used another entities work as his own without attribution.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#347

Post by BrandoElFollito »

I am on SO for 14 years and collaterally accumulated some 200k of rep.

I am an amateur dev and SO helped me tremendously to overcome problems that are obvious after some time. But at the time they were blocking.

Some questions I asked were brilliant :) and some were nightmarish. SO usually got it right.

Except some of the tags that are toxic to the point I do not even try to ask a question there because of the immediate down votes and patronizing. I am looking at you Golang (Go).

It would be better, I think, if the rep of the asker was more prominent. Voting down a question that *I* think is useless when asked by someone with 20x my rep is an indication that maybe I am wrong.

Also I never understood what the downvote is for because the description tells about quality and usefulness, but it is often actually used to say that you do not agree. Requiring a reason for the downvote may help.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#348

Post by garfieldnate »

My experience on SO has been overwhelmingly positive, but I can say that I observe a large difference in the behavior of other users depending on the subject of my question. The C/C++ community is the most pedantic I've experienced, with tons of people jumping in to get those answer points, but also some fussing over question edits, tags, comments, etc. But I don't mind pedantic; they're also the most active, and I don't remember the last time I had a question that was left unanswered.

I've improved my ability to ask focused, clear questions over the years, and that has led to a higher likelihood of getting answers. When I was a student still learning how to code, a lot of my questions would be left hanging, but looking back I think a lot of that was asking unclear questions, or not using the right keywords, or not even understanding what it was I wanted to ask (some was due to asking questions about arcane stuff used only in academia). Overall, I'd say that learning to use SO well has been largely a matter of improving my technical communication skills.

Just wanted to give a word of support for SO. I love that site, I've used it for over 10 years now, and I look forward to having a place to go for technical help for the foreseeable future. It's gold for googling issues, but I can always count on a community there to help me craft another piece of "internet documentation" to help me and the next person.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#349

Post by m463 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #295
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.

Yeah, I don't need a social network, but the question asked was a really good question, and the answers were USEFUL.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#350

Post by PaulHoule »

_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 could never to stand to play the SO game to get enough karma to be able to fully play the SO game.
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