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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#131

Post by worthless-trash »

38 wrote: post #66

Stack Overflow banned my character with 100,000 reputation: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1002260 for FIVE YEARS, because of a rollback war on some of my own answers. some idiot was gaming the system and adding minor punctuation here and there, just to get review points. so yeah, good riddance.

Hey, you had helped me out in the past ! thanks.

I have since deleted my account on SO, which was actually a somewhat involved process. They did not however allow me to remove the answers that I provided.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#132

Post by andirk »

Let us all increase our questioning, answering, voting on Stack Overflow! With private chats like Discord and Slack, and chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT, a lot of the shared knowledge is not indexable. That's bad.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#133

Post by harry8 »

is_true wrote: post #6

I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers. It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content

As soon as you consider google no longer does search but instead is a "suggestion engine" it all makes a lot more sense. Sadly.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#134

Post by Lazare »

I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top.

I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite.

That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#135

Post by ezconnect »

svachalek wrote: post #121
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT Claim asserted without evidence.

I have 110% replaced it with ChatGPT. Perhaps SO would still have a chance back in its glory days but there's no comparison to having a direct, specific, instant answer vs having to fight against SEO or moderators for hours.

I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#136

Post by hanniabu »

JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

On point 2, even worse is when you ask a question and the mods close it and point to another post that isn't the same. Or they mark the question as too open ended when it's not, or tell you to split up the questions into multiple posts even though that's dumb because they're dependent on each other's answers.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#137

Post by Eduard »

djbusby wrote: post #115
Semaphor wrote: post #104

The most help I ever got from SO for questions not already there, was because of their (perceived) strictness. The process of writing a high-quality question, with a minimally viable example, clearly lined out thought-processes, and other things tried, solved the question for me in most cases without me ever having to post it.

Rubber Duck. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

> The process of writing a high-quality question, with a minimally viable example, clearly lined out thought-processes, and other things tried, solved the question for me in most cases without me ever having to post it.

Nevertheless post the question and provide an answer. Everybody wins: you reap the upvotes, and everyone else benefits from the shared knowledge.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#138

Post by andirk »

pentagrama wrote: post #78

I remember trying to learn front end development around 2013, was fascinated by responsive web design and twitter bootstrap. Asked some questions on that site, was mostly ridiculed for my amateur questions several times, never touched the site again and also never learned front end. So this is my story with that site.

I went to a university that basically just handed me the Comp Sci manual and said RTFM. I almost failed out, but then I learned it.

I have only had great experience with SO, but regardless, don't get dissuaded by those with less than mediocre tact.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#140

Post by choppaface »

andirk wrote: post #128
JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

I have seen similar. I wonder if a new set of people are old enough to use SO now, and their style is different than the original community.

Copilot and ChatGPT have taken a lot away from StackOverflow.
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