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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#141

Post by geitir »

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…

Yeah I noticed something happened late 2019 to SO Google results. I feel like today it is better than it was, but still a far cry from how it used to be. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503049#21504485)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#142

Post by [deleted] »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #117
iJohnDoe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s interesting is that Google was known for how hard it was to figure out the Google algorithm. Remember, when people were hired because they knew the secret sauce on how to get the best Google ranking. Google experts? Well, it turns out that the person at Google that was responsible for keeping the algorithm fresh and the search results fresh retired and everything went to shit when they left. Actually, I’m bett…

My bet is revenue went up for google with the second guy, so who is smarter is a matter of perspective.

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#143

Post by fzeindl »

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…

This issue of having the answer in the comments definitely wasn't there 5-10 years ago and makes the site much more difficult to skim and read hence provoking more hapless questions.

Maybe they should expire comments or remove them alltogether.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#144

Post by andirk »

TillE wrote: post #73
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

That's my guess too; I'm sure Google drives the overwhelming majority of SO traffic. A few years ago, my programming-related queries would hit Stack Overflow as the first or second result. Now it's very frequently spammy garbage in the top 2-3 slots.

What kind of spam do you get when searching something specific and technical? Who is trying to SEO their way to the top for "how to set redis max memory"? A lot of comments here saying the spam is beating out SO, but what spam and from who and why??

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#145

Post by osigurdson »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #86
maxlin wrote: post #43

Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT, I sincerely hope it keeps operating, stays strict (even if it causes collateral) and keeps ban on LLM-generated content. The wheels of this kind of stuff turn slowly, but obviously ChatGPT was trained partly with data only gainable from a healthy StackOverflow-kind of site with users actively asking unique questions and enough people ans…

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

Adding one datapoint... it certainly has for me.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#146

Post by sedatk »

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…

Not to mention that you have no rights over the content you create on SO. You can’t take your content off the site if it happens to be an answered question or an accepted answer. Their reasoning is “but the content would be gone and would stop helping people”. The way it completely dismisses your efforts and your emotional connection with your own creation is the greatest indictment of how SO lacks the human perspective. No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this. The only exception could be Wikipedia, and it communicates its content format and collective editing mechanics very clearly. SO just isn’t that but thinks it’s whatever it works for them.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#147

Post by lispybanana »

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.

I hope you still posted (and self-answered).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#148

Post by Const-me »

franciscop wrote: post #101
jrumbut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just another anecdote. But here goes. My experience was that there was a long period where your complaint was quite true. I believe that they have heard this complaint enough and have lightened up a little. There are still more and stricter rules than most sites, but the obsession with pruning duplicates seems to have cooled.

And my opinion as someone with high reputation is that letting in silly questions has ruined the site and made me stop using it. SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher, it's a place for interesting knowledge sharing and if the knowledge is drowned in noise, well it's just noise then.

Moderation has ruined the site for me.

Stupid people don't realize they are stupid. When they can't understand a question they conclude there's something wrong with the question, not with them. And since they believe the question is silly, they happily close-vote the question.

This way they close questions which require specialized knowledge, experience, or deep understanding of the subject. Precisely the kind of questions I consider interesting to answer.

Sometimes I managed to undelete such questions, but SO made it easy to delete and hard to undelete.

Examples of the questions where I succeeded: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/57064879/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/57323981/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/65025858/revisions

In many more cases I haven't bothered. Sometimes, moderators killed questions so fast that I discovered that while trying to post my answer.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#149

Post by osigurdson »

ezconnect wrote: post #135
svachalek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://chat.openai.com/

I currently pay for it but I'm not sure if it makes any difference.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#150

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

choppaface wrote: post #140
andirk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true for me.

I wanted good ways to deal with pointers to 2D arrays in C, which aren’t hard but you need to remember that [] has precedence over *, so (*pointer)[x][y] is needed to deference. It’s not the hard to mess it up. Ultimately GPT had an OK answer but… it had that immediately without searching and the didn’t have to craft some well written example, it picked up my dirty explanation no problem.

I have the 2D array typedef’ed now, but it’s still confusing to read and hard to work with. I’ll search tomorrow on it.

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