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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#171

Post by Foobar8568 »

julianeon wrote: post #47
krackers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO games resulting in SO clones ranking higher than SO itself?

As much as SEO experts would love to do that for their clients, I don't see any way they could've realistically crossed that moat. If you had a programming question, and you went to Google to answer it and found some answers - would you choose Stack Overflow, or PythonIsSuperFun.com? I think the behaviour of Google searching for programming issues decreased overall, and I don't think Stack Overflow suffered more than…

Unless I put a site stack overflow, I only get spam result.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#172

Post by anticodon »

Lazare wrote: post #134

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 pleas…

I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score.

Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open".

I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could.

And there were many similar cases, probably still are.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#173

Post by bayindirh »

andirk wrote: post #132

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.

I don’t want to be constantly low-key insulted because I already don’t know the best approach and the answer to my own question, thank you.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#174

Post by cwillu »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

Telling people they're doing the wrong thing is extremely common. People actually wanting the wrong thing is common, but not _extremely_ common, and the mismatch is one of the more rage inducing things on the internet.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#175

Post by shriek »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

Often the better answer is to just explain what's being asked by strongly encouraging them in the Z direction. Sometimes people just want to understand what's happening behind the scenes rather than just looking to solve for Y.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#176

Post by axblount »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

The issue is that sometimes poeple just want 'X by Y'. To get a question answered, you shouldn't have to list every constraint and design descision that led you to that point.

Comes up all the time when people ask how to do things in bash/sh. I know there are better tools for the job, but this is the one I have.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#177

Post by dragontamer »

paradite wrote: post #165
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

I'm assuming you are talking about XY problem? https://xyproblem.info/

They're talking about the XY problem-problem. The problem when other programmers mistakenly think you have an XY problem and ignore your words.

Sometimes, the original poster is not mistaken. Especially when an expert asks a question, there's a reason for it. Assuming the expert to be a beginner who hasn't tried easier solutions is degrading, and forces experts off the site.

Actively insulting your userbase, especially your expert-level userbase, is a bad idea. It leads to StackOverflow falling and collapsing over the years.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#178

Post by floren »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

You know what's at least as common on SO? "I don't understand the thing you're asking, so I'll pretend it's the XY problem and tell you about something I do understand"

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#179

Post by boyka »

JohnMakin wrote: post #120
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…

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

It seems like most of us all have the same issue with SO. However, is there a viable alternative?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#180

Post by wodenokoto »

sedatk wrote: post #146
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 perspect…

> No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this.

Doesn't hacker news also do this?

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