Earlier quoted context omitted.
To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
Have you tried to use it?
I tried and it didn't work nearly as well. Probably depends on the topic.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
181–190 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#182I don't use SO sites anymore because of the incessant "accept our cookies" popups that aren't even relevant to me because I don't live where EU cookie laws or GDPR applies.
The "we don't care about your privacy"-popup is the main reason why I also have stopped using SO
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#183I 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 had the opposite problem; I'm actually quite skilled in areas but never had enough "karma" to answer any questions so I've never ever been able to.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#184I 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…
Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#185I 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 wonder if it's just finally reached a tipping point of frustration with the moderation. I know I stopped going there years ago. At some point as all the good contributors leave you'd expect to get a snowball / downward spiral, even if the site coasted for years before that.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#186Once every year. I get to ask real question. Every time it's closed immediately. Fuck their policies.
Perhaps you could provide an example or two?
Not GP, but here's 3 questions I managed to recover:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879/finding-coordin...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981/realtime-video-...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65025858/how-to-fetch-th...
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of being on IRC in 97 asking questions about Assembly. When someone did finally respond it was "Did you read the manual yet"? It's ironic that SO became what it was replacing.
But did you even _try_ to read the manual? Did you lift a finger to figure out what the issue is? Some of the best answers are ones that directly quote the manual and then add clarity since manual language can be terse.
Yes I showed him the exact page that talked about my issue and he never responded. Still a silly response. He could have answered it in 30 seconds and saved me 10 hours.
I think ChatGPT is amazing foe this because you will rarely have to deal with anyone who has this type of attitude when you need help in the future
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of asking a question on stack exchange is to create a question answer pair as the whole goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of high quality question answer pairs. If it's not possible to select an answer to a question then it isn't a relevant question for stack exchange.
And the point of this repository created by users for free is to sell it to a 3rd party I suppose? Why would anyone other than undergraduate students spend their time on such a site
I think the point is to just spread knowledge, in principle at least.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#189Even 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…
If you loosen up your definition of of LLM the moderators and posters are really just LLMs that have been jailbroken to insult you and close your post.
Stack Overflow is the programmer's internet bloodsport.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#190The 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…
Also answers becoming obsolete because newer versions of the technology came out.
E.g. Python 2 answers aren't relevant anymore, but still there.