Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 808 posts

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#191

Post by zulban »

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/

Alternatively, people might have to use X and Y to accomplish Q because of their organization or team. If it's technically doable, there should be a solution and explanation for that X and Y problem somewhere.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#192

Post by suzzer99 »

wvenable wrote: post #183
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 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.

Same. I got put in StackOverflow jail for posting my contribution an answer because I didn't have enough karma to post a comment on a previous answer (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget). Never mind that I was earnestly trying to help the original poster, and pointed out a legitimate mistake in one of the answers. I broke protocol and had to be punished.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#193

Post by ideamotor »

floren wrote: post #178
Eisenstein wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I’m not convinced anyone interacting on SO can diagnose something like this. The act of breaking down a problem to a tiny part so you can post it kinda guarantees this scenario.

But I think it will always be up to the user of SO (not the poster or answerers) to make the real judgement on what is useful.

Often I think SO is useful to use as a bunch of puzzles folks solved. You gotta decide if they are relevant.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#194

Post by notatoad »

dehrmann wrote: post #64
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M. However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/v…

Drops like that are either due to how bots are tracked, a Google algo change, or a major internal design change.

or else bad measurement.

the post doesn't explain where they got these traffic numbers, and it seems unlikely they have access to stackoverflow's real traffic stats. they're using some sort of estimation here. there's always a chance that their estimates are wrong - especially if they're showing implausible shifts like this.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#195

Post by camel-cdr »

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…

The worst part about xy problems is that even if the user could use a different approach, often the actual answer for the question would be very interesting. But because of SO, it's an xy problem, marked as duplicate and there no answer to the original question.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#196

Post by wodenokoto »

As an analysis, I think a lot of things could be improved.

I'm sceptic that having having to choose between seeing upvotes or downvotes is helpful for the reader to draw conclusions. It would be nice to see this on the same chart.

It is hard to see how much voting and posting follows overall traffic trend.

But, posting and accepted voting had a huge uptick in May 2022, seemingly without any change in traffic. That is interesting. What happened?

In the overall traffic chart, it would be interesting to post some landmark events. Covid shutdown in US (assuming traffic is mostly US), release of ChatGPT 3

I'm not sure what the histograms in the tables are supposed to tell us.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#197

Post by cjs_ac »

andirk wrote: post #144
TillE wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

There are many websites that scrape Stack Overflow's content and serve it up again with their own ads.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#198

Post by sedatk »

wodenokoto wrote: post #180
sedatk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn’t. You just have to send an email.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#199

Post by rmuratov »

Scarblac wrote: post #190
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…

Also answers becoming obsolete because newer versions of the technology came out. E.g. Python 2 answers aren't relevant anymore, but still there.

SO prioritizes more recent good answers now.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#200

Post by itronitron »

anticodon wrote: post #172
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…

That matches my experience. I stopped using it in 2015 after trying to solve something with a new framework I was using and finding that all of the answers on SO were just wrong.
Post reply on HN