I mostly gave up a very long time ago. Craft an answer, update it to stay relevant and some mod turns it into a wiki. Another mod decides it’s time to move it to a different Stack site so it stops attracting cred on the site I posted it. Honestly I have better things to do.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
211–220 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#212Earlier 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/
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.
Since I apparently did a terrible job explaining it (the link does a much better one) -- it is when someone has a problem that they are trying to solve in a way which will not solve their problem adequately or at all -- it is not when they are using the perceived wrong tool for the job.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#213These 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…
That makes sense. "New visits" are first time users, likely young coders who are looking up answers to things on a search engine, find what they're looking for on Stack Overflow, maybe click on an ad, and leave. They probably don't vote or post much. A sudden die-off there suggests something very bad happened to organic traffic (change in Google? Terrible new SEO scheme? A sudden stop in ad buys?)
The new content rate been dropping at a dismally constant rate for a long time, but the first few months in 2023 were awfully grim. I wonder what might've corresponded to that.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#214Earlier 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 haven't. Because (free, as in free beer) chatGPT is extremely slow, I have to make a rather extensive proompt to get the result I want to, and then I still have to debug most code.
That's not very convenient, atleast for now. I got so used to search engines by now, that it only takes a few keywords to get the expected result. Be it a SO-answer or a documentation page. And as people have mentioned, chatGPT was learned on the stuff that's on the internet, so if there will never be any new stuff, because people just use AI, then it will not learn and won't answer your new questions. For some edge cases I might try AI here or there, but usually it's not for me.
Hell, there comes even an example to my mind. I recently just asked chatGPT what a single-issue 5 stage pipeline on a CPU actually means. I wanted to know if, especially, the "single-issue" meant that only one instruction is present in the pipeline at a time, or if a new one gets shifted in on every clock cycle (if there is no hazard). It just couldn't answer it straight-forward. It was also kinda hard to find the exact definition on the internet. I found it in a book from the 90s which was chilling in my book shelf (Computer architecture and parallel processing by Kai Hwang). Hint: Single-issue just means that only one instruction can be in one stage at a time, but still multiple get processed inside the pipeline. The keyword is 'underpipelined'
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#215The 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…
Usually prefixed by a condescending "why would you want to Y?"
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#216Earlier 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…
sprinkle in a 100K+ reputation user commenting "this is easily answered with `man Y`" — oblivious to the fact that Y's manpage is a 188 page monster, and manpages being awkward to search in. Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
Here's a question maybe someone can answer for me, or maybe I'm just stupid and other people don't need it, but...
What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of the man file.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#217Stack 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.
What was your incentive to dedicate so many hours for this website? Can you list a few if possible?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#218SO is weird. Or the people on it are weird. I once provided an answer but without code. Someone posts the same answer with code (effectively my answer); he gets upvoted and since then I get down voted. I get most of my reputation from a really really old answer about what the right mime type should be for JSON[0]. When I look at the question now there are a more than a dozen answers added...and loads of edits by moderators.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/477816/which-json-conten...
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#219SO by design gets its traffic from Google Search. If Google for whatever reason is sending less traffic, then SO will decline.
Yes, AI coding assistants will mean less frequent Googling occurs during development, but also, when Googling is required it usually goes beyond SO and more towards primary sources as the former's results strongly overlap with the AI assistants capabilities.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#220Earlier 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?
> 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.
Here is an example of using it to write simple powershell scripts:
* https://chat.openai.com/share/17a9d185-4a8c-4c10-97a2-0c5b08...
Here is an example of using it to merge different types of json configuration files:
* https://chat.openai.com/share/ed0c9cf9-7586-43df-9271-7b5859...
You need to pay for it if you want access to the latest version of the model, along with some beta features like plugins. Plugins are extremely useful and it is worth paying just to get access to them. For instance, you need to have a certain plugin to get it to read links.