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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#291

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

Google keeps returning SO answer threads that are way too old to be relevant. Like a question with a top answer from 2013.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#292

Post by [deleted] »

sedatk wrote: post #209
jb1991 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.

That’s appalling. I thought they honored deletion requests. Terrible look on HNs side too. Edit: It seems like there’s a wiggle room, but still terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#293

Post by noufalibrahim »

The culture of programming has been changed by much of these "quick answer" tools.

The first generation of SO people were folks who cut their teeth pre (or early) internet when it required quite a bit of effort to learn a technology. Mistakes without googlable solutions, patchy documentation, bad or non existent internet forced people to work hard to figure things out that it's in that effort where, in my experience, learning happens.

These people contributed to the early SO and genuinely enriched it. Made it a source of high quality topical information. Over the years though, it's become a source of cut/paste code and then perhaps cut/pasted code (driven by the gamification). Few people go there anymore to contribute well written deeply thought out answers. It's mostly fly bys I imagine.

I used to train freshers and over the years, I can distinctly see the decrease in quality and the increasing tendency to have SO, ChatGPT, whatever just "solve this problem for me" rather than "I want to learn this and get better at my job".

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#294

Post by honzabe »

alex_lav wrote: post #206
ezconnect wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're mostly right in your experience. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to get ChatGPT to be a worthwhile piece of my workflow, and I guess sometimes it is, but most of the time the basic code or config or content I try to generate, it gets very fundamental things incorrect. It feels like it's mostly just hype these days.

Can you please specify whether you use (paid) GPT-4? Would you kindly provide links to a few examples of very fundamental things incorrect?

My experience - the free version made up a lot of things but still felt very useful - enough to want to upgrade to the paid version. With the paid version, I notice very rarely that it hallucinates. It does make errors but it can correct them when I provide feedback. It is possible that I just do not notice the errors you would notice, it is also possible that we use it differently. I would like to know.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#295

Post by scrollaway »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #291
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…

Google keeps returning SO answer threads that are way too old to be relevant. Like a question with a top answer from 2013.

Not all ecosystems disintegrate after a couple of years. Many times an answer from 10 years ago is still extremely relevant.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#296

Post by homami »

I don't understand why they killed their job board. We used to pay them a few hundreds a month for a a couple of job ads that we were quite happy with. But then they "decided to focus on enabling our community of developers and technologists to discover and learn about companies rather than just giving them a way to apply to an open role." Which meant they became a platform for recruiters that can spend monthly 10Ks+. That killed Stack Overflow for me.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#297

Post by jason-johnson »

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/

Sure, but the issue is that SO was used largely for people working in companies with arcane rules. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten one of these annoying “don’t do X, do Y” when I already know this. I have to do X for some reason, I don’t know how to do X because I do Y when given a choice and now no one will answer how to do X because someone killed interest in the question by apparently answering it. I use whatever points I get to downvote these answers.

The thing people don’t get is: when you answer on SO you’re not answering that poster. You’re answering anyone who will ever have this question. It’s quite arrogant to assume it will be an XY for every single person forever more.

The proper way to answer is to answer the question exactly as ask and then insert your “but you probably should be doing Y instead” at the end.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#298

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

If you have such an emotional connection to your Q&A content that it would drive you to delete it, I think you're using the site wrong.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#299

Post by majikaja »

iSnow wrote: post #250
majikaja wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least in software development, SO is/was very useful, as they provide a curated repository of Q/A where the answers follow the current state of tech. Every time I started out learning a new framework, SO would be tremendously helpful, because in software development, you mostly have questions that have correct and incorrect answers.

I said SO but I should have said SE in my case - it just doesn't work for research fields because these especially are all about exploring unknowns, yet SE doesn't allow this...

Maybe software engineering is all solved and there's no more ambiguity left to be discussed.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#300

Post by Const-me »

franciscop wrote: post #280
Const-me wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 que…

The first question for example is what would be a low-quality question in SO, and could easily have been a homework assignment. It doesn't show any effort from your side, you just pose the question and expect other people to answer it fully, without explaining what you attempted, why it worked/didn't work, where you got stuck, etc.

> It doesn't show any effort from your side, you just pose the question

You probably assumed I asked that question? If so, the assumption was incorrect, I answered it.

> without explaining what you attempted, why it worked/didn't work, where you got stuck

I don't think any of that is possible to do. The question, and my answer, are too simple to decompose into smaller parts. Not enough runway to start and get stuck.

> expect other people to answer it fully

My expectation was rather different. I wrote my answer on Jul 16, 2019, and expected it to stay there.

Instead, on the next day some people have decided the question was bad, and closed it. Then on the next month, some other people have deleted it, along with my answer.

To close it, 5 people clicked once/each. To undelete it, I spent quite a few hours. Sadly, that's not a rare exception: moderation on SO is horrible.

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