Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8b on June 2, 2021, 3 months after the all-time high for traffic.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
311–320 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all ecosystems disintegrate after a couple of years. Many times an answer from 10 years ago is still extremely relevant.
Not when the answer references libraries that haven't been maintained in five years or have fallen out of favor completely (like jQuery).
I understood what you meant. But first of all, many languages have libraries relevant for several decades; second, asking questions about legacy code is often valid (and often where you need the most help); third, some people even still use jquery! (Poor guys)
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#313I 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.
On StackOverflow.com you are allowed to answer (most) questions even if your reputation is low.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#314The 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.
Exactly. The top answer is often wrong and you have to look at an edit on the third answer to see "Since 2021, this is solved by doing x y z".
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention unsearchable, poor discovery, a chat platform is not a replacement for message boards. SO is well suited to the Q&A format and Discord just isn’t.
From my experience, most questions and answers are asked and solved in forum channels, which are quite easy to search for anything you need.
On Discord? Really? My experience has been that if I don't know what the popular community discord is and what channels to search, I will simply not find an answer. For me, my Discord experience really suffers from Discord not being indexed by search engines.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#316The 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,…
You seem to blame the users and relieve SO of any responsibility or inefficiency.
Sure, times change, but it's definitely not the fault of users that a platform is becoming obselete.
This like a chef saying: "People in the past used to like it" in response to anyone criticizing the meal
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just some random musings about Stackoverflow:
SO is at its best when it’s actual error debugging IMO. When you google some specific error whoever else has the similar error it’s right there. I feel like GitHub is replacing this more and more though - I often get the GitHub ranked specific error higher than Stackoverflow these days. Usually you get better discussions on the GitHub issues too, for a multitude of reasons. Two off the top of my head:
1. all of the people working on the stuff related to the issue are very close by
2. the moderation is not nearly as heavy handed as SO.
ChatGPT is also much better than SO as well if you can give it enough context and the thing you are working on wasn’t built on stuff released after 2021
I also really like Stackoverflow for current event type stuff, like black swan type events. One recent example is when google’s Paris data center was on fire and infra guys were helping each other out trying to get systems online.
All of this combined means that StackOverflow the forum is probably on its way out though. They made the mistake of taking VC money and the model hasn’t really proven profitable so they have really made some poor decisions to please the vc overlords.
I won’t miss Stackoverflow much other than nostalgia unfortunately - better alternatives have arrived. Seeing the decline of all of the other Stackexchange sites kind of sucks though. There aren’t better alternatives for many of those
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#318This post, to me, is about the rise of ChatGPT — but I do think over-moderation is a huge problem. I had a hard moment on the gamedev stackexchange where I was stuck trying to learn how to do something in OpenGL. A moderator immediately closed my question as a duplicate because there was a similar question about OpenGL ES, which is a (related but) different API. I tried to plead my case, but was shut down. Shortly af…
The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.
Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#319The 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…
> here’s a classic SO thread
My favorite example, from "TeX stackexchange" :
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/100574/really-wide-h...
Quote from the actual answer (which is not the bogus accepted one):
The question wasn't "should it be done?" But, for the same reason men climb mountains, "could it be done?" The answer, [...] is yes. Thus, we introduce [...]
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not when the answer references libraries that haven't been maintained in five years or have fallen out of favor completely (like jQuery).
I understood what you meant. But first of all, many languages have libraries relevant for several decades; second, asking questions about legacy code is often valid (and often where you need the most help); third, some people even still use jquery! (Poor guys)
I understand all of that - I just question Google's algorithm that prioritizes answers from 2013 vs answers from 2021 for similar queries.