Did we all learn to actually program?
The Fall of Stack Overflow
321–330 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#322Earlier 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…
It seems like most of us all have the same issue with SO. However, is there a viable alternative?
ChatGPT has replaced most of my usage of StackOverflow/Google.
It probably won't last forever without people generating new answers somewhere else, but it answers a lot of things correctly, and the things it gets wrong are easy enough to verify.
I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#323Earlier 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.
You do know where chatgpt got those answers, right?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're talking about the XY problem-problem. The problem when other programmers mistakenly think you have an XY problem and ignore your words. Sometimes, the original poster is not mistaken. Especially when an expert asks a question, there's a reason for it. Assuming the expert to be a beginner who hasn't tried easier solutions is degrading, and forces experts off the site. Actively insulting your userbase, especial…
the XY problem-problem I never saw this term before, but it is perfect. So many times I have experienced it when asking questions in mature tech domains. It is so frustrating. Frequently, my question is asked poorly from the view of an expert , so they sweep it aside as not a real problem. Only after getting help (from comments) to provide more info or improve the writing, does the expert suddenly agree it is an issu…
I was active on SO years ago and my answers and questions typically are either upvoted to large number, or downvoted to a large number despite my best attempt at explaining the context.
So I do know this problem (problem-problem) very well and I've since stopped asking or answering on SO.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”.
I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#326The 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…
Seconded re moderation.
Also, the site itself - the ethos of the owners; I used to have an account, became disenchanted with the mods, decided to delete my content, close the account.
I then discovered;
1. You cannot delete answers which have been accepted.
2. The mechanism for deleting your own content allows you to delete a max of something like five replies per day.
I deleted everything I could, over the course of a significant number of days, and left.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#327The problem for me is not that SO became difficult as all popular/large systems inevitably become, it's the seeming lack of action to solve some of the issues involved.
The reputation thing is still nonsense. I can ask a noob question and end up with 10K reputation because of the likes it gets or I can answer a complicated question that takes all 25 years of experience to articulate well and get nothing. People can offer a bounty but it should also be possible to "reward" people who obviously know what they are doing and not reward people for asking questions.
The problem with duplicate questions is big, but again, the search isn't great at finding them, especially if you don't quite know how to ask the question.
They don't do much about people who just appear with 1 reputation asking something like "What does Null Reference Exception mean?". I ended up being allowed to moderate questions but the moderation queues get stuck constantly so I couldn't even help with that - after all, the crowd-sourcing is a great way to solve the volume of moderation needed and some of us are happy to help but as soon as you start seeing "Moderation queue full" after only moderating 2 posts, then you give up.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#328I will get only two results of asking questions in SO. No answers or marked as duplicated.
Haven't used `site:stackoverflow.com` for a long time but using `site:reddit.com` to get more informative and generous answers.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#329Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#330Earlier 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…
The content is licenced under the Creative Commons license, which ensures that everyone can take it and make something useful out of it. For example in the case Stack Overflow turns evil, adds a paywall or something like that. This is a lot better than almost every other comparable site with user-created content. In most cases the company has the rights there and can do whatever they want with it, and users have no r…
SO can still respect Creative Commons and the human at the same time by granting their wish to remove their content from SO when they request it.