331–340 of 808 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen similar. I wonder if a new set of people are old enough to use SO now, and their style is different than the original community.
Copilot and ChatGPT have taken a lot away from StackOverflow.
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,…
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
I think, SO, for the most part was a genuinely well intentioned effort with really good outcomes.
Spolsky's earlier talks describing his philosophies about a good QA site, I thought, were insightful. To their credit, they did organically reach the top of Google rankings and for a long time, the quality of answers and insights on the site were really good. I learned a lot of from reading answers to various questions by Alex Martelli and Raymond Hettinger (of Python fame).
I'm sure they made some mistakes along the way and those contributed to the current downfall. My larger point, however, is that this and other tools and sites which make things "easy" have contributed to a decline in the quality of (especially new) programmers and that has indirectly taken a toll on the site.
To extend your chef analogy, the rant would be "Here I am trying to create interesting dishes with modern ingredients but people these days haven't tasted really food and can't digest anything other than a quick burger, canned soda and frozen fries."
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/
Here, I'll coin a name for a problem I see much more often, which is called the XX problem:
1. User has problem X, and asks for a solution for it.
2. People viewing the question decide that the original user actually has problem Y.
3. Those people tell the original user that they actually want to solve problem Y, condescendingly flame the original user for not asking about problem Y, and if they have the power to do so, edit the original user's question to be asking about problem Y.
4. Those people use poorly-thought-out pop-social-psychology to justify their shitty behavior.
5. The original user still doesn't have a solution to problem X, and they really needed a solution to problem X all along.
It is not without irony that examples of the XX problem are sometimes also examples of mansplaining.
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…
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 then took the time to look at the T&C, and SO…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 then took the time to look at the T&C, and SO…
If you live in the EU, you could do a GDPR request to delete all your data. https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/gdpr/request
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 very popular Zalgo answer is a perfect example of this problem [1] The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem. Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts…
I actually think SO is a great site and resource, but I also think a lot of that is despite the bitter old timers in the community, not because of them.
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…
Behaviour of users on SO has always been, well, as all the complaints here suggest. It's never really bothered me that the top answer's someone going off on their favourite approach, most questions have multiple answers, and I've learned a lot about coding from reading the top few and trying to understand where the answers are coming from.
The discussion's as important as the answers sometimes, and that's why a potential collapse is a problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have two opinions about your post. One: I agree. Two: I disagree. My point: I see both . I see "answer as comment" in my most mature tech subjects because people are afraid of downvotes. In my experience, the most mature tech subjects are carefully guarded by a small community of very unfriendly "fastest gun in the West" types. The C++ community is incredibly unwelcoming and negative towards most questions. Note: C…
> people are afraid of downvotes People are afraid of downvotes because people will throw out downvotes without even reading your answer , and once you get the first downvote, everyone else will pile on, also without reading your answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And what all the replies are telling you is that the most XY problems are misdiagnosis. Explaining what the XY problem is to people who are telling you about it's high false positive identification is, itself, an XY misdiagnosis. Your reply is an example of what people are complaining about - you are addressing the issue you wished was asked, not addressing the issue you were presented with.
I especially enjoyed my time spent on various Discourse servers, e.g.
Figma: https://forum.figma.com/
CodeMirror: https://discuss.codemirror.net/
Compared to SO, those single product servers have much better signal to noise ratio and the community are very welcoming.