341–350 of 808 posts
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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".
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…
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…
Do note that your posts on SO are published with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license:
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
so regardless of who owns them, they can be reproduced, and probably are. So in many senses there is no deleting them.
Also, don't understand why you wanted to delete. Despite its problematic policies, SO is an important public resource and I assume so were your answers on it...
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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 learn…
ChatGPT-4 seems to do fine on this for me. https://chat.openai.com/share/c5cc8cb6-ebb5-45eb-9476-ef85a6...
I'll just keep an eye on AI progress, but will probably not make it my goto for some time. Maybe later (whenever that is)
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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.
It seems like there was a time window when you could actually get upvotes, and if you missed it you'll never be able to use the site as a normal user.
The quick way to accumulate reputation is through bounties. However, it's very much a lottery: bountied questions are often about ultra-specialised niche topics. You may need to hunt for a long time to find something you actually know something about.
I think the problem is google losing the fight with spammers. It's being a while for me that I have to put "stackoverflow" in the search query to avoid sites with scraped content
I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleas…
The first is marking so many interesting questions and answers as off-topic or opinion-based, which vastly reduced the scope of interesting content, and discouraged daily visiting to learn instead of just using the site as a reference through google. Relying on google to feed you users is a fool's gambit. Websites need to create recurring visitors, and they do that by providing something that engages. Stackoverflow and software.SE's moderation policies made it far less engaging as they grew more heavy-handed. This left the sites open to changes in google's algorithm affecting their traffic.
The second major problem is duplicate policing and a lack of staleness policies. By not allowing the same question to be asked again it meant that the content of the network has grown gradually more and more stale. Even my own old answers are now often wrong because they are simply outdated. Stackoverflow is filled with questions in the style "what is the right way to use technology X to do Y", and the right answer to that changes every 2 or 3 years, when technology X gets an update or when new insights in how to best do Y are formed. I tried updating a few here and there, when I saw people engaging with wrong answers, but overall the blame is on stackoverflow and its moderators for not working out a more effective mechanism to get rid of stale answers and letting new users answer old questions with answers that have a shot at rising to the top. This also means that as top-voted answers grow more and more stale there is a tipping point where google no longer sees the site as a useful resource and starts lowering it in the ranking, and this is what seems has happened.
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 used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago
SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always will be worse than stackoverflow. I don't have a clue what their algorithm is doing but it's surely trying to kill Google search as fast as possible.
Another joke is the fact that searching for "[language] [symbol]" also brings me to these content farms instead of the documentation. You seriously can't find useful anything these days using Google.
What I see recently is that the answers start being out of date, and Google sometimes bizarrely returns these weird copies of StackOverflow instead of the main site. Can it be that?