Why is it that SO moderation is so awful? What incentivizes SO mods to be jerks?
Feels good to moderate others
The Fall of Stack Overflow
371–380 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#372Earlier 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…
Which is the correct response to this question? > How do I shoot myself in the foot? I’m pointing the gun at my foot and pulling the trigger, but nothing is happening. Is it: > A common reason for guns not firing is that they aren’t loaded. Try loading the gun and trying again. …or is it: > Woah, hang on a sec! What are you trying to achieve exactly? It seems like you are doing something very wrong here. I’m sure the…
How I usually try to answer these kinds of questions is "Shooting yourself is generally not a good idea, for these reasons. If you really want to do it, you can try loading your gun and pulling the trigger again, but a better alternative might be to take off your shoe by untying your shoelaces and carefully pulling on your shoe, following the curve of your foot."
But it's hard! On the one hand, you don't want to teach people to do the wrong thing (especially not on SO, where answers are often copied wholesale and pasted into production code), but also not answering the question as asked usually doesn't help the OP at all.
If it's not clear what they're trying to achieve I usually leave a comment asking for clarification rather than answering, though.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
Have you tried to use it?
I did.
It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it.
It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored.
I found it useful once - when I had to write an essay about ISO 27001 for college and just wanted it to go away. Took what it generated and spent 20 minutes editing it to look closer to my style. For real work it isn't as useful.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#374The 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…
For me personally it’s the rise of good documentation. 12 or 13 years ago I needed to build something for our sharepoint 2010 in a world where sharepoint 2013 was out.
I’m not a share point developer, at all, it was my first time with it. I am of the old school however, so figuring out how systems work by reading the manual or specification isn’t foreign to me. I’ve worked with the bitmap format, I’ve worked with solar inverters, I’ve worked with embedded construction software and so on, so sharepoint should’ve been easy. But I couldn’t have done it without StackOverflow.
Fast forward to 2023 and I need to build something for sharepoint again. Haven’t touched it since I was sort of dreading it. Only this time the official documentation made it so easy I never needed anything else. I’m sure StackOverflow could have helped me, but I didn’t need it.
Those are very isolated examples, but really, that is my personal experience with almost every thing I work on these days. Yes, I’ve also got 10 more years of experience under my belt, but I do think it’s because we as an industry have become much better at working through the official channels. I mean, when you have a problem with something today, so you go on StackOverflow or do you go to the GitHub issues (or whatever else they have)?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hilariously, the accepted (I assume by default, not by the asker) answer is flagrantly breaking, like, half a dozen rules and guidelines… but because it’s cynically and unhelpfully crapping on a newbie, it stays up. Or maybe there’s a good reason for it to stay up, but at a glance it sure isn’t a good look. I actually think SO is a great site and resource, but I also think a lot of that is despite the bitter old time…
Oh come on, it's not crapping on a newbie. It's a funny comment that serves as a reflection of the days and weeks this guy spent debugging these kinds of systems.
As someone who was a newbie at the time when it was posted, who was looking for a way to parse HTML, I took away that it's just really the wrong way to go about it. I didn't feel crapped on at all.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.
It already has, and not for the better. SO is currently awash with nonsensical answers that are clearly the result of feeding the question into ChatGPT. Not to mention questions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-bui...
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#377The 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…
For me personally it’s the rise of good documentation. 12 or 13 years ago I needed to build something for our sharepoint 2010 in a world where sharepoint 2013 was out. I’m not a share point developer, at all, it was my first time with it. I am of the old school however, so figuring out how systems work by reading the manual or specification isn’t foreign to me. I’ve worked with the bitmap format, I’ve worked with sol…
Out of interest, do you think your recent experiences with SharePoint were because Microsoft decided to unify pretty much all of their services behind the common Microsoft Graph API? SharePoint used to suffer from having multiple different overlapping styles of APIs depending on what API style was fashionable at the time that feature was developed - which could make development a nightmare... (OK, an even bigger nightmare).
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
Disagree.
Doing things the right way is BETTER.
If you can't, you should add a bit to your question saying "I know the standard way is to do Y, not X, but because of reason Z I can't do it."
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copilot and ChatGPT have taken a lot away from StackOverflow.
I have found that I cannot and do not trust either of those for anything.
Really? For programming they are immensely helpful! ChatGPT 3.5 even rewrote Rust code for me that compiled with borrowing issues, replacing iter() with itermut() and other things. I also had a question about specific configuration w/ an old version of Chart.JS that I could not find an answer on Google, and ChatGPT figured it out.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#380I can’t remember the last time I saw the accepted answer being up to date and relevant. Things change, and the things you needed to work around in Java or whatever ten years ago are now approached in an entirely different way etc, but SO is stuck in a time warp.