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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#401

Post by ivanbakel »

jason-johnson wrote: post #381
underdeserver wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Again, you’re not answering the person who asked but every person who ever will . Some of them will be asking because the “right way” is not an option in their situation.

And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.)

Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wrong way, because they don't know what the right way is, an answer that simply tells them how is a bad resource.

It's not enough to tag caveats onto such dangerous answers, because people can't read. Instead, newbies should have to overcome a sufficient amount of opposition to filter out those who don't know why they're doing what they want to do, and the rest can make the little effort of being very explicit about why they want to do something the wrong way.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#402

Post by kjuulh »

I've noticed I haven't used stackoverflow that much, I've always been a lurker, but the answers have gotten less and less highlighted. Now instead I am nearly always in the github issues of the project I am working with.

Also ChatGPT has really been a big help, as for most basic questions I can just ask it and get a fair result. This is more tricky to do when searching on google.

I.e.

chatgpt: How do i sort a slice of structs in golang with an inner field of "Name" Usually somewhat correct the first time.

google: golang sort slice struct (I hope to find a good answer, but I usually have to go through 1-3 pages

This is more documentation based, but this is also what stackoverflow did in the past quite well, that is answers to common questions for a language.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#403

Post by OJFord »

stavros wrote: post #392
gpgn wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that Wikipedia is often pushed to the bottom of the page compared to a few years ago where it would always be at the very top.

And it's always the result I want.

Then consider using DDG & '!w term', or some other method (searching Wikipedia, extension, I think Firefox has something engine-agnostic built-in) instead?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#404

Post by pasc1878 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #317
ideamotor wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason…

ChatGPT is not in anyway better than SO - no see the current moderation strike.

Both sides can identify ChatGPT answers as being wrong. The question is how can they be deleted. The moderators say they can delete a lot by manual inspection. SO say that AI tools were deleting wrong ones.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#405

Post by stavros »

OJFord wrote: post #403
stavros wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's always the result I want.

Then consider using DDG & '!w term', or some other method (searching Wikipedia, extension, I think Firefox has something engine-agnostic built-in) instead?

Oh I do use DDG. I think it might suffer from the same problem, actually, since now I'm wondering why I see Wikipedia results very far down in Google when I don't really use Google.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#406

Post by MandieD »

philbo wrote: post #229
fishtoaster wrote: post #20

Interesting that this seems to have started around Spring 2021 when posts + votes started tailing off, followed by traffic starting to decline around spring of 2022. I can think of a few theories that I don't think hold water: 1. The rise of ChatGPT to answer many questions that StackOverflow would previously have been used for. This seems unlikely, since the timing doesn't really work out. 2. The perennial complaint…

This sounds right to me. If I were building a Q&A site that genuinely wanted to encourage high-quality answers, I'd implement something like a 1-hour window where all answers are invisible immediately after the question is posted. This is to give people time to work on a good quality answer, without racing to be the first and gain those precious early upvotes. The UI could still indicate how many other people have an…

That's really clever, and I think would also make things like Advent of Code still fun in the post-ChatGPT world.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#407

Post by Shrezzing »

sznio wrote: post #349
JohnMakin wrote: post #109

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…

Your first point seems to be most important. > - 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 wi…

Google is really failing hard in this regard, and I'm fairly sure it's intentional on their part. Searching "Typescript array" has obvious intent from the user, and an obvious "correct" first result. Google returns the documentation page in the 3rd result, but it's a link to a deprecated version of the page. The rest of the above-the-fold links are websites that contain Google ads.

Duck-Duck-Go returns the up-to-date documentation link 2nd, and the MDN result in 3, with W3Schools in 1. Bing returns actual content on the results page, describing exactly what you need to understand a TS Array.

Google have the incentive to push the poor sites, because they earn revenues from doing so. Bing and DDG don't have that incentive, and return much more relevant and useful links. That doesn't feel like a coincidence.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#408

Post by stevage »

I'm a huge contributor to SO, with over 100k rep.

But I stopped contributing seriously maybe 2 years ago. I just got so sick of SO behaving like complete jerks again and again, and lost any desire to keep enriching their shareholders.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#409

Post by lloydatkinson »

berkes wrote: post #286
anticodon wrote: post #172

Earlier 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…

The "opened up and downvoted" rings so true. I've a rather high account. So I can revert mod decisions and sometimes do. E.g. reopen a marked-duplicate that isn't duplicate on closer inspection. I don't do it often (can't be bothered too much) but when I do, I sometimes almost feel the hate radiation over the web. Indeed, people on a rage-tantrum going through all my answers and questions and downvoting those. Lol.

I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#410

Post by pasc1878 »

techdragon wrote: post #223
axblount wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that sometimes poeple just want 'X by Y'. To get a question answered, you shouldn't have to list every constraint and design descision that led you to that point. Comes up all the time when people ask how to do things in bash/sh. I know there are better tools for the job, but this is the one I have.

Oh god that just reminded me how often people ignore the question asking for posix shell or “/bin/sh” or other specific shell scripting language… and processed to answer the question using bash, zsh, Perl, python, or even the slightly less wrong (because it is kinda weird to be shell scripting without a moderately normal unix environment) of using a bunch of Unix binary programs to do the requested job without actual…

The bash not sh issue is due to ignorance on the part of the answerers not an XY problem. Also shell can"t do everything - you are in a POSIX environment so use POSIX tools. The Unix environment is an environment of putting together many small tools and not just using one so any shell script can call POSIX tools as a minimum. So just making a complex shell script rather than using the tools does need to explain why.

I must admit that I don"t buy in to that philosophy and like using one tool so for scripting I would do all in python, so I would not be answering that question.

Many Linux users think that their way is the only and that means bash as the shell and many others like GNU coreutils, gcc etc. I am an MacOS user and my professional career includes several non Linux Unixes so I know bash is not the only shell - try csh for fun - which is partly why I use python or previously perl as they are the same on all machines

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