431–440 of 808 posts
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To contrast, I've not once used it where I would have previously used SO (professional developer).
Have you tried to use it?
When I search for something, I want factual and correct information, which is not what a language model is for.
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This whole situation just shows as a lie everything we hear about SEO. Stack Overflow has the exact text, it loads incredibly fast (should be commended more for this), doesn't require ten meg of Javascript to render as far as I know generally meets HTML standards. These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them, if you open devtools you'…
> These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them Only if you're not googlebot. The crawler sees a much nicer site.
Back in the day SO would be practically the ONLY place you would ask any questions regarding issues in programming or tech, but over time things like asking for help about specific frameworks or open source products has become more common to ask it on those projects github or discord.
And then you got LLMs being able to summarize an entire manual for you.
I have asked a lot of questions, got good and useful answers on some. I have also answered a lot. Some of my answers and questions have been edited afterwards, most of the edits where good.
My experience was not perfect. Some of questions have been marked as duplicate when in fact they were not duplicates, but only superficially similar to other questions. Some of the edits people did to my answers where incorrect.
But overall, my experience with the site is still mostly positive. It saddens me to see that others are not enjoying the site as I did.
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…
One thing I noticed in the first chart displaying visits is that there is a sharp drop in April, which is just after Google deployed its last core update: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Cou8Tr74r7EXNthuE...
At some point regular replies were replaced by administrators and mods who are seemingly far more interested in finding faults with your question rather than to actually answer it. The worst one was probably those times I’d ask a question, and then it got labelled “not a question.” Honestly, this unhelpful, bureaucratic, and down right nasty attitude has really disgusted me with the site.
Apparently new users are having even bigger problems, and they get flamed really hard for asking newbie questions. Often people are rudely asked to read the manual, when the entire cause of their problems is that the manual is so poorly written that it’s impossible to make any sense for it—even if answering questions like that is the “raison d’être” of a place like Stack Overflow...
Now, with the prevalence of ChatGPT and services that will give you great answers to almost any code-related question, I honestly think that the fall of Stack Overflow is well deserved.
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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 responded to the person above me when there were literally two other comments in this thread.
> Your reply is an example of what people are complaining about
Defining something is not an example of an XY problem.
> - you are addressing the issue you wished was asked, not addressing the issue you were presented with.
As I am not much of a programmer but work on electronics and computer hardware I deal with different types of people than would be on SO, so I am not addressing anything but my own experiences.
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…
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…
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
Google is not "losing" any fight. Google is deliberately letting spam thrive because that spam may contain Google Ads/analytics and increases engagement on the SERP page as people who click on the spam go back to try something else (potentially one of the sponsored results). All these contribute to Google's bottom-line.
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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…
This whole situation just shows as a lie everything we hear about SEO. Stack Overflow has the exact text, it loads incredibly fast (should be commended more for this), doesn't require ten meg of Javascript to render as far as I know generally meets HTML standards. These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them, if you open devtools you'…
If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.
I looked into it and some other websites benefited from the update, so who knows what changes they made and why.