The Fall of Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#461

Post by RyanHamilton » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:05 AM UTC

Shrezzing wrote: post #407

sznio wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I spent years learning a programming language well then further years delivering a training course, iterating and then providing sections of the course on the website free online. Both as advertising and to get new people started. Your "typescript array" returns one of the sites in the top 5 that basically copy-pasted via thesaurus many of my articles. I checked and it turns out they offer $50 for people to submit content for any language / technology. So you have someone in a cheap country paid to go copy content and reword it on that site. Then they rank higher than you, as they do this over many languages thus seeming more authoritive. Even more worryingly with chatgpt, they won't even have to pay the $50 any more. So the whole internet may become like this. Leaving me little incentive to publish material except that which solely entertains myself, mmm facebook/twitter = not a good outcome.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#462

Post by zmxz » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:06 AM UTC

In limited topics I took part on SO, what frustrated me the most were the "users". I deliberately put word users in quotes because I worked as a consultant and often saw guides on how to ask questions on SO (i.e. use an account with female name and picture, deliberately misspell words/interpunction). There was this Magento company and I was consultant for their (UK) client, one of the devs gave me the tour of how they use SO.

What was frustrating is that day in and day out, similar questions were asked - ones that are googleable.

One day I received a comment from such "user", under a question I answered and explained in detail. The "user" went to discredit me, without arguments or links and was pretty rude through all of the misspellings he did to avoid some automatic triggers. I replied rudely as well, asking him to read other people's answers before discrediting and providing no info.

Result was that I was sent to "cool off" for 2 weeks, and was given a speech from mod as if I was a child. At that point SO changed their ToS and claimed that all content was theirs, including answers I provided.

And that's where I departed from SO because from my experience - I was free debugging service for various agencies who went a little bit overboard with claims of their experience and in case someone was rude to me - I get no protection, however if I'm rude to "users" then I get slap on the wrist.

Working for free, being patronized, interacting with people who are too lazy to read - that were my reasons for abandoning SO.

Besides, when it started - all of the big questions about nearly every language were covered fast and there was very little to do except write SQL for other people and get praise for it as form of payment.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#463

Post by alecco » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:07 AM UTC

alecco wrote: post #384

Besides suffering from mod hell, I stopped answering SO questions mostly because: 1. it takes time to write a good answer; 2. fast copy-paste answers, often wrong, get upvoted anyway; 3. picking the accepted answer, out of many, is done by the person who asked it... who usually doesn't have the knowledge to do this! 4. also many times no answer is accepted, like the person who asked it stopped bothering. And the hard…

Ask a dumb question about a trendy JS framework and you get hundreds of votes.

Answer a difficult question on a barely documented part of software (e.g. low-level) and you'll get a couple of votes, at most. And you're lucky if the answer gets accepted.

There are a few unsung heroes on certain hard/obscure SO tags. They dedicate a lot of time and get little reward. Whatever follows SO should find a way to fix this.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#464

Post by leblancfg » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:08 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M. However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/v…

I’d say the peak of Github copilot adoption might have been during that month as well, IIRC the VS Code extension got released late March

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#465

Post by lelanthran » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:14 AM UTC

ivanbakel wrote: post #401

jason-johnson wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

> And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves

Can't be done, will be marked as duplicate.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#466

Post by EspressoGPT » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:14 AM UTC

devjab wrote: post #374

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…

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…

Yes, and documentation that is actually usable. I don't enjoy the standard JavaDoc pages but I do enjoy the, for example, GoDoc pages. I think the programming community did a good job in establishing user-friendly documentation.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#467

Post by Fatnino » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:14 AM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #325

suzzer99 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.

Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”. I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.

But it's pay to play over there.

So in short, gambling.

And the house always wins.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#468

Post by collaborative » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

Tao3300 wrote: post #285

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT Claim asserted without evidence.

Anecdata: I've started asking Bing these questions instead of SO. E.g., it recently gave me a very helpful answer for debugging a Spring issue and cited its sources. What it didn't do was present me with a whole lot of moderation cruft. I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. I also don't have to pray my question will get enough vote attention or worry that I posted it at the w…

I wonder how you feel aisearch.vip compares to your Bing experience. Send me a message via Side Menu-> Contact and I will give you a grand for free

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#469

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

I still use SO as much as I ever did, but I rarely/never ask/answer/comment because it’s very often already answered. The answer to my question is often 10 years old. So my activity these days makes less traffic (I don’t need to visit to reply to a comment etc) but it’s still useful.

Another reason I rarely ask is of course as others have pointed out: the amount of pedantry is around 10x the amount needed to keep the quality of the site high, and often enough to make the quality worse. Often these days I ask a question, and get attacked despite it not being a dupe or off topic or low quality (I’m a top 1% account as I assume many of us are so I know my way around). Then a perfect answer comes and I can’t accept it because it’s already jumped on by mods. Somehow a useful exchange with a reasonable question and accepted answer has been completely drowned by mods. It’s infuriating.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#470

Post by jb1991 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 10:16 AM UTC

collaborative wrote: post #412

sedatk wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s appalling. I thought they honored deletion requests. Terrible look on HNs side too. Edit: It seems like there’s a wiggle room, but still terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237

I happen to have tried this multiple times. Every now and again I want to erase all trace of me on the internet. HN doesn't allow it. They tell you that you can give a spreadsheet with comment ids and how you want to rephrase things in case you've given TMI about yourself (in order to anonymize). I just don't have the time to go through my entire history to do this. So I attempt to post less, knowing I don't own my c…

Perhaps if HN eventually improves in this area then we will have all the proof we need that it is in fact becoming more and more like Reddit. Because it seems like a lot of the discourse is already checking a lot of those other boxes.