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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#481

Post by contravariant »

anticodon wrote: post #367
quirino wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".

I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments. Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incenti…

I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#482

Post by soco »

pjc50 wrote: post #421
technion wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what will I see if I change my browser's user agent?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#483

Post by kzrdude »

culopatin wrote: post #99
lawgimenez wrote: post #83

My SO account is almost 12 years, with just over 2k reputation and I don't really care. Until now I am still somewhat helping answer some basic questions in the mobile development area tags, my only gripe with SO is the hostile nature of some mods with large reputation. Some seem to get a kick out of this and forgot that reputation does not translate to expertise. For 12 years, they have not figured this one out. New…

I think that with the rise of push notifications, no one really goes to a site to check notifications anymore. So the new user may have not developed the muscle memory to go back to SO and participate. I suspect this also has something to do with the decline of forums. Reddit still works because the app sends 200 notifications a day, but without it, I don’t think it would be as popular. Also SO is participation hosti…

I don't know if we all do it the same way. I don't use push notifications for barely anything, because I don't want to be disturbed by random sites (least of all linkedin or SO.)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#484

Post by rightbyte »

geysersam wrote: post #391
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…

There are browser extensions for blacklisting domains from your Google searches. I've been so incredibly happy using one if them. If I see one of those despicable content farms I just blacklist it and move on. Often when I search on Google for technical stuff I only get 2 visible results on the first page, 1 SO and 1 documentation. Soooo relaxing. The business reasons why Google doesn't take steps to remove the bad c…

Your experience matches mine. Spend two or three weeks blacklisting sites as you hit them and they disappear.

Some people argue that Google possibly can't win the fight vs spam sites, but obviously it works perfectly fine manually blacklisting them.

It takes time to build ranking.

The underlying reason is probably that the spam sites use Google Ads (revenue which is tied to 1000s of PMs and managers bonuses) and that Google as an org is deeply dysfunctional at this point.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#485

Post by rightbyte »

geysersam wrote: post #444
lolc wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Google has an incentive to send people to content farms because those farms will show Google's ads. Stackoverflow doesn't. So they can increase ad exposure. Thinking of it, it would be an interesting test to compare the ranking of two similar sites, one with google ads, another with ads from another provider. Might be good evidence for antitrust litigation. But what do you do if they just pre…

Maybe you're correct. I've heard that explanation before but it just seems too incredible that they'd undermine their monopolistic global billion dollar business for a measly share of the revenue of geeks4geeks.

Google is a self playing piano with clueless leadership. There is probably no plan involved.

Just managers doing what they get more money for or devs hunting promotions by increasing ad revenue by 0.01% in the short term one sting at a time.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#486

Post by AtNightWeCode »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #213
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…

That makes sense. "New visits" are first time users, likely young coders who are looking up answers to things on a search engine, find what they're looking for on Stack Overflow, maybe click on an ad, and leave. They probably don't vote or post much. A sudden die-off there suggests something very bad happened to organic traffic (change in Google? Terrible new SEO scheme? A sudden stop in ad buys?) The new content rat…

If SO was worried about that drop I think they would have bought back some of that traffic. More likely something has changed how they count the visits or they blocked some bad traffic. Traffic data is often sampled as well.

The fall in the beginning of 2023 may be the introduction of ChatGPT. A more worrying idea is that the numbers reflect not just the decline of SO but a decline of the whole IT business.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#487

Post by iib »

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…

There is also a bizzare thing that I noticed only when I enabled RSS for some of the tags I wanted to watch. My RSS reader routinely had questions that were nowhere to be found on the site, even though they did not seem to be offtopic or have some other kind of structural problem.

Of course the users themselves could have deleted the questions, but regardless, I did not expect to see that.

It could be a nice experiment to enable RSS for some niche topics and checking automatically after a number of days to see which are gone.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#488

Post by permo-w »

bad_alloc wrote: post #472
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…

Conspiracy theory: Bad initial search results forces people to search more often, hence allowing google to show more ads. Since few people switch away as a result, they continue doing this.

this is a bit like the cosmetics industry. there are very clearly probiotic solutions to body odour that could be developed with the coins down the back of P&G's sofa cushions, but if you fix everyone's body odour, then how are you gonna sell them anti-perspirant from now to the end of time?

now, in an ideal world competition would solve this problem, but the cosmetics companies heavily collude and anti-compete to prevent this

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#489

Post by thumbuddy »

I use stack overflow every other day and it's fine? It's imperfect advice but there are some gems on there and it's pretty easy for me anyways to spot when something is dated, not right, or whatever. Maybe it's less useful to me now because I understand the domains I'm in better?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#490

Post by merdaverse »

Eisenstein wrote: post #220
ezconnect wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?

> Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Here is an example of using it to write simple powershell scripts: * https://chat.openai.com/share/17a9d185-4a8c-4c10-97a2-0c5b08... Here is an example of using it to merge different types of json configuration files: * https://chat.openai.com/shar…

In that JSON example you're honestly losing more time with ChatGPT that doing it yourself. It seems more like mentoring a junior than a helpful assistant. Most of my interactions with it have been this way.
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