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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#491

Post by arp242 »

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.

I don't think it's an intentional decision anyone has taken, or that they intentionally made the search engine the way it works now, but more of a "there's nothing wrong here from out perspective, so what's there to fix?" kind of thing.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#492

Post by johnny_reilly »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #440
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'…

Anecdotal, but my website lost a lot of search traffic after Google's core update in March, which seems to have affected SO as well looking at the first chart. 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.…

Again anecdotal, but I lost the majority of my SEO traffic late last year around the time of a core update. I've spent the best part of a year attempting to repair it, on the assumption I'd committed some heinous SEO crime. The more time that passes, I'm starting to think that the issue isn't mine so much as Google's. It's baffling. I wrote about it here:

https://johnnyreilly.com/how-i-ruined-my-seo

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#493

Post by keithnz »

For me, I stopped contributing just before the downfall and was in the top <0.1% . Basically, the mods wrecked the whole thing for me, they obliterated a lot of answers from multiple people that were really good. There is no way to challenge that at all. Not to mention the mods got into big silly dramas with each other. So I just stopped. Now it feels like there is a lot of stale content is on there.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#495

Post by Closi »

pittmajp wrote: post #426
winrid wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had it write an ansible job to enable a service with a specific name, and I got what I expected: something that looks correct a first glance, but with some subtle errors.

Much like half the answers on stack overflow.

Rather than ask it to write a full ansible job, try asking it the question you would ask on Stack Overflow (i.e. you probably wouldn't ask Stack Overflow to write the full job for you).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#496

Post by xkcd1963 »

kebman wrote: post #436

I used to contribute a lot to Stack Overflow, but then I noticed that I’d get flamed for even asking simple questions; stuff that can really stand between actually getting somewhere with your code, and where a helpful comment could really make a difference. 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 a…

There was a hn post once where OP wrote all questions are already answered on SO. Hence nobody should ask questions (especially newbs)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#497

Post by PurpleRamen »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier 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…

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/

Is it SO's purpose to make assumption about the intention or context of questions? I would say no, and that it's even harmful, as it prevents the quest-giver from learning the flaws in their solutions on their own.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#499

Post by zacmps »

wokwokwok wrote: post #460
sznio wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fou…

I find it incredible you find a LLM slower and less full of useless chitchat about a question than stack overflow. I don’t even open SO anymore; if it has a direct answer to your question, the LLM almost certainly does too; and asking new questions on SO is basically impossible. If you manage to survive the gauntlet of “too specific, already answered, not general interest, arbitrary moderator activity”, the chances o…

> To you.

Which was the whole point of this chain :)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#500

Post by weinzierl »

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…

"I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever."

Stackoverflow once set out - with the very best intentions - to be better than expertsexchange et. al. I think that's why they are so strict with their moderation.

The issue, of course, is that this is a hard problem. To moderate a community of experts you need to be an expert yourself. With Stackoverflow I feel most moderators are just overwhelmed with the task, so they aggressively shut down everything they don't understand.

Many of them are probably aware of that and just don't know how to handle it better. Others are so clueless that they do not even recognize the good questions.

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