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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#551

Post by fireflash38 »

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…

My biggest problem with github issues is similar to the problems with SO:

Bots closing issues because someone doesn't spam the page. Closing as duplicate of (non related bug). A slew of random solutions that are only tangentially related and don't really solve the problem.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#552

Post by Scarblac »

XCSme wrote: post #537
pjc50 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it even make sense to serve different content to a bot than what a human would see? Isn't the search engine trying to rank content made for humans?

It makes sense if you know your content isn't nice for humans (e.g. full of ads and tracking stuff) but you want it to rank high anyway.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#553

Post by joenot443 »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #255
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…

ah, the primordial incompatibility of cultures. Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india. this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like…

My mind went to the same place.

Do people not remember the "Hacktoberfest" fiasco? People were encouraged to make a PR on public repos in exchange for a free t-shirt, and _obviously_ this led to repos being overrun with spam PRs changing a single line comment.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktobe...

There were dozens of videos like this one,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjmCsdgUhE

with loads of people replying and thanking the author, excited for their t-shirt, not really knowing they're _creating unnecessary work_ for actual engineers with limited time.

Incentivized systems like this can work okay in small, self-selected communities, but as soon as it's open up to the entire world, the implied courtesy of said system vanishes, and immediately we're pandering to the lowest common denominator.

This thread digs in a bit. https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944/

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#555

Post by pjc50 »

XCSme wrote: post #537
pjc50 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it even make sense to serve different content to a bot than what a human would see? Isn't the search engine trying to rank content made for humans?

It's an adversarial process. The search engine is, in theory, trying to rank by usefulness to the user, and the site owner is trying to maximize revenue by lying to the search engine. And the user.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#556

Post by tcgv »

This downward trend makes me wonder where is all that traffic going to? Surely developers are still searching for answers, where are they finding them? It can't only be ChatGPT since the trend started in February 2022, but it surely is a really strong contender now.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#557

Post by Karunamon »

CodeCompost wrote: post #290
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 impression I get from commenters is that somehow they think their careers are tied to StackOverflow points. Trying their best to downvote correct answers and promoting their own in order to further their agenda.

SO ran a careers site for a while, and as a part of that, provided a resume/profile page upon which you were encouraged to share your score and/or your own questions and answers. I wonder if there was actually something to that…

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#558

Post by testtestabcdef »

Closi wrote: post #501
testtestabcdef wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't. Because (free, as in free beer) chatGPT is extremely slow, I have to make a rather extensive proompt to get the result I want to, and then I still have to debug most code. That's not very convenient, atleast for now. I got so used to search engines by now, that it only takes a few keywords to get the expected result. Be it a SO-answer or a documentation page. And as people have mentioned, chatGPT was learn…

> I haven't. Because (free, as in free beer) chatGPT is extremely slow, I have to make a rather extensive proompt to get the result I want to, and then I still have to debug most code. That's because you are comparing asking ChatGPT to write full code to searching for a question on Stack Overflow and adapting their answer (which is comparing apples and oranges). Try using ChatGPT like you use Stack Overflow instead (…

>Try using ChatGPT like you use Stack Overflow instead (i.e. the question is "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python" rather than "write me an application / function which...").

That's my point though. I get, that it can produce quite good results, if you are specific enough. And for some applications it makes sense to take your time and describe that as much as possible.

Most of the time I just need some small snippet though and usually I can get that with just a few keywords in my favorite search engine, which is way faster. So the conclusion is: There is no one or the other. They should be used complementary, or atleast that's what I am doing (as in use the search engine for quick hints and chatGPT for some more verbose stuff 'write me a parser for this csv in awk'.)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#559

Post by Yajirobe »

newaccount74 wrote: post #310
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 very popular Zalgo answer is a perfect example of this problem [1] The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem. Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts…

> If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes.

Jesus this is cringe

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#560

Post by bigfishrunning »

josu wrote: post #393
maxlin wrote: post #43

Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT, I sincerely hope it keeps operating, stays strict (even if it causes collateral) and keeps ban on LLM-generated content. The wheels of this kind of stuff turn slowly, but obviously ChatGPT was trained partly with data only gainable from a healthy StackOverflow-kind of site with users actively asking unique questions and enough people ans…

>keeps ban on LLM-generated content. How is this being enforced? It's either bots banning bots in a digital game of whack-a-mole; or humans arbitrarily trying to asses whether something has been written by an LLM or a human.

If you read some LLM output, you'll pick up on lots of patterns. LLM generated content isn't terribly difficult to identify.
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