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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#571

Post by cassepipe »

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then.

Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc.

The only issue with SO imho is that it's getting too big and there should be a lot to gain from further splitting to other StackExchanges like computer science, computer graphics, databases, infosec, Vim etc.

It would be great if there was a way to transfer a SO question over the more relevant community I guess

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#572

Post by ur-whale »

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…

> moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible.

Can't agree more. So many relevant questions shot down by an anal retentive mod you end up having to find the answer on another site.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#573

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

> Google is really failing hard in this regard,

Failing at what though? Is it anything they care about, that they want to do?

If not, then it's not so much failure as it is a change of plans on their part. They don't want to do that anymore, and there's no one else to pick up the slack.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#574

Post by rustybolt »

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…

This. Stack overflow contains many diamonds. We just can't find them anymore because Google randomly decided to stop being a proper search engine at some point.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#575

Post by shafyy »

sznio wrote: post #349
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…

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…

Try out Kagi Search. You can manually increase website's weight and completely block others. E.g. I have increased Stack Overflow's weight and blocked those stupid content farms. Works great.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#576

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

JohnMakin wrote: post #120
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…

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…

SO changed its policies a long time ago already... they don't want to answer your questions. They hate your questions (and by extension, they hate you!).

It's ok, you deserve the hate. After all, you're asking the wrong questions.

They want questions that are "textbook-worthy" or possibly "encyclopedia worthy". They're on record as having said this officially. If programming and technology is just messier than that, if it's more complicated than that, and you still have questions that don't fit because of it... well, fuck you. They don't exist to answer your questions, they exist to answer great questions that they can use to build up this pretty little sight that now has some purpose other than whatever it was you thought you were using it for.

The Z guy, he's playing their game. He's awesome. You, you need to be punished until you comply.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#577

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

tcgv wrote: post #556

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.

For me at least, I often go directly to the official docs. They're much better in 2023 than they were in 2013, pretty much across the board. And if that doesn't work, it seems you're more likely to find your specific problem being asked in the issues of the official Github, Gitlab, etc. than you are on SO. Even Reddit and some language/technology-specific forums will have better results now.

The fun thing is... I think SO saw that coming. They made that huge push to be the central documentation hub for everything from huge projects to internal teams. It just wasn't well thought out and expensive iirc, and had an abysmal adoption rate as a result

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#578

Post by mcv »

cassepipe wrote: post #571

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO…

I also think Stackoverflow is great, but to be perfectly honest, I haven't used it much in the past year and a half. And I have no idea why.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#579

Post by XCSme »

pjc50 wrote: post #555
XCSme wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then, maybe the "crawler" should be an actual PC navigating to the browser, taking a screenshot (or live feed) of the page and processing it with AI.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#580

Post by waterproof »

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…

In this case, the question actually says “and more importantly, what do you think?”

So the answer is actually on topic.

It may be a bit… stylistically unusual, but I think I came away with a pretty good idea of what the answerer thinks.

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