Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 808 posts

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#581

Post by Turing_Machine »

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…

Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so). Presumably this was because SO still wanted the Google juice.

It was irritating as hell to have the top several Google links go to SO discussions that had been shut down by the moderators.

> I can't blame them

I'm sorry, this is like saying you can't blame cops for beating up the occasional suspect because they encounter a lot of genuinely bad people every day.

If you can't do the job in the presence of shitheads, you have no business being a cop. Or a forum moderator.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#582

Post by whstl »

gvx wrote: post #376
whstl wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has replaced most of my usage of StackOverflow/Google. It probably won't last forever without people generating new answers somewhere else, but it answers a lot of things correctly, and the things it gets wrong are easy enough to verify. I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.

> I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change. It already has, and not for the better. SO is currently awash with nonsensical answers that are clearly the result of feeding the question into ChatGPT. Not to mention questions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-bui...

Well, perhaps that's what moderation should be focusing on blocking then, rather than driving away humans (as was mentioned a lot by other answers in this thread).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#583

Post by waterproof »

School-Cotton wrote: post #546
Lutger wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question explicitly invites the kind of witty reflection shown in the accepted answer, by adding: "and what do you think?" As mentioned elsewhere, this is an old question and both the kind of question and answer wouldn't be allowed these days. However, I also fundamentally disagree that questioning the assumptions in a question is unhelpful. You want to solve a problem, find an approach and want help because you…

“You didn’t actually want to do X, here’s how to do Y instead” may indeed be helpful for the beginner who initially asked the question, but it’s very unhelpful for me who finds the page years later actually wanting to do X.

I disagree- on SO you’ll usually get some literal answers as well as the more high-level, question-the-premise ones. Why not both?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#584

Post by ceejayoz »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #508
JacobSeated wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I want to remind you, Stackoverflow is a Q/A site that sometimes contains stolen content from, as you put it, so-called "content farms" and the official resources. Now, I do have a Stackoverflow user as well, but I actually prefer publishing my ideas on my own site rather than help build someone else's content farm for free. Stackoverflow is, itself, a content farm, and it can be very hard for new users…

Yes, if you cite a solution the mods there get angry when you don’t copy paste the third party site content instead of just link to it. The stated reason is to make sure the content isn’t lost. In other words to ensure the content is duplicated on SO. I have no allegiance to SO ownership so when the fake SO sites show up in results instead of SO, usually reading them will just give me the answer more quickly than fin…

They want enough of an excerpt so the answer doesn't become useless years later when someone redesigns their blog URL schema or shuts it down. That's reasonable, and probably falls within fair use.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#585

Post by byronic »

I would point directly at two culprits kind of under the same umbrella -- Google usurping StackOverflow answers in its search results (as in, displaying a Q&A format where google's 'answer' is just a portion of a StackOverflow accepted answer) and the general SEO poisoning of search results (ad networks / LLMs scraping and rehosting the content, Google failing to return relevant results etc.)

Until seeing this article, though, I hadn't thought about how much I had unconsciously changed my habits to work around the aforementioned issues -- I swapped to DuckDuckGo, started appending site:stackoverflow.com to searches, performing multiple searches around the same content (like grabbing a few keywords from a scraped article and then feeding that into a search of the official documents), and also more aggressively searching GitHub issues

With the caveat that I still use SO relatively frequently -- everything from 'I can't remember this specific syntax' to 'I have an intractable terraform/AWS/k8s issue and need to see if anyone else is experiencing it'

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#586

Post by osigurdson »

Agingcoder wrote: post #268
osigurdson wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://chat.openai.com/ I currently pay for it but I'm not sure if it makes any difference.

Yes it does - gpt 4 is vastly superior to gpt 3.

It is slow and rate limited however (even with the paid plan). I usually only use it when GPT3.5 isn't giving good results.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#588

Post by dan-0 »

berkes wrote: post #278
shriek wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the better answer is to just explain what's being asked by strongly encouraging them in the Z direction. Sometimes people just want to understand what's happening behind the scenes rather than just looking to solve for Y.

But that's a different question. And should be asked different. "I'm trying to learn foo.js and attemt to do so by porting Tetris to it. I know foo.js is a terrible option for a game. So. How can I write to the canvas from foo.js?" Is often answered properly, if only because to many it's a nice puzzle. "How can I write to the canvas fro foo.js?" Is different in that it will attract a lot of people explaining that foo…

This is part of the problem. You know your constraints, other people do not, but like to assume they do. So you end up having to write a defensive argument about your problem rather than just plainly asking your real question.

This may help less experienced engineers not understanding their problem set, but for a more experienced engineer it's absolutely obnoxious to think of all the ways to defend my question so I don't have to deal with a rush of "oh but you should do this instead" answers getting up voted that don't actually answer my question, then asking to accept the answer.

To one set of users it's possibly helpful, to another it's useless if not also condescending, often condescending to both sets.

The bottom line is now, SO is so filled with these types of responses, I can't expect to get a very specific question answered, which is really the only reason I'd ask a question in the first place, so why use it?

There are plenty chat groups now via Slack and discord in my field where I can get much more direct answers. People aren't worried about getting down voted for a bad question, people aren't giving low quality answers to boost their points. So for me, SO is practically dead except for the occasional obscure error message that I can query for there.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#589

Post by madog »

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…

This is what I want from a new search engine:

1. Respect exact match searches - this used to work enclosing the search terms in "" quotes, but no longer works. If there are no exact match results, return nothing.

2. Allow blacklisting or removing results from certain websites entirely e.g. I want to be able to configure geeks4geeks to never show up in any results ever

If someone could make this new search engine they would have a good shot at replacing Google :)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#590

Post by christophilus »

madog wrote: post #589
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…

This is what I want from a new search engine: 1. Respect exact match searches - this used to work enclosing the search terms in "" quotes, but no longer works. If there are no exact match results, return nothing. 2. Allow blacklisting or removing results from certain websites entirely e.g. I want to be able to configure geeks4geeks to never show up in any results ever If someone could make this new search engine they…

I think Brave search has those features. (I haven’t tried it, though.)
Post reply on HN