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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#601

Post by pg5 »

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…

My least favorite thing is how many highly upvoted answers are telling the OP to "do something else" instead of actually answering the question. Sometimes requirements come from above and we don't have a choice!

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#602

Post by bobajeff »

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…

>mods there get angry when you don’t copy paste the third party site content instead of just link to it...

There's a good reason for that. Sites come and go and as a result links to solutions die and you wish someone had just answered the question instead of just linked to it.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#603

Post by dboreham »

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…

Nope, it's working well for me too.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#604

Post by freediver »

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…

Results on Kagi for comparison:

https://kagi.com/search?q=typescript+array&r=us&sh=Qa5cXHvwj...

We simply downrank sites which display a lots of ads on them and also use community blacklists for dev site clones.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#605

Post by slashdev »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #492
DeusExMachina wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t see what you did wrong, it must have been the algorithm change. My parents had a business that was killed by a Facebook algorithm change. My brother took a significant hit from an Amazon algorithm change. Building a business around any of the big tech companies seems very risky.

I think Google search has just declined a lot. I guess they’re losing the constant cat and mouse game with SEO. It seems worse than it has ever been, I’m relying more on ChatGPT and copilot now.

I can only imagine that LLMs will be the end of any content based search ranking. I don’t know how they’ll adapt to that.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#606

Post by ncruces »

rightbyte wrote: post #484
geysersam wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but then they're editorializing.

And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#607

Post by mountainb »

technion wrote: post #395
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 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'…

It has long been a mantra in SEO land that user generated content sites in general and forums in particular are to be aggressively down ranked. The reason for this is that industrial strength spam farms otherwise spin up tens of thousands of forum domains to pass link juice to what they are targeting. This naturally penalizes real forums, which often contain the best content for a query.

This is why Google has basically surrendered and why so many search result categories are now dominated by whatever sites Google has arbitrarily declared the winner through editorial decision making. In many search categories, we are effectively back where we started with Yahoo directories and hand-picked search rankings. What you see on the first page SERP is the best that they can do under the circumstances based on the fundamentals of how search works.

The web was a fun idea while it lasted, but if you are using it as a primary information resource, you are wasting your time.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#608

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

I never really liked StackOverflow. The only questions they seem to allow are “How do I get the length of a string in Python?”. Most of the problems where I am scratching my head and really need the benefit of somebody’s experience are software selection problems that aren’t allowed.

The competing answers paradigm is also fundamentally broken, I don’t want to see 15 answers to “How do I get the length of a string in Python?” I just need to see

   len(x)
Programming splogs do better than SO does in this respect. In fact, even the Q/A paradigm is bad because the average SO post requires scrolling past at least one extensive code example that does not work,

For more than 10 years I thought the world needed a search engine for programmers. You really ought to be able to upload your POM file or equivalent and have the system automatically search the correct version of documentations. (Any attempt to look up things in the Java manual has to be written like “JDK17 javadoc {className}”; Javascript libraries like reactstrap, react-router and such often have a few wildly incompatible versions and I don’t want to waste a millisecond with the wrong version doc, …)

I wouldn’t mind searching answers from stackoverflow but I only want the best correct answer and I don’t want to read a long confused question, etc. As this would clearly save coders time maybe they’d pay for a subscription as they do for Jetbrains tools.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#609

Post by bee_rider »

coliveira wrote: post #593
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…

The answer is that the content farms are doing a better job of interacting with Google algorithm than SO. Of course it is a problem with Google search, but search was always hackable. The made-for-google sites know very well how to play the game.

I wonder if Google should make their SEO prevention worse but simpler. Everyone has always wanted to SEO for Google, as long as Google has been around. It has seemed like only recently that good sites predictably lose.

Perhaps 10 years ago Stack Overflow was able to do some minimal SEO and then get by on content strength. Perhaps nowadays Google is doing a good job preventing basic stuff from working, so the only people to get good results are SEO-ologists that only know about exploiting SEO, and have nothing interesting to say on any other topic.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#610

Post by azherebtsov »

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…

I was involved in SEO related projects some time ago. Not that I’m an expert. I’ve heard google understands that the site is a search engine and does not index it. However it should be smarter, like do not index SO’s search pages, but do index question pages - because the original content is there. SO might have ran out of crawl budget which Google assigns to each site, and/or Google prioritises fresh content. But I agree with the sentiment, what we know as SEO is nothing more than playing games with Google indexing algorithms, based on rumours about the recent changes in it, or improving page performance beyond reasonable boundaries. The other day I was looking at apple.com internals and spotted a few things which we were “fixing” on our pages. I asked SEO experts “what is the point of doing X, since there are examples of a well indexed page having that same problem?”. And the answer was like “when we will be as big as Apple…”
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