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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#611

Post by hermannj314 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #581
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…

For police and moderators, having a false positive rate that equals 0 seems impossible.

There are lots of ways to respond to a positive indicator that could reflect a aelf-awareness of your own false positive rate. Being trigger happy probably isn't the correct response.

It isn't clear how SO moderates the moderators, do they have an IA team that investigates corruption?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#612

Post by josu »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #560
josu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Yeah, I've been using chatGPT quite intensively. And while pure LLM output is relatively easy to spot, human edited LLM output is almost impossible to detect. Most of my message above has actually been written by GPT4 (3 prompts + some light editing).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#613

Post by DanHulton »

Ketan-fullstack wrote: post #526
DanHulton wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform. When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not undul…

Agree with the first part of your comment. gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room. There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms. But i…

I mean, neither do I, but I'm giving the poster above me the benefit of the doubt, and also kinda recognizing that -- even though I can't think of a concrete example right now -- there's almost certainly a situation where there IS a cultural norm that is otherwise acceptable, but antithetical to a particular platform, so the question is still valid, IMO.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#614

Post by pwpw »

freediver wrote: post #604
Shrezzing wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also notice and appreciate that Kagi returns older results while Google continues to push newer webpages. I have found so many useful results from perfectly fine content on older webpages. At this point, I’d be extra happy if Kagi had a Web 1.0 filter that focuses on basic html websites.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#615

Post by School-Cotton »

waterproof wrote: post #583
School-Cotton wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

Because in many cases people don't bother giving the real answer once a comment already has an answer, especially a highly upvoted one.

I'm fine with indirect, "question-the-premise" comments, but they should be posted as comments, not answers, because they are in fact not answers.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#616

Post by masukomi »

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 Kagi ( kagi.com/ ) . SO answers are almost always the first ones for my geeky questions (as they should be in most cases), and it also extracts and displays the official answer to the question that best matched your search.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#617

Post by paulmd »

underdeserver wrote: post #596
lelanthran wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves Can't be done, will be marked as duplicate.

This is bad then. They are not duplicate questions.

Yes. StackOverflow mods frequently mark questions duplicate that are not. That is something that has been observed by many many people.

Some of it is that SO has gamified shitting on and suppressing the question/asker instead of gamified providing the answer, and built a culture of toxicity that tolerates the abuse of the tools in this fashion.

And when the CEO asked them to tone it down maybe 5 years ago they basically did a collective “am I so out of touch? no, it’s the askers who are wrong”. Extremely funny to read the meta responses to that at the time.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942

(admittedly "women and people who don't speak english well are particularly unlikely to adopt to the pedantic neckbeard culture we've built" is a spicy take for your average SO'er, or wikipedian, but it's also not actually a wrong one either. SO's culture problems probably do disproportionately chase away users with marginal engagement, nobody likes putting up with formalized neckbeard culture and those users have absolutely encountered it before and absolutely have an aversion/revulsion to entering yet another online neckbeard nest. I think this is a case of “he’s probably right but the medicine would have gone down better with the manchildren if he hadn’t mentioned women and minorities”, and he’s also right that those issues have continued to bury SO over the last 5 years.)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#618

Post by shagie »

throwaway290 wrote: post #524
throwaway277432 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers. But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly…

Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.

> There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time,

There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077

> How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.

The Java NPE question is https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384

It now has 10,339 linked to it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1

That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results.

> The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.

Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#619

Post by usrbinbash »

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…

> 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

Yes, and they are factually correct in doing so. The correct answer to the question: "How do I use a hammer to tighten a screw" isn't a lengthy description of how to perform some magic with a hammer. The correct answer is: "You don't. Use a screwdriver."

HTML isn't parseable with regex. The various answers under the question explain in great detail why [1] that is the case.

SO isn't a help forum, it's a question archive. The purpose of an answer isn't to solve one guys specific question, but to provide an answer that is useful to all people who ever stumble upon this question.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1758162/19508364

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#620

Post by tlogan »

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…

The funny thing is that the person who worted top voted answer is not smart all. He might look smart for a newbie but the question is about tokenizaion and not about parsing.

So here is the reason: the top voted answers are wrong.

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