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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#641

Post by iib »

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 have the same feeling. I recently started contributing more, even after such articles were already present, and I have to say it's a fun experience and I feel like I learn a lot, despite the occasional hang-ups I mentioned in a sibling comment to parent.

Especially nice to be able to link my own answer to things.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#642

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

Owners of the SO sites are control freaks. Mods have started ruining the site around 10 years ago. Now, when I do a fresh registration I can't do basic things like upvote an answer or write a helpful comment, because I need X reputation.

So I can't add relevant info/feedback to a topic I landed on via google, because I don't have reputation, so in essence the site strangles itself. Because in 2023 I'm not going to farm(!) 50 points just to share my info. All this because a few bad apples tried to game a system and someone came up with this lame idiocy of you must have X reputation...

But you can ask questions.

But if noone upvotes your answer because it's a hard one, and/or noone knows the reply to your problem, then you are stuck. So should you ask some blatant question, like, is the sky blue and why? But it will be a duplicate. No reps for you. So it's a totally braindead system, they deserve to die.

Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. But that will not be implemented, because it would make a dangerous precedent where you could harness other's valuable knowledge in almost an instant.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#643

Post by stevage »

sznio wrote: post #373
droopyEyelids wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried to use it?

I did. It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it. It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored. I fou…

I add "no preamble, no summary" to a lot of my prompts to avoid that wordiness.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#644

Post by eitland »

School-Cotton wrote: post #544
borland wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That answer is only there because it's really old, from the early days of S.O. where people were allowed to ask questions that weren't super serious binary yes/no style. It'd get moderated and deleted in a heartbeat today. A forlorn monument to the cool place that S.O. once was

Maybe I’m just a fun-hating asshole but personally I find this kind of thing annoying, not cool. People are just trying to get work done, not see someone’s attempt at cringey “nerd culture” humor.

That is not what most of us complain about I think.

I and I think many other are sad that S.O. removes many serious work related questions (have lost count of how many times I saw the perfect question with the perfect answer, with a note that this isn't what Stack Overflow is made for and these questions only exist for historical reasons).

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#645

Post by the_af »

lloeki wrote: post #454
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…

A typical pattern I've repeatedly seen in various shapes and forms: Q: [very explicit title about F in context X] I'm specifically not asking about F in context Y which I know about but is irrelevant; I'm specifically not asking about libT which may accept it in accordance with standard U; instead, in context X, is F working for libS? A1 [100+] [+50 bounty] [auto-accepted] [date d]: "it works" + long winded answer ab…

> A1 [100+] [+50 bounty] [auto-accepted]

I don't think SO "auto accepts" answers. The only one who can do that is the original asker, manually. See: https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer

On meta.so this has been asked repeatedly and the consensus is that no, it cannot be done and furthermore, "accepted" doesn't mean "the best", it just means whatever the original asker marked as helpful for their situation, so "auto-accepting" would be meaningless. Also see: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262915/147346

As for upvotes: if a question is upvoted that means the community upvoted it. The "community" in SO is just regular people, programmers both knowledgeable and newbie. I don't know that any "open access" platform can solve the problem of people upvoting the "wrong" answers; it's not a tech problem. It happens here on HN, too!

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#646

Post by zerkten »

gingerlime wrote: post #432
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.

which should — in theory — get them penalized for cloaking. But obviously it doesn’t. Reinforcing GP’s point.

Does Google run other indexers for the purposes of catching cloaking? Are there other strategies that can be used? One of the problems of SO is that most of the valid content is out there and easily available without having to scrape the site which may mean penalizing for bad content is harder.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#647

Post by _zoltan_ »

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…

yep, moderation is pretty horrible.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#648

Post by m000 »

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 think they need to bypass Google somehow to keep it going. Embracing LLMs could be a way out.

I already go to ChatGPT to cut through the SEO-optimized crap that Google offers me in the first couple of result pages. I would bet that a lot of the responses given by ChatGPT come from Stack Overflow.

Now, what if we had StackGPT which offered me similar funtionality as ChatGPT, but better? E.g. respond with some code and an explanation, but also link to the sources (which are probably within their site, so they have prime access to them). Or offer as an explicit option to respond using sources other than their archive, but perhaps without citing sources.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#649

Post by tivert »

tzs wrote: post #628
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 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 shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever. Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained…

> Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.

> I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.

I know what you mean. Whenever I (rarely) ask a question on Stack Overflow, I always have to defensively load it up with language anticipating misinterpretations and instructing people to answer my question and not some other one.

Otherwise, internet-point-chasers will fall through the woodwork giving easy, worthless advice. Even with all the defensive language, a few always show up.

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