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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#671

Post by ajmurmann »

mountainb wrote: post #607
technion wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basica…

I think there are a number of things that could be done to improve this, but I'm sure Google won't do:

1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model.

2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#672

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Yajirobe wrote: post #559
newaccount74 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. Jesus this is cringe

I thought it was amusing. Reminds me of a lot of 90s internet humor.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#673

Post by redsaber »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #318
lph wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.

Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO

I had to use ublock origin to start blocking those sites

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#674

Post by anter »

usrbinbash wrote: post #619
newaccount74 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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."

My car broke down in the middle of the desert because of a screw that came loose and all I have is a hammer. You have just condemned me to death because you assume you know better.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#675

Post by metabagel »

pasc1878 wrote: post #452
hans_castorp wrote: post #240

I left SO because I was downvoted to oblivion for an answer that took me 2 minutes to write - but I had answered a similar question several years before (which I actually didn't remember). Searching for my own answer would have taken way more time than it took to write a new one. When I pointed out that it's not the responsibility of the one answering to search for dupes, but for the one asking, I was told that I sho…

Yes especially if you know you have answered the same thing before. You look for your original. Remember all users are moderators. There are some explicit moderators but they don"t close or downvote often they deal with other problems - or on smaller sites just use normal user powers to vote and close.

OK, but the person you’re replying to left SO over this policy, and you didn’t seem to register that at all, just repeated the policy.

The fault finding culture of SO is toxic.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#676

Post by Xeamek »

ajmurmann wrote: post #671
mountainb wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basica…

I think there are a number of things that could be done to improve this, but I'm sure Google won't do: 1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model. 2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.

Except those adds are often provided by Google itself. So penalizing them would be self harm for google revenues

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#677

Post by GMoromisato »

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'm sure everyone has thought of this, but is any search engine trying to add LLMs to the crawler pipeline? That might be more useful than at the user side (like Bing) where the index is already polluted.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#678

Post by Fanmade »

ajmurmann wrote: post #671
mountainb wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basica…

I think there are a number of things that could be done to improve this, but I'm sure Google won't do: 1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model. 2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.

Well, those sites are often running ads probided by Google, so it's understandable why Google doesn't really have a good incentive to follow your first suggestion.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#679

Post by metabagel »

culopatin wrote: post #99
lawgimenez wrote: post #83

My SO account is almost 12 years, with just over 2k reputation and I don't really care. Until now I am still somewhat helping answer some basic questions in the mobile development area tags, my only gripe with SO is the hostile nature of some mods with large reputation. Some seem to get a kick out of this and forgot that reputation does not translate to expertise. For 12 years, they have not figured this one out. New…

I think that with the rise of push notifications, no one really goes to a site to check notifications anymore. So the new user may have not developed the muscle memory to go back to SO and participate. I suspect this also has something to do with the decline of forums. Reddit still works because the app sends 200 notifications a day, but without it, I don’t think it would be as popular. Also SO is participation hosti…

Unless you post your own Q&A, it’s difficult to get the initial mod points to even be able to comment.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#680

Post by blondie9x »

One of two things is happening here. I'm not sure if its one or the other or really both.

1. Copilot and LLM trained on code is reducing usage of StackOverflow.

2. People are just coding less and searching for less with layoffs and slow down due to burnout.

But it's definitely connected to these points. The degree of magnitude for either though is difficult to assess.

If it is mostly #1 though that's the worst thing isn't it? Because SO is weakened and then the LLMs gradually become less effective. We generate less curiosity and public discussion overtime as people use AI and LLMs more. That's sad for software engineering as a whole. One of the best parts of this job is collaboration and problem solving. Not just individually but as a community as well.

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