681–690 of 808 posts
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Exactly. The top answer is often wrong and you have to look at an edit on the third answer to see "Since 2021, this is solved by doing x y z".
its a problem but once you know to look for the updated comment, it's not that bad.
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It's an adversarial process. The search engine is, in theory, trying to rank by usefulness to the user, and the site owner is trying to maximize revenue by lying to the search engine. And the user.
I'm generally puzzled by Google's reluctance to do manual intervention in these cases. It's not like this is a secret. Just penalize the whole domain for 60 days every time a prominent site lies to the crawler.
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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.
There's just a lot of fraud on the internet related to search and advertising manipulation, but it's under-policed in part because of the internationalized nature of it and because it is hard to bring fraud cases in the United States because of the particularized pleading standard. That should not stop the feds from bringing criminal cases, but generally the feds care about large dollar value frauds (as they probably should be) rather than on policing very large numbers of small dollar value frauds that have a major aggregate impact on the online economy. They like going after the guys who steal $100 million from deaf children with Lupus rather than doing 200 $500k fraud prosecutions.
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> 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…
I've never really thought about how contributors trying to avoid the XY problem really stands at odds with StackOverflow's mission of being a repository of answers, rather than a helpdesk. Not all Ys present as X, and not all Xs are actually Ys. Sometimes its an XZ problem. The best you can hope for is some answer down the page that says something like "to answer the actual question..."
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LOL. It's not "called the XY problem" just because some Dunning-Krugerite decided to make a website on a budget TLD. Here, I'll coin a name for a problem I see much more often, which is called the XX problem: 1. User has problem X, and asks for a solution for it. 2. People viewing the question decide that the original user actually has problem Y. 3. Those people tell the original user that they actually want to solve…
I understand your frustration but honestly the tone and style of your comment is dismissive and condescending. It strikes me that you are complaining about people treating others high-handedly and without understanding by epitomizing that attitude in your own post.
You realize that it's dismissive and condescending to ignore the problem I'm describing and respond with an assumption that I'm unaware of the tone of my post, right? Pot, meet kettle.
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…
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It's an adversarial process. The search engine is, in theory, trying to rank by usefulness to the user, and the site owner is trying to maximize revenue by lying to the search engine. And the user.
Then, maybe the "crawler" should be an actual PC navigating to the browser, taking a screenshot (or live feed) of the page and processing it with AI.
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…
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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 questio…
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which you can discuss in the comments below the question, instead of polluting the answers.
You can't discuss in the comments unless you have enough reputation. This is IMHO the absolute stupidest feature of Stack Overflow.
But apparently I can't comment as a new user so I guess the discussion will just be "because calculus classes use matrices in examples".
[0] https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/26417/why-...