The Fall of Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#701

Post by raydiatian » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

The problem with stackoverflow is simple: it eschews it’s core use case to be something unnecessarily autistic.

Instead of being a platform that encourages those with experience to mentor and lead, and those without to seek experience, without punishment, it takes the opinion that “dumb questions are the ones that have already been asked and it’s the responsibility of the newbie to know if their question has already been asked.” It seeks to be the training set for its replacement rather than be its replacement.

Then a new product comes around to support the core use case newbies want more directly:

Yeah, of course we fucking left. Because surprise, if you’re constantly learning, you’ll always be a newbie at another thing. If SO had been an actual community, it would merged with an LLM rather than being eaten by them.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#702

Post by lostphilosopher » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

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…

Even if X isn't the right solution to my use case I still often want to know _why_ X (or my implementation of X) doesn't work. The answer to that might be a really valuable learning independent of the problem at hand.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#703

Post by w0mbat » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

As it ages, Stack Overflow is developing a problem where the accepted answers to questions are obsolete and no longer work. APIs get added and removed, new languages change syntax, etc. This is particularly the case in mobile.

Stack Overflow has no good mechanism for ousting obsolete answers in favor of the current right answer.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#704

Post by BeetleB » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

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…

> HTML isn't parseable with regex.

Poster is not asking for this. He is asking how to parse a specific subset of HTML. And it is demonstrably parseable.

> 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."

It is not the appropriate way to tighten a screw, but there likely is a correct way to do it with a hammer.

It is fine to point out that there are better ways to parse that HTML, but it is not wrong to do it with regexes.

Sorry to be blunt, but having coworkers like you make the job really annoying. I'm not a newbie, but a seasoned programmer. If I'm asking a question and am in a domain with a fair amount of experience, don't give me patronizing answers.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#705

Post by gwnywg » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

talonx wrote: post #597

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 think SO remains great for the answers it already has. The rough moderator problem exists on other SE sites also (source: personal experience) where they are IMO needlessly rude, snarky or dismissive.

I joined SO in 2013 and was asking questions since then and had no problem with moderation. But it takes effort to ask question, I always aim to gather all bits of information I already know and if possible write minimal working example (many times it was not possible, like when I had problem with Apache and kerberos). Most of the time I was then answering my own questions a few weeks later but that's because not many people faced problems I was facing..

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#706

Post by verteu » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

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

Maybe Google (semi/permanently?) penalized your domain when spammers started using your GA4 tag?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#707

Post by cogman10 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

I'll add one more with moderation. I've seen far too many cases where person asks "how do I solve X" and it's closed as a duplicate for a question of "how do I do Y". 2 unrelated questions but they have some similar wordings so the moderator shuts it down.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#708

Post by jason-johnson » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

pasc1878 wrote: post #400

jason-johnson wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you’re not answering the person who asked but every person who ever will . Some of them will be asking because the “right way” is not an option in their situation.

Yes but the right way should be the answer unless it is explicitly stated why they can't use this. Most readers will be able to use the "right way".

No, the best thing is not assume you know better than anyone who will ever ask this. It’s good to mention what the right way is and why but your answer should always include the answer to the question exactly as asked at a minimum.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#709

Post by deadeye » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

maxlin wrote: post #43

Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT, I sincerely hope it keeps operating, stays strict (even if it causes collateral) and keeps ban on LLM-generated content. The wheels of this kind of stuff turn slowly, but obviously ChatGPT was trained partly with data only gainable from a healthy StackOverflow-kind of site with users actively asking unique questions and enough people ans…

If the lights are on at SO then they must be in the process of training their own AI with their own dataset and documentation for the topics covered. That is what it would take for me to make SO my first stop again. It should be very doable for that talented group.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#710

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

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…

Nothing on that questions makes me think the person asking it wants to parse HTML. Most HTML parsers will never give the result the question described. And unless you want to dig into tar structure, solving that question is an essential part of creating a parser.

So, no, the top 3 answers are all bullshit.