I haven't had an SO account in over a decade. In fact I had mine deleted per my request circa 2010 and it was Jeff Atwood himself who was handling that request. I still have that email interaction with him somewhere in my inbox :)
The Fall of Stack Overflow
711–720 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
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're saying your problem is (X) people don't answer questions, but have you considered that your problem is actually (Y) that your tone is condescending and dismissive?" 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.
I'm not ignoring anything, and this conversation has gotten strangely emotional for people responding to me. I joined this thread when it had a few comments and explained what an XY problem was. I don't use stackexchange and I am a little bewildered why people are accusing me of being condescending.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#713The 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…
The mods are so ubiquitous and so busy on SO, I wish they'd spend some of their time silencing the "let's figure out what your real question is" pseudo-trolls.
I call them pseudo-trolls because I think they are well-meaning, but they function as trolls: overrunning a web site, hijacking discussions with repetitive and irrelevant content, and making most potential users feel that participating isn't worth the time and effort of interacting with them.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#714The 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…
Is that actually true though? So, I literally just went to Google this morning for a toddler python question (very much not my first language, heh).
"how to load a file all at once in python" returns a first hit pointing to a blog post answering the question correctly, a second pointing to a SO answer that is actually for a slightly different problem but contains the correct answer, answer #3 is a youtube video that probably answers the question correctly.
Geeks4geeks doesn't show up until #4, well below Stack Overflow. (FWIW, their answer was fine too).
> You seriously can't find useful anything these days using Google.
That really feels more like a meme than reality. Are there other subareas where the SEO is doing better than this one? It seems like a pretty representative question.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention that you have no rights over the content you create on SO. You can’t take your content off the site if it happens to be an answered question or an accepted answer. Their reasoning is “but the content would be gone and would stop helping people”. The way it completely dismisses your efforts and your emotional connection with your own creation is the greatest indictment of how SO lacks the human perspect…
If you have such an emotional connection to your Q&A content that it would drive you to delete it, I think you're using the site wrong.
I do because I’m not a robot? I wrote answers that made it to HN’s frontpage (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243389). Later, that answer was edited by automod to remove “Hello” line because somebody hated that people greeted each other on SO.
I wrote paragraphs only to be closed by mods as “opinion based” or whatever, so I had to turn them into blog posts, and they got picked up by popular publishing channels, like this one: https://medium.com/hackernoon/are-interfaces-code-smell-bd19...
Of course I care about how my work and my relationship with it is treated. Why don’t you?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you think if you clicked on a Wikipedia article about Mozart and instead of the current introduction which says: > Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart[a][b] (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every genre of his time. it opened with: > Hello everyone, I stu…
At least Wikipedia has a facility for meta chat.
Stackoverflow has https://meta.stackoverflow.com/ and https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ (you see it when the comments on a question or answer go on too long, there's an automatic "comments are not for extended discussion, take it to chat" reply, or you can invite people to a chatroom about a question).
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#717Earlier 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…
funny, I just rented an introductory book about signal processing and was (re) amazed to see how much the information is well explained, with tons of example, and a real plan to guide you in the ton of knowledge you have to master. I for one welcome back our new library overlords.
Come on now... Don't hold out... Citation?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#718Earlier 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 think maybe you haven't been using GPT4 (the one where you have to pay money). Or else you're coming at it with a very strong prior, or you're not asking it about software engineering questions, or you're not phrasing your questions carefully. GPT4 is demonstrably extremely useful for technical questions in the realm of software engineering, and in addition to surfacing useful answers, it (obviously) presents a completely unprecedented conversational interface.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#719The 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…
The XY comic has done irreversible damage to stackoverflow.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#720The 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…
IME moderation was bad after a year or so of SO. Something about the moderation role in general seems to attract certain personalities that have a negative effect on the content they are supposed to be moderating.
That said I find SO still very useful, you can always ignore the moderators and caustic comments. Often a question has a high quality answer that I can use even though the question is locked for being off topic or the comments are filled with irrelevant argument.