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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#751

Post by Nextgrid »

hinkley wrote: post #747
Nextgrid wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not "losing" any fight. Google is deliberately letting spam thrive because that spam may contain Google Ads/analytics and increases engagement on the SERP page as people who click on the spam go back to try something else (potentially one of the sponsored results). All these contribute to Google's bottom-line.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. --Upton Sinclair

Problem is that in addition to people whose salary depends on it, there seems to be plenty of people out here defending Google and spreading misinformation despite having no obvious profit motive.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#752

Post by franciscop »

Const-me wrote: post #387
franciscop wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah sorry, if you answered it it's totally different, sorry for assuming the question was yours! Some of my best answers are also on "simple questions". The question is asking about the best way of doing X, which has a clear substep of "any way of doing X". Not only that, it's asking about a code solution, not just maths/combinatronics. Not a single line of code in a question about finding the optimal (not any) soluti…

> asking about the best way of doing X To be fair, English is not my native language. But when I see a question “what’s the best way of doing X”, when it doesn’t have any criteria for what’s the best would be, and no other ways of doing X in the question, I consider “what’s the best way” part a redundant figure of speech. I view such questions an equivalent of “what’s a good enough way of doing X”. > it's asking abou…

Again, they are asking how to solve a math problem, in code. That's a two big-step problem, no attempt to solve it on their own. Big problems:

- Does not show any attempt or willingness to try to solve the problem first on their own.

- Does not even give any indication of where the problem comes from, why it might be interesting, etc., it's just a "how to calculate X?", which could easily be a homework problem.

- It is about finding a (possibly) mathematical solution, and then implement it in C++. Two very big and different problem, asking the audience to do them both. Again no attempt to fix either of these two problems on their own.

- I'll concede the optimal thing might be a language issue.

> I’m not sure that’s actually possible to do.

But that's not my point, my point is that I already showed more willingness to try to solve this problem than OP. And THAT is a big problem. It's not on topic about any of those points, in fact if you remove the bit where OP is asking us to give them the full solution in C++ it could be a good question for the Mathematics SE!

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#753

Post by bazoom42 »

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.

The questions isn’t about parsing, the question is about recognizing a token.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#754

Post by abathur »

hinkley wrote: post #745
abathur wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, IME, these scraped sites often manage to rank above the canonical source.

Which means they aren't applying any sort of primacy to the information. If three segments of the internet think the same piece of information is relevant, that should affect the score of all 3 copies, not just the largest segment.

I'm not sure I'm reading you right--you're suggesting it should work this way?

When content republished on some bizarre/sketchy/unaccountable ~adfarm outranks the site where it first appeared, users of Google's search service end up at higher risk of getting phished or infected with malware.

Is there some benefit you see here that outweighs this downside risk?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#755

Post by Tao3300 »

BeetleB wrote: post #724
Tao3300 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata: I've started asking Bing these questions instead of SO. E.g., it recently gave me a very helpful answer for debugging a Spring issue and cited its sources. What it didn't do was present me with a whole lot of moderation cruft. I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. I also don't have to pray my question will get enough vote attention or worry that I posted it at the w…

> I can ask for recommendations for tools and libraries, which IIRC SO disallows. Bing Chat almost always is useless for me with these kinds of queries. A few days ago I asked for a tool that monitors to see if a website is up. I told it I needed the tool to be something I'd run locally - not an online service and not something I need to sign up for. It gave me 3-4 online services. I reminded it about my constraint.…

Wow. It does seem uniquely bad at that. I had to practically beat it over the head and force it to suggest ping or curl.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#757

Post by hinkley »

abathur wrote: post #754
hinkley wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means they aren't applying any sort of primacy to the information. If three segments of the internet think the same piece of information is relevant, that should affect the score of all 3 copies, not just the largest segment.

I'm not sure I'm reading you right--you're suggesting it should work this way? When content republished on some bizarre/sketchy/unaccountable ~adfarm outranks the site where it first appeared, users of Google's search service end up at higher risk of getting phished or infected with malware. Is there some benefit you see here that outweighs this downside risk?

Applying SEO to a copy of someone else's content gets you highly ranked on Google. I'm saying that at this point Google is doing enough processing that they should be able to detect duplicates after a fashion, and weight the oldest copy more heavily than duplicates.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#758

Post by wahnfrieden »

ceejayoz wrote: post #584
wahnfrieden wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you cite a solution the mods there get angry when you don’t copy paste the third party site content instead of just link to it. The stated reason is to make sure the content isn’t lost. In other words to ensure the content is duplicated on SO. I have no allegiance to SO ownership so when the fake SO sites show up in results instead of SO, usually reading them will just give me the answer more quickly than fin…

They want enough of an excerpt so the answer doesn't become useless years later when someone redesigns their blog URL schema or shuts it down. That's reasonable, and probably falls within fair use.

That’s what I said

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#759

Post by wahnfrieden »

bobajeff wrote: post #602
wahnfrieden wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you cite a solution the mods there get angry when you don’t copy paste the third party site content instead of just link to it. The stated reason is to make sure the content isn’t lost. In other words to ensure the content is duplicated on SO. I have no allegiance to SO ownership so when the fake SO sites show up in results instead of SO, usually reading them will just give me the answer more quickly than fin…

>mods there get angry when you don’t copy paste the third party site content instead of just link to it... There's a good reason for that. Sites come and go and as a result links to solutions die and you wish someone had just answered the question instead of just linked to it.

Thats what I said

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#760

Post by Dylan16807 »

sedatk wrote: post #749
Dylan16807 wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something long enough to be a blog post like that isn't what the site is for. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about things like that. And I wasn't talking about the issue of mods deleting entire answered questions. I was talking about single contributions, and mods deleting things is the exact opposite of what my post was addressing! On the other side, that compiler post is fun but it's not some big effortful thing…

> Something long enough to be a blog post like that isn't what the site is for It wasn't a blog post on the site; I extended it to a blog post after mods closed it and flagged it for deletion. As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for. > but it's not some big effortful thing It doesn't have to be. It's my thing. It sounds like me, it carries my spirit. Nobody else would have…

> Say, if my writing style, or my choice of words, or my tone were associated with a traumatic event in my past, SO's insistence on keeping it up would be explicitly abusive, don't you agree?

No, I'd say your trauma is causing you to make an unreasonable demand. The writing style in a short technical post existing somewhere should not be harmful.

> SO's or HN's insistence on keeping my content online against my wishes is also abusive; it deprives me of control over my thoughts and my words. Is it legal? Yes, 100%. But, is it ethical? No, I don't think so. And for what?

It's supposed to be a collaboration, especially SO, and keeping things intact is important for that.

Just yesterday I found a helpful guide on reddit where half the posts were "." It's pretty clear how a site where the primary purpose is guiding people would do a worse job if it worked that way.

> And for what? For keeping the answer for "how can I simulate a click on a DOM element?" online, as if that problem immediately becomes "unsolveable" when that comment, heck, the whole SO web site goes down. What a pretentious excuse to keep your income stream steady.

If it would affect the income stream, then it's something that makes the site bad for users. You can't argue both sides of that at the same time.

> As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for.

Maybe? I don't think most contributors would be anywhere near as upset about an inability to delete posts.

SO wants text like you gave them, I don't think they want the level of emotional investment in those pieces of text. (They might want emotional investment into the site itself, but that's a different thing.)

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