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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#771

Post by johnny_reilly »

verteu wrote: post #706
johnny_reilly wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Gosh that would suck. Sounds plausible though

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#772

Post by Const-me »

franciscop wrote: post #752
Const-me wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> attempt or willingness to try to solve the problem first on their own… indication of where the problem comes from, why it might be interesting

None of that is required to ask questions on stackoverflow. For details, read “How do I ask a good question?” and “What types of questions should I avoid asking?” help articles. You’re inventing arbitrary restrictions.

Another thing is, “why it might be interesting” is subjective. Personally, I found the question interesting, that’s why I have answered it. You probably think otherwise, but note it only takes 3-5 votes to kill the question. Any question at all is guaranteed to have at least 3-5 people on that site who find it uninteresting, opinion-based, need more focus, duplicate, etc.

> Two very big and different problem, asking the audience to do them both.

Two big problems don’t have solutions which can be both explained in 3 short sentences. As you can see from my answer, the problem formulated in that question has such solution.

> I already showed more willingness to try to solve this problem than OP

You have not. However, you have demonstrated willingness to delete interesting questions based on arbitrary and subjective criteria, despite the question is perfectly in line with the stackoverflow guidelines. Which BTW is very on-topic, because I think that’s the main reason for the fall of SO being discussed here.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#773

Post by captaincaveman »

pasc1878 wrote: post #736
metabagel wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then SO's reasonms for this policy need to be explained more. The aim of SO is to provide answers to a question. You do not want many questions with the same answer as if you have a new answer or a comment on this duplicate answer you need to then add it to all the questions. Thus we want to collapse all these multiple questions into one. Also the person who I was replying to did noit seem to understand that they wer…

They are a user, they choose to moderate or not, forcing people in this way to contribute only in a very specific way means, less users ...

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#774

Post by usrbinbash »

firesteelrain wrote: post #664
usrbinbash wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your response and the other responses are proving our point. It wasn't about context free grammars, level 2 or level 3, etc. It was a very limited subset of a problem. Answer should have been, "while I don't recommend doing it the way you want to do it, that should work for your limited subset".

> Answer should have been

Yes, and answers on that very page, with lots of upvotes, do exactly that. People looking for answers online, can reasonably be expected to scroll down a page with results.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#775

Post by usrbinbash »

BeetleB wrote: post #704
usrbinbash wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Poster is not asking for this.

Poster is not the one answers are for. Answers are for everyone who stumbles upon this question in the future, and the general topic of the question is very much about parsing some HTML with regex.

Again: SO != Help FOrum

> but there likely is a correct way to do it with a hammer.

No, there isn't. Because the correct way is to use a screwdriver. There is certainly a way to do it with a hammer, same as there is a way to write a webserver in brainf__k. Doesn't mean that way is good or should be done.

> Sorry to be blunt, but having coworkers like you make the job really annoying.

Bluntness is fine. I will be blunt as well: Having to fix code full of hammers used to tighten screws is a lot more annoying than having colleagues who try to prevent a codebase full of hammers in the first place.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#776

Post by pasc1878 »

captaincaveman wrote: post #773
pasc1878 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then SO's reasonms for this policy need to be explained more. The aim of SO is to provide answers to a question. You do not want many questions with the same answer as if you have a new answer or a comment on this duplicate answer you need to then add it to all the questions. Thus we want to collapse all these multiple questions into one. Also the person who I was replying to did noit seem to understand that they wer…

They are a user, they choose to moderate or not, forcing people in this way to contribute only in a very specific way means, less users ...

But better more consistent data - which is what I want from SO.

However SO Inc wants money and so more users.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#777

Post by collaborative »

redsaber wrote: post #659
collaborative wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how you feel aisearch.vip compares to your Bing experience. Send me a message via Side Menu-> Contact and I will give you a grand for free

small nitpick but I thought it was just an icon but it turns out to be the button for switching light/dark mode. It would be great if you could replace it.

Thank you. What would you have it replaced with?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#778

Post by ivanbakel »

tivert wrote: post #666
ivanbakel wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.) Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wr…

> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. Then you have to do two things in your answer: 1. Correctly answer the question as asked . 2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it. If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."

Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#779

Post by kebman »

xkcd1963 wrote: post #496
kebman wrote: post #436

I used to contribute a lot to Stack Overflow, but then I noticed that I’d get flamed for even asking simple questions; stuff that can really stand between actually getting somewhere with your code, and where a helpful comment could really make a difference. At some point regular replies were replaced by administrators and mods who are seemingly far more interested in finding faults with your question rather than to a…

There was a hn post once where OP wrote all questions are already answered on SO. Hence nobody should ask questions (especially newbs)

To claim that "all questions are already answered" is super arrogant. Then they could at least do the courtesy of linking to the already answered question. Granted, they do this sometimes, but not always.

Anyway, it's simply not true that "all questions are answered." Often when I've read the answer for a purportedly same question, the nuances of the other question is often nowhere near the original one, leading you to never fully having your question answered, which is extremely frustrating.

Often what you're looking for is simply a new way to explain an old concept, so that you better learn the inner workings of the problem. People are different, and so different people need different explanations. This is basic pedagogy. And that's also why RTFM does not work for all people. To think so is so arrogant that I'm at a loss for words.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#780

Post by tivert »

ivanbakel wrote: post #778
tivert wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. Then you have to do two things in your answer: 1. Correctly answer the question as asked . 2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it. If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."

Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read [0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need? [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

> Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?

You know that's not your responsibility. If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).

And frankly, I think you greatly overestimate how valuable and essential your non-responsive "you're asking the wrong question" answer is.

> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.

Quit coming up with excuses for not answering the question.

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