Apart from ChatGPT, I can find answer in reddit instead of SO.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
781–790 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#782These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M. However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/v…
From the comments on this answer https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/391625/136010 it is suggested and agreed by staff that the chnage in May 2022 was the role out of a proper cookie consent form. If you don"t have performance cookies SO can"t work out the analytics.
Fro staff member Catija
"@JourneymanGeekOnStrike Yeah, if you go back further, the "traffic" numbers see a 40M/week drop between April and May 2022, which is when the cookie tracking changed, and then normalizes again until December. So, prior to the cookie changes, traffic was about 140-150M per week. But, to be clear - this is stuff we're aware of and have "corrected" for, I guess."
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#783I don't know if the charts presented in the link are misleading or not, but I did notice a visible reduction in quality of answers (during a period of 5-6 years) as I can't find relatable questions to issues I'm facing.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
>That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.
Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
Put another way - when was the last time you used a development tool, or a library, or some other resource, and sat down to read the full documentation of it? I would posit that that's very rare as an activity, even for developers who need to develop a deep understanding of what they're using.
It's much more common to learn by doing, and the limit of that learning is very often what the developer can't do. Answers which easily enable developers to do something are overwhelmingly likely to lead to developers doing that thing - much in the same way that a long page of library documentation which gives an example is likely to lead to developers repeating that example, even if at the end of the docs, there's a little caveat saying that you shouldn't follow the example for so-and-so reason.
>If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
But is it a good experience? Sure, maybe they'll learn that they always have to read the whole answer before they use any part of it. But we sensibly have abandoned this no-guardrails approach to teaching in almost every arena where it's been used, because it's not really suited to the way people do things in real life - and in real life, people often end up affecting others with their mistakes.
Does junior developer who learns how to glue SQL strings together in their favourite programming language, and makes the "small mistake" of not learning anything about SQL injection in the process, benefit from the learning experience when they cause a data leak? Do their customers? Or should the learning resources they access maybe use the pedagogical tools available to make sure those kinds of mistakes are really hard to make, even if it occasionally inconveniences a seasoned pro?
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
the way you phrase it there makes it sounds miniscule, but you scale that up to the size of the SEOified internet and the numbers are surely into the billions
Last time I saw, Google gets much more revenue from ads on search than from the entire 3rd party ecosystem.
a big number that's much smaller than a big number is still a big number
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
Owners of the SO sites are control freaks. Mods have started ruining the site around 10 years ago. Now, when I do a fresh registration I can't do basic things like upvote an answer or write a helpful comment, because I need X reputation. So I can't add relevant info/feedback to a topic I landed on via google, because I don't have reputation, so in essence the site strangles itself. Because in 2023 I'm not going to fa…
> Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. I think the problem with that is how do you prove it's a good or bad answer? Say you offer a bounty and I generate a great answer. You look at the answer and use it and then flag the answer as bad so you don't have to pay.
Then you will have that next to your profile. Non paying customer...
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
sprinkle in a 100K+ reputation user commenting "this is easily answered with `man Y`" — oblivious to the fact that Y's manpage is a 188 page monster, and manpages being awkward to search in. Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
Here's a question maybe someone can answer for me, or maybe I'm just stupid and other people don't need it, but... What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of…
`man` is "a documentation". It turns out there's more than one type of documentation, but lots of man-page writers didn't get the memo.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. I think the problem with that is how do you prove it's a good or bad answer? Say you offer a bounty and I generate a great answer. You look at the answer and use it and then flag the answer as bad so you don't have to pay.
Then you will have that next to your profile. Non paying customer...
Someone reading your profile will have to parse whether the not-paid answer actually answered the question, before they can determine whether it's a "non-paying customer" or just someone refusing to pay for an irrelevant non-answer.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's a different question. And should be asked different. "I'm trying to learn foo.js and attemt to do so by porting Tetris to it. I know foo.js is a terrible option for a game. So. How can I write to the canvas from foo.js?" Is often answered properly, if only because to many it's a nice puzzle. "How can I write to the canvas fro foo.js?" Is different in that it will attract a lot of people explaining that foo…
This is part of the problem. You know your constraints, other people do not, but like to assume they do. So you end up having to write a defensive argument about your problem rather than just plainly asking your real question. This may help less experienced engineers not understanding their problem set, but for a more experienced engineer it's absolutely obnoxious to think of all the ways to defend my question so I d…
> So you end up having to write a defensive argument about your problem rather than just plainly asking your real question.
My experience is that it's not so much a defensive argument, but context. My example was poor in that it could be misread as a defensive argument, sorry about that.
I meant it to show how adding some context changes the question. Because, in programming, it is all about context. AKA that "It Depends" meme.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but then they're editorializing. And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”
>> Some people argue that Google possibly can't win the fight vs spam sites, but obviously it works perfectly fine manually blacklisting them. > Yeah, but then they're editorializing. > And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.” Except that shouldn't be a problem because I'm pretty sure Google already blacklists domains.
Surely, they do. But they reserve that for stuff that's really way beyond the line. For everything that might be legitimate they leave it to the ranking algorithm to sort out and it's a game of cat and mouse.