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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#791

Post by jrumbut »

franciscop wrote: post #101
jrumbut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just another anecdote. But here goes. My experience was that there was a long period where your complaint was quite true. I believe that they have heard this complaint enough and have lightened up a little. There are still more and stricter rules than most sites, but the obsession with pruning duplicates seems to have cooled.

And my opinion as someone with high reputation is that letting in silly questions has ruined the site and made me stop using it. SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher, it's a place for interesting knowledge sharing and if the knowledge is drowned in noise, well it's just noise then.

> SO is not a support forum, it's not your teacher

This, to me, is the mistake that SO made. Developers helping developers is the engine that runs the site, that's why people come.

The body of interesting knowledge is an emergent property of the support forum/peer-to-peer teacher.

Eventually they tried to put the cart before the horse and traffic has dropped.

It's OK that you're done answering "how do I change font color with jQuery" for the thousandth time and are only interested in the occasional very interesting question, because there are people behind you who do want to answer that question. That will help them grow to get where you are.

If we don't allow new generations of users to go through that process we went through, then StackOverflow has an expiration date.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#792

Post by andirk »

abdellah123 wrote: post #281
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for me. I wanted good ways to deal with pointers to 2D arrays in C, which aren’t hard but you need to remember that [] has precedence over *, so (*pointer)[x][y] is needed to deference. It’s not the hard to mess it up. Ultimately GPT had an OK answer but… it had that immediately without searching and the didn’t have to craft some well written example, it picked up my dirty explanation no problem. I have…

very good insight. Integrating AI into stackoverflow as a question refiner is a very good idea

And as of today, here it is: https://stackoverflow.co/labs/

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#793

Post by lofaszvanitt »

Qwertious wrote: post #788
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can show something akin to ebay's reliability value based on user feedback. People can establish payment conditions before doing any task, I don't think that would be a problem.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#794

Post by vehementi »

Lazare wrote: post #134

I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleas…

Maybe SO can have like super moderators / admin employees that are summonable by paying XXX score and they can bring the hammer down on problem answers and punish the toxic moderators etc.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#795

Post by tivert »

ivanbakel wrote: post #784
tivert wrote: post #780

Earlier 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? 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 pos…

> Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?

The are a lot of different kinds of "users," and I think the kind of thinking in that article is totally inappropriate when applied to developer Q&A board.

To be perfectly blunt: the result if what you're advocating is to condescendingly treat experienced people as newbies so dumb that their question should not be answered, because you think they're so dumb the real answer might distract them from the lecture you want to condescendingly give them.

People like that are super annoying and almost always unhelpful.

Every single fucking question I ask on SO has some lazy condescending dude chiming in to answer the easy question he thinks I should have asked, after he totally failed to understand the constraints that made my question hard. Of course, lazy condescending dude always thinks he knows better.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#796

Post by still_grokking »

Sosh101 wrote: post #283
Gibbon1 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if they served up a high quality site it you'd just go there and might not have ads even. Where the dozen SEO garbage sites they do serve up are all hosting ads google gets a cut of.

That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation. Those junk AI results have certainly led to me using Google less.

> That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation.

Why should they care? They're too big to fail…

Google controls almost the whole end-user realm through Chrome & clones, and Android, the dominating end-user OS by a wide margin.

At the same time end-users are completely helpless and can't do anything against Googles liking because they don't understand anything about IT tech.

Computers are black magic to most people so they're trapped. This never changed! Especially millennials and gen-z are completely clueless as they didn't had the chance to use personal computers ever, where you had at lest some control over the device and needed to know at least some basics about its inner working. All the younger people know are the tightly sealed black-box devices you don't have any control over, called mobiles, which are fully operated by big-tech. Google search + Android apps are "the internet" for most people. They mostly don't even know there is something else beyond that, so Google can do whatever they want, and this will have exactly zero consequences for them by now.

Google's move regarding rolling out "browser DRM", the next "trusted computing" initiative, regardless of what anybody thinks about is is very telling.

Now they will violently reap the fruits of their monopoly, and likely nobody will be able to stop them in the next decade. People where warned about the consequences of this monopoly for many many years. Nobody cared. Now it's payout day for Google.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#797

Post by fho »

freediver wrote: post #748
fho wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won me over by summarizing listicles to a short list :-) To be honest I think your pricing is to high. $25 for unlimited queries might be fine for somebody who needs a good search to work and earn appropriately. But as a (former) PhD student I ran through the 100 free queries in 2 or 3 days and just would not have been able to afford 25€. I would gladly pay 10€ (for unlimited searches) or 15€ (for a unlimited fam…

Thanks for the kind words. There are many things like grouping listicles you can do to improve search experience, once the incentives are aligned. Unlimited for $10 is something we are working towards.

Thanks for listening! At $10 per month unlimited searches I'll immediately switch.

Also thanks for creating kagi. Kagi was the first "alternative" search that convinced me that there can be competition to Google. YaCy just does not work, most competitors (DDG, etc) just repackage the big engines. I use presearch as my daily driver right now, but am somewhat turned down by the NFT shenanigans behind that. Kagi looks like the only engine that stands on its own and is definitely something worth paying for.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#798

Post by IIsi50MHz »

lelanthran wrote: post #369
xyproto wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people ask questions like "how do I shoot myself in the foot and still have a working foot", though. Questions are not always reasonable. A question is not always "pure" either, but can embed incorrect assumptions.

> Sometimes people ask questions like "how do I shoot myself in the foot and still have a working foot", though. Questions are not always reasonable. A question is not always "pure" either, but can embed incorrect assumption But those are correctly diagnosed XY problems. No one is complaining about those. My parent was told the issue is too many incorrectly identified XY problems, and responded with an explanation of…

Asking why does not have to be condescending. I agree that some responses can read that way, or seem in some other way hostile. In text, or with any reasonable spoken tone, I would not assume that a person asking me why is condescending.

But on second consideration, I suppose you would not, either, and I suppose you are specific'ly talking about responses which, each taken as a whole, are easily interpreted as some form of hostile.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#799

Post by OkayPhysicist »

still_grokking wrote: post #796
Sosh101 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation. Those junk AI results have certainly led to me using Google less.

> That's a very short sighted business strategy if true. Simply liquidating their reputation. Why should they care? They're too big to fail… Google controls almost the whole end-user realm through Chrome & clones, and Android, the dominating end-user OS by a wide margin. At the same time end-users are completely helpless and can't do anything against Googles liking because they don't understand anything about IT tech…

When do you think millennials were born? The very youngest millennials were in their tweens when the first iPhone came out, and the oldest were pushing 30. They definitely experienced pre-smartphone computing. In fact, it's probably the defining characteristic of the generation: millennials grew up with modern computing, but before the smartphone. Gen Z grew up in a world were smartphones were ubiquitous.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#800

Post by IIsi50MHz »

jalapenos wrote: post #215
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

Usually prefixed by a condescending "why would you want to Y?"

Or a befuddled asking of the same "Why?". Or an honestly curious asking.

Yes, there are plenty of rude replies, but sometimes it helps to assume what somebody really means is they failed to do a context switch. Exchanging more details can help turn a 'madness' into a method. Even if they were outright rude, doing this can lead to an answer that might not otherwise be given (even though that answer may be provided by someone else).

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