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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#161

Post by discors »

bowsamic wrote: post #64
discors wrote: post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

I'm actually quite shocked going back and looking at old StackOverflow posts. At the time, I was supportive of such brutality, but it is clearly against modern norms regarding what is appropriate internet socialisation. My take is that SO was born in a time where ethics among the primarily male and tech-fanatical audience of the internet was less developed. At the time, what we now would call toxicity was expected: w…

> You can see the user “rejectfinite” has replied to you with a flagged comment which demonstrates how people still try to act out this kind of toxicity

A point made well. I saw that post.

I myself have been generously downvoted, which is understandable given the audience here on HN.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#162

Post by photochemsyn »

sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

Almost every time I had a coding-type question for SO, I would diligently search through previous SO answers and 98% of the time I could find the answer to my question by doing so - but it would always take a long time. LLMs are just a lot faster, and while double-checking their output is necessary, that's a much quicker process than trying to hunt down answers starting from little knowledge.

There's also the issue of people trying to improve their SO score because that can impact things like job interviews, at least on the programming side, and as with any such system gaming it for high reputation (points for questions, answers, upvotes) has some side effects on people's behavior that aren't always pleasant. There's also a saturation effect, e.g. many common questions have already been asked, and the 'archive of truth' mentality means that you're supposed to search past answers before asking anything, which again tends to take a lot longer than ChatGPT does.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#163

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sanderjd wrote: post #156
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What use of computer technology can you imagine that does not involve programming?

Cobbling together SaaS's, "no-code", building stuff using "prompt engineering" with AIs instead of writing code, innovative business models using pre-existing software, etc. etc.

Fair points, mostly.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#164

Post by Brian_K_White »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #121
bluetomcat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a negative dynamic that starts from the popular, "low-hanging fruit" kinds of questions like "how do you subtract 2 dates in framework X". Such a question would gain many points both to the OP and the answerers. The best answer to a question like that is short, unambiguous and concise. Consequently, you have high-reputation users skilled in answering popular questions. Then the popular questions are mostly over…

Not necessarily "not researched", rather "too localized". SE is not a place to ask to solve your specific problem, which will only litter the website because it will never help anyone else. Debugging and solving logical errors is one subset of that. Once the problem is about some kind of misunderstanding how some interface works, it can help others who will have a similar problem. And of course a high-level design pr…

Maybe there needs to be a separate "bunny slope" SO site, and such questions just get bounced over there where they are topical. Though I don't know who that could write good answers would spend time doing so. The people for whom those are still interesting questions are not the ones everyone else should get advice from.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#165

Post by tivert »

birdstheword5 wrote: post #136
sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in. I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

> I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

It's not just hostile to beginners. It's also quite hostile to experienced programmers (at least those subject to less than ideal design constraints), who are incorrectly treated like newbies and force-fed cookbook answers that fail to answer the actual question asked.

For example. Here's a paraphrase of some experiences I've had on Stack Overflow (obfuscated to preserve my anonymity):

> Me: I need to know about the implementation of this weird function in this weird proprietary language. I need to re-implement its output, which was (unwisely) directly exposed in our system's output and is depended on by our integrations. I know this sucks, but it's the problem I have to solve.

> StackOverflow: That's a bad design. You should use the XYZ function in Python instead.

> Me: You're not answering my question. I know it's a bad design, but I can't change it. The output is fixed, and I have no authority to force a change. If I can't re-implement the function, I'm suck using the weird language forever.

> StackOverflow: You should use XYZ function in Python. If you can't, talk to your architect and get budget allocated to rewrite all the downstream systems.

> Me: You're no help at all. Why did you even bother answering?

> Me (thinking to myself): Wait, I know: chasing after internet points and trying to feel high and mighty.

> StockOverflow: What if a newbie found this question? If I don't tell you to use XYZ function in Python, they might do something else instead! Like design and implement and entire less-than-ideal system!

> Me (thinking to myself): Good grief.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#166

Post by bhandziuk »

dotnet00 wrote: post #122
the_jeremy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the reven…

In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.

But by being closed as a duplicate with the duplicate linked hundreds of future askers who arrive at that question in the future from a search engine are saved the trouble.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#167

Post by tinus_hn »

layer8 wrote: post #124
laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

The benefit of “sifting through answers” on StackOverflow is that you learn about different perspectives and about possible caveats. You tend to get a more complete picture. At least for me, that makes human-discussed content much more valuable. It’s a bit like reading HN comment threads vs. asking an LLM for its take on a submission.

All I learn whenever I follow a link there is that the powers that be have decided that ‘this question is off-topic for Stack-Overflow’ and it has already been answered in a location that is now unavailable.

The site is a big douchey middle finger. A dismissive know it all that actually doesn’t know all that much.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#168

Post by dotnet00 »

bhandziuk wrote: post #166
dotnet00 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.

But by being closed as a duplicate with the duplicate linked hundreds of future askers who arrive at that question in the future from a search engine are saved the trouble.

The posts being discussed are cases where the question is marked as duplicate for being vaguely similar but not actually the same. Of course marking literal duplicates as duplicates is fine.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#169

Post by Etherlord87 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #164
Etherlord87 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily "not researched", rather "too localized". SE is not a place to ask to solve your specific problem, which will only litter the website because it will never help anyone else. Debugging and solving logical errors is one subset of that. Once the problem is about some kind of misunderstanding how some interface works, it can help others who will have a similar problem. And of course a high-level design pr…

Maybe there needs to be a separate "bunny slope" SO site, and such questions just get bounced over there where they are topical. Though I don't know who that could write good answers would spend time doing so. The people for whom those are still interesting questions are not the ones everyone else should get advice from.

Yea I typically just point to a non SE forum in such too localized cases.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#170

Post by robertlagrant »

at_a_remove wrote: post #158
robertlagrant wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring. Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through thei…

I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?

I didn't mean I would literally filter the email into a shorter email. I just wouldn't send an email.
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