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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#181

Post by antimora »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #170
antimora wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not. I ceased posting questions a while ago due to the aggressive moderation, which often labeled my questions as duplicates or too common. I was very upset with the direction Stack Overflow had taken, as it seemed to embody the very criticisms it had once had about forums. The Stack Overflow community has lost its vibrancy and has be…

Counterpoint: I've never had a question moderated as duplicate, and I've been using StackOverflow for 15 years.

Your experience must be an outlier. After I posted I read other comments here and others had the same experience (just search "duplicate" here).

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#182

Post by mschuster91 »

busterarm wrote: post #62
bhouston wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant. SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut. Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by…

> Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that.

Or you follow the lean engineering model, like Whatsapp did. Millions of users paying a $ each are still millions of $, and Whatsapp prior to FB acquiring them had very very low operating costs - similar to Stackoverflow by the way. Both engineered their systems to run on incredibly low resources.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#183

Post by motleyhatch »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #170
antimora wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not. I ceased posting questions a while ago due to the aggressive moderation, which often labeled my questions as duplicates or too common. I was very upset with the direction Stack Overflow had taken, as it seemed to embody the very criticisms it had once had about forums. The Stack Overflow community has lost its vibrancy and has be…

Counterpoint: I've never had a question moderated as duplicate, and I've been using StackOverflow for 15 years.

It can still happen. I've been actively using SO for 14 years and had my first question marked as a duplicate last week. The question was already 9 years old and had been thoroughly answered. Last week somebody decided to "optimize" it, which sent it to the review queue and finally led its closing.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#184

Post by harshalizee »

dmurray wrote: post #161
lokar wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what you are doing that leads you to lookup stuff 10 times a day.

I'm curious what kind of programming job you could have where you look up stuff less than 10 times a day.

I rarely ever need to use SO on a daily basis. I've been programming on the .NET ecosystem for a while now and usually if I need anything I just directly go to the docs.

I used SO a lot when I was a junior engineer. Most of my issues now stem from biz logic or internal design that really can't be googled for.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#185

Post by d0mine »

lokar wrote: post #154
ggregoire wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I look for answers about 10 times a day I'd say and in 90% of the cases I found what I was looking for, in a few seconds, for free. I also post answers when I found old questions and the answers are outdated or not complete. I know it helps other people cause I usually get 1-10 upvotes / year for those answers on old questions. Mostly about python, sql, postgres, js, react, aws and docker, so popular topic…

I’m curious what you are doing that leads you to lookup stuff 10 times a day.

StackOverfow is great for questions that are very basic for people who work in the corresponding domain but can take some time to put together based on the docs along.

For example, "how to insert multiple multi-columns rows dynamically using psycopg2" It is trivial if you are writing sql everyday but may take longer to find the right postgres docs. StackOverflow gives you the answer in 5 minutes: several variants with different tradeoffs (readability, performance, security).

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#186

Post by hn_user82179 »

charlie0 wrote: post #157
antimora wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not. I ceased posting questions a while ago due to the aggressive moderation, which often labeled my questions as duplicates or too common. I was very upset with the direction Stack Overflow had taken, as it seemed to embody the very criticisms it had once had about forums. The Stack Overflow community has lost its vibrancy and has be…

If they didn't moderate aggressively, they would probably end up with a bunch of duplicate questions. I really like the fact there's not a ton of dups on SO. ie, see other help sites. They also have a high standard for those questions, to the point where it will take 10+ minutes to post a good question. I don't ask questions either, mainly because I don't want to spend 30+ minutes writing a good question AND that's a…

IMO, the aggressive de-duplication of questions means that people will keep updating the answers as things change, which is really nice as you don't have to worry about the responses to a question becoming out-of-date/stale.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#187

Post by bryanlarsen »

antimora wrote: post #181
bryanlarsen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: I've never had a question moderated as duplicate, and I've been using StackOverflow for 15 years.

Your experience must be an outlier. After I posted I read other comments here and others had the same experience (just search "duplicate" here).

It does seem likely that I'm an outlier . OTOH it could be that just people that have had bad experiences are posting their experiences and the silent majority without bad experiences aren't posting. It's so hard to tell in a forum format.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#188

Post by bachmeier »

nineplay wrote: post #49
rezistik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out. The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.

I've seen python questions marked as 'duplicate' when the question was python 3 and the "answer" was python 2.

Love the duplicates that link to questions that have two answers, neither of which solves the question.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#189

Post by xmprt »

mywittyname wrote: post #111
xmprt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true but it's a very nihilistic way to look at things. I believe SO had many more successful years ahead of it but decisions taken by the company and moderators sped that process up.

I don't think it nihilistic. The world changes; it changes rapidly; it changes dramatically. Successful businesses pivot, and as a result, often don't resemble the company that they used to be. The end game of successful businesses is to become a conglomerate of sorts. Once a company owns enough brands/products across enough markets, they can shed the under-performers and expand into new segments and industries.

I think we're in agreement. But the original commenter was stating that all companies die or change given a long enough timeline so criticizing a company for dying/changing is pointless since that happens to everyone.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#190

Post by kar5pt »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #103

Am I the only one that still finds SO to be quite useful? If I paste an error message into Google, it's still quite likely that the SO answer is the best one. And if it doesn't, I contribute an answer if/when I eventually find it because I still think I get more out of SO than I put in. I've received 21 necromancer badges doing that.

For Android development SO is pretty useless. I often find answers on there from <=2015. That's when Android 6 came out, its way too old to be relevant. But if you try to re-ask the same question they mark it as a duplicate.
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