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We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#191

Post by zahlman »

Someone1234 wrote: post #137
cogman10 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reddit death spiral is AI, bots, and brigading. I think they've accelerated it by making it easy to make all comments private and by hamstringing moderators. Part of that directly ties back to AI as well. The API limiting has a lot to do with making it hard to scrape reddit for data.

I definitely think that has made it worse, but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.

> but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.

Stack Overflow's situation, of course, is totally different. It only changed ownership once.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#192

Post by tstrimple »

jjice wrote: post #55

This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource. For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise. For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits. I'…

> I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits.

My favorite is when searching for something I land on a thread where the only reply is "just search for the answer!"

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#193

Post by zahlman »

j_w wrote: post #95
stackskipton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…

There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: and here is the issue I have . " This does two things: 1. It dem…

> You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case.

There are no stupid questions, but there are stupid choices about whom to ask.

Often the right choice is yourself.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#194

Post by gushie »

zahlman wrote: post #165
ACS_Solver wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource. Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very…

> Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very similar question has ever been answered on the site". What else could it mean? The entire point is that if you search for the question, you should always find the best version of that question. That only works by identifying it and routing all the others there. > That c…

> You are, generally, supposed to put the new answer on the old question

If you're asking the question, you don't know the new answer.

If you're not asking the question, you don't know the answer needs updating as it is 15 years old and has an accepted answer, and you didn't see the new question as it was marked as a dupe.

Even if you add the updated answer, it will have no votes and so has a difficult battle to be noticed with the accepted answer, and all the other answers that have gathered votes over the years.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#195

Post by zahlman »

bachmeier wrote: post #110

This topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO. It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness. I wanted to learn web development during the…

The founders have not been around for years.

The remaining community understands perfectly well why people have left. It's just deemed irrelevant.

Way too many people joined the site, way too quickly, based on a false understanding of the intended premise. Gradually they filtered themselves out as they realized the mistake. Those few who saw value in the actual idea remained.

It was always going to be relatively few people who truly want to participate in something like that. And that's fine. Ideas don't have to be popular to be worthwhile or valid.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#196

Post by zahlman »

smithkl42 wrote: post #81
smithkl42 wrote: post #44

I can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this. I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself. For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that arou…

If you're interested, a perfect example would be this question here ("should I enable application insights profiling on production Azure web apps"): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl... That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as…

Have you tried https://devops.stackexchange.com?

The question as written is still opinion-based (try instead something like "what negative consequences could occur from..."; the point is that the site should not be trying to weigh pros and cons for you, but just stating what they are, so that people can make their own decisions).

This sort of thing gets marked off topic because it pertains to the matter of hosting the program, rather than creating it. See also https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425628, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276579, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271279 etc.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#197

Post by [deleted] »

zahlman wrote: post #157
kstrauser wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwe…

> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked. > Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. This is absurd and I can't think of anything remot…

[deleted]

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#198

Post by ourmandave »

zahlman wrote: post #177
ourmandave wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's odd to me. When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could…

> When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Okay, presumably you're familiar with the experience of seeing these links. When you saw them, how much effort did you put into opening them in new tabs and checking whether they answer your question? I'm guessing, not a lot. The UI affordance isn't great. The semantic searc…

I'm not the one who was down voted or didn't check links.

The last time I started to ask a question I was able to rubber duck the answer so didn't need to post it.

And if I saw -3 votes as a newbie and then watched it go to -4 and -5, that sure feels like a rebuke. You see that every time stackoverflow comes up. People always comment about how mean they are, intended or not.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#199

Post by cr125rider »

otikik wrote: post #94

I must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.

Stupid people hated stack overflow because it didn’t allow them to be lazy.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#200

Post by rurp »

zahlman wrote: post #161
cogman10 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I think this is part of what lead to the downfall of SO. The moderation could be very aggressive with "duplicate" posts getting closed fast. The problem is sometimes the "solution" in the duplicate was either irrelevant or dated. Things like telling someone to us jQuery in 2020.

People keep saying this specifically about jQuery, but without any object examples.

If you lookup how to do any sort of standard front end operation there's a good chance the top SO answer will reference jQuery or some other outdated approach. I don't typically save these cases for future reference but have seen them many times and expect most people who have spent much time searching these topics have as well.
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