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Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

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Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#201

Post by bluedino »

stackghost wrote: post #33
alach11 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.

Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so. It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.

Question askers got lazier and lazier.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#202

Post by torben-friis »

kstrauser wrote: post #179
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?" Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011 The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity".

It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#203

Post by bluedino »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #23

This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.

Reddit in a way is about finding an echo chamber with people who share your beliefs, not necessarily finding facts. Great for spreading misinformation and smelling your own farts.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#204

Post by hungryhobbit »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #143

For me, the strict requirements for posting questions help me to define the problem well, and after writing the question properly, I'd have the solution.

Early Stack Overflow as an amazing "rubber duck" (see "rubber duck debugging").

Unfortunately in recent years it became such a traumatizing experience to post a question there (even if you made a perfectly legit question you'd likely get downvoted and closed ... and god help you if you posted a question with an issue).

It completely changed from "I posted a question I can answer myself, and someone said so in the comments" to "I posted ANY question and everyone on the site teamed up to get rid of that question".

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#205

Post by torben-friis »

hintymad wrote: post #149
legitster wrote: post #82

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…

StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.

Agreed for the math one. I went there when I was dealing with game engines and needed something geometry related or the like rather than to stackoverflow and they were far nicer.

Even inside SO each language and topic would have different standards. A C question would not be answered in the same way one about a JS framework would.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#206

Post by hungryhobbit »

vanuatu wrote: post #59
torben-friis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better question is what's left for those who don't have access to that. We went from publicly available to vacuumed from private users

Open source models unfortunately all the incentives right now are for repos to be private

Open source models are for rich people: only they can afford the hardware needed to run them.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#207

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #179
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?" Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011 The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#208

Post by selcuka »

superjose wrote: post #171
bjourne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!

The best was when the duplicated question was ranked higher on Google haha

It doesn't matter because the duplicate is linked to the original, so most visitors coming from Google would still view the actual answer. It works like a soft HTTP 302 response.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#209

Post by golem14 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#210

Post by golem14 »

golem14 wrote: post #209
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

... and I wonder if this culture won't be baked into the LLMs using this dataset for training ...

... and of course, this wondering applies to other training sets, like usenet ...
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