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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#211

Post by bdangubic »

Arnt wrote: post #173
kulahan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”. It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that si…

How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?

this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#212

Post by zahlman »

IshKebab wrote: post #207
zahlman wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short version: Stack Overflow was always, explicitly intended to be the site that you think "went wrong", and is made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team. There is abundant historical documentation of this, but it took time for that intent to be explained coherently and the site initially grew far faster than it…

> made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team. When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges. You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want…

You say this as if you expect me to accept implicitly that popular == good.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#213

Post by Arnt »

kulahan wrote: post #206
Arnt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself. Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.

Probably right, definitely justifiable, super annoying and actively driving away users.

Most users don't ask. They search.

The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#214

Post by Karrot_Kream »

zahlman wrote: post #198
mvdtnz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.

It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content. It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish . I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing…

You are a volunteer. You can stop volunteering. If the job is becoming corrosive to your mental health and you don't have the emotional energy to engage with the job in manner that involves empathy, then I think the healthier option for everyone is to stop volunteering and let someone new come in who still has the empathy to handle it.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#215

Post by Karrot_Kream »

spjt wrote: post #176
ndneighbor wrote: post #81

My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked. It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I…

I'm not very sympathetic to moderators. Their job is to make some forum contain only what they want to hear from the (unpaid) people providing the content. If that's what you want, start a blog. In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane. Howeve…

Yes this is the really hard problem of human organization on the internet. You need mods to keep the quality gate up. But eventually mods feed off their own power and alienate the community. Maybe some combination of human and algorithmic moderation can help.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#216

Post by yuzzi »

surgical_fire wrote: post #141
zahlman wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to t…

> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted…

Yes. This

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#217

Post by yuzzi »

zahlman wrote: post #146
slyfox125 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base. Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.

My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used. We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously. But n…

How ironic. For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo) and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#218

Post by computerdork »

danjl wrote: post #165
myvoiceismypass wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist

Those hallucinated libraries exist in the future where the LLM lives and works. You just haven't caught up in time yet. ;-)

Ah, I see, it's that advanced? Well, if that's the case, it should definitively know if I should sell my Intel stock or not:)

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#219

Post by zahlman »

yuzzi wrote: post #217
zahlman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used. We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously. But n…

How ironic. For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo) and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

> For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo)

This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.

> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.

What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#220

Post by zahlman »

yuzzi wrote: post #210
Arnt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that si…

Seems to me like you're part of the problem. Of course it's not my problem anymore because I no longer contribute there.

From GP:

> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.

Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?

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