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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#221

Post by RandallBrown »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #163
nmilo wrote: post #88

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…

25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians got out of control and it no longer was about helping people but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge where most users started to be categorised as problematic to that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at expressing themselves in English. Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answe…

I lucked in to some moderator powers by posting the answer to an extremely simple and common problem in Objective-C.

Sometimes I'll go through and undo lots of those trivial "improvements" that people make where they slightly change the wording of the questions and answers.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#223

Post by mdaniel »

playingalong wrote: post #136
nmilo wrote: post #88

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…

Me neither. But I think to ask a good question (on SO or to a more senior colleague at work) is a skill itself. Most people don't have it. Even most developers don't have it, which is somewhat surprising. Also this skill is not taught actively, or at least not widely. So people end up asking these poorly worded or poorly aimed questions. And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their educa…

> And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when using SO).

I've never asked a question in order to know what the question guidance is like, but _undoubtedly_ there is a well written "how to ask" page https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask> and (one that I cite in comments so often I have a bookmarklet for it) the "please rubber duck your way to the question before vomiting into SO" that used to be called MCVE https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example>

Now, saying "ain't nobody got time to read all that text, I got bugs to write!" is a reasonable response, but saying "there's no guidance on how to write a question less likely to be closed" is untrue

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#224

Post by metabagel »

mellosouls wrote: post #85

Unfortunately this doesn't really have much to do with StackOverflow, beyond it having the success that gives it a) A large community. b) Unpaid moderators who include people and cliques who feel self-worth in gatekeeping and other forms of "power". It's always been this way in most fora; the more success, the larger the community, with a corresponding increase in inappropriate moderation. See also, Wikipedia, Reddit…

Yeah, there's probably a limit to how much dang can be scaled.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#225

Post by qwertox »

fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to pipe the data.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#227

Post by Izkata »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212
michaelt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how rarely they provide links to the questions? If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the prima…

Ask, and ye shall receive: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968

The main post[0] you go on about in there is a badly formatted question: It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links. It doesn't surprise me it got close votes.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75361518/accessing-an-io...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#228

Post by siwatanejo »

_gabe_ wrote: post #202
fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions,…

IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#229

Post by pixl97 »

grey-area wrote: post #219
pixl97 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mind explaining how?

If you think it’s useful you’re stealing the work of GPT by posting without attribution, if you don’t you’re wasting our time.

This is where I want to make an omniscient bot that follows you around and gives you a severe electric shock every time you use potentially copyrighting material snippets (I'll be nice and give you a 3 second window to declare fair use).

I will be happy the day copyright is dead and buried under a mountain sized gravestone. As much as you think it protects the small guy, it enabled the rich to buy up portfolios and enslave them to constant payments and holding back the progression of society.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#230

Post by Slighted »

_fat_santa wrote: post #97
pixl97 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit. That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.

>I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits

Trust me, you aren't missing out on anything by not being able to post on r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/Chonkers, or r/FunkoPops

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