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Stack Overflow is almost dead

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#271

Post by mcejp »

daedrdev wrote: post #269
Arnt wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show, don't tell. Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.) Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.

This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.

Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#272

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

I'll be harsh, but they deserve it. The value of SO plummeted as documentation got better, disallowing open ended questions and discussions completely removed the value of talking to other humans. It was useful as junior and intermediate, but the value for a senior dropped to 0 due to the inability to ask what I would consider important.

I had to resort to reddit to ask those questions, which is ironic given the focus of SO.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#273

Post by whoknowsidont »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #192

Everyone is blaming AI, and it's undoubtedly a factor. But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing. Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and on…

Can you link to questions that you feel were unfairly derided (not necessarily closed)?

As someone who has extensive experience modding an niche SE I see this sentiment quite often but honestly, the people making these complaints are just arrogant _and_ wrong about the topic they needed help with.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#274

Post by zahlman »

louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

The point of an LLM is that it can take your problem as input, along with answers to previously asked questions (perhaps implicit) in its training data, and attempt to synthesize a solution to a problem as output. Here, a "question" is something that can be found with a search engine - something that directly presents the/a crux of an issue, which is identified after a debugging session (for a problem in existing code; for projects still in the design phase, a how-to question emerges after coming up with user stories and breaking tasks down into their logical steps). The point is that the question can be relevant to many different people who have written different code which encounters different problems - all caused fundamentally by the same conceptual misunderstanding (or non-understanding).

Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.

This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.

Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#275

Post by zahlman »

stormblooperz wrote: post #268
zahlman wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide , and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work"…

I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on. I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists! Also: I kn…

> not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation.

I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.

I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.

They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).

> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.

I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.

> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.

Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.

But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#276

Post by zahlman »

zero_shift wrote: post #202
louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

Ironically, when someone first asked the Meta SO community if ChatGPT could ever become a threat, it was downvoted with prejudice: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...

It was downvoted because the entire purported "threat" is based on a misconception.

It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.

But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#277

Post by zahlman »

Buttons840 wrote: post #142
irrational wrote: post #75

> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site…

For a time the "let's interact with people and talk about cool things" group and the "let's build the ultimate knowledge base" group had their incentives aligned. Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.

> Then, with better moderator tools, the "ultimate knowledge base" group set out to achieve the ultimate knowledge base by reducing the amount of people who were just there to talk.

Yes, because the people who were just there to talk had reached a point where they could effectively only pollute the knowledge base. Bad questions make good ones harder to find, simply by existing (since the bad one could potentially be found instead, and because of the broken window effect).

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#278

Post by zahlman »

palata wrote: post #9

I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be". Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

>Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?

"Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric.

Popular != good.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#279

Post by zahlman »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #132
bawolff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity. Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of gr…

The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past. But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old…

Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration.

Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.

Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.

The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.

This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".

As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#280

Post by zahlman »

williamDafoe wrote: post #258
bawolff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity. Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of gr…

Two thirds of the wikipedia article i wrote in 2003 have been deleted by rabid editors. It was a biography of my father, written based on interviews with my mother. I have found that restoring any of the rabid editor deletions results in threats of me being banned from editing my own article.

... And what, precisely, is the reason why a biography of your father belongs in an encyclopedia?
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