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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#381

Post by jason-johnson »

underdeserver wrote: post #378
jason-johnson wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the issue is that SO was used largely for people working in companies with arcane rules. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten one of these annoying “don’t do X, do Y” when I already know this. I have to do X for some reason, I don’t know how to do X because I do Y when given a choice and now no one will answer how to do X because someone killed interest in the question by apparently answering it. I u…

Disagree. Doing things the right way is BETTER. If you can't, you should add a bit to your question saying "I know the standard way is to do Y, not X, but because of reason Z I can't do it."

Again, you’re not answering the person who asked but every person who ever will. Some of them will be asking because the “right way” is not an option in their situation.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#382

Post by SCdF »

Lazare wrote: post #134

I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleas…

I was in the beta of stack overflow (my numerical id is It is still the best place to find a lot of answers (though their piece of the pie is rapidly shrinking), but participating in the system was never fun.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#383

Post by pptr »

JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

Out of curiosity: what programming language are you searching for?

I never had problems finding SO answers for C++.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#384

Post by alecco »

Besides suffering from mod hell, I stopped answering SO questions mostly because:

1. it takes time to write a good answer;

2. fast copy-paste answers, often wrong, get upvoted anyway;

3. picking the accepted answer, out of many, is done by the person who asked it... who usually doesn't have the knowledge to do this!

4. also many times no answer is accepted, like the person who asked it stopped bothering.

And the hard blowback for that old post on how to game the SO point race, instead of SO trying to figure out how to fix their broken system.

Just like SO was a move out of Experts Exchange and others, this is a good time for the community to start a post-SO Q&A site.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#385

Post by SCdF »

anticodon wrote: post #172
Lazare wrote: post #134

I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top. I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleas…

I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total…

This incentive was always there, from day one. It was a classic thing to put the most basic answer as possible in as quickly as possible just to get it out the door and then refine it later, because whoever posts the answer first would have theirs shown first presuming no upvotes.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#386

Post by Nursie »

JimDabell wrote: post #363
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

Which is the correct response to this question? > How do I shoot myself in the foot? I’m pointing the gun at my foot and pulling the trigger, but nothing is happening. Is it: > A common reason for guns not firing is that they aren’t loaded. Try loading the gun and trying again. …or is it: > Woah, hang on a sec! What are you trying to achieve exactly? It seems like you are doing something very wrong here. I’m sure the…

> There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot.

Sure, but some of the stuff I've looked up in the past is answered with helpful comments like "You won't need to do this, your CA will do this for you" or "this is handled by your certificate verification stack, you don't need to be involved in this stuff".

Well, thanks, but I'm actually implementing both of those things right now and I'm having an annoying issue with figuring out how the API for the (very popular but IMHO poorly documented) library I'm using for part of it hangs together.

> Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.

I think sometimes its because comparatively the respondents are newbies, and are repeating received wisdom.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#387

Post by Const-me »

franciscop wrote: post #361
Const-me wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't show any effort from your side, you just pose the question You probably assumed I asked that question? If so, the assumption was incorrect, I answered it. > without explaining what you attempted, why it worked/didn't work, where you got stuck I don't think any of that is possible to do. The question, and my answer, are too simple to decompose into smaller parts. Not enough runway to start and get stuck.…

Ah sorry, if you answered it it's totally different, sorry for assuming the question was yours! Some of my best answers are also on "simple questions". The question is asking about the best way of doing X, which has a clear substep of "any way of doing X". Not only that, it's asking about a code solution, not just maths/combinatronics. Not a single line of code in a question about finding the optimal (not any) soluti…

> asking about the best way of doing X

To be fair, English is not my native language. But when I see a question “what’s the best way of doing X”, when it doesn’t have any criteria for what’s the best would be, and no other ways of doing X in the question, I consider “what’s the best way” part a redundant figure of speech. I view such questions an equivalent of “what’s a good enough way of doing X”.

> it's asking about a code solution, not just maths/combinatronics

Please read this: https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic According to that article, questions about math which don’t imply a code solution are offtopic on stackoverflow.com. They should be closed, and possibly moved to other stachexchange sites. According to that article, the OP’s question is good. The question was about a specific programming problem, and is a practical, answerable problem unique to software development.

> can already try to think about brute-forcing it

I’m not sure that’s actually possible to do.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#388

Post by mihaaly »

JohnMakin wrote: post #120
JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

This is precisely what kept me away asking anything on SO. It is so much easier and quicker searching on or figuring out by myself than preparing a question defensively and then answering all the questions about why asking about that thing and the road getting there.

When I find a straight and relevant answer that is great, I like browsing SO, but I wouldn't dream having a question just to find myself in a word duel with some very eager contributor steering me into his favourite domain. I want to get ahead with a task not being in the quest of finding The Ultimate Solution or having a social life over interesting and related topics.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#389

Post by throwaway2037 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #338
feoren wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are afraid of downvotes People are afraid of downvotes because people will throw out downvotes without even reading your answer , and once you get the first downvote, everyone else will pile on, also without reading your answer.

It is interesting how a tech-oriented community still replicates monkey or chicken behavior against unpopular individuals.

So, regular humans, right? I am unsurprised.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#390

Post by gpgn »

sznio wrote: post #349
JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

Your first point seems to be most important. > - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always wi…

I have noticed that Wikipedia is often pushed to the bottom of the page compared to a few years ago where it would always be at the very top.
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