The comments im seeing here cite moderation practices and scrutinizing culture as reasons for the downfall. But those arent new. I think its safe to say its largely ChatGPT.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
511–520 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#512I don't understand why they killed their job board. We used to pay them a few hundreds a month for a a couple of job ads that we were quite happy with. But then they "decided to focus on enabling our community of developers and technologists to discover and learn about companies rather than just giving them a way to apply to an open role." Which meant they became a platform for recruiters that can spend monthly 10Ks+…
Where do you post your SmallCo jobs these days?
We mostly use recruiters now
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me personally it’s the rise of good documentation. 12 or 13 years ago I needed to build something for our sharepoint 2010 in a world where sharepoint 2013 was out. I’m not a share point developer, at all, it was my first time with it. I am of the old school however, so figuring out how systems work by reading the manual or specification isn’t foreign to me. I’ve worked with the bitmap format, I’ve worked with sol…
Out of interest, do you think your recent experiences with SharePoint were because Microsoft decided to unify pretty much all of their services behind the common Microsoft Graph API? SharePoint used to suffer from having multiple different overlapping styles of APIs depending on what API style was fashionable at the time that feature was developed - which could make development a nightmare... (OK, an even bigger nigh…
I sort of like ODATA on the client end of things. It's an absolute nightmare on the server side, at least with .NET, but for clients it's usually fairly easy to consume. This is true for every part of the Microsoft Graph API that I've worked with except for the SharePoint part. Which for whatever reason works differently when you query things. It's sort of hard for me to answer though. I've spent quite a lot of time in enterprise organisations, and I've integrated with basically everything, and it's almost all bad in one way or another. On that scale I think the Microsoft Graph API in general is a 8/10 maybe even a 9/10, but the SharePoint parts of it are at most a 5/10.
I'm not 100% sure this is the fault of the API, if it's because of SharePoints indexation, if it's because of the 3rd party meta-data indexation that we buy for our document library or if it's because of how terrible our own architecture for the data flow is. But I've had to build a lot of redundancy and caching into the terrible piece of gaffa tape which is our integration, because SharePoint won't give me every document everytime that I ask for them.
So a bad experience? But at least it's not FTP (yes not sftp) pulling different file formats from 9000 solarplant inverters bad.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#514The comments im seeing here cite moderation practices and scrutinizing culture as reasons for the downfall. But those arent new. I think its safe to say its largely ChatGPT.
Also: Chatgpt can give you answers based on what’s already on SO. In other words based on the content that is a result of the very moderation practices being criticised
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#515Earlier 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…
The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/
If doing X by Y is possible and will achieve Q, then the best way to respond to these questions is either of:
1. To do Q that way you would to but you will likely it far more efficient/easy/whatever to do instead.
2. Q can be achieved far more efficient/easy/whatever by doing , but if you are stuck with using Y then try .
Of course this relies on you correctly deriving that they are trying to achieve Q, or them explicitly stating the fact. Maybe instead they are trying to get to K.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#516The 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…
Ironically(?) I seem to have little trouble getting search hits for SO questions that have been closed with some vague explanation as to why...
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#517Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#518Stack Overflow banned my character with 100,000 reputation: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1002260 for FIVE YEARS, because of a rollback war on some of my own answers. some idiot was gaming the system and adding minor punctuation here and there, just to get review points. so yeah, good riddance.
Probably because you were going around antagonizing everyone and then deleting the evidence, Steven Penny.
thanks for the valuable comment. I realize now that my 1,800 answers mean nothing, and that the only important thing is my comment etiquette. I will try to do better, random stranger.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#519Even though StackOverflow in the common use case has been taken over by ChatGPT, I sincerely hope it keeps operating, stays strict (even if it causes collateral) and keeps ban on LLM-generated content. The wheels of this kind of stuff turn slowly, but obviously ChatGPT was trained partly with data only gainable from a healthy StackOverflow-kind of site with users actively asking unique questions and enough people ans…
+1
And I think Stack Exchange needs a new CEO. Maybe new owners, which is since 2021 Prosus. My impression is that they don’t understand what is the purpose for developers.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#520Super interesting charts!
I was surprised to see big humps over early springtimes. As if springtime causes people to feel more willing to open up and communicate, similarly to how we associate springtime with heightened romantic drive.
Another cool thing I've discovered by reading this right after the Usenet thread[0] is that it is typical for large-scale social networks to stop being humanity's darlings after ~15 years of age. Which is also surprisingly similar to how people are supposed to become completely self-sufficient around 16, as if there's no reasonable expectaction of substantial external care for them.
Usenet: born in 1979 [u1], stagnated in 1993, 14 years later. XMPP: born in 1999 [x1], stagnated in 2013 [x2], 14 years later. Stack Overflow: born in 2008 [s1], stagnation reported today here, 15 years later.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859510 [u1] "Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [u2] "Segan said that some people pointed to the Eternal September in 1993 as the beginning of Usenet's decline" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
[x1] "released the first version of the jabberd server on January 4, 1999." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development [x2] "In May 2013, Google announced XMPP compatibility would be dropped from Google Talk for server-to-server federation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development