Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8b on June 2, 2021, 3 months after the all-time high for traffic.
It’s possible the post-acquisition operation did something that made the search engine gods mad.
The Fall of Stack Overflow
521–530 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#522So demise is a pretty standard story of bureaucratic takeover
It was not sudden either, I remember by 2014 it was mostly pointles to try to ask any complex question.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just some random musings about Stackoverflow: SO is at its best when it’s actual error debugging IMO. When you google some specific error whoever else has the similar error it’s right there. I feel like GitHub is replacing this more and more though - I often get the GitHub ranked specific error higher than Stackoverflow these days. Usually you get better discussions on the GitHub issues too, for a multitude of reason…
ChatGPT is not in anyway better than SO - no see the current moderation strike. Both sides can identify ChatGPT answers as being wrong. The question is how can they be deleted. The moderators say they can delete a lot by manual inspection. SO say that AI tools were deleting wrong ones.
In my experience it’s usually often enough been right enough, and has the added benefit of adapting it’s answer to my issue.
Which is more than Google, or a previously answered StackOverflow question, can say.
But then, it’ll probably greatly vary depending on the problem you are facing.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#524I 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…
The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers. But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly…
Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments. Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incenti…
I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.
HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc.
These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah, the primordial incompatibility of cultures. Let's not forget that in india it is not considered wrong to "game" the system, even it is considered unethical by western standards. It is not a coincidence all of these tech support scammers are based in india. this brings forth an interesting topic, how do we reconcile cultural differences in online platforms ? Nobody can deny they exist, and they create clashes like…
I don't think you do. Your platform should have an explicit and expected code of conduct set up in advance, and people should be held to it. If they cannot, they aren't allowed to use the platform. When it becomes apparent that there are cultural norms that make it difficult or impossible for people from those cultures to use your platform, you re-examine your code of conduct, of course, to make sure you're not undul…
Agree with the first part of your comment.
gaming the system is prevalent but not considered ethical in india. HRs won’t allow such candidates for example. So there is no question of amending CoC to make room.
There is a difference between something being prevalent and something being culturally accepted. The solution lies in naming and shaming. Making it clear that such people aren’t wanted on these platforms.
But i don’t think anyone should chalk this up to “cultural norms” That’s just being unfair to those of us who are just as fed up with this mindset.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is really failing hard in this regard, and I'm fairly sure it's intentional on their part. Searching "Typescript array" has obvious intent from the user, and an obvious "correct" first result. Google returns the documentation page in the 3rd result, but it's a link to a deprecated version of the page. The rest of the above-the-fold links are websites that contain Google ads. Duck-Duck-Go returns the up-to-date…
I spent years learning a programming language well then further years delivering a training course, iterating and then providing sections of the course on the website free online. Both as advertising and to get new people started. Your "typescript array" returns one of the sites in the top 5 that basically copy-pasted via thesaurus many of my articles. I checked and it turns out they offer $50 for people to submit co…
I have a friend that does something similar, but only does video with the text gated behind a paid-only site. He makes pretty good money, but for the exact reasons you listed is why the site is paid-only. They have a much harder time stealing (as in posting as their own content) the video.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotal, but my website lost a lot of search traffic after Google's core update in March, which seems to have affected SO as well looking at the first chart. If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.…
Again anecdotal, but I lost the majority of my SEO traffic late last year around the time of a core update. I've spent the best part of a year attempting to repair it, on the assumption I'd committed some heinous SEO crime. The more time that passes, I'm starting to think that the issue isn't mine so much as Google's. It's baffling. I wrote about it here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-i-ruined-my-seo
Looking at your post and the HN discussion, I am also of the same impression.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rubber Duck. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
> The process of writing a high-quality question, with a minimally viable example, clearly lined out thought-processes, and other things tried, solved the question for me in most cases without me ever having to post it. Nevertheless post the question and provide an answer. Everybody wins: you reap the upvotes, and everyone else benefits from the shared knowledge.
Upvotes are worthless, and SO is unnecessary in this flow. Write a blog post or a gist, don't deal with SO mods.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#530The 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…
Stack overflow committed the cardinal sin of running their own ad network on their sites, not much of a mistery it's downplaced.