Why can’t we just Pair Program more? There is enough open source out there. Enough user groups meeting. Enough hack-a-thons. Just make them Pair Programming sessions. Please! please I beg of you!
The Fall of Stack Overflow
561–570 of 808 posts
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#562The moderation became absolutely abhorrent.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#563The 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…
Google has gone down the drain. As I've written recently somewhere here, they could easily fix their search by hiring maybe a dozen people per country to moderate common search request results or to, hell, listen to users like here, and respond by booting the scammers.
The problem is, they won't, because active moderation beyond responding to legal (DMCA, right to be forgotten, anti-CSAM) demands would massively endanger their "we are an impartial search engine" defense.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#564See "new visits" in the first chart. You can reduce the window for extra clarity. Something very specific must have happened in that week, nothing that can be explained with a "grand theory of decay".
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
That answer is only there because it's really old, from the early days of S.O. where people were allowed to ask questions that weren't super serious binary yes/no style. It'd get moderated and deleted in a heartbeat today. A forlorn monument to the cool place that S.O. once was
Maybe I’m just a fun-hating asshole but personally I find this kind of thing annoying, not cool. People are just trying to get work done, not see someone’s attempt at cringey “nerd culture” humor.
You agree with SO: those answers are no longer allowed, and haven't been for years. They are only kept as historical artifacts, and marked as such.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#566The 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…
>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?
SO had an expert sexchange.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#567Earlier 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…
Should get rid of the reward system -- or at least reform it drastically to discourage pettiness. An accepted solution should not result in a reward to anybody. Somebody just starting to learn a topic posts a basic question and gets an answer from an old timer - and they both get rewarded! for what? There seems to be an army of "moderators" who are ready to pounce on easy questions and they end the answer by remindin…
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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#568The 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…
The sweet spot for SO for me is workarounds for esoteric problems, not for more common issues because the solutions tend to be out of date (but correct for an older version of the library or whatever).
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#569Even 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…
>keeps ban on LLM-generated content. How is this being enforced? It's either bots banning bots in a digital game of whack-a-mole; or humans arbitrarily trying to asses whether something has been written by an LLM or a human.
It's human judgement. Definitely not perfect, but something has to be done to prevent SO from being overrun.
There are some subjective signs that a post is LLM generated, like being overly verbose and making unrelated assumptions, or mix of horrible and perfect grammar. Those bans are hard to justify because the false positive rate is high.
But other signs are pretty obvious. My favorite is the use of APIs that should exist but don't. Passing parameters that neatly solve the problem but have never been accepted, or importing non existent libraries. I'm happy to flag those.
Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation. " https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior " Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat. " Every post you…
I asked about this 10 years ago and look at the sarcasm I received in response. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/142703
What would you think if you clicked on a Wikipedia article about Mozart and instead of the current introduction which says:
> Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart[a][b] (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every genre of his time.
it opened with:
> Hello everyone, I studied classical music in college but have been out of the scene for a while and now I'm getting back in, I was wondering about the history of Mozart and I remember that his middle name was Allen or Almond or something? Can anyone help? Thanks for any information. || Hi, I learned about him in middle school and we all joked that his middle name was Armadillo but I think that's wrong, haha. || Greets all, it's in Olivier Hallengrunsch's Classical Composers as 'Amadeus', and that's well regarded. It also says he lived (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791). I think we can all agree he was prolific, right? Thanks and regards, Jason [xxKiller; AMD Ryzen2 32GB RAM 2TB Western Digital SSD; BMW 330 2l aircooled] || Why's nobody mentioning how short that life was, smh || Good evening all and sundry, m'lady (tips hat), forsooth would anyone speak to how many works he is believed to have composed, all considered? Methinks such knowledge would be a most hearty addition to this esteemed gentleman's biography - Martin, [Fort Lauderdale TX Ren. Faire organiser 1997-1997] || etc.
StackOverflow isn't a forum, it's a collaborative reference work. Meta-chat would be edited out of a wikipedia page and goes on a separate 'talk' page (equivalent: meta stackexchanges or the stackexchange chat). What if you then went to the Wikipedia talk page and said "Is overzealous moderation of questions ruining Wikipedia? I want to be able to edit questions and greetings into pages but there are hoards of awful literal-minded jobsworths cruising the site just looking for the slightest reason to edit a spelling or grammar mistake or revert my changes. It just leaves me feeling unwelcome"?
Why would you expect to feel welcome when you're spoiling what others are trying to build up and insulting them for caring??