The Fall of Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#631

Post by wiz21c » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

mountainb wrote: post #607

technion wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole situation just shows as a lie everything we hear about SEO. Stack Overflow has the exact text, it loads incredibly fast (should be commended more for this), doesn't require ten meg of Javascript to render as far as I know generally meets HTML standards. These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them, if you open devtools you'…

It has long been a mantra in SEO land that user generated content sites in general and forums in particular are to be aggressively down ranked. The reason for this is that industrial strength spam farms otherwise spin up tens of thousands of forum domains to pass link juice to what they are targeting. This naturally penalizes real forums, which often contain the best content for a query. This is why Google has basica…

funny, I just rented an introductory book about signal processing and was (re) amazed to see how much the information is well explained, with tons of example, and a real plan to guide you in the ton of knowledge you have to master.

I for one welcome back our new library overlords.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#632

Post by dmingod666 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

As a full time Dev. I'm on ChatGPT (paid) and use co-pilot.

My teams first go-to is ChatGPT as well. SO is no longer 'that site' to go to ( been on SO for 10+ years ). I have 0 love for that site. It was 'The resource' before, now it's just another site..

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#633

Post by NavinF » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

gingerlime wrote: post #432

pjc50 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them Only if you're not googlebot. The crawler sees a much nicer site.

which should — in theory — get them penalized for cloaking. But obviously it doesn’t. Reinforcing GP’s point.

Google has gotten pretty lenient about that: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

"If you operate a paywall or a content-gating mechanism, we don't consider this to be cloaking if Google can see the full content of what's behind the paywall just like any person who has access to the gated material and if you follow our Flexible Sampling general guidance."

I wonder if they just gave up

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#634

Post by anonu » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

Do you think there may be secular trends here? We do see COVID-induced peaks in that data around 2020. I'm not suggesting that "less people are coding" - but just that lots of media-related sites are coming down from 2020/2021 peaks.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#635

Post by L3viathan » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #581

cassepipe wrote: post #571

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO…

Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so). Presumably this was because SO still wanted the Google juice. It was irritating as hell to have the top several Google links go to SO discussions that had been shut down by the moderators. > I can't blame them I'm…

> Those rough moderators would close off discussions for the most trivial reasons, yet SO still allowed those discussions to be indexed by Google (despite rel="nofollow" having been a thing since 2005 or so).

At least for "closed as duplicate" that is working as intended: "Closed" doesn't necessarily mean "you shouldn't have asked that question". In the ideal world, a post being closed as duplicate just allows people that phrase the duplicated question differently to also find it.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#636

Post by culopatin » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #483

culopatin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that with the rise of push notifications, no one really goes to a site to check notifications anymore. So the new user may have not developed the muscle memory to go back to SO and participate. I suspect this also has something to do with the decline of forums. Reddit still works because the app sends 200 notifications a day, but without it, I don’t think it would be as popular. Also SO is participation hosti…

I don't know if we all do it the same way. I don't use push notifications for barely anything, because I don't want to be disturbed by random sites (least of all linkedin or SO.)

But you’re not the average person.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#637

Post by tlogan » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

ChatGPT offers an effective substitute for Stack Overflow, fully encompassing its role for simple questions.

For more compelx problems, Stack Overflow was never a good solution; it's better suited for tackling simpler questions. But for simpler questions you have chatGPT.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#638

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

cowthulhu wrote: post #336

newaccount74 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very popular Zalgo answer is a perfect example of this problem [1] The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem. Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts…

Hilariously, the accepted (I assume by default, not by the asker) answer is flagrantly breaking, like, half a dozen rules and guidelines… but because it’s cynically and unhelpfully crapping on a newbie, it stays up. Or maybe there’s a good reason for it to stay up, but at a glance it sure isn’t a good look. I actually think SO is a great site and resource, but I also think a lot of that is despite the bitter old time…

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#639

Post by harimau777 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #628

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…

> 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 shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever. Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained…

I ran into that a lot when I was doing low level firmware programming. The answers to someone's question would be something like "that feature is only intended for ultra-specialized low level programmers". And it's like "in this case, I am an ultra-specialized low level programmer".

I'm thinking of things like assigning constants to pointers in C and/or manipulating pointers directly.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#640

Post by sevenf0ur » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

SO has been around so long a lot of the answers are no longer relevant. I don't place much trust that an answer from 2010 will solve my problem. You often see [2023 UPDATE], but that answer is usually buried or hidden within other answers.

I firmly believe that ChatGTP is the SO killer. You get your answer instantly, it's usually good enough, and you don't have to worry about a mod closing your question as low quality or duplicate.