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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#661

Post by zero_shift »

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 reminds me of my last ever SO question. It was many years ago, so I might be misremembering some details, but:

I wanted some information on figuring out what texture serialisation was supported on a given client for a WebGL app. I needed to know this because I was optimising the client and had to deal with very large textures (it was an AR / augmented reality context).

Cue a barrage of comments along the lines of "you shouldn't need to do this" "the abstraction means you can simply assume the GPU has infinite texture memory" (!) "just provide all the formats and let the GPU bridge figure it out". Then the question had a downvote and that was that, cast to the bottom of the pile.

It seemed to me everyone responding to my question had this assumption "questioners are morons". A moron asking about texture serialisation is a paradox, ergo the question must have a faulty premise.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#662

Post by taylodl »

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.

Yup. And that's why I stopped using SO quite a while (years) back.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#663

Post by inglor_cz »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #389
inglor_cz wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, regular humans, right? I am unsurprised.

I am not very surprised either, but it also indicates that we may be overvaluing education when it comes to behavior improvements.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#664

Post by firesteelrain »

usrbinbash wrote: post #619
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…

> 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 Yes, and they are factually correct in doing so. The correct answer to the question: "How do I use a hammer to tighten a screw" isn't a lengthy description of how to perform some magic with a hammer. The correct answer is: "You don't. Use a screwdriver." HTML isn't parseable w…

Your response and the other responses are proving our point. It wasn't about context free grammars, level 2 or level 3, etc. It was a very limited subset of a problem. Answer should have been, "while I don't recommend doing it the way you want to do it, that should work for your limited subset".

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#665

Post by redsaber »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #640

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 qualit…

> 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.

I did have problem like this before too and I just made my search better by appending the `after:` to my google search to ensure the latest info

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#666

Post by tivert »

ivanbakel wrote: post #401
jason-johnson wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.) Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wr…

> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way.

Then you have to do two things in your answer:

1. Correctly answer the question as asked.

2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.

If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#667

Post by cubefox »

If you select window size "7 days" and filter the Traffic section for "new visits", you see a massive and permanent two-thirds drop between end of April and mid May 2022. Apparently some change in the Google algorithm pushed down Stack Overflow heavily.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#668

Post by Someone »

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…

> it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now?

Are they just fine today, too? To judge that, you have to look at the date of the question and its answers, make an educated guess at what OS/language/library versions they are about, judge whether that makes a difference for the version(s) you’re using, and only then evaluate whether the reply even was correct at the time (it may have had a thousand upvotes, but still be dated)

I think a really good Q/A resource would require posts to be tagged with version info. Most people think manual tagging isn’t fun, though, so it’s hard to get such a set from volunteers.

An alternative would be to require test cases that the site can run to check what version(s) replies are valid for, but writing such tests that do not break over time is hard, and, again, in general volunteers don’t like writing them.

That leaves generating tags or test cases. I don’t think we’re there, quality wise, to do that.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#669

Post by malfist »

josu wrote: post #393
maxlin wrote: post #43

Even 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 not. That's why the moderators are on strike.

See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-s...

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#670

Post by texuf »

tivert wrote: post #649
tzs wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y. > I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me. I know what you mean. Whenever I (rarely) ask a question…

Sounds like you’re good at prompt engineering
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