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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#731

Post by cowthulhu »

Etheryte wrote: post #427
cowthulhu wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The answer can only ever be accepted by the asker, not even mods can change that. It's actually not that rare that the accepted answer is not the one with most votes in which case the accepted answer is somewhere further down, not the first one on top.

Oops, you’re right! I was totally misremembering.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#732

Post by _gabe_ »

School-Cotton wrote: post #546
Lutger wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question explicitly invites the kind of witty reflection shown in the accepted answer, by adding: "and what do you think?" As mentioned elsewhere, this is an old question and both the kind of question and answer wouldn't be allowed these days. However, I also fundamentally disagree that questioning the assumptions in a question is unhelpful. You want to solve a problem, find an approach and want help because you…

“You didn’t actually want to do X, here’s how to do Y instead” may indeed be helpful for the beginner who initially asked the question, but it’s very unhelpful for me who finds the page years later actually wanting to do X.

> “You didn’t actually want to do X, here’s how to do Y instead” may indeed be helpful for the beginner who initially asked the question

Stack Overflow isn't a site for beginners, it's for "professionals". At least, that's what all the Stack Overflow defenders tell me every time I criticize the snarkiness, rudeness and patronizing manner of many answers/comments you receive on Stack Overflow.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#733

Post by travisgriggs »

"Every institution fails due to an excess of it's own first principle."

I have watched/experienced SO go from a super useful/helpful site with a balance that pitted people's desire to be recognized with a desire to be helped, and slowly be subsumed by those overbent on organization and bureaucracy. And is it did so, it became less useful, to me as a questioner as well as an answerer.

Now I have to put up with stochastic parroting from GPTs to try and steer me in the right direction. Yay.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#734

Post by JuanPosadas »

pharmakom wrote: post #301
tylerneylon wrote: post #249

This post, to me, is about the rise of ChatGPT — but I do think over-moderation is a huge problem. I had a hard moment on the gamedev stackexchange where I was stuck trying to learn how to do something in OpenGL. A moderator immediately closed my question as a duplicate because there was a similar question about OpenGL ES, which is a (related but) different API. I tried to plead my case, but was shut down. Shortly af…

This is a problem on the other side of the experience spectrum too. Sometimes I want to ask an advanced question and interact with other experienced users on SO. However I have to battle the mods (who clearly don’t understand my question) to keep it open.

My questions usually go unanswered for years with several "me too"s and "did you ever figure it out?"s nailing my inbox.

I do typically self-answer if I figure it out, but you know, if I'm going to be ignored maybe it should be a github issue so I can get the sweet zero replies and that juicy 90 day auto-close from inactivity.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#735

Post by Dylan16807 »

sedatk wrote: post #715
Dylan16807 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have such an emotional connection to your Q&A content that it would drive you to delete it, I think you're using the site wrong.

I do because I’m not a robot? I wrote answers that made it to HN’s frontpage (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243389 ). Later, that answer was edited by automod to remove “Hello” line because somebody hated that people greeted each other on SO. I wrote paragraphs only to be closed by mods as “opinion based” or whatever, so I had to turn them into blog posts, and they got picked up by popular publishin…

Something long enough to be a blog post like that isn't what the site is for. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about things like that.

And I wasn't talking about the issue of mods deleting entire answered questions. I was talking about single contributions, and mods deleting things is the exact opposite of what my post was addressing!

On the other side, that compiler post is fun but it's not some big effortful thing. Caring about it some makes sense, but I wouldn't care about it that much.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#736

Post by pasc1878 »

metabagel wrote: post #675
pasc1878 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes especially if you know you have answered the same thing before. You look for your original. Remember all users are moderators. There are some explicit moderators but they don"t close or downvote often they deal with other problems - or on smaller sites just use normal user powers to vote and close.

OK, but the person you’re replying to left SO over this policy, and you didn’t seem to register that at all, just repeated the policy. The fault finding culture of SO is toxic.

Then SO's reasonms for this policy need to be explained more.

The aim of SO is to provide answers to a question.

You do not want many questions with the same answer as if you have a new answer or a comment on this duplicate answer you need to then add it to all the questions. Thus we want to collapse all these multiple questions into one.

Also the person who I was replying to did noit seem to understand that they were a moderator, moderators are not a separate set of people to users.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#737

Post by da39a3ee »

sznio wrote: post #373
droopyEyelids wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried to use it?

I did. It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it. It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored. I fou…

Can you give an example of a technical software question where you found it wasn't helpful? I'll see if I can get a good answer and post the permalink for you. I suspect you're not phrasing your questions well.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#738

Post by pasc1878 »

jason-johnson wrote: post #708
pasc1878 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the right way should be the answer unless it is explicitly stated why they can't use this. Most readers will be able to use the "right way".

No, the best thing is not assume you know better than anyone who will ever ask this. It’s good to mention what the right way is and why but your answer should always include the answer to the question exactly as asked at a minimum.

I agree but sometimes the answer exactly as asked leads to wrong things. So sometimes you don"t provide the answer to the exact question but include the reason why the exact question is not good. This gives the option for the questioner to comment why the exact answer is needed.

My experience with less experienced developers is that they ask the exact question as that is where they have stuck but they are ignorant of the better ways.

I do tend to answer differently depending on the questioners reputation. If they have a higher rep then I can assume they know what they are doing.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#739

Post by da39a3ee »

alex_lav wrote: post #206
ezconnect wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?

You're mostly right in your experience. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to get ChatGPT to be a worthwhile piece of my workflow, and I guess sometimes it is, but most of the time the basic code or config or content I try to generate, it gets very fundamental things incorrect. It feels like it's mostly just hype these days.

Can you give an example of a technical software question where you found it wasn't helpful? I'll see if I can get a good answer and post the permalink for you. I suspect you're not phrasing your questions well.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#740

Post by underdeserver »

stavros wrote: post #399
underdeserver wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, it's not crapping on a newbie. It's a funny comment that serves as a reflection of the days and weeks this guy spent debugging these kinds of systems. As someone who was a newbie at the time when it was posted, who was looking for a way to parse HTML, I took away that it's just really the wrong way to go about it. I didn't feel crapped on at all.

The question isn't looking to parse HTML (or XML). Regexes are inappropriate for HTML because they can't adequately match the starting and ending tags, not because of black magic. The OP isn't looking to do that, so regexes look like a perfectly acceptable way to go.

I agree completely.

But the asker is very clearly a newbie. The question does not contain further context. The asker's suggestion is wrong (I think). And we've all worked with junior engineers who try to use the wrong tool.

The answer is a whimsical way of making an appropriate suggestion in this inferred context.

Also, to be fair, I think it's not mathematically impossible to use dark regex magic (with look-behinds and such) to parse HTML, but that's a discussion for another day...

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