Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 304 posts

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#81

Post by jerf »

reitanqild wrote: post #9
Latty wrote: post #3

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. People keep saying that and I keep wo…

"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on."

It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help.

However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.

Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#82

Post by DrNuke »

It's natural that complex, evolving organisms have more and more entropy but their decline, as for what you HNers are saying here, is due to the unavoidable predominance of more and more web-idiots, mostly coming from 3rd and 4th world countries, which I however understand in full: they are looking for recognition as human beings in a global world, guidance to make their talents work and opportunities in richer environments while starting from nothing. It's the same reason a lot of web-idiots, me among them, are writing here on HN from 1st and 2nd world countries. That said, noise is reduced by stricter filters or by changing the definition of noise and your attitude towards it. Your choice.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#83

Post by jimjimjim »

gdulli wrote: post #64
jimjimjim wrote: post #57

stack overflow is one of the best dev resources available. do people not remember the dark days before trying to unblock the answers in expert sexchange?

For more than a decade before SO existed I was searching the internet and successfully finding answers to questions. There were good sites and bad sites then, good sites and bad sites now. SO didn't change anything. If it didn't exist the information would still be out there and searchable through other sites. Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's never been a time that the makeup…

true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c.

more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#84

Post by sklivvz1971 »

exstudent2 wrote: post #72
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist. Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.

On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close.

No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

blowski wrote: post #54
tlogan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No evidence. Just observation based on unscientific measurements. I could be very much wrong.

It's probably the same evidence that causes people to say Hacker News is in decline, the internet is in decline, society as a whole is in decline. Occasionally those predictions are right, but usually they're not.

At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#86

Post by sklivvz1971 »

Eupolemos wrote: post #75
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

What do you mean by "vampires"? I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".

People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them...

"Give me teh codez..." etc

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#87

Post by helthanatos »

marcelluspye wrote: post #8
Latty wrote: post #3

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…

>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point…

Marked as duplicate and closed for being too broad are annoying. Often, the "duplicate" is actually a different question with a different answer and many of the too broad ones are not too broad, can be answered easily, and can make it easier than reading 10 other threads and pulling the needed information from each.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#88

Post by enraged_camel »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#89

Post by fma »

One person has a few bad experience, says it's in decline. I'll counter his bad experiences with my positive experiences of both asking and answering questions - and finding more answers there anywhere else.

There - now the universe is back in balance.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#90

Post by shkkmo »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.

Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints.

The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible.

> Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages?

Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english?

> Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is?

Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions.

Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.

Post reply on HN