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Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

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Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#81

Post by bhouston »

eastbound wrote: post #69
bhouston wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

> AI would train No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing. SO should really pivot to the search business. They have everything: The culture of how to build a website that answers users’ questions, the culture to index pages, the culture to get an invested community. The only faulty mechanism here is Google, and SO would be a much better steward of how people want webpages t…

> No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing.

Maybe that as well. But I have definitely reduced my Google searches for technical answers and focus them on ChatGPT. So to me it doesn't matter if Google stopped referencing them or not. ChatGPT is phenomenal at answering technical questions with context specific answers and code snippets.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#82

Post by alright2565 »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #74
kalleboo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.

> Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?

They do do this! When you're on a question, for example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30081275, click on the answer sort order drop-down and select trending.

I've also seen the trending sort automatically applied on certain questions.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#83

Post by rgoulter »

ram4jesus wrote: post #71
dehrmann wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work. Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.…

I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014. And it was an awful experience. I got over my Java block by not just reading my Uni's textbook but by also reading another much older textbook. I got so good at Java that I became a Lab/Teaching Assistant my last two years in college. And I helped folks the best I could in person: always kind, always patient, never blaming the student even if they didn't want to lear…

Being polite in answering questions is pro-social.

It's a more pleasant interaction when someone is polite. -- Whereas, if you get rude answers, you'll be discouraged from participating.

Asking good questions is pro-social. People are going to be more willing to help if the questions are well thought out. -- Whereas, asking in an anti-social way discourages people from helping out.

It's still possible to ask questions even if you get snarky responses back; and it's still possible to answer lazy questions... But in either case, it's easy to see why people might not like that.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#85

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

JAlexoid wrote: post #28
jf22 wrote: post #16

I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.

SO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.

Just because Reddit is throwing handfuls of money at Google to prop up their results doesn't mean it's a better resource for programmers. In fact, it's completely, utterly the opposite. The programming subs are just getting caught in the crossfire. It's also one of the main reasons I finally switched to DDG permanently.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#86

Post by bombcar »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #70
kalleboo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.

A lot of people say to use Reddit instead of StackOverflow, but IMO Reddit is even worse for this than SO, since most old threads are locked.

When you hear someone say something like that, what they mean is get involved with the related community on Reddit, or Discord, or a forum.

SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group.

Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#87

Post by [deleted] »

bhouston wrote: post #79
busterarm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant. SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut. Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by…

> The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant. Given a long enough timeline every companies dies or they pivot so extreme that they resemble nothing that they were to begin with.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#88

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #84

Stack overflow for teams with an ai bot intregation that trains on external sources would be the killer app though.

I'm absolutely certain that the private equity monstrosity that paided almost $2B for it a couple years back is fervently working on this to recoup their investment.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#89

Post by berkes »

eastbound wrote: post #69
bhouston wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time. You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.

> AI would train No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing. SO should really pivot to the search business. They have everything: The culture of how to build a website that answers users’ questions, the culture to index pages, the culture to get an invested community. The only faulty mechanism here is Google, and SO would be a much better steward of how people want webpages t…

Somehow they never managed to get search right.

It's decent, but most often DuckDuckGo gives more relevant stack overflow answers than stack overflow itself does for the same query. Even though SO has far more information to tune the results on than DDG.

Another "proof" of how bad their search is, can be witnessed in the millions of duplicates. SO basically got an army of volunteers who know how to operate this search within their niche, to close duplicates, something that a decent search result would solve for a big part.

Re: Stack Overflow is laying off another 28%

#90

Post by inanutshellus »

AndroTux wrote: post #80
rgoulter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting. e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.

Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and ho…

Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs".

It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow.

I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.

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