Ask HN: Is developers hating on Stack Overflow?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912876

by null4bl3 • 3 years ago

3 1 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi HN.

A few days ago I was reading through a thread on the /webdev subreddit about how ChatGPT apparently scraped SO content and SO traffic was now in decline. What surprised my a great deal was that the vast majority of comments was glad to see SO suffer, as they seem to hate the site with a passion.

Are developers here abandoning SO?

The reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/15ai8ah/chatgpt_was_trained_on_stackoverflow_data_and_is/

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

I never liked it.

Think about it objectively for a minute as opposed to being a victim trapped in that system.

A stack overflow page starts with a code example that doesn’t work which has nothing to do with your code example that doesn’t work. It’s something you have to waste your cognitive capacity ignoring, There is frequently a large amount of confused rambling that could get you really confused if you take it too seriously.

You need one answer, a correct answer. There might be zero or there might be 100. If you are lucky one of the answers is right. If you are lucky you can find which one. If you are lucky a correct answer got voted to the top.

Then there are the silly little things like all the Python 2 code examples that would work in Python 3 if you put parenthesis after the print but nobody has done that.

SO is almost OK when it comes to questions like “How do I look up the length of a string in Java?” but you are much better off learning how to look up answers in the real manual because those are always right!

Then there is the meta-problem that you have a Spring configuration file that was written by coders (maybe even you) who got it where it is by cutting and pasting snippets of code from Stack Overflow. You need to deeply understand how Spring works to get out of this mess and you won’t get that from discussions on Stack Overflow!

Many of the problems where I want insight from other programmers is in the area of software selection such as “what static site generator should I use for my blog?” where a little bit of other people’s experience could save me months of suffering but you aren’t allowed that have those kind of high-leverage discussions on SO.

Keep the title, delete the question, delete all but the best correct answer, and then you have a good training set for an A.I. If you don’t do this you are training the A.I. to give wrong answers.

Ask HN: Is developers hating on Stack Overflow?

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