The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?

https://newsletter.devmoh.co/p/the-fall-of-stack-overflow-explained

by cryptoz • 3 years ago

158 202 3 years ago

newsletter.devmoh.co

If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the publishers.

I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs. moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel like an icky place to be.

rg1112• 3 years ago

It could have been a community, like Quora, but focused towards CS/IT.

But it absolutely missed the mark on that one. It is a high pressure, toxic, unwelcoming place.

I contributed a lot of Math and CS content to Quora where I had ~1.5m views on answers. I really liked engaging there. OTOH, SO felt like a toxic exam hall on a bad day.

Every year SO asked in the survey if I felt I belonged to the community or something similar, I chose the most negative response from the list- every year.

If SO behaved like a community, then it could have had organic growth, and organic visitors, not depending so largely on Google.

TRiG_Ireland2• 3 years ago

Huh. I've long had the opposite impression of the two communities. Quora seemed to celebrate showing off in a way that SE didn't.

oarsinsync• 3 years ago

It’s worth reading right to the end, for the joke about Overflow AI. Enjoyable article. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to form an opinion on the accuracy, but it’s well written.

gsich• 3 years ago

Those search examples is the reason why Google also declines.

boredumb• 3 years ago

A big take away for anyone reading this, if you have a massive digital asset that relies on google you should probably be planning and leveraging yourself for a 50% drop in traffic and revenue over the weekend at random.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

Regardless of how you feel about Stack Overflow’s users and moderators, running a site like that is not cheap.

StackOverflow runs on less than 25 servers, its infrastructure is incredibly cheap considering just how much traffic they serve. And their UI, thankfully, hasn't changed much over the last decades either.

[1] https://stackexchange.com/performance

toshk• 3 years ago

Staff is much more expensive then servers, especially in the west.

resolutebat• 3 years ago

The vast majority of moderators are unpaid volunteers though.

byw• 3 years ago

I'm guessing they're doing some aggressive caching since it's read-heavy?

adventured• 3 years ago

Yeah it's very aggressively cached for read purposes. You could write most Q&A pages to static html files if you felt like it. Stack has a similar age-toward-zero outcome that Wikipedia has (the % of new content as a total share of all content on the service chases toward zero over time); the more you fill out the site, the balance of aged content to new content inverts to an extreme, so mostly what you end up doing is serving up cached reads on older content.

They're fairly well over-provisioned on server capacity. It's so relatively light to operate on the infrastructure side that they could safely further reduce the server count. There's no need in their case however, since infrastructure cost isn't one of their big problems.

whalesalad• 3 years ago

interesting to see how underutilized all of that hardware is ... "peak 1%, peak 2%" etc

ec1096852• 3 years ago

Because clearly they have way less traffic now ;)

ec1096852• 3 years ago

The author makes it sound like Stack Overflow was a non-profit. They were sold for 1.8B: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...

Literally sold at the peak.

Legend2440• 3 years ago

I think this article (and other online discourse) overestimates the value of StackOverflow to ChatGPT's training data.

Sure, it's in there - but so is all the library documentation ever written, billions of lines of code, and millions of tutorials. StackOverflow is just one small part.

acdha2• 3 years ago

Stack Overflow has tons and tons of things which aren’t in the documentation and almost all of them are questions from people who couldn’t find the answer in the documentation – exactly what ChatGPT needs since it also doesn’t understand anything about how a given program works, only what patterns are common in public examples.

Pannoniae2• 3 years ago

Probably "unpopular opinion™" but I feel like the ban on "opinion-based" or recommendation questions also didn't help. Not everything can be answered purely objectively, there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python" or something. Stackoverflow removed itself from that process which has driven people elsewhere.

Answers are also often more focused on the cosmetic aspects than actually answering a question. Just see the example in the article. The questioner asked about a lambda reference to a public field, and they got told "just don't use public fields lol". That's not help, that's just being a condescending asshole and not actually answering the question.

Combined with the toxicity and elitism rampant, I am not surprised.

nerdponx• 3 years ago

This is a multi-year trend and doesn't explain the sudden and significant decrease.

The article points to Google search algorithm changes for the first big drop, and ChatGPT release for the second one.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

Oh, it can explain a sudden and significant change. Just because something changes slowly, it doesn't mean that the effect will appear slowly too.

The article points at two causes that coincide in timing with the change. But even if it's correct, it doesn't mean that those are the two only causes or even the most important ones.

Pannoniae2• 3 years ago

Things work.... until they don't. A bunch of things can accumulate and not be a problem until it suddenly is.

Tao33002• 3 years ago

Slowly, then all at once.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python"

You know what I'd love? Framework or language authors publishing a curated set of FAQs and "best practices". It can't be that hard to get a list of the most common tasks people google for, and provide links to the commonly used libraries as well as code examples.

AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these days, although I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions

I imagine they'd rather you use CloudFormation?

sdenton4• 3 years ago

I think it's a genuinely tough problem. Keeping documentation up to date is a Sisyphean task - it's great that Amazon has managed to to some extent, but it's hella difficult for small teams.

There's some amount that can be answered by providing a 'beaten path' for people to walk, but a) discoverability is a problem - people often don't know the right keyword to search for to find what they need, and b) people are often subtly off the beaten path, and need some adaptive guidance to their particular situation.

AI answers are great for both of these problems.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

I would contest that claim, honestly. If you mean the Terraform AWS provider, that has very good documentation, as do all the Terraform Hashicorp providers, but AWS itself is all over the place. They have way too much. Run into nearly anything I can't figure out and have to go their solutions architect for and I get links to 15 different blogs that aren't even part of the main documentation. Been fighting to figure out how to authenticate a AWS VPN throug Azure AD for weeks, though to be fair there, the defect is mostly on Microsoft's side, not Amazon's. I just spent the entire day today getting rsql to finally work for querying Redshift on a M1 Mac and their documentation seems to just be flat-out wrong. All the paths they think Homebrew installs stuff into are not the right paths. They offer a arm ODBC adapter, but rsql itself only comes in x86 for some reason, so they fail if you try to use them together and you have to get the x86 ODBC instead.

Also, not Amazon's fault, but I consistently get annoyed that when you web search the documentation for awscli, the top links always take you to the awscli v1, not v2.

To be fair again, I don't even know that it's a solvable problem. AWS offers too many services, too many ways to access them, and makes changes too frequently. They can't just unpublish anything because someone out there is still using some combination of each version of server and client side services. But it makes it very hard to find exactly what I'm looking for. Probably made all the worse by some of the subtle differences in GovCloud, but having very little GovCloud-specific documentation.

the_af3• 3 years ago

StackOverflow set out to be a place for Q&A without "debate", to varying success. It's a fundamental part of its mission that questions that are really prompts for debate ("what is your favorite...?", "what do you recommend for...?") are not accepted.

I agree with this decision. It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate.

StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y". Again, with varying success and not always consistently, but it'd be even harder to accomplish if it accepted "what are the best things about X?".

edit: example, from the article:

If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma.

This is by design. Comments in SO are meant for correcting minor details or asking for clarification. They are not a form of "engagement" or debate; extended discussions are a symptom of impending flamewars and usually get promptly moved to the chat section of SO, where they belong. If you lack karma to comment, focus on asking & answering questions instead -- the primary active use of SO (other than just looking for answers, that is).

hn8305823• 3 years ago

StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y"

StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or Y is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that way, why would you even ask that?"

j454• 3 years ago

Nice comment, resonates.

There should be other was to get karma.

Maybe through writing a post about how something existing helped you.

willsmith72• 3 years ago

The comments thing can be annoying. When an answer isn't really clear, becomes outdated, or anything else, there's no way to follow-up

magicalhippo2• 3 years ago

It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate.

Clearly I'm becoming a dinosaur. Back in the days there were newsgroups and IRC. What do the non-dinos use these days?

Like, not long ago I was looking for a library to X in language Y. Most of my questions are like that, so SO is almost never a fit for me. And I'd love to get some input from people who have tried the alternatives.

So yeah, where's the plethora of places to ask for such things?

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

Every useful question I have as I became more experienced doesn't have a clear answer and should be a discussion. Yes I use stackoverflow at times as documentation, which is good. The other situation where it's good is when there are enough different answers to a question that help you attempt different approaches.

I never ask a question on Stackoverflow like I did before, anything useful I'd ask can't be asked.

shagie7• 3 years ago

The ban on opinion based and recommendation questions grew out of the inability for people to make sure that they didn't overrun the entire site and crowding out the information / goal that Jeff and Joel wanted the site to be about.

It is so easy to post a "{background}, what do you think?" which is more of a discussion than a Q&A format... or "I'm looking for XYZ" and getting a page of recommendations... and then people keep adding them without checking for duplicates.

The administrative / curation time requirements of such content then grows faster than the number of people willing to do it.

There are other, smaller, SE sites where such questions are allowed because with the slower amount of daily activity they are able to handle every question every day and a post suddenly getting an abnormal amount of time isn't that much more time.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=... isn't a problem when they get 38 questions per day... while Stack Overflow gets 100x more, but doesn't have 100x more people doing curation.

The result of that is that the question types that are most time consuming for doing curation and moderation get cast out and it becomes the easier, more objective ones that remain.

As to answers... gamification hurt it there. While its part of the onboarding / understanding the site, people went after the numbers and so any answer, no mater how poor was ok. The culture became one of "don't remove an answer if it is any attempt to answer a question (not the question)" and getting 10 points for an upvote and only losing 2 points, unless you've written something awful, as long as you get one up vote its typically a positive point gain.

The example question that is in the article is from 10 years ago.

The current attribution of the comment is:

    a -> a.id. Why are you using public fields in the first place? - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:27

    @JBNizet, I like public final fields in classes which are data structures. They don't implement interfaces or have deep hierarchies. - Daneel S. Yaitskov Dec 14 '14 at 9:31

    You're making your own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown by your question). This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected. I'd really not do that if I were you. If generating getters is what bothers you, then use a decent IDE, or use Lombok to generate them for you. - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:42

There is no "lol" in that comment.

The question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-referenc...

The screen shot is old ( https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline - it was at +29 by Dec 14th, 2014).

In the article this is described as:

For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb.

I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the problem.

The "7% of comments are unwelcoming" - if there's a problem, flag them. If a pattern of unwelcoming comments from a person, they can get suspended. Not taking action on unwelcomeing comments perpetuates them.

I would call out that calling someone a condescending asshole for asking about why public fields are being used is more unwelcoming than asking why public fields are being used.

petsfed2• 3 years ago

> For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb.
I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the problem.

If you are asking a question on SO, you probably lack the knowledge to understand why a person wouldn't want to use $whatever. So adding a simple contextual clarification ("Public fields are generally frowned upon, as they violate the OO encapsulation principle. So, why are your using public fields here?").

Because there is so much nuance lost in text, some people have (and I think rightly) come to understand that when statements or questions are directed at an individual, the more concise you are, the less respectful the statement or question is. Something like "I don't care enough about you to clarify my intent at all"

The followup, where they say "use a decent IDE" presupposes that the person asking the question isn't. Indeed, this sentence here

You're making your own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown by your question).

reveals that we really shouldn't give this person the benefit of the doubt. If I was an e.g. wikipedia editor removing too much personal flair, the only sentence I'd keep is

This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected.

oxfordmale• 3 years ago

It is worth noting that this article only uses one of the four graphs in the original articles to fit the narrative it is ChatGPT that is responsible for the decline. Other metrics show that the decline set in earlier.

glenstein3• 3 years ago

I know they sometimes change links at hn, but the article I'm reading is emphatic that it's not due to Chat GPT.

bombcar• 3 years ago

The decline set in earlier such that that GPT Chap could swoop in and be "as good".

rg1112• 3 years ago

In Mathematics SE, you can ask the community which are the best books on Point Set Topology or Linear Algebra. But you can't ask about the best Algorithms book in SO.

This was a bummer.

You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is stupid.

Math SE is a much nicer community and I have enjoyed contributing there and also got a ton of help there.

shagie7• 3 years ago

Math.se gets 1/10th the questions per day and 1/100th the visits per day of Stack Overflow. ( https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday )

It is able to handle the wider scope more easily. The fewer questions per day and the more people there to help guide a not-quite-right question to become more useful the more that variation in scope can be handled.

Stack Overflow has the difficulty that as they scaled up in activity, the number of people willing to spend the time to curate and the corresponding tooling didn't scale with it. This resulted in a reduction of time that can be spent on a question to help it be a good question and so people do the least friction fastest action as they can.

If, for every person in https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats you got 10 people to show up in https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats it might be feasible to have a more similar level of topic deviation. Note that Math, a small fraction of the size of Stack Overflow has done as many close vote reviews today as Stack Overflow.

Tao33002• 3 years ago

You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is stupid.

That's the best way I've seen it worded. Any rationalizing about policies and manpower is a distraction from the fact that it's a stupid situation. None of that changes the fact that for a while you'd search "recommendations for x" and the first thing you'd get in your Google search results was a closed SO thread from someone asking for that thing.

ciupicri• 3 years ago

For this kind of questions there's Software Recommendations https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

They need at least one forum where people can ask questions that challenge the accepted status quo in software development.

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

Fortunately the recommendation part is often ignored.

I am an amateur developer and I am so glad that some people say "use X" instead of a block of code which is "native" and pure.

In Python this was requests and arrow, in Go it was resty (despite the Go community being extremely toxic in SO). These are fantastic for casual coders.

Answers with expensive code instead of a simple lib are useful too, but only when you gain expertise in the language.

matsemann15• 3 years ago

Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer.

Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown. It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the community has to deal with.

What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers for a long time. And with no stewards, it will become toxic. And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.

josephcsible2• 3 years ago

It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic.

Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.

xmprt• 3 years ago

99% of the times it was really a dupe

I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.

josephcsible2• 3 years ago

But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.

Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old question.

zer8k3• 3 years ago

Nah, SO is really toxic. There are plenty of examples and probably dozens of blog posts illustrating it. It took two seconds to find two of MANY meta posts [0][1]. In fact one answer to the posts here illustrates what looks like at least a dozen similar posts. ChatGPT is just hastening an already well deserved death. I have not heard a positive opinion about SO in my professional network in years. Everyone passively consumes SO but a community built on contribution can't live on passive consumption. If the community is so high huffing it's own farts it drives away the exact thing it needs there's no good end for it.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-about-t...

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-rudeness...

matsemann15• 3 years ago

Did you read your own links? I feel they explain it well. Strict moderation isn't toxic. It can feel harsh, but it isn't toxic. The rudeness is people joining a forum, spending zero effort to understand the rules or etiquette, and then demanding others helping them for free without putting any effort in.

bink• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is just hastening an already well deserved death.

If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API access, where will it gets its answers from?

edgarvaldes• 3 years ago

I think this shows that people need a place to talk about the same topics even when there is an answer somehere on the site. SO is not that place, but we need it. Like the old IRC days (in some channels, at least).

1123581321• 3 years ago

I don't think it's in dispute that SO has to deal with a lot of identical low effort questions. What people don't like is that the moderators and power users are entrenched against duplicates in particular in a way that makes the site hostile by default to questions that are not outstandingly original, but are nevertheless legitimately different.

Subreddits deal with the same issue (tons of identical basic questions) but have better processes to divert them and educate the user while still letting legitimate mid-level questions live by default.

There are bad subreddits where moderators make it hard to get help, but since redditors can move to better communities on the same topic (and duplicate all the content!) users don't feel stuck with the current moderation in the same way they do on SO, which doesn't let competing Q&A communities exist for the same topic.

I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years and want to credit that too. That work is another indicator that there is a problem.

I also agree that leadership-moderation relations are a problem on SO.

chrisjj3• 3 years ago

I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years

Oh? What work?

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown.

It's toxic enough that neither I nor any of the programmers that I personally know would ever dare to ask a question there. We see how other questioners get treated.

TRiG_Ireland2• 3 years ago

I've been active on Stack Overflow since its founding, and have always found it delightful.

bjornasm4• 3 years ago

If everyone feel it is toxic, while you don’t, you might want to consider the thought that it is actually toxic.

matsemann15• 3 years ago

If everyone feel it is toxic

Citation needed. "Everyone", really?

AlbertCory6• 3 years ago

I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown

"overblown" == "who ya going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

At Google I interviewed a refugee from Theranos, when they were still around. (It was just lunch, so I wasn't expected to ask him anything.) Still, I mentioned the bad press, and he said the news was "exaggerated."

When people mention something again and again, it's usually not "overblown" -- it's real.

matsemann15• 3 years ago

No, you can't know without knowing the ratio of good to bad. With more popularity comes more negative experiences as well. And as with everything in life those with an axe to grind keep harping on forever and everywhere, making it more visible than the silent enjoyers.

thiht• 3 years ago

But 99% of the times it was really a dupe

Not in my experience.

Almost 10 years ago, I asked a question about PHP. I wanted to know if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` always contained a _valid_ IP address. I specifically wrote down in my question that I knew it wasn't always the IP of the client, that it could be spoofed, but I wanted to know if it contained a valid IP, even it's a fake IP.

Without surprise I god closed as duped and redirected to the question asking if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` was reliable to get the IP of the client, which is specifically what I didn't ask. And I wrote down that this wasn't what I asked, because I knew some rando would close it as dupe.

This is just one example, from almost 10 years ago, but it's only gotten worse. I routinely search for a specific question in Google and find a "marked as dupe" StackOverflow answer, which is not a duped, and I'm left with no answer. I almost don't click on StackOverflow links anymore because of this, I consider them as clickbait

cratermoon• 3 years ago

Google the rentier

password4321• 3 years ago

Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 (5 days ago; 290+ comments)

Overflow AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 (4 days ago; 97 comments)

alextingle• 3 years ago

Love the punchline at the end.

padolsey3• 3 years ago

Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer

Is this true? Wondering if there's a more objective way to know than endless anecdotes. I think programming communities stereotypically are pretty mean. I don't really see reddit as a "safe place". But maybe there are smaller subreddits where being wrong doesn't make you feel awful?

You can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging

I'm quite perplexed by this same talking point being regurgitated. These LLMs do indeed hallucinate. But I've found, with coding problems, that it's very easy to see it's wrong if you're working in a domain you're familiar with. I am doing a lot of react development with chatgpt(gpt4) as a kind of intern-on-steroids and it's working really well. I can usually identify when it's being silly as I've worked with react for a few years. Ofc without that it's hard. But even if I'm in unfamiliar territory I can ask it to write tests to confirm its code works. I can also hand it stack-traces and it'll usually be very helpful at debugging its own code.

An e.g. I am not competent at shell stuff but it's been such a boon at helping me hack and pipe stuff together. Actually two days ago I wanted to generate a big bird's eye grid of a huge PDF document. I had no idea how to and asked it point-blank to write some code. Within a couple messages it generated a python script w/ PIL and a pdf2image imports and shell commands to get things installed and $PATH properly configured. One cycle of debugging because I was missing a dependency, and boom, done. Took me 5 mins. Would have taken 30mins or more otherwise (and a tonne of pointless cognition/research/rabbit-holes).

soulofmischief• 3 years ago

GPT-4 is my one-stop-shop for 80% of programming-related questions, and I get much more useful feedback as I am able to have a live conversation and drill into anything and everything.

Every interaction with GPT-4 makes me a better programmer. It's also obvious when things aren't right: The problem isn't solved. So I also become a better mentor as I try to coax the right answers out of GPT-4. I ask it to explain its reasoning, I ask it to go over pros/cons of different approaches, I ask it to give me security reviews of provided code. GPT-4 really shines in filling in the gaps for old/new APIs where I haven't RTFM.

But I don't rely on it for correctness. That is my job as an engineer. I am just seeing the same stupid arguments play out that got played out over IDEs, higher-level languages, etc.

Anything that makes me a faster and better programmer is worth it, even if it comes with caveats.

padolsey3• 3 years ago

Very much agree with what you've said here, and I love the idea that it makes me a better programmer/mentor. Hadn't really thought of it that way!

sillysaurusx• 3 years ago

For what it’s worth, I actually laughed out loud at the idea of Reddit programming being nice at all, let alone nicer than SO. My wife has plenty of horror stories when she was learning to program.

arkitaip• 3 years ago

The problem is that SO is so toxic that it makes Reddit's toxicity seem rather tolerable.

outsidetheparty4• 3 years ago

The few times I've tried using ChatGPT or another LLM as a coding assist, the "confidently wrong answer that looks correct" was the entirety of my experience. (Mostly the failure mode was mixing up incompatible instructions from various versions of the framework or toolchain: even if I specify a version number it'll still often want to use syntax or functions that don't exist in that version.) I did not find it to be a time saver.

padolsey3• 3 years ago

Hmm fair. It's strange that our experiences are so different. Can I ask what types of problems you ask it to solve? FWIW I've had to take quite a lot of time figuring out how to talk to it in a way that gets good results.

tuetuopay• 3 years ago

My first interaction with LLMs for programming was asking ChatGPT about one of our interview questions: sending a request in tcp, sending an udp packet, and an icmp request. It confidently wrote code using TcpSocket (correct), UdpSocket (correct) and IcmpSocket (hallucination). Further attempts to tell it that it was incorrect ended up with more and more incorrect code. Guess that Rust is not common enough for it to know it well.

outsidetheparty4• 3 years ago

Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good.

But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission:

...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.

prepend2• 3 years ago

This hasn’t been my experience at all and I’ve found that chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO.

I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing “duplicate” answers.

It’s hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods.

It’s a tough place to be and I don’t think it’s possible to make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original founders sold a few years ago.

pwdisswordfishc3• 3 years ago

a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods.

Tell me you don't know how Wikipedia works without telling me you don't know how Wikipedia works

oezi• 3 years ago

Unless you are living on technologies edges, ChatGPT gets it right plenty of times and isn't a rude brick about it.

If it gets it wrong it usually is pretty apparent quickly and normally gives enough hints for avenues to explore.

At least my SO use (and programming related googling) has fallen dramatically...

outsidetheparty4• 3 years ago

When I've tried using it I've generally found that it leads me in circles between incompatible versions of a framework or tool -- it'll give me syntax that's correct for one version, but wants to use it to call a function that only exists in a different version, that sort of thing. They're not even hallucinations, each step is technically correct, but can't be used successfully with the other steps.

jcrawfordor• 3 years ago

I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow seems to have hit the same problem even harder.

Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask a question to get an answer, or a repository of information?

There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells‚ and now we see posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for Business") this way.

StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which were very much curated and written to an audience of people who want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers, etc. The most prominent public resources for programming, websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase in a Wiki-like way.

And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a forum, it's a resource, and that means the "questions" are supposed to be evergreen, curated references.

Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange headquarters settled on their answer: aggressive removal of duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new moderation tool that gamified closing questions, sending moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow/destroy decisions that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the direction of "if in doubt, close the question."

From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the websites that the best way to maintain a high-quality information resource is to close as many questions as possible. A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the perspective of running a Q&A website? absolutely not! StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A websites that were openly hostile to people asking questions.

I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora, which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being just extremely weird and frankly right on par with Yahoo Answers for quality.

Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale. But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I always wanted.

My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty obvious why. No one knows what it's for exactly. If you want to ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team's Slack channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice information for people to look up later, you put it in the documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain documentation.

shagie7• 3 years ago

I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website.

That tension existed in the announcements for the sites...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

(note: good is italicized in the original text too)

And the history of this question: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline (note revision 1: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 )

twelve403• 3 years ago

having conversations in Slack somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things

It was probably oversold like that, but in my daily life, the old threads i find in slack people troubleshooting similar things from way back when, that can be life-saving. Totally not a replacement for proper docs, but still an improvement to have those past threads around.

wendyshu• 3 years ago

Quite. It seems like more often than not, when I answer or ask a question, a moderator comes along who only half understands what I'm talking about and starts harassing me for not making the most perfect, ideal, gold-plated contribution possible. Didn't say what I've already tried (usually irrelevant); sounds like a homework problem (please); looks like a duplicate (it's not); didn't include examples, too much code, too little code, not enough links, too few links, ... Infurating. If someone wants to answer it, let them, otherwise fuck off.

dvt• 3 years ago

Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on.

The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time.

On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco

saganus• 3 years ago

it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers

This is one of the things that baffled me the most.

Until very recently you could not even sort by "newest answers first" (I just checked and it seems it has been added now, but it looks like it was added this year?), which seems a pretty strange decision considering technology changes so fast.

As years went by, it became more and more difficult to look for answers as you would need to search through piles of old answers to find the most recent one (which was not necessarily the accepted answer or even the one with the most votes).

I mean, most places I've seen, that show data with a sortable Date field, let you sort by olders or newest, but not SO, no.

I could never find an answer fot this, but always seemed like a big obvious oversight.

EGreg• 3 years ago

What about the other StackExchange sites, though!

ElemenoPicuares• 3 years ago

I quickly rose to the a top contributor role of a non-programming stack exchange site. I had more technical subject matter expertise (including formal training) than seemingly anyone else there, was friendly, thorough, empathic, upbeat, technically competent, and prolific. Not too long after getting involved, I just got too sick of unhelpful, pedantic, self-important moderators nitpicking at my posts and making passive-aggressive edits, so I just left. That was years ago and I still regularly collect points in upvotes and get positive comments from people.

Many people in those roles claim they're uptight because they want to maintain the quality of the posts. Well, I assure you that particular SE, at least, is much worse off for it.

tedivm• 3 years ago

Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered.

I experienced this just last week. I answered a question that was never asked before, and one of the "powermods" closed it as a duplicate while pointing to a question that was similar but vastly different.

Since I have enough karma there I was able to start a reopen vote, but it took a week before it was opened again. The user who asked the question was justifiably upset, and probably not going to come back. At the same time the community lost access to an actually useful question without any real reason.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

I have noticed their SEO drop.

That may not even be their fault. Every day, I see more and more garbage sites trying to capture coding questions with blocks of text.

kristianc• 3 years ago

One of the biggest features of ChatGPT, for me, is that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" when you ask it a question.

belfalas• 3 years ago

"ChatGPT, where does John Lennon live?"

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

Interesting. But one of the faults of ChatGPT is also that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?"

There's a place for asking that question - not as often as SO asks it, but more often than never.

dang• 3 years ago

Recent and related:

The Fall of Stack Overflow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 - July 2023 (781 comments)

j454• 3 years ago

When technology can solve a problem equivalently well in so many ways discussion and debate is the way to learn from the experiences of others to help navigate your own course.

When it comes to adult learning, some people with some topics prefer to only know the answer of what they’re after or other times want a bigger picture.

Last but not least learning to read the code and system design decisions of others are both required for competent software development.

The part that stack avoided is maximum value comes from is understanding that decision making is the key in a lot of the underlying intent of users coming there … not just a snippet of code in system design.

Not know what you should be looking for or if there’s other ways to do things is a big lose in the development of software engineers.

How do I know this beyond my subjective interpretation and preference?

I was an early user of stack overflow.

It was a heavy time of software development, and I could easily spent 4-6 hours a day on it. So I decided to write. I learned so much, and shared anything I could. It really was a great early community.

I really disliked Experts Exchange and it was one of the major inspirations for SO to happen.

Little by little, I noticed some of my posts of hard earned lessons attached to a solution, started getting locked down.

People deciding how things should be interpreted one way. Correcting answers they don’t understand.

Answers started getting rejected. Context had no value. That’s not a great recipe for success.

The strange thing is I still sit in the top X percent of stack users for not having answered anything in a while, and still get upvotes and comments.

How to schedule multiple parties to ensure eveyrone has dace tkme?

Sorry, explaining steps in English is not code or acceptable. It apparently can’t be translated to different programming languages.

Software is for people in the real world, not strictly a technical pursuit.

SO started their network of other sites but the bar to entry was too high. There’s lots of extremely valuable but esoteric design knowledge that remotely being aware of or having access to can be tremendously helpful.

Stack overflow didn’t understand or care it was helping system design to be better.

Architecture goes bad in hand with code and I don’t know how you can talk about either effectively on the whole with the ability to refer to the other. With out it the trees don’t always become a forest.

criloz2• 3 years ago

A community that is unwelcoming to new users, is dying? who would have thought?

moralestapia2• 3 years ago

I used to be mad at SO but after some time now (haven't been there in years) I understand is just another instance of an Eternal September.

At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot; people who, in general, loved technology. Anyone who really enjoys what they're doing usually enjoy helping others who know less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the internet is an amazing place.

With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance, there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on others all over the site, just because they were after some imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is something that happens to all online communities that need moderators, at some point.

At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO being run de facto by knowledgeable and passionate people to being run de facto by these kind of moderators who completely missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was still a Q&A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around 2014, maybe a bit earlier.

To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just couldn't? SO fell into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining ventures.

Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever use SO?. Compared to Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite personality, I'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or whatever.

Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its place in the future (which, btw, I don't think it is ChatGPT).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA

hcks• 3 years ago

I never really got stack overflow. When I look for something I know, I find all the most upvoted answers kinda bad and/or suboptimal. Sometimes look like written by experienced beginners.

stupidcar• 3 years ago

The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated.

Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards.

For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.

sedatk6• 3 years ago

That's why SO has shot itself in the foot with its attitude towards duplicate content. Duplication would have allowed modern answers to bubble up. It's impossible to do that on SO.

twelve403• 3 years ago

um... unclear? you can provide a new answer to the old question and have it bubble up via votes. Does not change other issues though.

Syntaf• 3 years ago

This is especially true when you're working with popular frameworks that been around for awhile, e.g. rails or even django at this point.

Most accepted answers I come across for questions I have with rails are a mix of:

* Use this niche gem I created, which btw has no license and hasn't been updated in 5 years

* Use this approach which depends on rails internals from 4+ major versions ago

* Use this rails helper which has been long-deprecated and removed in modern rails

At this point I just use Phind [1] -- it's quite good at niche rails questions and I can specify that I want "Rails 7.0 or Edge" answers only so it won't give me an answer from 2011 or 2013.

[1] https://www.phind.com/

notatoad• 3 years ago

relevant question i saw in the sidebar the other day, and i think the responses really show why StackOverflow isn't super useful anymore:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425822/should-an-ed...

people are trying to modify the answers to keep them up to date with modern best practices. and the result is pages of debate on whether or not it should be allowed. and at the same time, duplicates where modern answers might be allowed are being closed and kept off the site. StackOverflow is essentially a museum for any topic relating to a technology that wasn't invented this year.

rurp• 3 years ago

One point I'm surprised this article didn't include was hostility towards users and mods from SO staff. I wander into Meta stackexchange on occasion and it's shocking how often the top threads are full of well reasoned posts from established users being ignored or bulldozed by SO employees.

Maybe I've just happened to look on bad days but I have the strong impression that SO is a platform that I absolutely don't want to get more invested in, despite a lot of interesting and knowledgable posters. It reminds me to the disdain Reddit has been showing towards its power users lately.

An established platform can get away with that sort behavior for a while, but is utterly toxic to its longterm quality and growth.

acdha2• 3 years ago

I saw a related aspect of this years ago trying to incubate a professional sub-community. It wasn’t a huge group (thousands of people, not millions) but important and long-lived, and the SE community was active, but it was closed for not being active enough.

Years later, that conversation still happens but not on SE since everyone got the message that mods only care about advertising metrics. That’s a common business decision but it seems short-sighted for what SE wants to do.

slashdev• 3 years ago

I rarely ask questions on stack overflow anymore. When I do, the question is usually closed for being similar to something else or off topic or whatever. Whenever I forget why I don’t use it, I’m quickly reminded. I find the moderation and some of the comments very unwelcoming.

It’s still great for finding information though. It’s likely the most visited site for me from Google search.

Edit: you guys are not too welcoming either sometimes… I don’t know why someone feels this is worth a downvote.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate because the people who most want to answer SO questions often are completely obsoleted by LLMs because they just don't have unique skills. Usually, they try to bucket into questions they know the answer to. Sadly, this means that an actually hard question will just result in their not knowing the answer and confusing it for an easy question they know the answer to.

The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this at a trivial point.

I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else. You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO / everything.

Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things right:

- prioritize questions which have clear answers

- gated functionality

- CC licensing

- data dumps

I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.

eth0pal• 3 years ago

StackOverflow is one of the most toxic places on the web. Glad to see it is being replaced by a AI tools.

lolinder• 3 years ago

Point #1 (May 2022 Google analytics changes) completely undoes the argument that this isn't caused primarily by ChatGPT. With a 15% drop in traffic from the cookie change, the new school year baseline should go down from 20mil to 17mil, and the summer trough should go from about 17mil to 14mil.

In 2022 we see the trough stabilize at 14mil, then climb back to 16mil before plummeting again in November with the advent of ChatGPT. That looks very much like the initial decline was the combination of the cookie change with the regular summer drop, and ChatGPT killed traffic before it could quite get back up to the new baseline.

segfaultbuserr2• 3 years ago

The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It's meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of "authoritative" answers to "general-purpose" questions. For better or worse, it's not a forum by design. In fact, forum-like behaviors are effectively banned. Stack Exchange wants the site to be an FAQ database, "there's no chit-chat."

This mode of operation, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the Web, unlike most things that came before or after it. A question must be asked and answered in a very particular way. For example, one is expected to do the following:

1. Show one's knowledge. Whenever a question is asked, one should write an introduction to present the background of the question to fit inside the knowledge base format. One should also write down all the previous solutions one has already attempted and why one has failed so far.

2. Case minimization. If one has a question from a large system, one must extract the core part via minimal reproducible example and present the problem in isolation (but also introduce just enough background to show a clear motivation and that it's not an X-Y problem). Ideally, the question must have a laser focus on an extremely narrow technical point. Come up with a proper minimized case may take an hour, just like when one's submitting bug reports to Bugzilla or mailing lists.

3. Encyclopedic tone. Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question.

If anyone's asking for clarification, it means this question is probably not properly asked. A question must be as "non-specific" and "objective" as possible. Similarly, the answer must also be as "authoritative" and "objective" as possible.

I found Stack Exchange is a great site and the knowledge base model works extremely well if you have a suitable question, or if you have the writing skill to frame the question into the proper form, as I've received helpful answers from multiple experts in the fields.

However, the fact that Stack Exchange is not a fourm is completely alien to most visitors, and there's an strong and serious need of forums. The large amount of negative feedback from new users is hardly a surprise.

Another problem is that it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. If the question is opinion-based, it's out of scope. If a question is extremely specific for your setup, the question is out of scope. If the question needs discussions for clarifications and conversations, it means the question is probably out of scope. It's also extremely difficult, by design, to debate on anything should a disagreement arise, since the site intentionally does not support replies or threads (comments are only usable for quick remarks) - anything that can't be answered with hard facts is out of scope.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer.

So it's only useful for trivial questions?

segfaultbuserr2• 3 years ago

No, it's possible to ask rather difficult questions and receive deep answers. To make an analogy, one can ask the programming equivalent of "why can alternative current flow without a closed loop" and receive a summary of classical electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations. For some actual examples, I've read some questions and answers on how to interleave x86-64 instructions in a way to maximize instruction-level parallelism, some of the answers are comprehensive enough that they can easily be expanded into a conference talk or research report (or rather, these answers often summarize them).

So if a question can be answered with a braindump, either from facts or from (highly agreeable) experience, and doesn't look like homework, it's probably a good fit of the site's model. But if the question requires many rounds of conversations like many threads you see in a forum, it's definitely not going to end well.

pwdisswordfishc3• 3 years ago

Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question.

Ironically enough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

janalsncm• 3 years ago

I’m wondering if there isn’t a better solution to the “closed as duplicate” issue. If you post a question it might be closed as a “duplicate” even if:

1) your question relates to a newer version of a technology, and previous answers do not address it

2) your question is similar to others but asks a more specific question, especially if it demonstrates having read prior knowledge

3) your question is more well-written than others

I don’t know what the solution is to this problem, but I think SO needs to give it more thought.

Another low hanging fruit is rude comments. I don’t know what the policy is now, but SO needs to tighten it up.

jaylittle• 3 years ago

"ChatGPT is actually notoriously good for coding. I don’t even use it for anything else at this point."

I can't take a coder who says this seriously. Come on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to expose the fact that ChatGPT is actually a pretty shitty coder once you get beyond the most dirt damn simple shit.

With that said, fuck Stack Overflow.

simonblack• 3 years ago

"Post hoc, propter hoc" - or "After this, so must be because of this." fallacy.

Stack Overflow has always been a disaster. When it started, I used to add a lot of answers. But I got disillusioned quickly because of the Smart-Alec Culture that has always existed at Stack Overflow. I have refused to go to the site of my own accord since about 2010. (Or thereabouts. I can't remember quite back that far.) I do sometimes go via Google when an answer is relevant to my needs at the time, but otherwise no.

I don't think any sort of AI is responsible, though AI is the fad 'catch-all' for everything right now. I think it's just that the tipping point that was always going to happen to Stack Overflow, finally did.

I couldn't wish it on a nicer bunch of folks. /s

jokoon• 3 years ago

That sort of explains why I started going to irc to ask.

But yes, interacting with pedantic or toxic people often makes things difficult, and I even met toxic people on IRC. Of course it's my job to do my research before I ask since I'm using somebody else's time, but there are limits.

I often spent an afternoon to prepare a question to thoroughly explain a problem I had, to make sure an autistic user could not criticize how I did things or have anything to say. I have nothing against autism, but sometimes it explains why some people are just toxic for no reason.

I do remember having a question closed for being opinion based. That was funny.

Setting up a bounty helps, but last time I used one, nobody answered.

pwdisswordfishc3• 3 years ago

Stack Overflow is ranked 4th here, but I don’t even need to click because the featured snippet answers it for me.

Amazing. Every word of what those three snippets say is wrong.

firemelt• 3 years ago

why people seems bother much about it?

the site is really toxic especially to a new comer I always try to avoid asking question to that site because the cesspool of elitist self entitled moderator

I contribute by answering though

and also I think the site have bloated reputation system. I mean some guy with 100k reputation is not a legend anymore because after I check their profile the contribution that they have done is basically just asking or answeing basic shits kn JavaScript/git/python/pandas question that is already on the doc or manual

fucking hypocrite

YeGoblynQueenne• 3 years ago

> The most obvious answer is AI, because ChatGPT is extremely useful as a coding companion.

People keep saying that but every systematic test of LLM coding ability suggests otherwise.

For example, another article linked to this table of GPT-4 results on various tests yesterday:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Sc...

The table is from OpenAI's article on GPT-4:

https://openai.com/research/gpt-4

And it shows how well GPT-4 did on verious tests, like LSAT, etc. One of the tests is listed as "Codeforces Rating". The score is:

   392
   below 5th [percentile]

The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?

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