StackOverflow Is Having Issues

[alex_sf]

I know it's the tacky thing to say, but: I feel like StackOverflow has gotten worse over the past couple years. The questions and answers are both lower quality.

It's possible that Google is leading me astray since that's typically how I'll find Q&As on there, but I don't see the same issue on the other sites in the Stack network.

[trollied]

Their best engineer went to work for Microsoft https://nickcraver.com/ As did their SRE SQL Server DBA. I don't know if their replacements are up to speed.

[DoingIsLearning]

One factor you can't discount is that we are also getting older and so are more capable of challenging both answers and question quality.

I am not sure if SO is less useful or just has become less useful _for_me_ over time.

[Helmut10001]

I find that Github is becoming a better place for more focused questions, mostly in issues, sometimes in the new discussion feature.

[therusskiy]

many people jokingly say that their work stops if StackOverflow is down. Surprisingly I barely use SO, I refer to docs and Github source code and issues much more often.

[simion314]

Today I had an issue and I also had a solution in mind, but I still used SO to find alternative solutions, in the end others had same workaround solution as me but sould have been great for my case if the workaround was not needed.

IMO "use the documentation" is not enough, many times you have much more complex question or bugs/problems where if lucky other individuals hit them before you and were kind enough to share their findings. I upgraded my Ubuntu version and now some people decided that is safer and smarter to move the /tmp in apache to some other place but at the same time hide it from me, I am not sure what man page search query for "my file is not in /tmp but the system is telling me is there" will give you the results.

[vidanay]

I intentionally avoid SO. The S/N ratio is terrible.

[tnzk]

How frequent you refer SO depends on simply how crowded the field you're working, and nothing else.

[marcosdumay]

I bet you don't work mainly in C# or Javascript. (Or, well, Javascript SO has been downhill for a while, so maybe it's time to take it out of this list. I wouldn't know.)

On some stacks, you depend on SO for everything. Others have much more complete and usable documentation somewhere else that answers any question that SO would accept, so people don't need it at all.

[Bayart]

Github issues have also largely replaced SO for me when it comes to failure modes (production tasks). But it's relevant for development when you want to learn how to extract a certain behaviour from a given tool. It's a treasure trove of obscure capabilities, especially when it comes to older versions of tools you've got to work with in production.

[applefangirl]

Same. I've downloaded most of the documentation I need to answer day to day questions, and try to limit my use of search engines. Finding most of my answers is faster in the local references I'm familiar. The Internet is my last resort.

[toastal]

But GitHub doesn't offer its source code. Did you mean to say just "source code"?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

We can't all be 100x, God's gift to computer science, engineers like you.

[samsaga2]

They will have to look StackOverflow to fix problems with StackOverflow?

[toyg]

Somebody should write a StackOverflow system using only code found in StackOverflow posts, self-bootstrapping like a compiler.

[ape4]

https://serverfault.com

[Varqu]

In that case, we can pretty much say: We lost StackOverflow, it had a beautiful life, R.I.P.

[jjice]

I'll be interested to see a blog post detailing the outage since, at least as of a few years ago, their architecture was pretty simple given the size of the user base. I'm hoping for something as detailed as the last big slack outage.

[Ekaros]

Interesting seems I hit rate limit after viewing 3 or 4 pages... So they seem to do some real time configuration on that.

[369548684892826]

And it's back!

edit: It's not back.

[ajoseps]

seems like it comes and goes

[spyremeown]

On that note: has anyone ever tried to archive SO?

[cjpearson]

There are dozens of spam sites that do.

[fabian2k]

You can download the data dump they publish regularly if you want to, so you don't even have to scrape the site.

[traverseda]

https://www.rickcarlino.com/2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-...

[samjbobb]

Kiwix is what you want.

I keep offline copies of Wikipedia and the major StackOverflow sites.

https://www.kiwix.org/en/

[arvindamirtaa]

May the "How do SO engineers fix SO without SO"