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.
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).
> 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AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these days, although I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
The Fall of Stack Overflow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 - July 2023 (781 comments)
[+] [-] Pannoniae|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] the_af|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rg111|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ciupicri|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxfordmale|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shagie|2 years ago|reply
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:
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.
[+] [-] nerdponx|2 years ago|reply
The article points to Google search algorithm changes for the first big drop, and ChatGPT release for the second one.
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skrowl|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shagie|2 years ago|reply
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 )
[+] [-] twelve40|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidcar|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Syntaf|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] sedatk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matsemann|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zer8k|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-about-t...
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-rudeness...
[+] [-] xmprt|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 1123581321|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] zeptonaut22|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ec109685|2 years ago|reply
Literally sold at the peak.
[+] [-] byw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toshk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ElemenoPicuares|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] padolsey|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tuetuopay|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outsidetheparty|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rurp|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] acdha|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tedivm|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] boredumb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oarsinsync|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slashdev|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] outsidetheparty|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonblack|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] password4321|2 years ago|reply
Overflow AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 (4 days ago; 97 comments)
[+] [-] jaylittle|2 years ago|reply
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.