Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
the search engine ignores -string
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder…
Hyphen (-) means you don’t want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.
Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.
Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don’t need to Google the symbol!
I’m still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.
It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.
UI-wise, though, it’s toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It’s something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)
Wait, what? On Google??
On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can’t get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -“website name”. Luckily -site:address still works.
That’s crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.
Wait WHAT? I was just asking on discord the other day if there existed a search engine that allowed you to blacklist websites as a user setting. I need to curate out all AI written garbage from my results.
Hmm, not really used to the idea of paying for search, but I understand.
Is it good at filtering AI generated sites and sites that are clearly copy pasted. Or do you kind of have to identify that yourself and manually block?
I think it’s worth testing it with the free 100 searches. All you need is an email address (no credit card unless you’re actually subscribing). I’ve only been using it a few days but I don’t think it filters out AI generated sites. But you can set a ranking by site (block, lower, normal, raise, pin) so you can make stack overflow be priorised and block quora.
They have a ranking board of top sites in each category so you can go through it and set the rank of a bunch of sites upfront.
Thanks
There’s no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has “listicle” detection. If you ask “best lawn mower”, all these “the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023” websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.
Don’t forget that Duck Duck Go is even worse at it now. It will literally change your results if you go back after clicking a link.
Why is that?
I think they’re trying to implement a sort of “smart prediction” thing, where it assumes that if you go back the link you clicked wasn’t relevant. And so it tries to remove closely related results. Which works the opposite if you get two results from the same page and you click the wrong one. Which makes looking up technical or programming related issues a nightmare.
I used to spend a lot of time on Google and stack, now I ask phind more often than not, which violates information for me.
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
“you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”
That’s one of my favorites: ignore the problem, only pick on the scope we can’t change.
I asked for advice on how to express something in UML once:
“No one cares whether you follow the UML standard, just make something up”
“But my company uses waterfall and requires UML diagrams to move onto the next phase of development!”
“That’s an issue with your company then. Ask your boss how to do it. Question closed.”
It isnt even my problem and I still despair reading this.
You have to build Rust from source, then install the dependencies with cargo, then update your node.js because it uses npm to manage it’s configurations and if your npm isn’t at least the current unstable version, the configs will be outdated. This worked for me on Arch, which is what I use btw.
You have to build Rust from source
As someone who actually did out of interest at one point, you’d be surprised how easy this is to do.
x.pyis a godsend.For the rest of your comment, it was immediately invalidated when you said you use Arch. The reality is that more people use Ubuntu, so you should be using Ubuntu too. Don’t use
apt? Figure it out yourself :P
I think it’s a behavior from work got carried over answering questions in StackOverflow. Usually when there’s a request from client/PM/PO, I usually ask them what they want to achieve by requesting said feature, usually after asking that question they will think and find out that making that pet feature is not the best way to achieve that goal.
As a Software Engineer we’re conditioned to respond that way to a question, and when we go to websites that’s specifically to answer questions, we are still answering questions from fellow technical people in that same mindset, which is not helpful.
However, I’ve used the condescending answers from StackOverflow to my advantage. Sometimes in a project we’ll get businesspeople with a technical background, either they used to be an engineer 15 years ago or they studied computer science in university but transitioned to product management after graduation. If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
My favorite Codeless Code: The Purple Beggar.
…
The monk opened his laptop. “Five separate posters have each called me a blithering idiot and offered a simple solution to my problem, which they claim to have tested on their own systems.”
Yishi-Shing nodded. “My walk once took me past a beggar whose sign read, You do not DARE throw coins at ME! His body was purple with bruises but his bowl was always full.”
(before you spend too much time reading them, remember that there are mouseovers on the images… so you don’t have to go back and read them again)
Heh. Easy there, Satan. But I do like how you weaponised S.O ;-)
The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
I don’t think they see that as a problem, that’s the goal
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
It looks to me that they could effectively address that by improving their search combined with question grooming, and not shutting down posters.
I mean, what’s a naive poster asking dumb questions other than a new user wanting to contribute? Is this the people they want to insult away?
You were able to post on there at all? Don’t they have extremely high barriers to entry for even question comments?
Honestly, I put some effort into get some of their reputation points. Then I asked one question that I didn’t realize was dumb and I can’t post questions anymore. You’re welcome to see my profile and try to figure out how I did it 👍
lmao, how dare you be inquisitive
Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.
I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more “run on sentence” and " ‘emails’ and ‘helps’ both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like “there-there, Timmy”.
So I said “you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead.” And they agreed.
So I’m read-only there now too. :-D
I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was “this has already been asked before”. No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.
I sometimes also suffer a case of “explaining until I figure the question myself”, where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
“You should be making a wiki page instead of a forum.”
- SO user on SO business model, thread closed Aug 2008
Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It’s usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.
I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution
Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
If I’m honest, stackoverflow was always a shortcut for searching documentation to me.
Simple stuff like how do I turn an InputStream to a String again? I can’t remember it, but I know exactly what to look for, I’m just to lazy.
For that kind of stuff ChatGPT is almost perfect.
Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
Not necessarily, but at least there’s much more opportunity for other people to jump in and correct false info or expand upon something. It’s by no means a flawless system, but it’s better than only have one source of information
When we use forums there’s also an opportunity to correct (or be corrected) on how we deal with problems.
I’ve seen a few times people asking how to do X while they’re actually trying to do Y. ChatGPT would gladly direct them to the wrong path.
I didn’t say that people should go on the internet and pick the first forum post either ; that would be like trusting whatever chatgpt is handing you :p
My point was more on the “people are lazy” side of things, but yeah you have to stay critical of both chatgpt and forum posts.
I agree, I just think that those lazy people will do what they do regardless of where they get their info.
To butcher a saying; blame the craftsman, not the tools.
I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it’s going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what’s to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?
A lack of intelligence and awareness?
You’ve never written code, have you?
Sadly there are so many people that take its output as gospel and don’t realise it can be wrong. So is a tool that commonly gets abused by people that don’t know how to use it.
ChatGPT is a great tool to get you started on stuff. I use it to better formulate my issues in technical terms.
I just started embedded Linux, so there are a lot of stuff that aren’t intuitive. ChatGPT has been immensely useful to get around cross compiling for embedded linux, and understanding the quirks of the native libraries without having to go back and forth in a forum and not get an answer after a few days
If you know your stuff already, ChatGPT is not the right tool. If you don’t know where to start, ChatGPT is the best tool ever made because you can clarify and ask for more detail in real time. This is like a personal tutor for free.
You mean shitty code which you can just check and ask them to change in almost real time, over posting your question on SO and waiting for months for an answer?
People who fail to understand the value of peer-reviewed code are just going to copy/paste bad, but popular, code practices.
There irony here is that Stackoverflow was considered a common source of copy/pasted code.
You can have it generate shitty code and then compare it against examples it finds online to iterate that code. Also, it was trained on the whole internet, including those good solutions, and can often reproduce them on its own. but you have to tell it, explicitly, to do all this to make better code, rather than just asking for the code.
Chatgpt is still a tool and it’s up to the user how to use it. If you google “bolognese recipe” you get one result; if you Google “traditional ragu from Bologna” you get another. Same for ChatGPT.
At least ChatGPT will not flag the question as duplicate.
“I’m sorry, as an AI language model this question has been asked too many times and there is insufficient computer resources to handle your request. You’ve been temporarily silenced for 15 minutes.”
You are delusional and will be left behind if that is your view point. The code is usually largely accurate only needing a few tweaks. Easily one of the most powerful scaffolding and learning tool I’ve used in 25 years. Our developers embracing it are more efficient then ever and passing static analysis, owasp scans, coding standards just fine if not better than cranky old devs who think they couldn’t possibly be helped by a dumb machine.
I prefer being delusional and a cranky old dev, rather than trusting AI by giving all of my workplace code and logic. Powerful? Maybe. Helping you ship products faster? I don’t know ; no metrics have been published about that in controlled settings, and I still think people will get lazy and after some time even the ones that tweaked the code and analyzed it thoroughly will just stop caring.
Go ahead, jump in that bandwagon, and prove me wrong in 5 years. All I want is proof.
Also, I didn’t know one could be a cranky old dev after a few years of experience only
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Can you write a code that would sort the input string from smallest to largest?
You would like to have it, wouldn't you? You fucken nerd.
I thought chatgpt is kinda shit now since the newest updates
I think it’s overblown tbh.
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
ChatGPT has been a great tool to help me teach coding. It lets my students with a few months experience write better code, as if they had a few extra months experience, but like you say it’s very easy to get in trouble with it. We had it generate some code to interface a web app with some cloud triggers, and chatGPT suggested we put all the API keys / creds right there in the front end where anyone with “view source” could see them. It made for a really good lesson, actually, on the need to gain experience, understand what code does , and to validate with documentation.
trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
This makes it worth it from just a time savings perspective. Also, describing it as trawling is very accurate lol. It takes a lot of trawling to get the answer you need, and even then sometimes it isn’t right because you’re relying on a single individual’s answer.
I agree that it isn’t as good as it was. The last two updates have definitely decreased its effectiveness for multiple things, not just dev. It is still my starting point when looking for something. It is just not as good as it used to be.
Obviously, you can’t take what it gives at face value, but you shouldn’t do that from SO either. In general, I see faster results using GPT than I do with Google and SO. You can also extend the responses with any customization or changes specific to what you are trying to do, where you can’t with SO.
I’m not saying SO is bad. Not by any stretch. I still use it a lot. It just isn’t my starting point anymore.
ChatGPT isn’t that good at code generation lol.
Doesn’t need to be good. Just good enough that people need SO less often. If GitHub Copilot gives a code suggestion, I don’t need to look up some syntax or some method I forgot. I’m reminded, and can see that it’s correct. No searching online required.
is that what people used stackoverflow for? I google cheatsheets for simple syntax reminders.
What I found stack overflow useful for was ‘I have this random bug in this random browser / os combo - here’s what hasn’t worked, has anyone dealt with it?’ - and then hopefully we can all share the misery of this bug until someone figures out the source.
Not sure where to go for that type of thing anymore.
Not exactly why people seek out SO, but it shows up in Google searches and people click. Now there are fewer google searches for that sort of thing.
It’s a little more decent than you give credit for. I use it all the time for easy generic subroutines and functions. It struggles a bit with specific, complex requests but is generally pretty versatile as a miniature code assistant. It’s good at catching human errors like loops starting or ending at the wrong specified integer, so I use it as a debugging tool.
I think it’s the junior dev blog spam and search results putting them higher.
I’m not sure what you mean.
Most of the comments here seem to be arguing whether it’s better to get help now from SO or ChatGPT, but this is a pretty short-sighted mindset.
What happens when the next new standard comes out that ChatGPT hasn’t been trained on? If SO tanks and dies, where will you go?
I’m not saying use a lesser resource, I’m saying this is kinda tragic and I hope they can sustain themselves; AI is propped up by human input and can’t train itself.
Does it really though? It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence, you’ll just need to provide the supplemental information (e.g. new documentations) for it to give an accurate response.
Bing already somewhat does this by connecting their bot to internet searches
We’re not able to properly define general intelligence, let alone build something that qualifies as intelligent.
I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.
Regardless of what you think is or isn’t intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn’t sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet
I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.
LLM’s cannot reason, nor can they communicate. They can give the illusion of doing so, and that’s if they have enough data in the domain you’re prompting them with. Try to go into topics that aren’t as popular on the internet, the illusion breaks down pretty quickly. This isn’t “we’re not there yet”, it’s a fundamental limitation of the technology. LLM’s are designed to mimick the style of a human response, they don’t have any logical capabilities.
Regardless of what you think is or isn’t intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn’t sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet.
You’re the one who brought up general intelligence not me, but to respond to your point: The problem is that people had an incentive to contribute that text, and it wasn’t necessarily monetary. Whether it was for internet points or just building a reputation, people got something in return for their time. With LLM’s, that incentive is gone, because no matter what they contribute it’s going to be fed to a model that won’t attribute those contributions back to them.
Today LLM’s are impressive because they use information that was contributed by millions of people. The more people rely on ChatGPT, the less information will be available to train it on, and the less impressive these models are going to be over time.
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What if the documentation is lacking? Experienced users will still know how a library works because they’ve tried some things, but that information won’t be available if they never talk about it online
how do people still have this much faith in the tools humans build after seeing the climate change caused by the industrial revolution.
I was working on a hobby project where I used a niche framework in a somewhat uncommon way. I was stuck on a concept that I think the documentation didn’t explain well enough, at least for me, and I couldn’t find any resource on it aside from the docs.
I asked Bing to write a piece of code that does what I wanted and explain each line. It was perfectly working and the explanation was also understandable. All it did was search for its official documentation. It really blew my mind.
It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence
That’s not happening anytime soon.
We will go to the documentation.
Oh god, oh no.
Do you realize what that will mean? My coworkers will have to learn how to understand documentation standards that rely on anything but “self documenting code.”
I am already “an expert (lol @ my salary)” because I read shit they don’t bother looking up. We’re truly doomed.
That’s a pipe dream thinking all the documentation is complete and well detailed
I can’t count the times where I read the documentation for the tutorial to get started and the steps described in the official documentation by the official maintainer fails early.
Documentation is 99% an afterthought (slight exaggeration here)
Hey, if people are going to go back to reading manuals like we’re in the 1980’s again is it such a bad thing? /s
It’s insane how a single tool managed to completely destroy the value collectively created by people in over a decade.
That single tool is still propped up by that collective decade of knowledge. ChatGPT would be nothing without sites like stackoverflow
Yeah but will people still care about contributing that information if they’re not going to be compensated for it in any way? Like people get something out of contributing to stack overflow, even if it’s just recognition. This is gone with ChatGPT.
Isn’t that the FOSS model since ever?
With the FOSS model you get credited at least, so you are getting something out of it even if it’s not monetary. With ChatGPT you don’t even get that. You’re feeding an AI that’s being monetized by someone else, what possible incentive could people have to contribute anymore?
Not everyone is motivated by money and recognition, are you aware of that? Since humans were humans, cooperation has been an integral part of society and still is today.
Some people will always try to monetize everything, but still, people continue to develop FOSS.
ChatGPT will be no different in that regard.
When a single entity reaps all of the rewards of that cooperation, people are much less motivated to do that.
Some people are politically motivated, there are tons of reasons, but it’s a two way interaction in all of these cases.
Crazy idea, what about a “federated” search. Hook up the websites’ internal search engines to an aggregator. Stop allowing random indexing spiders to scrape.
We go back to expertsexchange
very good point! I find myself using ChatGPT more for references and I am also afraid what will happen if there isn’t enough “human generated content” to train on. I can picture an edge case a chunk of the internet is AI generated content (with even users at the wheel). The the next wave of AI will train on previous gen AI output
AI should be trained by itself though. I just wouldn’t call LLMs “AI” as a term
Also, it shall be possible in the future to just feed it the documentation and have answers. Obviously we are still nowhere near yet
SO is a shithole, just like Reddit. All the work is done by volunteers. When it was time to cash out with the platform, they also did several things to fuck with their community. I’ve contributed quite a bit to the trilogy sites, and served as a moderator. I regret every second of it. But at least a few people got rich in the process.
I don’t get why programmers, especially ones actually working on open source projects, insist on using proprietary services. Stack Overflow is one, also GitHub.
It’s unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are… free, convenient, and where the people are.
Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.
If you decide to start a project but somehow decide to self-host a git repository, ticketing service, CICD pipelines, etc… You no longer work on said project and instead you’re the system administrator of half a dozen services.
…or you register an account with the likes of GitHub/gitlab, and stay coding right away.
Because there are no free and quality alternatives.
Because it’s free and reliable
I used to go to SO and really liked it. I haven’t been in a long time though and didn’t know about this. What are your thoughts about Quora? Seems similar to me.
Quora is pure cancer. SO is still better.
OK, do you have a suggestion?
Don’t use quora
I don’t really have any Insights into Quora. I know StackExchange hardliner always joked about the site and felt like SE is better. I joined that because I thought it was fun to feel superior, but I don’t even have an account on that site
This doesn’t tell us much without also including the quality of the posts. Are we sure this isn’t just idiots who ask stupid question that can be found on Google over and over not doing that now that they have chatgpt
Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT’s launch.
For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don’t actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I’ve answered someone’s perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.
All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.
For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don’t actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators.
This. I recall that I posted some question over a framework and if it supported a feature, and the question was shut down because a moderator complained it lacked a minimum working example. Unreal.
Do we have a community on lemmy to ask questions like stackoverflow?
I think for specific platforms, like rust questions in the rust community.
It wouldn’t be very good.
Most people want answers, not questions, and with Stack Overflow the answers are usually already there and easy to find. Plus they are maintained and kept up to date, so if something was correct six years ago but isn’t anymore, that will usually be obvious before you try the solution.
Some kind of federated stack overflow alternative could be awesome, but Lemmy is not it and never will be.
Federated data tends to be ephemeral. None of the fediverse sites claim to store everything that they’ve ever gotten there or federated to them. As such, the federation structure tends to perform poorly as a durable store of knowledge.
The oldest posts on many Mastodon have been lost to database expiration. This too will happen on Lemmy. There is no guarantee with federation that content will be available and searchable a year or two or ten down the road.
If you then say “ahh, but I’ve stood up an instance that has lots of disk storage and can serve it as an authoritative source for future visitors…” then we’ve lost federation and are back to a centralized server.
For federated Q&A, beyond saying “it’s federated” - what is the use case for federation? Why federation? How is moderation and curation done?
Ah. Feels similar to the relevance discussions on the German Wikipedia. Gatekeeping at its finest.
My favorite part of stackoverflow was asking a question because every result from Google at the time was either not helpful… Or lead to a SO page with the same question with no answer, but was marked as a previously answered question by a moderator… And was then told by them to use Google
Like bitch I did use Google, the first 2 pages of answers filtered only for SO results were all marked as previously answered and closed by moderators!
That was the last time I used SO. Never figured out the answer to my problem either. At least chatGPT might point me in the right direction to figuring out the problem
I am not sure when this started, but google searches now sort by paid content first rather then relevant content first, so Stack Overflow started to drop down into page 2 or more.
I start my search string with
stackoverflowas a workaround.
Maybe I would post more if I didn’t get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.
I’ve had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don’t have the “reputation” to.
Honestly a really dumb system imo.
Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I’m not going to keep bothering with SO.
Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don’t have enough reputation :/
Never got into it because of that.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there’s even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don’t know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don’t know if that’s feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it’s not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you’d definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial… just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that’s as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they’re looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it’s a good question… my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it’s full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.
I really like using code.whatever.social as an alternative frontend to Stack Overflow. It has way less distractions and allows me to only look at the question and the answers and nothing else.
I really like this, never saw it before. Thanks!
No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.
Annnnd bookmarked. Thanks, this is really cool!
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answer the stupid questions.
What do you mean by “stupid questions”?
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Ah, the prime example of a stack overflow user. Nice.
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That’s fair.
There is not much dignity in belittling others in a desperate attempt to compensate for something.
If you don’t want to help others then that’s ok. Move on. Just don’t try to pretend you want to help.
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The real question is does belittling people in Stack overflow helps you compensate for something? Because that’s supposedly a venue where people help each other, but you’re just there to dump your frustrations on newbies.
The prime example of a SO user is being intentionally obtuse, demanding more detail even if the typical programmer would have a pretty clear picture of what is being asked. So yeah, projection much?
And then asking, “why would you even try doing it like this?”
I’m trying to SSH into my Window 11 machine and it keeps saying “Connection refused: port 22”. Wut do?
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Oh, thank you. Your use of reduplication helped my smooth brain process your comment properly.
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Code is something used by the Germans to defeat the Allies, they put code in their tanks and drove all the way to London to greet the English prime minister with a barrage of advanced warfare and AI-enabled crypto currencies.
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This is my favorite comment on lemmy so far
That doesn’t clarify anything at all, and in fact reflects a desire do denigrate people for asking honest questions.
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How about this. SO is a conglomerate of volunteering peers, who do not work for you (…)
And that’s fine. Ignore the question and move on with your life.
As you’ve said, you are only a volunteer. You don’t own the service nor do you get to dictate what other people’s doubts are worthy or not. If you want to help others them share whatever you can share. Otherwise go find a better use of your time without getting in the way of every other volunteer.
It is not a tutorial site, a help desk, or a source of free labor. It’s denigrating to treat it that way.
Stack Overflow states quite clearly in its home page that it is “A community-based space to find and contribute answers to technical challenges”.
Call it “help desk” or whatever. Stack Overflow is by design a place to ask questions to technical challenges.
You do not get to dictate what other people find challenging. You do not get to abuse services to abuse people by denigrating them.
https://stackoverflow.com/tour
With your help, we’re working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
There’s a call out to quality of answers… which has implications for the quality of the questions.
Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.
Make note of the use “exactly what you are trying to do”. When people are asking about what are you trying to do and the nature of the question… that’s part of it.
Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.
Not everything is suited for the Q&A format that Stack Overflow uses. It isn’t a help desk - it’s a Q&A site that is trying to build a repository of information.
Further reading: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/
In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers. While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic…
…
That’s why we’re determined to keep question quality high, even at the cost of refusing a little sand. It’s true that you can’t have Q&A; without questions, but having the wrong sorts of questions is far more dangerous. The fastest way to kill any Q&A; site is to flood it with low-quality questions. I think Mark Trapp summed it up best in this meta answer:
And an announcement of Stack Overflow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
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.
The emphasis on “good” is in the original too.
It may be that your question isn’t one that fits the site format well. That should be ok - there are many other places to ask questions. Stack Overflow is poorly designed for many types of questions in an effort to optimize its utility for being a repository of knowledge for people to search and find answers without having to ever ask a question.
Probably questions that can be answered by RTFM
LLM has RATFM and you can ask it directly
Most questions can be answered by RTFM. That does not automatically mean the questions should not be asked.
Proponents of RTFM seem to believe all manuals are written well, when that’s the exception and not the norm.
If all you have to say is RTFM, everyone would be better off if you sat out the question and let others chime in. The overall posture reeks of ladder pulling.
Is there a fediverse alternative yet?
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
There is not yet a good story for federation and the Q&A format… or at least I’m not aware of one.
The difficulty is making sure that it’s moderated with sufficient controls… but then that starts running counter to the ideals of people on the fediverse. But without moderation, you get things that are Quara, and Yahoo Answers… and worse.
The corresponding part is that much of the utility of Q&A is making sure that it has good SEO so that you don’t need to answer the same question again.
All these things tend to suggest that a centralized Q&A system would work better. It’s not that you can’t federate it - but there are a lot of other hard problems for federation of Q&A that are much harder to solve.
Alternatively, what about !asklemmy@lemmy.ml doesn’t fit the desired functionality of Q&A?
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
what other forums do you use ?
Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the “question” tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I’d get a “good” answer out of it.
I actually go there more often now that I try to avoid reddit in my search results. Sometimes valuable posts have been edited or deleted.
jQuery is also dying. Coincidence?
i use jquery daily… maybe now that it’s dying ill have a real reason to move to something a little more cutting edge. haha
I’m so sorry.
If you don’t mind me asking, why do you still use jquery and what do you use in jquery?
one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.
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