Am I the only one that still finds SO to be quite useful? If I paste an error message into Google, it's still quite likely that the SO answer is the best one. And if it doesn't, I contribute an answer if/when I eventually find it because I still think I get more out of SO than I put in. I've received 21 necromancer badges doing that.
For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not. I ceased posting questions a while ago due to the aggressive moderation, which often labeled my questions as duplicates or too common. I was very upset with the direction Stack Overflow had taken, as it seemed to embody the very criticisms it had once had about forums. The Stack Overflow community has lost its vibrancy and has become stagnant. I am pleased that platforms like ChatGPT are emerging as real competitors.
If they didn't moderate aggressively, they would probably end up with a bunch of duplicate questions. I really like the fact there's not a ton of dups on SO. ie, see other help sites. They also have a high standard for those questions, to the point where it will take 10+ minutes to post a good question. I don't ask questions either, mainly because I don't want to spend 30+ minutes writing a good question AND that's a good thing.
IMO, the aggressive de-duplication of questions means that people will keep updating the answers as things change, which is really nice as you don't have to worry about the responses to a question becoming out-of-date/stale.
I don't think people object to de-duping true duplicates. The problem is near duplicates, where the original question/answer didn't quite cover what you're asking. In those cases, it can be frustrating getting past the SO duplicate filter, which can sometimes be too aggressive.
Or, when searching for answers, you keep chasing your tail because the mods kept killing off the variants of the question you cared about, and you have to cobble together answers from the comments because those will often be all you get.
Or (and arguably worse), you'll find a relevant question but the answers are inundated with "like the real answer, but variation for situation X" because people are posting to the main question because they know the almost-but-actually-not dupes will all get closed out.
There still are a ton of duplicate questions. When questions get marked as duplicate they don't get merged or anything, they just lock the most recent ones (even if they are much better than the older one).
Their moderation doesn't prevent duplicate questions it just makes it more frustrating when the question you find has been marked as duplicate.
It can still happen. I've been actively using SO for 14 years and had my first question marked as a duplicate last week. The question was already 9 years old and had been thoroughly answered. Last week somebody decided to "optimize" it, which sent it to the review queue and finally led its closing.
It does seem likely that I'm an outlier . OTOH it could be that just people that have had bad experiences are posting their experiences and the silent majority without bad experiences aren't posting. It's so hard to tell in a forum format.
I think the loudest people are the ones talking about their bad experience. I've been on SO for, I think, 13 years. I've rarely had questions closed as duplicates and if one was it truly was a duplicate and I found my answer on the referenced question.
I don't see how all the people complaining about moderation don't look at all the low quality questions and see why moderation is what it is.
Personally I don't remember having gotten questions closed. However,
sometimes other people's good questions have gotten closed, making me annoyed that I didn't get to see any, or more, answers.
> For finding answers, Stack Overflow may be useful, but for posting questions, it is not.
That is mostly as it should be. The primary original intent of StackOverflow is to curate a good Q&A, not to provide an interactive support/mentoring service. Questions are (supposed to be) evaluated by what they add to the repository of questions and answers.
That being said - there has certainly been a culture of harshness in relating to newbie question askers on large parts of the SO.
Suppose you are just learning C++ language. There is a syntax error or type mismatch. The error message is 50 lines long and it does not make any sense to you. You already spent 10 minutes on it. What do you do now?
If there is an experienced C++ developer around who is happy to answer questions, great. Otherwise you are stuck with having to figure it out by using trial and errors and Google-fu. If you post it to a forum, it could take a while for anyone to respond. If you post it to stackoverflow, very likely nobody wants to look at your horrible code (natural for a beginner, you know), and your question gets downvoted.
By contrast, ChatGPT can look at your code and explain very clearly what is wrong with it within seconds.
This is just one example. And it's not only for beginners. I have found that ChatGPT can answer high-level questions in programming very well. The alternative would be searching for the Internet and sift through all the noise to find the answers as well.
Isn’t it worth considering that the reason ChatGPT can do those things is that it was trained on data from platforms like Stack Overflow? This is hard to quantify but my guess would be that without the SO data it wouldn’t be as useful.
This is why reddit and twitter both locked down their APIs, due to the data being very high quality and immensely valuable for training.
Too bad they all did it too late, no one saw ChatGPT coming. And since all the data was already scraped from Stackoverflow, it no longer has any value for OpenAI. Stackoverflow is rapidly declining in volume, so future data from it is irrelevant.
Oh wow that's interesting, thanks for sharing! I thought that the value in today's LLMs comes from the wealth of "free" crowd-sourced answers online. It seems like OpenAI is trying to create more source material specifically for "basic coding", though I wonder how cost-effective that is in practice. Or effective in general, for that matter.
Exactly. I've already hit the dreaded "knowledge cutoff" of 2021.
What happens when this training data is 10 years old? Where will we get new data?
In the meantime we'll get used to functioning with these models with assumption the "knowledge cutoff" will just be moved. But if there is little new data, how? Furthermore, how do we prevent feeding ML generated data to ML training in the first place?
Same here. I look for answers about 10 times a day I'd say and in 90% of the cases I found what I was looking for, in a few seconds, for free. I also post answers when I found old questions and the answers are outdated or not complete. I know it helps other people cause I usually get 1-10 upvotes / year for those answers on old questions. Mostly about python, sql, postgres, js, react, aws and docker, so popular topics. I rarely have to post questions on my own, usually cause it's already asked and answered, or cause I'm experienced enough to find the solutions on my own or somewhere else.
Anyway, have been using SO for 12 years and still think it's great.
If much of your development is spent on implementing business logic in a language you are familiar with, and you have a decent IDE, I don't know what you use stackoverflow for at that frequency. Occasionally you may need to consult stackoverflow for a specific issue in string manipulation or API usage, but that's not something you run into a lot.
I rarely ever need to use SO on a daily basis. I've been programming on the .NET ecosystem for a while now and usually if I need anything I just directly go to the docs.
I used SO a lot when I was a junior engineer. Most of my issues now stem from biz logic or internal design that really can't be googled for.
StackOverfow is great for questions that are very basic for people who work in the corresponding domain but can take some time to put together based on the docs along.
For example, "how to insert multiple multi-columns rows dynamically using psycopg2"
It is trivial if you are writing sql everyday but may take longer to find the right postgres docs. StackOverflow gives you the answer in 5 minutes: several variants with different tradeoffs (readability, performance, security).
I love stack overflow, however I also hate it. I have asked some, I thought very reasonable question on there, and they got shot down and removed. The elitism, in this day & age of nearly infinite search and data storage capabilities makes me not feel all that sorry for them though. I do hate that we are doomed to AI generated trash answers on google now for at least a decade though.
For Android development SO is pretty useless. I often find answers on there from <=2015. That's when Android 6 came out, its way too old to be relevant. But if you try to re-ask the same question they mark it as a duplicate.
I've found that SO varies a lot by tech/language. In my experience, the C++ and JS subworlds are pretty brutal. C# is middle-of-the-road when it comes to culture. Clojure is very friendly and welcoming, but obviously more niche. This may explain why folks have different experiences on the same site.
I agree. Rust is the worse by far in my experience. There's a couple of really prolific people on there (Shepmaster and Stargateur) who treat it as their personal fiefdom. Shepmaster does provide a ton of high quality answers but I don't think that gives them the right to be so unfriendly.
Kind of ironic considering how the Rust community prides itself so much on being welcoming.
It's the top result for "case insensitive string comparison in C++". It has 372 votes and a ton of useful high quality answers. But it was closed 5 years ago for being "opinion based". Presumably because the author made the foolish mistake of asking for the best way to do it, rather than just a way to do it.
I don't see how anyone could defend that.
That's not cherry picked, and actually the situation is worse than it might seem to a casual observer because when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
That's one of common failure modes for SO. When people ask for "best", they actually mean tell me the options, and the reasons to choose them, and their advantages and problems. It's hugely helpful. But moderators see "best", and automatically close it as "opinion" because there's no objective best. But that isn't the point of it!
So the author made a foolish mistake of not reading the site's rules? I know, I know, who does that? I might be one of very few… Just like I might be one of very few who actually take their time when asking a question, showing respect to anyone who might spend some time answering…
The question doesn't show research effort, it's just two sentences. Sometimes that's all it takes, but if you add a requirement "without converting to lower/upper case", I think it should come with an explanation? I often encounter questions like that "How do I drive my car without using a steering wheel?" - and upon a confrontation I usually hear "well just for fun" or a similar answer - SO is a bad place to ask questions like that. If you're e.g. interested in performance, describe your situation, paste your current code and explain how you're concerned about the efficiency of your current approach.
Also originally the post wasn't not even properly written… Just a low quality post, so why bother improving a question (editing away the "best") that is so bad to begin with, especially as that doesn't guarantee you will avoid the critique (instead of critique of bad moderators who close a question, I would be reading about bad moderators that modify a question changing its meaning).
As I hinted at the beginning, we might be from different worlds: it's beyond my understanding how you could think of pointing out the example is not cherry picked, as if it was some beautiful post, with images, thoroughly explaining the issue, perhaps even addressing (preemptively or as an edit) the "opinion-based" flag, and yet was unfairly closed. Meanwhile it's shit. The revision history doesn't show any real OP's effort to fix the question, other than that meta exists to discuss such things, and if you're not satisfied with answers, you can write a real question describing your case.
So we might be from different worlds, and I'm happy SO/SE exist, because I find them, and their policies - for the most part - useful. You don't, and it's fine, you can use the alternatives.
> when you do occasionally manage to reopen a question (quite difficult) it leaves no evidence that it was ever closed.
I sometimes contribute. There's a lot to be done on the Python side, because Python and libraries change faster than the answers do.
"In theory" - I think at least - answers should be updated when new things become possible. A lot of answers used to be "you can't do that with X, do Y instead" and should now be updated to either, "You can do that with X" or "You have to use Z"..
Exactly. The biggest issue for me is duplicate questions, which is why mods are tough on new questions. 99.9% of the time the question has been asked. I also racked up a ton of necromancer badges doing what you do.
ChatGPT generally solves stuff quicker and more precisely for me.
I have yet to receive a badge but could add that to the prompt or custom instructions as an alternative to its encouraging words when I'm nearly there.
It will just learn directly from the code suggestions it gives you. Did you use the suggestion it gave you? Did you fix it manually? Did you generate or write a test case that passed for the suggestion. There are many ways for such a system to learn.
If I had a nickel for every SO thread that came up in my Google searches that could have answered my question if only the SO moderators had allowed it to be answered, I'd be able to buy a few steak dinners.
Me: Goes to read the other ticket. It's from 8 years ago, and the answer was "This is solved in version X."
Me, on something many versions after X, and having the hindsight of knowing that no, it was not solved in X, shakes my head. I find the solution someplace else.
I do not go back to SO because I can't be bothered to fight an uphill battle.
Same experience here, except half the time I visit the "duplicate" question, only to find it isn't a duplicate at all! In the last I've had several of my own questions closed as "duplicates", where it's quite obvious the moderator didn't read either my question, or the one they point to.
I haven't asked a question on SO for over 2 years now, mainly because I just got sick of the hostile environment that the mods created.
A 'high' (just not a new one) reputation user (not necessarily a moderator) opens a review queue. He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong, but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you, so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
> Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong
Right.
> but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site
"Cleaning up" by mislabeling stuff. Sounds like they are making a mess. But go on...
> is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
> People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you
I hope they care about being accurate rather than being apathetic about it.
> , so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
There was no discussion. I didn't resign, I never engaged in any discussion in the first place. I just found a question and a closed question.
And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed. It's closed. That's it.
Your entire comment is about how SO fails, and rather than work to overcome it, it just blamed the people for "not holding it right."
> "Cleaning up" by mislabeling stuff. Sounds like they are making a mess. But go on...
Accidents are inevitable.
> Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
Do you know the concept of a triage?
> And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed.
Either you don't have some very minimal reputation in the network (I don't know, 100 points?), which limitation is there, I think, do protect from bots and similar abuse, or the question was *locked* for other reason than just being a duplicate. You could still open a question on meta to discuss that.
I don't even want to defend SO, I'm just frustrated by how terribly bad the arguments criticizing SO are.
> you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong
this comments are ignored
people closed my questions in past for being duplicate - despite that I linked that question and described why it is not a duplicate
> He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
that is wrongheaded and bad idea leading to predictably terrible results
she/he should not close it as duplicated without proper check (it is better to have some duplicates over bad closures)
Well it doesn't matter because the parent post completely disengaged from the site. Turning away potentially active users seems like a horrible move that the owners of SO didn't try to fix and possibly led them to where they are today.
Flashback to a very common question about relative imports in python that had mostly outdated answers, or very hacky non-solutions but that kept being referenced in newer threads. You actually had to scroll way down to get a reasonable answer. Even then, there was so much confusion and "works for me if I just set the path manually (lol)" or "add __init__.py in this folder" , "no actually don't remove __init__!". Which okay I guess sometimes questions have multiple answers (though the answer way down the page was objectively correct!) ... but then why close newer questions if past answers were messy and very non universal?
They pushed me out when I was a student in Uni struggling with Java 101. And my experience left me shocked that an industry could be so cruel to people trying to learn the ropes and be just another programmer.
Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.
I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work.
Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.
I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"):
The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"
I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014. And it was an awful experience. I got over my Java block by not just reading my Uni's textbook but by also reading another much older textbook.
I got so good at Java that I became a Lab/Teaching Assistant my last two years in college. And I helped folks the best I could in person: always kind, always patient, never blaming the student even if they didn't want to learn and just wanted to pass the Lab; that is an obviously wrong student attitude to have, but whether they cheat or want the answers without learning is between the student and god. I can only try my best to help.
Who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project? Who cares if their question is not deep enough or poorly written? Just answer their question or don't. You don't need to impose your moral sense of fairness unto them: it's not that deep. And you especially don't need the snark and the putting down of others. Again, the simpler thing is to not engage at all which is obviously not what happened or happens under the sludge and grime of SO answers.
Being polite in answering questions is pro-social.
It's a more pleasant interaction when someone is polite. -- Whereas, if you get rude answers, you'll be discouraged from participating.
Asking good questions is pro-social. People are going to be more willing to help if the questions are well thought out. -- Whereas, asking in an anti-social way discourages people from helping out.
It's still possible to ask questions even if you get snarky responses back; and it's still possible to answer lazy questions... But in either case, it's easy to see why people might not like that.
You are interpreting ability as a social gesture, taking disability as an insult. Thusyou not participating in the part of society that is learning is a good thing.
There's a difference between "I haven't paid the full effort to figure the answer out myself" and "I haven't paid the effort that makes it easier for you to help me". -- There's no setting in which being rude is going to be more helpful than being polite.
Expectations vary; in some settings, it's going to be more acceptable for questions to be a more raw "I'm stuck and I need help" than in others.
There is an asymmetry: people giving answers are more able to help those who are asking questions. If the people learning don't like the teachers, they'll have to go elsewhere (& learning is harder). If the teachers don't like the students, they don't have to teach.
> I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014.
Please link them! They should still be there, and we should be able to analyze them. The strength of Stack Exchange is that it is factual, like on Wikipedia, users are discouraged to be emotional and encouraged to to prove their theories.
> who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project?
A visitor from Google, who doesn't want to search through dozens of "too localized" problems, that don't apply in his case. There are other places to ask such questions, and the strength of SO/SE lies in its ruleset.
I'd phrase this a bit differently, for the questioner's side of things.
I know from experience that when I'm frustrated, I need to keep trying something smaller (or otherwise get more information) until it becomes clear what's not working.
The kind of steps it takes to ask a good question goes hand in hand with the kind of steps you'd take to solve the problem yourself. (Similarly: with domain knowledge, you know what to look for; without domain knowledge, you don't know what to ask about).
If I put too high a value on other people's time, I'm never going to ask questions, and may be slower than if I'd asked a question at a suitable time. (Whereas, putting too little value on other people's time ... can cause friction).
If people had your level of insight and self-reflection, then SO would be less popular but much more helpful and probably not known for all the needless hostility.
It takes a lot of guts to ask for help. And being put down when you're vulnerable: exposing an ignorance or a lack of understanding, is not a good feeling at all. For me, it always sticks for a long time until I forget it.
Yes, that's beginners in nutshell. It's why it's so important to educate them rather than take the opposite stance which is to chastise them for being so inept. I wouldn't take their bad questions that personally myself, it's what it is, but also I am not a person to answer SO questions so there's that.
Those who answer questions want good questions but those who ask good questions probably solve them on their own. Leaving things as they are.
Who cares, people with homework need help too. They're beginners so asking them to formulate a perfect question or conduct research is basically a non-starter. If the barrier to entry is become a professional first, it's no wonder why the company and its user base are shrinking.
I think "professionals who can't figure this obscure things out" is the best use-case for SO, really. Perhaps being a professional is something to be required. I'm speaking only from my own experience. I have only ever asked a handful of questions on SO (going back to about 2011), and that's because I spend hours and hours trying to figure it out first. So yes, I think I do expect that of other questioners as well.
"Why won't my docker container build?" Well, because there's a typo in your instructions and it says so clearly in the error output. Of course we get tired of answering these types of questions.
Can you name those alternatives? I don't think SO/SE is being beaten by anything, it has no competition within the set of questions it allows. When it comes to other questions - of course other websites are better for answering the questions that are offtopic on SO/SE.
I'd you think the SO is bad, you should check out the EE board on StackExchange. I've never seen such aggressively unhelpful behavior by people performing excellence in my life.
ChatGPT may have killed it, but it was already severely weakened by them allowing a-holes to run the place.
while I agree about SO culture, it's probably the case that most of the laid-off staff took no part in that behavior.
The Great Reset 2.0 which might save SO:
Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero. And since "sentiment" is measurable nowadays, the same would be done for anyone whose hostile comments exceed some threshold. Probably other behavior would be similarly penalized.
Do you lose some valuable expertise? Undoubtedly, but making an example out of people is a warning to the rest.
> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.
Why it would help?
While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.
> While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.
In what way? Who really cares if it's homework or a newbie question? Are you such an expert in everything that you never ask newbie questions?
This arrogant attitude is toxic, spreads quickly, and poisons far too many communities. I'm grateful to dang et al that HN hasn't become like this.
Just ignoring the newbie questions is best, unless you want to answer honestly.
On the r/jazz and r/classicalmusic, almost every day there's some question like "I'm just getting into <genre>. What are some top albums/artists I should listen to?"
Someone does answer those questions. Props to those saintly people.
SO/SE might benefit from a "this question smells like homework" button that could shunt questions that are posted without any code or evidence of adequate clue off to a forum specifically for homework, rather than leaving them in the general queue.
> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.
This could be reasonable or not, depending on the "threshold". SO/SE already have mechanisms (which aren't perfect) to deal with emotional up/down-voting. It already 'punishes' with a 2 rep cost for downvoting an answer. It doesn't for downvoting a question.
Is it really that bad? I know I have asked some duplicate questions in the past but it’s not like I care. As long as they point me to the answer I’m happy.
Way back in 2014 or whatever it was I was really questioning the decision Fog Creek made to spin out Trello and Stack Overflow. It seemed to only benefit investors and I wondered how the companies could diversify their income streams with such fixed-niche products. At the time having such an opinion was very opposite of mainstream.
Even though Trello was acquired, I feel like Fog Creek the company and all of its products have suffered the worst fates possible from this decision.
For years the place seemed like an idea factory where people made great products and now it's basically irrelevant.
> Way back in 2014 or whatever it was I was really questioning the decision Fog Creek made to spin out Trello and Stack Overflow. It seemed to only benefit investors and I wondered how the companies could diversify their income streams with such fixed-niche products.
I was at Fog Creek (FC) while some of these decisions were made. There are a few missing pieces here that may help it make more sense.
The model was for FC to act as an incubator and fund other projects on the backs of FogBugz and Kiln. I'm more familiar with Trello, but with SO I'm sure the idea was the same: when you take VC, you are committing to a very specific model: burn cash on getting as large as possible.
The goal with Fog Creek was to _not do that_. So, rather than having FC take funding, Trello was spun out and raised as it's own entity.
FC employees received equity (in lieu of profit sharing) in these products.
The last product to come out of FC was the result of a few competing teams working on different projects. Glitch (nee Hyperdev) was.. not a great idea, with not a great team on it.
A leadership change shortly after the focus on Glitch led to (more-or-less) the complete collapse and acquihire of it by Fastly.
> Even though Trello was acquired, I feel like Fog Creek the company and all of its products have suffered the worst fates possible from this decision.
I guess it depends on your measure. FC employees made money. I regret what FC was turned into at the end.
I disagree. StackOverflow grew to be many times the size of Fog Creek software. It was highly successful for a time.
You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs. StackOverflow is being destroyed by Copilot and ChatGPT.
> You can not anticipate back then that AI would train on its Q&A and then provide the same service but fully integrated into IDEs.
What an interesting interpretation of events. For years (almost since the beginning) users were complaining about the experience. The SO leadership took pride in ignoring those complaints. Remember Jeff Atwood repeatedly boasting, without a shred of evidence, that the lack of discussion was what made SO popular? They dumped resources into automating the closing of questions in the coldest possible manner. They had out of control mods that everyone hated, but the answer was always that those very mods were the only ones that mattered for the site. They knew about the ridiculous dup trolling, and they did nothing to prevent it. The list goes on...
Now that they're in trouble, the explanation is that a new technology came along that nobody could have anticipated. No. They lost their base of new users long ago to Reddit and Discord. They had enough existing users that put up with their crap because SO was a standard part of the toolbox, and it's where Google took you. They did everything to make the site awful and now they're attributing their problems to new technology.
The way we measure success is different.
The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant.
SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut.
Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by Prosus. Most of Prosus' other investments also look really questionable if we're headed for a global recession like it looks like we are...
That might be true but it's a very nihilistic way to look at things. I believe SO had many more successful years ahead of it but decisions taken by the company and moderators sped that process up.
I don't think it nihilistic. The world changes; it changes rapidly; it changes dramatically. Successful businesses pivot, and as a result, often don't resemble the company that they used to be.
The end game of successful businesses is to become a conglomerate of sorts. Once a company owns enough brands/products across enough markets, they can shed the under-performers and expand into new segments and industries.
I think we're in agreement. But the original commenter was stating that all companies die or change given a long enough timeline so criticizing a company for dying/changing is pointless since that happens to everyone.
Criticism of the company has been done to death, but I'd be interested to hear criticism of the moderator actions. (I'm not even sure which actions you and the grandparent are referring to.)
The moderators seemed to collectively go insane with maintaining the purity of their individual fiefdoms.
Questions and answers both got moderated out of existence with high frequency with it being clear that the moderator didn't understand either. I remember this behavior becoming rampant throughout the community around 2012 and the moderators being incredibly toxic in Meta SO. I removed my profile and never looked back then.
> Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that.
Or you follow the lean engineering model, like Whatsapp did. Millions of users paying a $ each are still millions of $, and Whatsapp prior to FB acquiring them had very very low operating costs - similar to Stackoverflow by the way. Both engineered their systems to run on incredibly low resources.
No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing.
SO should really pivot to the search business. They have everything: The culture of how to build a website that answers users’ questions, the culture to index pages, the culture to get an invested community. The only faulty mechanism here is Google, and SO would be a much better steward of how people want webpages to look like, than Google.
It's decent, but most often DuckDuckGo gives more relevant stack overflow answers than stack overflow itself does for the same query. Even though SO has far more information to tune the results on than DDG.
Another "proof" of how bad their search is, can be witnessed in the millions of duplicates. SO basically got an army of volunteers who know how to operate this search within their niche, to close duplicates, something that a decent search result would solve for a big part.
> No, Google made StackOverflow live and StackOverflow die by stopping its referencing.
Maybe that as well. But I have definitely reduced my Google searches for technical answers and focus them on ChatGPT. So to me it doesn't matter if Google stopped referencing them or not. ChatGPT is phenomenal at answering technical questions with context specific answers and code snippets.
I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.
Anecdotally, every single time I’ve put effort into answering someone’s question, I got shot down by mods for various reasons despite (generally) being the only answer.
Yeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out.
The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.
I've noticed that for a lot of quick/common stuff ("how do I change font color with JavaScript?") the question that comes up is old and talks about jQueryUI, but there are 400 answers that cover every library and framework since then.
It's really not convenient to search through those answers even though the knowledge you need is there.
For a long time they argued that duplicate questions were a problem because they weren't trying to be a Q&A site but rather a knowledge database. But it turns out that the duplicate reduction effort has made the knowledge database harder to access for many common queries.
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Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff
I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?
What I found those information in Reddit is that they are current with the information than SO. The results from SO are dated back to '08 to '17 and they are often outdated. If the thread is locked in Reddit, they can create a new post and add the link to locked thread in the comment and seeking for more solutions, they are often keep it up. Compared to SO which will locked it up for being "dupe".
This is particular annoying when it comes to CLI tools. Often the search top result will show outdated SO post that the command arguements are depreciated, it took me hours to find this out after couldn't figure out why the command are not working. If I search the problem with site:reddit.com, the answer are usually relevant and current with a working command.
SO's overaggressive moderation are preventing the new information from being relevant. That's why people flocks to GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums because they don't share the SO moderation philosophy.
Only outdated answers exist anymore. While in theory you can ask a question an get an up to date answer, in practice it is duplicate or off topic and so closed. The answers from 2010 are still there, and good enough even if the technology has moved on.
I wonder whether Reddit can be a serious medium/long-term threat. My usage of Reddit has gone to 0 ever since "the incident". I've heard the rumors that overall usage is up but I'm curious about whether the niche of developer content has gone down. The assumption is that developers are more likely to understand and be affected by the incident. Reddit won't be a medium/long-term threat if developers don't continuously invigorate it with new content.
I'm not I agree if under threat from reddit, but I have noticed that Google has gotten significantly worse at showing me the correct relevant SO post I need. It usually takes a few tries.
There are even the same perfect/simple posts that I have visited tons of times over the years (small JS/CSS stuff I can never remember) that have disappeared or became near impossible to find via Google.
Just because Reddit is throwing handfuls of money at Google to prop up their results doesn't mean it's a better resource for programmers. In fact, it's completely, utterly the opposite. The programming subs are just getting caught in the crossfire. It's also one of the main reasons I finally switched to DDG permanently.
The the types of technical questions I get SO results for I’ve not once got Reddit results. That said there are other queries for which Reddit is the only answer and SO not capturing this is a failure on their part.
Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and hope someone bothers to help me before my question drifts off into oblivion.
For real, though, who though this is a good idea to do project documentation and issue tracking? It's stupid.
Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs".
It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow.
I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.
Yeah, I can understand that it's quite okay from a maintainer point of view. But still, you have to moderate the Discord server, which in itself can be quite the hassle.
Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.
The biggest problem with SO is that it is self-conflicting in its mission. It wants high-quality answers, it wants to avoid duplicates, it wants to be wiki-like or even something that can replace official docs/man page. All those are good and noble goals, but you cannot have that and at the same time be novice-user friendly. Wikipedia has the same issue to a certain extent, but SO is much worse because it's a Q&A site, and yet because of the above goals it in effect prevents novices from asking questions because of duplicate, because they don't know what to ask (since they are novice), etc. If they want to be truly useful to question askers, perhaps there should be some spin off part of SO where people can ask question freely to their heart's content but somehow doesn't affect the main site's quality...
People can learn a ton by answering questions. Trying to create a complete answer will make you realize the gaps in your own understanding. As an early SO user, I benefited from this greatly.
Sadly, I find this impossible these days. I've given up on SO as anything other than a mostly passive user. I'll vote, and make the rare comment, but that's it. The last time (a few years ago) I made a concerted effort to answer some questions, my experience was that many questions would be closed as dupe/low-quality while I was partway through answering. Flagging that it isn't low-quality (proven by the fact I can answer it) goes nowhere -- people are seemingly all too happy to yield their close hammer power, but not to re-open.
I agree. It can be a Q&A site where you ask a question and get an answer, or it can be an FAQ style reference wiki where all the questions and answers are perfect and people edit any answer. It can't be both, but it seems like they just can't decide which it should be.
I side with you. On the other hand, there seems to be no business case left. You mentioned Wikipedia. I think that WP is highly profitable and even in the times of ChatGPT still is. And does not need such a high staff count.
The way the redundancies were carried out were very disrespectful. People got invited to a meeting and essentially told "You'll lose access in about 30 minutes" -- from a close source who was laid off after literally receiving feedback that they were the most efficient in their department a couple days prior.
Sadly being "the most efficient in their department" doesn't always mean anything in layoffs. Whole departments and teams come and go, and salaries are also a concern (e.g. 20 year vet vs 5 year mid level with half the salary)
I don’t understand how redundancies can be carried out respectfully. Redundancies suck. Someone will always be on the list that didn’t expect to be and quite honestly shouldn’t be.
People will say they know the right answer and some aspect that helps them would’ve been considered (tenure, peer feedback, # of commits). It always sucks no matter what.
That's a common practice, but very foolish. If your employee is at all trustworthy they don't need to have their access revoked (and if they aren't trustworthy they'll just do the damage before they tell you they are leaving). So your org is robbing themselves of employee time without any actual benefit.
You're preaching to the choir here. The most depressing thing is that people leave, like a forest fire, behind echoes of their impacts but we never really get to give them their flowers. The turnover is so rote and frequent that when the best guy in the team leaves, it's not only just a 'I'm so proud to have ... Thank you guys...' email or slack message, but everyone else is like 'Just Another Monday in Corpo Hell.'
I blame the unpaid volunteers to some extent. Sometimes they're overly rude, not always, but we've all seen it. You never have that problem with AI. You can ask all the questions you want and it will at least try to answer them.
AI can do the same thing - it'll probably pretty up the words more, but it's perfectly capable of fuzzy matching a "duplicate" question, passive aggressively telling you to sod off, and telling you that some questions are wrong to ask.
"Yes, that was a duplicate question, but that's absolutely fine! I'm here to help with any questions you have, whether they're duplicates or not. If you have any more questions or need information on any topic, please feel free to ask."
Agree completely. They did the same thing with discourse. The type of thinking I classify as "I'm smarter than my users".
Draconian limits on even slightly adjacent questions in SO are basically the same thinking that led them to prevent posting on a Discourse thread _in private instances_ unless your answer has the number of words they think you should use.
And they of course justify it by saying their "research" says this will create a "healthier" community which is of course bullshit.
Wait till you hear how businesses intentionally pit employees against each other by granting different benefits at different levels so that the majority doesn’t feel as bad about things. This is, for example, how businesses got rid of comprehensive retirement packages.
Most of them aren't Machiavellian masterminds though. Most of them are barely passable managers who are mostly just reacting to what is right on front of their noses. Company is growing? Extrapolate linearly, and hire enough people to cover the projected growth over the next 12-18 months. Growth didn't increase linearly, costs have gone up due to inflation, and we can't borrow more cheap money? Lay off a bunch of people to stem the bleeding, hope the company makes it through alive.
> If the fresh blood can do the same job as the seniors but for less money then why wouldn't you do this?
Brain Drain, it's a real phenomena that has real economic impact on a surrounding locality, local economy, and state economies.
Brain Drain affects companies as well, but by the time they notice Brain Drain has occurred, it's too late to rectify.
Hiring for bottom dollar, instead of experience, will increase the the outflow, decrease supporting services in the area, and decrease the available pool of potential employees.
It's a cycle that once begun is almost impossible to stop, even with legislation.
Here's what our Federal Government, and several States have done to discourage the BD effect.
You're (a) expecting the new folks to stick around long enough to fully learn the system and (b) that they will have access to all the knowledge around the real tricky parts of the system that they have. A senior dev who has shown he wants to be there is better than 3 new recruits, all day, every day.
I don't know where you are... but my biggest issue with the last few years, was that promotions were handed out left and right. Half of the engineering teams I worked with in the last 3 years should be demoted from being called Senior anything, considering most of them are at most 3-5 years out of college.
Just today - a Staff DBA was completely befuddled by the 5000 concurrent connections config parameter on Postgres RDS, when they had the task of making sure that the services stop dropping connections for the last month.
My previous job has a "senior" engineer that routinely blocks any attempt to move from an in house NodeJS proxy, because it would cost an extra $70 per month... and for the architectural decisions the explanation is routinely "because I like it".
Grow some skin. Other then the snark it's a good resource.
I agree that the snark shouldn't be there but stack overflow is a good resource for lurkers and people who don't care and aren't so hurt by online mistreatment. It's just randos on the internet.
I don't need to grow skin on the internet where mistreatment is abundant. I just don't engage. Offline people can't treat you like shit because then they're gonna get treated like shit. Respect begets respect and good manners beget good manners.
The way SO folks talk to you ... I'll just say: try that offline and I'll pull your card no ifs or doubts.
Thats not the point. The point is who cares about the mistreatment. The objective is to get the relevant info. I'm one of the highest ranked people on SO.
And guess what? All I do on SO is ask stupid ass questions. One time someone scolded me, said I should know better for asking a certain question that was against policy of something given that my rank was so high. You know what I said to him?
Nothing. I just didn't give a shit. Stackoverflow is one of the few places on earth where you can ask the dumbest questions with zero consequence. The consequence is just in your head. Better to launch that dumbass question in stackoverflow than on your company slack.
I probably have 10 questions with negative points. My highest ranked question was likely the stupidest one I ever asked.
I care. And it's not "in my head." Read the comments here, others have had similar experiences to mine: I'm not just making it up; it's a real downside with real impact.
Now as for me: I don't mind being stupid (look at how often I get downvoted here in HN: water off a duck's back). I want to be treated in a dignified way. And if that's not happening and there are better sources out there, then I don't have to play the game of reading someone's snark or passive aggressive bs.
I don't want to read it not because it affects me in some psychological way (the internet is full of cruelty and I can handle it ok), but because it's tiresome: I've seen it before and have had it happen to me so many times that it's just boring.
If you treat me like shit but help me solve the problem, ok thank you. The problem is solved. Now on to the next. But if you treat me like shit and don't solve my problem, well then, I'll look elsewhere for the solution.
Well there's no alternative. People will think you're dumb if you ask a dumb question that's just society. If they aren't talking shit to your face then they're thinking it. Can't change human nature.
What better source is there? Stackoverflow is the best IMO. I'm up for a better resource if a better one actually exists.
The problem isn't the people asking questions, there will always be an infinite number of those.
It's the moderation scaring away the people who answer questions. Just because they haven't shooed away everyone doesn't mean they haven't had an impact.
I know that I no longer browse relevant SO topics "for fun" anymore.
Funny, it's the lack of moderation that scared me away from answering. (And I say that as someone who's… kinda been scared away from asking by excessive moderation.) It's the age-old question: how can Stack Overflow be all these different things to all these different people, simultaneously?
It's an incredibly difficult problem, and it's a people problem - as so many companies find out; they're solving people problems and the technology is really a side-note.
(This is the real answer to the "why does tech company X have so many employees" question)
Don't be scared of moderation. Just ask the question. If it gets shut down, you can ask again via copy+paste. Just edit the question slightly so it doesn't piss someone else off.
Here's a prototype of an average tone-deaf user of SO who think their imaginary internet points actually count. The point being raised here is the difficulty new users (with no imaginary internet points, but with dignity and self-respect) face while submitting a questions/answers to SO. Not people like you who've normalized the bullying for "getting info". Guess what, now with ChatGPT you can get answers that are on average of much better quality than average new SO answers without tolerating pricks.
Tone deaf isn't the word to describe anyone here. I think blind and stupid are the perfect two words to describe you.
if you ACTUALLY read the post you'll see that I literally said I asked the stupidest freaking questions ever. My entire post is trying to prove to him that asking dumb shit questions on SO is harmless and can even net you empty worthless points to be one of the top posters.
I don't even answer questions or ask smart questions on SO. I direct all the stupidest and most embarrassing questions I've ever had to that platform.
Spoken like someone who lurked in #Linux on EFNet.
There's a way to foster new people who are interested in your field. There's a time to explain something, and a time to say you're at a point where you should be able to grasp this, and point them in a direction, and wish them well. There's never a time to make someone feel stupid for simply asking a question, even if it really is a stupid question.
It feels crazy to say this, but I find StackOverflow useless in 2023. It's crazy because ten years ago or even six years ago StackOverflow was everything. There were all the jokes that you couldn't even code without it or that StackOverflow being down would halt all programmers worldwide or whatever and they were for a large part actually true. If you tried to set up a new library or framework or whatever you would eventually run into an issue that would just take way too much time to figure out by yourself and you'd find the solution on StackOverflow in minutes (or ask a question yourself and often get a good answer.) Sure, it was a bit of a hostile community but most of the time if you phrased your question well you'd get a good answer that would solve your problem. You could even use it exclusively - restrict your searches to site:stackoverflow.com and you'd be fine. I found many solutions on StackOverflow that were absolutely not anywhere else on the web.
Today, I use a combination of Github issues, documentation and ChatGPT/Copilot - and it's way more powerful than StackOverflow, it's not even close.
One underappreciated part is that the rate of change of programming has significantly increased. Two months time today brings more change in our world than a whole year in the 2000s. Not even just AI stuff but also the frequency and magnitude of change in frameworks, best practices, services, APIs... I once learned things from paper books, now by the time you've written and published one it's already outdated. Keeping a massive resource like StackOverflow up to date in 2014 or so required a similarly massive effort, but with today's rate of change it's crazy.
I hope they can turn it around but I fear it's already dead.
You are probably correct, but that perspective can be skewed by becoming a better developer and learning more about your language's documentation and how to research.
As someone doing full-stack PHP in 2014 I'm not sure about that. SO was filled with bad advice for PHP and JavaScript. It was so bad you could use it as a guidebook for writing outdated insecure code.
Agreed. I've always viewed SO as being just slightly better than w3schools. Worse than useless. It has benefited my career significantly that I never got in the habit of using it.
For many domains, it was perfect - how do I adjust the margins in LaTeX or how do I reverse the output of ls.
But for programming, you'd get a similar "it works" answer ... eventually. And even if you read the comments under the answer, you still might get burned by side effects/security issues you'd not thought through.
It's such a shame they've closed their job board. It was the only decent developer-centric job site. Having a CV connected to SO profile was one place where the Internet Points were actually worth something.
SO has languished so much, it’s really sad. There is a definite need here, and yet they seem happy to provide the same service they did 10 years ago while people migrate to LLMs and copilot and GH search and the like.
Sir, you work as a sales representative, we have your employee records here... oh wait, you've been marked as duplicate, there's a guy doing purchasing already employed, you've been deleted!
It's unclear if today is 28% or if that's the whole year. TFA says:
> Stack Overflow has laid off 28 percent of its staff over a year after doubling its employee base in a massive hiring push.
and
> Coding help forum Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff as it struggles toward profitability.
The linked letter from the CEO says:
> This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing impact to the lives of Stackers. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%.
The same reason the board never does anything to punish CEOs, even when they run the company into the ground. It's a good old boys network where the people on the board are themselves an executive somewhere else, and they want their own boards to take care of them.
I can't help but wonder why did they have a massive hiring push recently? I don't remember any huge functional upgrades, the site is pretty much how I remember it being for years. Why double the staff? What were they trying to do? Did they just convert from engineering org to a massive sales org with engineering on the background?
SO was such a great tool when it was created and for a long time, but now we have so many options. Collaboration improved in every front, both due to tech improvements and to becoming the default human behavior in all of IT, rather than minorities. And the whole industry has better standards now.
so long, it was an okay to good decade but that’s it. really good at the beginning.
LMs are going to get dated pretty quick if they cant update their models fast enough, completely unknowledgeable of newer frameworks and it becomes more obvious every week in faster moving communities. Really good at the beginning
Stack Overflow is really a relic of the past at this point.
Libraries and tools change so fast these days, I almost never find what I need on SO. You've got to go into Github issues, get in a discord, or go to some other source to actually find root causes. If you do find something, it's likely to be from 8 years ago, and it's rarely still the "best" answer.
I think developer troubleshooting will be reinvented, and almost nothing that SO has built is needed for troubleshooting in 2024/2025. Some leaner or more capable solution will come along that fully leans into LLM-supported search.
I was really thinking they’d be able to train a high quality coding model and connect it back to the community better than anyone since it’s their platform & data.
I'm absolutely certain that the private equity monstrosity that paided almost $2B for it a couple years back is fervently working on this to recoup their investment.
