The Decline of Stack Overflow | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of Stack Overflow

hackernoon.com

94 pointsdvt78 comments

So, years ago I "used" Stack Overflow a lot. Now, rarely, if by "use" you mean "ask and answer questions". But, I find answers to my questions on it every day, and it is still far superior to other sources.

I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.

My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).

SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.

Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.

Do you have any evidence (anecdotal or empirical) that people actually hire based on StackOverflow rankings? I'm sure it's happened in a few cases, but it seems backwards to me. If somebody came into an interview talking about their high SO rank or Reddit karma, I'd wonder if they would actually be focused on their work.

To me, hobbies and online activity aren't really credentials unless you've really built a strong personal brand that directly relates to your job.

Employers that don't look at GitHub and Stack Overflow activity when hiring are being silly. Unfortunately, it's the status quo. I mean, I actually wrote a book published by Apress that rarely gets brought up in interviews.

I once interviewed a guy who listed an academic paper on his résumé. I skimmed the paper, and asked him a soft question about it in the interview (I was just curious about some non-essential detail). He looked surprised said no-one had ever mentioned it before (and answered my question just fine, of course).

As a hiring manager, I rarely look at GitHub and never look at Stack Overflow or Kaggle, or whatever. All these tell me is that you don’t have any hobbies outside of coding.

As for GitHub in particular, it let’s me know if your project was something substantial, or merely an exercise for a class.

GitHub, your book, all that stuff takes time and effort to read, and quite frankly it isn’t worth it. You’re still going to need to go through the interview process so I can figure out if you’re competent. Reading some 1000 line random GitHub repo is hard, and it’s just not worth it.

I don't know about employment, but Stack Overflow has become one of the main lead gens for our 2-person software development consultancy. I monitor the tags that are relevant to our niche and try to answer any sensible questions that come along. (And try to help out people with less sensible questions where I can too.)

This presumably only works if you you cover some obscure-ish, deeply technical niches, not for more run-of-the-mill stuff. If your clients are non-technical, they won't find you on Stack Overflow. If your clients are companies that develop software themselves but need specialist skills for a project, it can work.

Note that I don't think my actual SO score[1] is in any way of importance. I suspect it's more important that:

- The answers are actually well written, in-depth and helpful.

- I have a reasonably recogniseable avatar image. I have been told by eventual clients that they kept running into my SO answers while they were trying to solve their problem themselves. Presumably this pattern is much more noticeable if there is a human face staring back at them from the bottom of the answer.

- Friendly comment exchanges probably help. Being an arse in SO comments probably won't help your chances of being hired by the person who asked the question or had the same problem and found your answer via a web search.

[1] At around 14000, my reputation score puts me in the top 3%, but if the stats in the article are correct, that doesn't even put me in the top third of the 8% of many-question-answerers. (I have answered 518 questions.) Mind you, my mean answer score is probably about 2, with the median squarely at 1; niche topics mean few people read my answer, and even fewer upvote them. My only gold badge is for voting on 600 questions, but I have bronze badges coming out of my ears.

I get loads of recruiter's messages via SO.

In general they are of much higher quality (as in, the person actually read about me and offered an interview because of what they saw) than other sources.

Perhaps ironically, even LinkedIn is a place where I receive a lot of spam recruitment messages.

I think it makes no sense comparing SO ranking to Reddit karma (unless maybe you're applying to a social coordinator position). SO rankings generally imply tangible useful knowledge in the technical space.

So, the evidence I have (anecdotal) is not so much that people actually are hiring, as that people are using SO to try to get leads. Whether or not that actually works, I don't know, but the competition for high rank relative to others undercuts the cooperative spirit.

One of my previous employers reached out to me on StackOverflow, telling me that my profile got them interested in me. I went through their interview process and accepted their offer. The project turned out to be quite interesting and working for them was one of the most positive experiences I had.

FWIW every job I've had in my 7-year career came from connections that stated though Stack Overflow. No one's hiring on the basis of reputation score, but many employers do reach out to users who have repeatedly demonstrated their technical communication and knowledge.

Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to it that work as well.

I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.

It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.

Yeah the guy has the mental consistency of pudding:

"The consequence thereof is that a lot of good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days."

This, merely a few paragraphs after claiming all questions are answered so quickly he has no opportunity to participate.

There's a dichotomy between "questions difficult enough that I need to ask them" and "questions simple enough I can answer them myself", though.

I wanted to share this article because, even as a user in the top 0.99%[1], I constantly get railroaded by "power trolls" -- I was extremely active on the site 6 years ago, but I barely answer/ask any questions anymore (maybe once or twice a year).

I have countless examples of some of my old questions or answers (with 100+ upvotes) being closed almost a decade later just so some new moderator can earn a few brownie points. After a while, it just gets old.

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

My biggest complain about SO is that with the expansion into other fields that questions that used to be welcome on SO (or get more visibility because of being on SO) are being shunted to SuperUser or ServerFault or other sites under the StackExchange umbrella. [1] I think the drive to keep SO purely about "programming" runs into issues similar to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy [2]. As a developer, sometimes I need answers about Amazon Web Services, Azure, Docker, or the Linux command line, as a consequence of programming, but those sorts of questions are, more modernly, marked off-topic for SO.

1: https://stackexchange.com/sites 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

This is definitely something that could be solved with Stack Exchange moderation tools. Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.

>Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.

That is already a thing the sites do.

That's great! I thought their issue was that questions are marked off-topic without further handling, requiring users to ask again on a different site.

Not quite. It's impossible to move a question from Stack Overflow to Server Fault or Super User right now, you can only say that it might belong there.

Do you specifically mean "right now" ? As in it has been disabled at the current moment? Because there are plenty of questions that have been moved around from one site to another in the past.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aserverfault.com+%22migrated...

Edit: Eg here's one from June this year: https://serverfault.com/questions/971652/windows-how-to-kill...

Does this break links and lead to link rot? Other StackExchange sites don't seem to have the page rank of StackOverflow. It also makes it harder to restrict searches to a particular site when questions are spread across multiple sites inconsistently depending on what year they were asked.

Yeah, one of the biggest problems with Stack Overflow is it has a fairly narrow definition of what's on-topic and really awful tools for shifting things to better forums.

Quora, by way of example, does not have the fragmentation issue Stack Exchange with its myriad of sites has.

https://i.redd.it/per2eihv0jn31.png

Half of the complaints quoted are about overzealous moderation, half are about low question quality. So it's unclear whether the article offers a coherent critique; if you're somewhere in the middle of the complaints then maybe you're doing it right.

I do think a coherent issue emerges here: much like wikipedia, stack overflow rewards and privileges those who do "meta" actions over and above those who make positive object-level contributions, when it should be the other way around. Answering a question should be more rewarding than closing it as a duplicate. Helping a newcomer should be more rewarding than driving them away.

Another problem that MANY moderated forums suffer from is too much focus on identity. If everytime you posted to SO or HN or /. or wkipedia or whatever, you were assigned a random id (consistent id for all responses to a specific story) rather than linking to your acct/post history/achievements, with a policy against posting with PII... the cliques might dissolve and the trolls do not benefit.

Not a judgement on the idea, but that's how 4chan works on some boards.

That's smart. Just like how /pol/ does it.

The publish date on this article says October 2019, but it's judging by the tweets linking to it, it's originally from September 2016.

https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fhackernoon.com%2F...

And has been submitted to HN several times previously as far back as 2015 with the same URL. Odd...

Probably has to do with Hacker Noon migrating from Medium to their own platform. Some of the formatting and metadata may have gotten malformed in the move.

Some mods are ridiculous. The profile of one tag maintainer for example read thus (paraphrased) "X is now a mature technology and all the meaningful questions have been asked so I spend most of my time editing and deleting questions".

ALL my questions got downvoted. So I stopped asking questions under that tag.

CUDA? lol. I remember reading that for someone who answers mainly CUDA-related questions.

I occasionally ask and answer questions on StackOverflow, but I find the 'old system' of forums, mailing lists, and chat (now it's Slack sometimes instead of IRC) to be making a minor resurgence.

Recently when a question about Racket went unanswered I resorted to the Racket user mailing list and received exceptional advice. The #python IRC channel is unbeatable for help debugging small snippets (of the kind and size you'd normally put in a StackOverflow post), and the Elixir Forums are just fantastic - they go to great lengths as a community.

The support you'll get in those kinds of places is almost always better than the answers you'd receive on StackOverflow, but the downside is the inconvenience of decentralization. Take Racket for example - the user mailing list is by far the best resource for questions, but how would you know that? There is also an /r/racket subreddit, a [racket] StackOverflow tag, and a (pretty dead) official #racket IRC channel on Freenode. A user is as (if not more) likely to check those places before even thinking to hit the mailing list.

I myself had a StackOverflow post closed recently, but I don't think it's so dramatic. And some tags are certainly better than others. Asking a question on [react] will lead to a flood of poorly written answers from people seeking quick points, for example. [asm] on the other hand has Peter Cordes, who is like a code angel and veritable blessing to all of Hacker Kind.

No matter how bad Stack Overflow gets, it is wildly better than what came before it. If you are not old enough to remember the horrors of trying to get any useful information out of the old world of random forums, or expertsexchange (most of these have gone the way of geocities), take a gander through some of the older MSDN forums - posts from the mid 2000s still tend to show up if you're searching for somewhat obscure IIS or ASP.NET related stuff.

9 years ago I joined Superuser (it was in beta at the time IIRC) out of pure hatred for Experts Exchange and how every time I would put in a technical question in Google, their paywall site would come up.

I'm glad Stack Exchange beat Experts Exchange and will always contribute to it no matter what the politics. Because that's how much Experts Exchange pissed me off.

I never created an account there. I tried a couple times to add a comment or answer a question or ask a question and everything I wanted to do required more points than I had. I had no time or interest in building cred, just so I could help someone out or get help.

The biggest pain point is all this interesting questions closed for bs reasons.

Thank you for your interest in this topic. Because it has attracted aggressive moderation, posting an answer now requires 10,000,000 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count), a signed note from your physician, and special dispensation from the pope.

Would you like to answer one of these other unrelated and very stupid unanswered questions instead?

I've had okay experiences on StackOverflow, but only because

1. I tend to answer questions thoroughly, in keeping with the spirit of StackOverflow being a common target from web searches

2. I dare not ask a question, ever

It is funny that for a site which spent the better part of the last two years to be more welcoming (which they IMO approached unsuccessfully), this is still the prevailing strategy. And it works, so I can't disagree. Now I don't think SO is that bad, if you really try to write a good question, at least in my experience, the reception is good. But I know I'm the odd one out among my dev friends and colleagues about not being afraid of posting questions to SO. Others, like you say, don't dare.

I have a question I want to ask, but haven't. This is mostly because I feel that asking it properly, describing what I've tried, linking to (not) duplicates and explaining why they're not relevant, and linking to the docs to try and explain why I don't understand them, etc., etc, is a great deal of work. In other words, explain why the top 20 Google and SO results and workarounds aren't relevant to the answer I'm looking for. Doing it "properly" would take about 30 minutes. ... and thus I haven't asked.

I went with a workaround that I'm unsatisfied with because it was easier than asking a good question.

I see what you mean, but when it comes to the rigor required to putting together a good question, this is no different than say filling in an issue template when reporting a bug or asking for support in a Github repository, right? Do you avoid that for the same reason? Not that I would blame you, I for one hate filling in overly defensive issue templates designed to discourage drive by shitty issue posters, but inadvertently alienating otherwise decent posters, such as (hopefully) myself.

> Others, like you say, don't dare.

I'm in that camp. I'm not afraid (they aren't going to send goons over to beat me up or anything), but looking at the most common responses to questions posed by others gives me the clear message that it's not worth putting up with that stuff.

That's a fair point, I haven't considered that it is entirely possible to just not want to bother due to one's experience with read only SOs perceived pedantry, as opposed to hostility.

Same. Thought I do ask questions, but I end up spending half a day researching and trying other alternatives to post a proper question in the hopes that it won't be closed. Mine rarely are.

But few people seem to put in the effort to ask questions.

It's okay to ask a question if 1) you have a thick skin and 2) you expect a negative reaction. Otherwise, yes, you're going to be disappointed.

The problem with most bad questions is it's hard to explain why they're bad in a gentle way when there's a fire-hose of bad questions pouring in and you can only spend so much time with each one.

The experience from someone new can suck because someone was terse or dismissive, but they don't understand they were one of fifty people that day to make exactly the same mistake.

If you do not have the time to appropriately respond to the question, then don't respond. Your phrasing makes it seem as though SO moderators are battling an onslaught of poor questions and the site will collapse if those questions are not deleted as soon as possible. It is the over-zealousness to close questions that is part of the problem.

If you are unable to offer constructive feedback to the user who asked the question then you are really just acting as a stop-gap and not really fixing the root of the problem. People ask "bad" questions for a lot of reasons but it you are unable to steer them in a direction that allows them to understand what makes a question "good", they will continue to ask "bad" questions.

Then you get bad questions with no feedback, they just get closed or deleted, and the experience is still "Stack Overflow sucks".

Stack's problem, was and still is, it doesn't do a good job helping new users learn how to use the site.

When it first came out, the state of programming questions on the web was abysmal. The top answers were wrong, and required you to register to view. There were forum posts, and half the answers were basically "RTFM". In my early days, it was things like "How do you convert a string to an int in C++" asked on Usenet. This was asked so many times that Marshall Cline wrote an FAQ which became the defacto place to learn about C++.

Stack solved that problem, AND fixed the issue of low-quality questions and answers.

These days, I find the answer to my question on Stack such that I rarely have to ask anything. Occasionally I'll be bored and answer a question.

Stack is still an amazing resource, just that the community and platform has matured, and there are less opportunities for new users to ask and answer basic questions.

Perhaps head over to Meta and suggest a Minor League Stackoverflow that will allow new users to ask the same basic questions over an over again, earn a fraction of rep, and graduate to the real site.

It might help if you were only allowed to downvote/edit/close on topics where you have proved yourself.

If have gained some reputation answering Java questions, maybe that does not make me qualified to decide if a C++ question is suitable for the site. A bit like the fact that reputation from SO does not carry to other StackExchange sites.

Well, if you have high rep on a tag, you have more power for questions with that tag.

Some of the author's issues seem to be a result of not scaling the voting thresholds based on the sites size. For example, 5 votes needs to close a question: When the site had 100 users, 5 votes is 5% of the site - a meaningful proportion. When the site has 1,000,000 users, 5 votes is 0.0005% - which may have no information content at all, it could just be random noise and the votes to close wouldn't be meaningful representation of the communities viewpoint.

Is this sudden flurry of bearishness about SO somehow (indirectly) correlated to its recent adoption of mandatory gender pronouns as policy?

It's an incredibly poisonous topic because most of the country does not agree with the premise. This is probably flame bait, let me know if it is.

I hated on SO before it was trendy.

They require what?

Don't go there. You'll be sucked into a cesspool of LGBT controverse.

I've found the internet to be a pretty generous community.. of course with any community, there are bad actors that will attempt to commodify that generosity by subtly asking for more and more, all the while profiting on the generosity of humans as a whole. Stack overflow needs to start paying it's workers.

Philosophically I am with you. Though, I do think SO rewards its users in a tangential way. "Karma" is something you can advertise to prospective employers. Not just the score, but you can give examples of how you answer questions for people of different skill levels.

The work I've done on SO, which is frankly insignificant compared to many users, has enhanced my hire-ability as a lead or manager.

I can't stand when someone answers a question on SO by first admitting they know nothing about the subject then take a guess with an answer. Why bother answering if you don't know the subject?

As someone who has asked questions there (or at least tried) a few times over the years, and who does constantly end up there when searching for answers I do think it's kind of heap.

The two major problems I see are a) people constantly claiming that questions are duplicates when they aren't, possibly because of poor reading comprehension, skimming, or some sort of Dunning-Kruger type effect, and b) people re-asking questions because they know an existing identical or almost identical question doesn't actually have a correct or useful answer and not really knowing what they're supposed to do about it, particularly as occasional or new SO users.

After those, is the inability of people to comment on answers until they're judged worthy which makes it so people feel forced to use answers as comments.

While I think the site continues to be useful it also seems to be something of an intractable morass.

Joel Spolski knows about many of these problems and is actively trying to change the culture on stack overflow... needless to say, changing a groups culture is hard.

Part of the reason things are slow to change is because people like that are in charge. It's a forest for the trees thing.

He doesn't need to change the culture. He needs to change the workings. The culture will adjust spontaneously to the workings.

If five downvotes are all it takes to cripple a question, and tens of thousands of people can cast them, then your site will work badly, no matter how successful your culture advocacy.

Downvoting has to cost something. Everything except providing useful answers should cost something.

Stack Overflow is the new Yahoo Answers

Lots of "can you google this for me" and copy/pasted content from other original sources without context or attribution

The problem is that it's literred with low quality questions like "How do I add two chars?" which has been answered incessantly and could also be resolved with a google search.

Their standard for questions should someone mandate that you include your code, include what you've tried to do already, and include the full text of error messages received.

There's plenty of high quality questions that go unanswered for ever. So I don't think you should flatter your self with this analysis. At least great moderation can generally help with low quality questions.

I've asked and answered a handful of questions ad found the experience generally rewarding. Even if there's no answer to a question, it's comforting to know I'm not alone in my struggle. I do wish versions were included in certain cases, especially for services/frameworks with rapidly changing APIs.

Small advice: if you are lucky enough to work with FOSS, just read the source code. Most of SO questions can be answered either by looking at concrete implementation details or by skimming through the code to get general concept. It gives more accurate answers more quickly than people on SO ever could, because

1) it doesn't require waiting for someone to read and answer your question 2) it doesn't require lossy conversion to natural language and back 3) "live" source code is probably more tested and more optimized than synthetic examples that someone came up with in 5 minutes and never ran

As soon as you develop the skill of finding relevant functions in large code bases, SO becomes mostly unnecessary. I never registered there, never asked a question, and don't browse it that often. I clone source code of my most commonly used tools locally just for quick grepping, and use full-text github search for more exotic staff.

P.S. Funny how the article keeps calling SO "totalitarian", while it is, in fact, a painfully precise model of democracy.

Some parts of SO are far worse than others and I think the 'No True Scotsman' falacy mentioned by alttag is very apropos. The GIS stackoverflow is pretty much dead to due to heavy handed moderation.

I think an actual problem with Stack Overflow is question quality. Oftentimes askers will include massive code samples, so it is hard to determine if their question is also your question.

What decline? Are you talking about your own personal perception or like actual data about the site and the way its used?

Personal anecdote: StackOverflow continues to be one of, if not the, best sources for solving programming problems, and I know of literally 0 alternatives that even come close. Quora? Are you kidding me?

Anecdotally: I've found that I now reach for documentation first, coworkers second and stack overflow only as a last resort, where as in past years it used to be the first place I looked. I also find myself more often disappointed with what I do find and leaving the site with the same unanswered question I started out with.

The last two years, all of my hard questions have been about AWS or an AWS manager service. Luckily, I can take advantage of our business support contract and just open a ticket and start a live chat.

If I didn’t have that available, I would probably use Reddit or the local tech Slack group.

Right now it dominates and prevents other similar forums and QA sites from starting up. People who have had issues with SO/SE sites have moved to things like Gitter. This sucks for long term archiving. But that's the state of things on the internet right now.

(Also, my rant form a long time ago was mentioned! That was a pleasant surprise)

Yes, Quora pretty much exists to validate the strict moderation policies used by other sites. There are occasional good answers, but they are buried under a mountain of idiocy:

Questions that could have been answered with 5 minutes' worth of googling.

Completely opinion based questions: https://www.quora.com/Who-sang-My-Way-better-Elvis-or-Sinatr...

Endless duplicates of stupid questions: https://www.quora.com/search?q=lyrics+prank

People who serially produce horrible translations of answers, probably using software, presumably for clout chasing.

And long, detailed, stories that most likely were made up (That's the genre that made me give up reading notalwaysright.com: Too many stories of people who behave horribly until a 7'5" Marine shows up to save the day).

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