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StackOverflow Is Having Issues

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38 pointstatoalo43 comments

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

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

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

Maybe, but I don't know see an obvious causal link between that and the quality of the answers and questions.

The user experience of the people in the 1% (the 90-9-1 rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule ) is diminishing. Existing systems showing their age and failing to scale, processes and norms that work in tandem between technology and people are straining as times change.

In these cases, the technology needs to keep pace with the systems (both computer systems and people systems) that it supports. Failure to do that means that the people who are creating content are having to expend more effort to make up for it.

Be it people leaving, or needing to spend more effort to attain the same quality - the result is the same. The quality of the site (questions and answers) is diminishing as people are less able to provide good answers and curate existing material to make good content more visible.

Incentives are super out of whack for sure -- website is saturated and answerers have no real incentive to wade through the mud.

It's for reasons like this that there are new startups cropping up in the field. One that's exciting to me is Quidio, a bounty-based Q&A marketplace that demolishes the 90-9-1 rule for better quality results.

Stack Overflow’s engineers aren’t writing the questions and the answers. How is your comment related?

I'm an idiot and didn't read past the first sentence.

How does that lead to lower quality questions and answers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

system-d private tmp has entered the chat

Not sure if apache or systemd are to blame, or security extremists, but I hate this kind of magic, please crash my app with a clear message instead of doing shit behind my back and showing me fake reality.

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

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

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

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

I work with C# and I almost never use stackoverflow anymore. Back in 2013 when I started working with it I remember I would use stackoverflow every day. But now I find way more answers in github issues. The answers on stackoverflow are usually really dated if they exist at all. Its almost like when microsoft made the move to dotnetcore and started hosting the project on github all the dotnet related activity on stackoverflow stopped.

It's not that it has stopped, but there is less and less open topics where there is no solution. And those topics are usually (in my experience) niche topics and will get better discussion in GitHub issues or in a similar system. Or related to a legacy stuff, then SO could help.

In addition to that, quality of experience, code, as well as quality of documentation increased comparing to before .net core. I find myself often going to the official docs for documentation now, or just look in the sources or even debug the internals using available debug symbols.

Interesting. Granted, I never looked at the .net github itself.

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

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

Can I ask you what workflow you use for this? Any particular tools? What do you do for documentation that doesn't provide a download?

I use Dash on my Mac for most of the documentation. It makes searching any of the "docsets" it has indexed fast. I've recently started creating some of my own.

I save references I use a lot, like the HTML spec, as PDFs. MacOS indexes these PDF files, so a search in Finder is usually all I need to bring the correct document.

If I can't find a reference locally, or know it doesn't exist locally, I'll turn to the Internet. Once I find the bit of information I'm looking for I'll either save the website as a PDF, or save the info in Snippetlabs or Bear so I can search for it next time I need it.

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

It was floating over HN last year, I guess gp has kept it.

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

All it takes to be a 100x engineer these days is to read actual source/docs?

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

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

https://serverfault.com

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

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

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

And it's back!

edit: It's not back.

seems like it comes and goes

Yes, you're right :-(

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

There are dozens of spam sites that do.

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

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

Kiwix is what you want.

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

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

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

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