It's clear Google Search algorithm is favoring other websites. And probably AI and the new LLM models are being another reason devs will stop going directly to StackOverflow.
What do you think? Will StackOverflow keep up, or will slowly dye?
I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question had reworded my answer, removed a ton of context, and in effect, made my answer incorrect.
I immediately changed it back. The person who edited my answer was doing this to farm points. With no understanding of the problem or my solution, they were racking up points simply by "cleaning up" answers.
I'm not going to say that this is killing SO. But it does seem like there are some perverse incentives that make it easy for folks to accrue points without actually being competent. And as long as SO points are considered a sign of competence, people will keep doing it.
Gamification works until it gets gamed.
Badges are dumb.
Sites like SO are bad at recognizing the kind of knowledge you got because you spent three years training in the mountains, which I've got some of (as well as opinions about as well founded as those of David Brooks or Jim Cramer)
There was a trade publication that licensed the SO software and I made myself the #2 user on their instance by simply asking a large number of good questions. I could have dethroned the #1 user but didn't want to because he was a knowledgeable guy who wrote great answers. I went looking at SO to see if anyone had gotten to the top of the leaderboard by this strategy and didn't find any so they've got to have some different mechanisms that make this hard.
Around 2017-18 I was pretty involved in the bootcamp/learning programming community, and I noticed my fellow teachers recommending students to "do not ask question on StackOverflow, if you have an issue it' better to ask in Github to the library author, people are more polite and you get better answers".
As an Open Source dev myself, this left a slightly bad taste, but couldn't exactly disagree since SO culture IS brutal (specially in the tight timeframe). I did explain when I could that the best is actually to learn to ask the right question, and that often this is part of the debug experience for yourself, but I was but a little pebble against the stream. This had probably gone for a while, and it was then also when we saw a lot of talk about burnout in open source devs. At some point it seemed there was someone burning out every other week!
Everyone can put 2 and 2 together to see what was happening; low-quality questions were not being asked in StackOverflow anymore and now they were dumped to random OSS devs who didn't sign for it and were forced to move from a collaborative environment that was Github back then to a more customer-facing environment it became.
The "interesting" part is what happened as a consequence. Today if you do Open Source, become semi-famous and want to continue, it's pretty clear that you have to have a thick skin and do a combination of: just shut down ALL issues/support in popular repos[1], or get used to tell people NO quick and easily, or take regular breaks, or I guess be part of a big company being paid to deal with issues as part of your job.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
I really need to try using Kagi more.
You can setup your own self-hosted instances or existing third party ones. It's a game changer both for privacy and UX.
The only outcome is see from that attitude is it fueled hundreds of spammy SO clones with names like “nerdsolution” and “geekanswer”.
We’d be better iff with SO keeping the data private.
If they can find any fault in a question or answer they will take the opportunity to do so.
If you give a correct answer but don't include a significant amount of explanation, it will be marked down.
Often times I see perfectly valid questions and people refuse to answer them but will only respond with a comment.
I just wanted to try to help some people. I don't have time to write Wiki articles or deal with assholes who have nothing better to do than to do than try to find fault with a question or answer.
Also, a lot of the time the answer is to use some library or module and you can get attacked for even acknowledging that modules exist.
It's sadly working around the negativity and toxicity of the site and the people who tend to vote / moderate there.
There are other SE sites I still like though. I tend to have an interesting time on the retrocomputing SE site, for example.
This has been my experience with learn language subreddits as well. I will give a one or two-sentence answer. Someone else will expound on that in the replies. If the reply was written in a snarky way, I get downvoted. That's just an invitation to not participate imo.
Same on HN. I assume programmers get hyper pedantic because they spend their time telling a computer exactly what to do... Although I was pedantic anyway, so maybe cause and effect are the reverse.
Many have notes that they are out of date in sub-comments. But its hard to be noticed against a 700 upvote selected top answer.
Out of date answers are useful when you need to fix something based on old / un-updated OS and/or software. Not every installation uses the latest versions of everything.
In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the documentation, and very advanced ones. Unfortunately, the number of basic questions far outweighs the number of advanced ones. As a result, the platform is losing popularity as users become increasingly less willing to answer questions that could have been easily researched.
Got better results on reddit
P.S.: this is also an issue with hn, though at least dang et al. work tirelessly to identify reposts. It still makes it awkward when the best discussion that you would like to contribute to is locked, or worse, has now bits spread in consecutive discussions...
(if they were really the first and not just failing to find previous occurrences of the same question being asked - because of the popularity of Reddit and how it works, the netiquette rule of searching first and avoiding duplicates seem to be forgotten in other spaces)
-but about those coming later with similar questions.
Sounds Microsoftian enough to be plausible.
It could be argued that the vast majority of questions are deserving of downvotes, but that itself is a problem and a turn-off and the definition of what qualifies as a good or bad question could be adjusted so that the majority aren't downvoted.
"Punishing" people for asking questions that would when the site was new be showered in upvotes feels like kicking out the ladder from under those of us who climbed it.
I still rarely use stackoverflow to ask questions, but I've given up on answering them. I don't mind giving answers elsewhere, but stackoverflow specifically discourages that, somehow.
A few effects that are clearly harmful (IMHO):
- Stackoverflow's game mechanics strongly discourage duplicate questions. But this is pretty dispiriting when it happens to you - both as questioner, and as answerer. Additionally, duplication is often not exact; there can be significant difference that are sufficient to really change the appropriate solution. Stackoverflow is really bad at finding those.
- Even where questions are in essence duplicate, that is clearly not always obvious to the novices asking the questions. It's just not very helpful to close their questions in a rather toxic fashion and effectively berate them for not already seeing the parallels they were looking for in the first place.
- Stackoverflow discourages discussion. However, discussion is useful in finding the best solution or even merely discovering the context and limits of that solution.
- When discussion happens despite the SO UI, gamification rewards almost exclusively the primary asker and answerer; to the extent discussion is permitted, it's not encouraged to be constructive or healthy therefore.
- Stackoverflow's attention algorithm highlights new questions and highlights first answers to those questions. However, this encourages answers that are essentially "First post!!1!", and then maybe editing those into something better. It discourages well thought out responses. This isn't intrinsic in gamification; it's simply due to the way they've tuned the knobs.
- There's an intrinsic tension in how they've tuned their gamification: on the one hand, they encourage knee-jerk responses because speed is of the essence, and on the other, they discourage questions that benefit from quick-n-dirty answers. That tension doesn't lead to a healthy middle ground, it just leads to frustration and a bad experience.
Fora like this one and reddit also use gamification - we all see and respond to votes - but they do so differently. Stackoverflow could try to learn from that. And stackoverflow could make the gamification more collaborative, and less zero-sum. Whether they'll do so... I guess at this point I kind of doubt it.
The community died many years ago. The company itself died a few years ago selling out. The value of StackOverflow is dying as we speak.
The original value was in the community. Sadly the system of moderation was not self correcting enough to change with time. No amount of democracy can solve the toxicity without new people in those positions of power. When people quote the community as being "toxic", you usually look to a number of rotten apples.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/22/the-loop-2-understandi...
Like what's famous at DARPA, there are short tenures to positions of power. StackOverflow could've adopted a similar model for their product and moderation teams(including community ones) to bring in regular positive change. The technical talent was already top-tier and created one hell of a marvel of infrastructure excellence.
I've asked a couple of questions I'd hope would be fairly simple (like how to run a program in cgroups v2), set a big bounty on them, and never got a single useful answer.
- for reference I land on official documentation
- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code
- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation
- for design stuff I land on blog posts
Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.
The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.
Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues.
The only way to fight the stale bot is to constantly spam your issue with "bump" comments, which nobody's going to do (and if they do, surely the maintainers will just complain that you're spamming, and rightfully so).
So if the maintainers don't have time to deal with your issue within X months, it just won't get fixed. They won't even be aware that those issues are still there (because who goes through closed issues looking for stuff to do?).
And so I hit google for an issue I'm having with Project X, stumble upon a "closed" issue, scroll to the bottom, and see "closed by stale bot". WHY IS IT CLOSED WHEN IT IS STILL AN ISSUE.
The bot doesn't really change the outcome (if maintainers don't engage, they don't engage), but it a huge bunch of noise.
Remember the stale bot is an opt-in feature. It is the maintainer (s) who decided to configure it.
So like I've said - as the reference docs improve SO loses value.
I got to top 10% about ten years ago, mostly through basic questions and answers that you could easily do when StackOverflow started. I haven’t touched my account in years, and I am now in top 8% with about 5000 reputation, because old questions and answers keep getting upvotes.
I would think few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation, so what keeps StackOverflow going?
2 things: earning points is exponentially more difficult today, you have to answer quite specific, detailed, niche questions -- and are rewarded with just one, or a a handful of points. Very unlikely you'll get hundreds of thousands.
> few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation
Totally correct. After 15 years, people have realized the points don't have any value. It was fun and cool for a while but at this point, who cares? Would you ever put your SO point balance on a resume? There's simply no benefit, and it's much harder to earn, so why waste your time?
If I were employing a developer, and the developer linked their StackOverflow account, I would definitely judge the quality and quantity of questions and answers. “Farming” reputation to use as a reference requires a lot of skill and judgement.
There is only one person in the top 30 at place #15 that has been using SO less than a decade: https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow
I know one of the top ten, and I would employ them (although I would be surprised if they choose to work with me).
The question of activity can be answered because SO publishes data. For example, the StackOverflow user database can be queried using https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new for LastEditDate, as a proxy for user activity. Or grab the raw database and work out activity over time?
(edits)
They tend to use google to search and then find the SO answer. Yes trhey tend to be beginners and ask the same questions as the beginners 10 years ago. Thus the rep from your old question keeps growing.
But like many others, I've stopped contributing to it. The last time I tried to answer a question, it was marked down. My answer was correct, concise, to SO standards etc, but because the question was poorly worded and formatted, I was seen to be 'encouraging' it.
I appreciate the need for high quality questions. But burying correct answers is completely ridiculous.
If that is the case then new questions are mostly on new frameworks and new languages which are often niche tags and don't have as much engagement as the popular tags once had.
Almost all questions newbies could ask are ripe for getting closed as duplicate and complicated questions are rarely getting answers since they require too much context to fit into SO's format.
People used to make 30,000 reputation out of a single answer on an extremely basic topic like "how do I create a variable in X".
Now all the questions are either duplicates getting closed or hard questions on very specific topic, that, even if you can answer, will get you 10 reputation, and maybe 50 over the years.
On the other hand, the spam of stupid, badly formatted or undersearched questions is intense.
So StackOverflow has basically become a platform where contributors have nothing better to do than moderation, for which there is no reputation reward.
I know someone will tell me it's not all about reputation, but I don't believe it one second.
Toxic deletionists are part of the problem, yes. But they are the literal dregs at the bottom of the bottle when all the good experts have left or burnt out or converted to deletionists. There's no way to find great questions that would make their talents shine.
And here we come to the next point - the company behind SO stopped investing dev time in improving the core experience. Yeah, they were also overrun by vitriolic politically motivated folks, but this is only a lateral plot line. Rearranging CSS, coming up with brand-new bug-ridden editors, concocting impossible get-rich-quick subsites parasitizing on the main site's popularity against the opinions of old-timers - here are just a few examples of brainless PM activities over the years.
As a consequence, Stack Overflow is dead. As in, still twitching from a combination of ideological / greed-fueled Cordyceps firing up random neurons. But yes, mostly dead.
It’s possible that new content is getting lower quality on SO, but for any area where a 10 or 15 year old answer is as relevant today as it was when it was written, it’s still a goldmine.
In what universe? I feel this is one of the strongest examples of selection bias at work that I've ever seen, to be honest.
Stackoverflow comes up for every single thing I search, lol.
However I agree new answers of quality are rarer. The site users are more concerned with identifying duplicates or even any overlap and closing things rather than providing useful information sometimes.
Also, most subreddits accepts posting detailed "Am I doing this wrong?" questions instead of only perfectly asked ones that have never been asked before. I find it a better balance than SO removing a question I spent 30 minutes formatting because someone asked a tangentially related question 5 years ago.
Yes SO is looking at altering its colours to improve accessibility https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386102/accessibilit...
1. It understands the versions more clearly, it won't generate the code for Bootstrap 2 when my question is about Bootstrap 5
2. Asking follow up questions is easy. So the code didn't work. I tell it that and instantly it tells me what I need to do to fix it (leave missing config file, etc) or gives me an alternate.
3. Its answers instantaneously except when their site is down.
4. Its more customised as the answer is not a generic question posted an year ago.
5. It spans multiple domains of knowledge, so if lets say I get an error curl.so not found, it can tell me what I must run on the command line to fix that on my system too.
6. Its so much faster because there are no stupid questions. It's just like typing on google vs SO where you need to proof read and make sure its not a duplicate.
ChatGPT has the user interface of an oracle sitting alone in a cave in the mountains, but it isn't as accurate as an oracle is expected to be. That makes it useless to me.
And yes, often I do follow up google searches for some things - but it has already saved me days of research time compared to Google
I'm so sick of these people on SO.
The most important comment on SO is the one where the OP says "I did this and that, and can confirm it's working". There is no such data when you only use the chat bot. It's a major problem. Perhaps the solution is a more tailored "stack gpt", where the "conversations" are published along with the human responses.
For instance, I needed to write a simple script that gave me all of the roles containing a list of policies where you can specify multiple policies from the command line using “-p” multiple times.
If I look it up on Google, I get this response which is close enough
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66127551/list-of-all-rol...
And I still have to make slight modifications.
Of course I could write the entire thing myself just by looking at the boto 3 docs.
But instead I told ChatGPT
“ Write a Python script that returns a comma separated list of arns of all AWS roles that contain policies I specify with the “-p” parameter using argparse”
Then I told it, “that won’t work with more than 50 roles”. It then corrected the script and used a paginator.
Yes, I had to know enough to recognize the bug. But I count have written or modified a Python script that fast and I write boto3 based Python scripts all of the time.
I definitely could have told it that the first version wasn’t returning all of the results and it would have corrected itself like it did and added a paginator
You would still have documentation published by originators of the technology but a lot of programming is figuring out the quirks of things that aren't in the documentation or getting past bugs.
Though to be fair, it's not like Stack Overflow, or even some of the less updated parts of the official documentation, will do any better than ChatGPT, but with ChatGPT you don't get a date on the knowledge and you don't get the comments from other people telling you that it's wrong or outdated. For me personally, there is also some thing about its confidence that makes me "trust" it more than the internet that I've spent 20+ years not trusting. I'm not sure if that's just me or even why that is exactly. I'm fully aware that the language model is basically just the internet, and still I believe it? I'm happy the first thing I asked it was on a subject I knew a lot about so that I could see straight away that its answer was very outdated. Because if it had been on a subject I didn't know much about, I'm not sure I would have even found out its cutoff point was in 2021. I only learned that fact because the answer it suggested was with a library that I knew was abandoned, to which I asked if it knew that, and it told me when it had stopped "learning".
Take it as you might, but I think the main reason many people were answering questions in the first place is the feeling of competition and wanting to establish oneself as someone with knowledge. This included gaining high scores and for some reason correlated with being quite blunt in the comments. But SO changes a few years ago made it so that asking questions got the same amount of points as answering them. Also people were forced to play nice with the new-comers who didn't even bother reading the rules of the site. And with these changes the whole atmosphere changed from being "a database of questions and answers" to just a site where people ask for free help.
If they kept their original polices, it'd be even more toxic to newbies which destroys their reputation over time.
But because they made it more friendly to newbies, the assholes who generated the most values left. Now questions are left unanswered, more duplicate questions are allowed, and answer quality has declined.
And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”
Ex, when I first started, I would ask things like how do I do string interpolation in shell scripting? Now I have more questions that require considerations from different angles such as why should I use redux over react contexts? how has it been for people with large teams?
The point system also doesn't mean much. I have over 60k points from just asking basic programming questions from when I was in college.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
SimilarWeb shows them as having a very high proportion of incoming traffic coming from search
https://www.similarweb.com/website/stackoverflow.com/#traffi...
RTM -> SO question (not found) -> IRC/Discord -> post question on SO.
As opposed to this:
LLM -> RTM -> SO (maybe post a question)
Simply has SO earlier in the pipeline. The later does not render it obsolete (yet?) from what I can tell.
If a simple annotation to how the LLM got the answer is deployed I think that is where SO will be visited only to ask questions rather than find an answer (still not obsolete).
P.S. this is speculative at best at this stage. SO can be rendered obsolete by some hidden side effect of LLMs/search engines
Im trying to put together a small project using a raspberry pi and figured the subreddit would be a good place to start. I couldnt find good recent answers so I make a short post, what pi would best handle quality video streaming, best ways to go about it ect. Deleted because I was supposed to ask it in a specific thread. Ok sure whatever. So I ask that question in the proper QnA thread and only response I get plainly and unhelpfully says to look at an faq question which dosent answer my question at all. I feel like if your going to have and run a community because your passionate about something, and offer help about that thing, you could probably do better than leading me down the "your question is to generic/easy for me to bother" like an automated help line.
SO feels like that to me, you need to go in with a "worthy" question to get any kind of help and not just stomped down
If you do maintenance programming you always have little questions like "How do you find the length of a string in Python?" and all you need is "len(s)". On Stackoverflow there is a discussion even if there is nothing to discuss, fortunately it is very unlikely that alternative answers like "sum(1 for c in s)" will get near the top but sifting through a lot of wrong answers and garbage is worse in the long term than learning your way around the official documentation.
It's highly unlikely that StackOverflow will slowly die. It's a very MOATY service: strong band, and network effects.
GPT gives better answers 2/3 of the time. It makes up some answers, but often it's more helpful and accurate than what you find on SO anyway.
It was interesting to hear a diverse (in occupation) non-tech group lamenting the search decline. I felt so validated!
Gone are the days of custom documentation layouts and designs that are hit or miss.
It might also be that SO was good for arbitrary and shallow questions, but most problems with more modern frameworks that aren't covered by the docs get domain specific and complex quick.
When I go to SO, I frequently find the answer is not what I was looking for and I've probably missed some keyword to get where I'm going - so I'm back on Google within seconds.
Google doesn't need much smarts to see I'm bouncing off of SO and hardly ever sticking around - if this is a common pattern then it's not favouring other websites that provide a more sticky experience - implication being that answered my question as I didn't return to further refine it.
It just doesn’t feel as useful as it did.
And for most programming questions I go to ChatGPT or GitHub search (which is utter garbage but I think a new version is coming).
https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/38660/was-chatgpt-tra...
I wonder what its contribution was to chatgpt’s ability to answer coding questions. And what happens if chatgpt (or similar) displaces it.
Also interesting is that SO has banned chatgpt from answering but I suspect that will be another shadow “AI vs humans” war.
HN was the nicest to me so far, then Reddit, and SO ranks the last.
There are a handful of decent[ish] tags
Most of it is total garbage
I had searched the same thing on google and stackoverflow and found nothing.
I (obviously) searched for questions related to the work I was trying to do on Google and Stackoverflow and could not find anything useful at all.
I can’t stand these people.
It would be nice if SO would go back to evolving Q&A and stop letting toxic losers become mods.
ChatGPT is like a smart human inventing a hypothetical API which would solve your problem. A service like StackOverflow has people who are actually familiar with what actually exists in reality. The human will usually know enough to come up with some alternative approach or workaround where ChatGPT hallucinates an answer.
I have seen nothing to suggest that future modes will fix the hallucination problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just an inherent, unfixable issue with the concept of neural network language models – they don't have a model of the world from which they produce logically coherent text, they simply have a giant statistical model for which words tend to occur in which order – so I don't see why we should expect a language model to not hallucinate. But I'm not an expert on the current state of the art, so if you have some links to papers which indicate that the language model hallucination problem is solvable, I'm open to admitting I may be wrong.
By design I literally can't add comments/engage in conversation. I need 50 reputation on each individual StackOverflow sites.
On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5. Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).
That hasn't been true since 2019: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-que...
> Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).
The limit is 1000 reputation earned from edits or 2000 reputation total, whichever comes first.
This is against the rules. The fact that you did it anyway makes me believe that your original question probably broke other rules too, and that the "unhelpful" and "toxic" comments were probably telling you that.
Maybe there is some deeply hidden rule against reposting. Or maybe you're just full of shit. But either way, reposting is clearly not a sign of reckless disregard for clearly laid out site rules, so the fact that a person has reposted their question does not indicate in any way that the person has a propensity for rule-breaking.
Then there are the mansplainers who very calmly explain they ignored half of my question because I clearly didn't know what I was doing.
But I still click on SO search results when searching for obscure AWS errors. It's not like the AWS docs explain them. I think there's still some decent content from 5-10 years ago, but it's slowly becoming less relevant as technology marches ahead.
Are you a woman? Do they know you're a woman?
Is mansplaining gender neutral at this point?
I ask because to me the act is quite sexist, but accusing someone of the same without basis seems quite sexist, and I don't see how gender would come up on SO.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75240915/is-it-possible-...
* The images should be inlined so people can see it without having to click to another site. Stackoverflow also has its own image server so it doesn't have to rely on the other site (giphy) not deleting the image, and you add images just by clicking the "image" icon above the edit box.
* The title of the question didn't match the body, which is probably what got it closed. The original title was an obvious "yes" because you already had an example of it in the question.
Edit: Left closed I guess, not originally closed. I see in the history the question was much improved, but it still didn't get past the review queue.
Whenever a community gets large enough that people start to care about their status within that community you get people who just want to throw around their authority.
In Stackoverflow's case though the value of the site comes from how helpful the user base is. I think part of the reason a lot of devs are asking questions on places like Reddit and discord servers these days is because you're less likely to deal with some dickhead picking holes with how you formatted your question before some power user comes along and closes the thread completely before you have an answer.
No you didn't. You don't have to earn any reputation points before you can post answers.
The current situation... If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality..
If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuanced answer, so it will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked.
So it's aimed at mid-level devs to ask things with certain answers, the kind of answer which would most likely be found in documentation. So the people who require help/answers the most are kicked off, whereas people who need answers/help the least are encouraged.
If your question is hard or highly specific then you're indeed less likely to get a lot of responses, because, well, your question is hard or highly specific. People on Stack Overflow are not omniscient.