No wonder. If I ask ChatGPT a question, it answers it.
If I asked Stack Overflow a question, they made sure I wished I hadn't.
If I asked Stack Overflow a question, they made sure I wished I hadn't.
- Ask ChatGPT (or a similar AI chat bot) a question, it at best gives some at most semi-true answer. In the best situation, I can immediately see myself where the mistake in the answer is.
- Look at Stack Overflow: very often find an answer
- In the rare situation that I cannot find an answer on Stack Overflow, and ask a question: get a good answer (often many good answers) after a few hours that let(s) me realize that I have a lot to learn about the respective programming topic, which I will do.
- from 10 years ago, and an entirely different version of the language/library
- from more recently, but it's been closed as a duplicate
- with a specific caveat, but that guy ignored and the question was also closed as a duplicate.
- with a wrong answer, that you'd like to post a correct answer for, but you haven't karma farmed enough
It'd only get worse in cases where only a human had access to the knowledge or the means of attaining that knowledge.
Besides, Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. have far more public data to train on, Stackoverflow only really provides the schema one would want for fine tuning to make sure the answers are in the right general question-code-answer-code format.
Once that is trained properly (see: to the understanding level of compression, not just memorization) you only need to update the model on new libraries and languages, which can be trained from repos and docs directly.
They ran adds to cover the servers and development cost. A fork must find how to get money.
Besides, Stackoverflow runs ads and profits directly from users' posts. You don't get to own things just by the virtue of being a platform that lets people host things. Does Github own all the people's code they host? Does a cloud service own the software people put in their containers? Of course not. Stackoverflow themselves state that each answer is the property of the poster, licensed as CC BY-SA. Even Reddit's TOS states that "You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to Reddit".
Now whether there should be a class action lawsuit including everyone who's ever posted on Reddit or Stackoverflow against OpenAI is another story.
https://files.catbox.moe/l5n5gd.jpg for some of the results in their technical report
Is there something about stackexchange format that accidentally encourages this? I go on various discords (learn piano, javascript, typescript, various games) and the absolute worst treatment I got was nobody replying.
Most of my reputation gained there is because I answered my own answer and ironically - just once - copied a solution from a thread on GitHub and pasted it there.
Had I been a minute or two later I suspect it would have been closed as poor quality.
I only spotted it by pure chance because I had just wondered the same thing before having a "duh" moment when I realised it was a really simple solution to what sounds complicated (but isn't).
So I was able to interpret the "real" question and answer it.
But, as you say, never a bit of feedback from the question asker. No acceptance, just abandonment.
It just slowly gathers karma, around 10 per month for ~10 years.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27607516/sql-join-with-c...
Which says more about your style of asking than about the SO community.
You could try a "I know I should be doing X but I want/need Y" disclaimer (also often useless) or spend writing half a novel, to only get told "can you make that a shorter repro?" or back to square 1, "you shouldn't do that'.
I refuse to interact with the platform after these encounters.
All I was doing was just: putting effort into my questions
A lot of questions show people have not done that by either reading manuals or searching SO.
Why should a answereer put effort into writing a good answer when the questioner has not shown any effort?
My understanding of the reasoning behind some of the moderation - flawed as that often is - is to make the questions and answers 'general'. Which means a question that is very specific to one person may be voted to close or voted down.
To take an example of another stack exchange site (chemistry.SE), they get a lot of 'homework questions'. Literally some questions are like "I have an exam in an hour PLEASE HELP". The stated policy is _not_ to just answer these questions, but to guide people towards a solution. Very frustrating for the person asking the question - who, you know, has an exam in an hour ...
Ultimately there are policies and processes intended to improve the overall quality, and sometimes that is a good thing and sometimes it leads to everyone getting annoyed with the whole thing.
That's the opposite of the guidance, or at least the guidance as it was back when I was active on SO.
General questions "What's the best way to do X" are shut down.
Questions should be specific and about actual problems you have rather than general problems.
Solving real problems with real solutions builds up a strong data set, not questions about imagined problems and their answers
Ultimately though, Stack Overflow just faced the customer service curse: as volume rises, moderation gets blunter.
May I ask your SO id? It'll be a link like https://stackoverflow.com/users/1, except with a different number.
Consider two scenarios : a) I have installed some software X but messed up one of the install steps and now there is this weird error. Or b) when installing this software, it always errors if library Y is on an old version.
For b) it is clearly a 'general' problem that many people will face. For a) it could be seen as a user error and therefore not generally useful. From the point of view of the people facing a) though, it absolutely is a problem!
"How do I sort a list of US States in Python 3.10?" Too specific.
"How do I sort a list of strings in Python?" About right.
"How do I sort a list with my computer?" Too general.
A great SO question ① is about programming, ② has a factual answer and ③ if other people need that answer, then their search terms match the wording in the question. It's that simple. Answering that kind of question is worthwhile for people like me, because many people will later search, find the question and benefit from the answers. Spread the knowledge!
And I disagree that questions need to have one factual answer. Great questions often have many highly ranked answers showing different ways to solve issues or emphasizing different aspects of solving the question.
A great question is one which others also have.
2. It sounds as if you think the moderators and the answerers are disjoint sets. They're not, at least not in the tags that I follow. The power tripping mods are the same people who contribute a majority of the answers. The decision of whether to answer or close is one decision, not two decisions made by different groups of people.
Mostly, moderators and answers feel like disjoint sets because the majority of answers come from the long tail of people (at least it feels to me).
But likely it is similar like with Wikipedia where the moderators feel like that they do most of the work when in reality they really don't and others would be happy to do the work if the moderators wouldn't hamper them.
There have been exceptions, e.g. we asked a site moderator to wipe someone's bas64-encoded password from a question. The user probably changed password, but we got a site moderator to wipe it thoroughly without waiting for that. I know those site moderators do a ton of work, but the power trip behaviour you see as questioner is done by answerers like me.
The site moderators do things like cleaning up vandalism or spam, when someone uses a script to add outgoing links to a thousand pages.