Hacker News Reader

Comment by jf22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Quickly stopped contributing.

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.

I've seen python questions marked as 'duplicate' when the question was python 3 and the "answer" was python 2.

Love the duplicates that link to questions that have two answers, neither of which solves the question.

reminds me if how i havent added to wikipedia since about 2008

Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff.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.

> Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff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?

They do do this! When you're on a question, for example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30081275, click on the answer sort order drop-down and select trending.

I've also seen the trending sort automatically applied on certain questions.

So the default priority that it shows to search engine crawlers is the wrong one?

A lot of people say to use Reddit instead of StackOverflow, but IMO Reddit is even worse for this than SO, since most old threads are locked.

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.

When you hear someone say something like that, what they mean is get involved with the related community on Reddit, or Discord, or a forum.

SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group.

Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.

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.

SO is under serious threat from Reddit.

Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.

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.

What I'd love to see is ChatGPT trained on GH issues/prs for a project and then use that to summarize things into something that looks like SO output.

And chatGPT, I rarely need stack overflow anymore

I'm a boomer, how do I find Discords of people coding?

I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting.

e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.

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.

I find they are linked frequently on GitHub pages for projects. If not as part of the README, then somewhere on the right-hand side.

There are also dedicated Discord search engines like disbord.org.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com