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Comment by beeboobaa3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but the funny thing is, the only people I've ever seen complain about SO are people who don't know how to search.

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Everyone has a pet theory about what’s wrong with SO; but here’s the truth:

Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working.

Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man.

That is a sinking ship.

If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search.

Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform.

That’s some high level BS.

I get useful info from SO all the time, so often that these days it’s rare I have to ask a question. When I do, the issue seems to be it’s likely niche enough that an answer could take days or weeks, which is too bad, but fair enough. It’s also rare I can add an answer these days but I’m glad when I can.

We're talking about stackoverflow right? The website is a veritable gold mine of carefully answered queries. Sure, some people are shit, but how often are you unable to get at least some progress on a question from it? I find it useful in 90-95% of queries, i find the answers useful in 99% of queries that match my question. The thing is amazing! I Google search a problem, and there's 5 threads of people with comparable issues, even if no one has my exact error, the debugging and advice around the related errors is almost always enough to get me over the hump.

Why all the hate? AI answers can suck, definitely. Stackoverflow literally holds the modern industry up. Next time you have a technical problem or error you don't understand go ahead and avoid the easy answers given on the platform and see how much better the web is without it. I don't understand, what kind questions do you have?

Nobody is criticising the content that is on the site. The problem is an incredibly hostile user base that will berate you if you don't ask your question in the exact right way, or if you ask a question that implies a violation of some kind of best practice (for which you don't provide context because it's irrelevant to the question).

As for the AI, it can only erode the quality of the content on SO.

I get good answers all the time on SO or used to. My problem is that I've been down voted several times for "stupid question" and also been down voted for not knowing what I was talking about in an area I'm an expert in.

I had one question that was a bit odd and went against testing dogma that I had a friend post. He pulled it 30 minutes later as he was already down 30 votes. It was a thing that's not best practice in most cases but also in certain situations the only way to do it. Like when you're testing apis you don't control.

In some sections people also want textbook or better quality answers from random strangers on the internet.

The final part is that you at least used to have to build up a lot of karma to be able to post effectively or at all in some sections or be seen. Which is very catch 22.

So it can be both very useful and very sh*t.

-30 votes would be extremely unusual on SO. That amount of votes even including upvotes in such a short time would be almost impossible. The only way you get that kind of massive voting is either if the question hits the "Hot Network Questions" or if an external site like HN with a high population of SO users links to it and drives lots of traffic. Questions with a negative score won't hit the hot network questions, so it seems very unlikely to me that it could be voted on that much.

You can get +30 from the HNQ list, but -30 is much harder, because the association bonus only gives you 101 rep, and the threshold for downvoting is 125.

I don't think I've ever seen anything, no matter how bad, go below -5, and most don't go below -1. Once a question is downvoted:

- it's less likely that the question even gets shown

- it's less likely that people will even click on it

- it's less likely that people who think it's bad will bother to vote on it, since the votes are already doing the right thing

- if it's really bad, it will be marked for deletion before it gets that many downvotes anyway

SO has its problems but I don't even recognize half the things people complain about.

But what problem is there with it? Most of the important questions have been answered already.

I submit that what SO is doing is working; it's just that SO is not what some people want it to be.

SO is not a pure Q&A site. It is essentially a wiki where the contents are formatted as Q&As, and asking questions is merely a method to contribute toward this wiki. This is why, e.g., duplicates are aggressively culled.

>is not a pure Q&A site. It is essentially a wiki where the contents are formatted as Q&As

The thing is, the meta community of Stack Overflow - and of other similar sites like Codidact - generally understand "Q&A site" to mean the exact thing you describe.

The thing where you "ask a question"[0] and start of a chain of responses which ideally leads to you sorting out your problem, is what we call a discussion forum. The Q&A format is about so much more than labelling one post as a "question" and everything else as an "answer" or a "comment" and then organizing the "answers" in a certain way on the page.

[0]: which doesn't necessarily have a question mark or a question word in it, apparently, and which rambles without a clear point of focus, and which might be more of a generic request for help - see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236.

>Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working.

It's working just fine. The decline in the rate of new questions is generally seen as a good thing, as it's a sign of reaching a point where the low-hanging fruit has been properly picked and dealt with and new questions are only concerned with things that actually need to be updated because the surrounding world has changed (i.e., new versions of APIs and libraries).

>Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform.

On the contrary. Almost everyone who comes to the site seems to want to use it in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the site's intended purpose. The goal is to build a searchable repository of clear, focused, canonicalized questions - such that you can find them with a search engine, recognize that you've found the right question, understand the scope of the question, and directly see the best answers to the highest-quality version of that question. When people see a question submission form and treat it as they would the post submission form on a discussion forum, that actively pollutes said repository. It takes time away from subject-matter experts; it makes it harder for curators to find duplicates and identify the best versions thereof to canonicalize; and it increases the probability that the next person with the same problem, armed with a search engine, will find a dud.

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