After 16 years, we're renewing the StackOverflow Brand
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meta.stackexchange.com
How they prioritized that list is exactly how they have prioritized their operations.
I was roundly berated for not reading carefully enough, until one lonely soul piped up and said that actually there was a typo in the book's example code.
I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes... I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.
But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.
In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.
Some overly-zealous mod came and edited (!!!) what i wrote because they didn’t like the wording. No swear or any kind of trouble involved, they just didn’t like the words i used.
Picking the specific words, besides merely answering questions, is quite literally what makes me me and what makes someone else someone else, in a text-only community.
I never replied any other thread since then and never posted again. Whatever I write can be edited according to what random person somewhere thinks is better.
Going to extreme: if some mod decides to edit my comments to include racial slurs, that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.
I do not play that game.
No wonder they’re getting crushed by ChatGPT and other LLMs.
I would never touch the wording though.
I don’t post or reply on stackoverflow.
Of course if you do not trust SO itself to not delete this history (mods cannot do it) then yes, that's a problem.
- Competent
- Selfless
- Free
If you go to meta you can witness a zoo of psychopaths.
This is in high contrast with many of the Stack Exchange sites where people are lovely and very helpful.
The usual argument about SO hard core approach is that there is so much crap in questions that people who want to answer are fed up with this. This is a fair comment, but if someone made the effort to get 100+k of rep by asking and answering questions, it would be worthwhile to pay a second of attention to what they wrote.
Otherwise it would be better to just say that only elitist questions are allowed, at least if would be clear.
And as for Meta - well you need to go there and dare to ask a question and you will see. The most infuriating downvotres and comments are "people are making about that twice a week for years" → wouldn't it be time to step down from the ivory tower and realize that sione people are constantly asking for something (toe be there on not be there) it may mean that there is an issue? Downvoting the ones who ask is certainly not going to help.
The funny thing is that I am, and the moderators are, volunteers. We ask and answer questions. But it seems like we owe something to SO and we should not dare to raise comments. This is how a company dies.
Stackoverflow's problem is that they did not push back on AI right from the start. Instead, they launched hundreds of surveys where they tried to extract from developers that they want AI.
Well, they don't. People don't like their free work under the Creative Commons License to be sold to "Open"AI under a partnership.
Is the recent lockdown with captchas designed to grant "Open"AI a monopoly over the stolen Creative Commons contributions? Is that the goal of the rebranding?
TLDR: it seems like they don’t want to, but there was enough uproar when they tried to stop that they reluctantly brought them back, behind a dubious clickthrough agreement which asserts “should I distribute this file for the purpose of LLM training, Stack Overflow reserves the right to decline to allow me access to future downloads.”
Actually you've been alienating the developers for years and no rebranding will fix that.
They are asking the community to get involved in the process, but don't exactly tell them how. Possibly because they aren't interested in their opinion, but just want to keep them busy to keep up the appearance that they truly care. I guess so that the backlash is smaller when they actually roll it out.
My personal opinion of stack overflow is, that they're past their summit. The community is toxic. Questions get closed or down voted for subjective reasons. I've been a big fan of especially the serverfault community. It was small enough to feel familiar, friendly, and questions were not met with a harsh tone. It felt like building a reputation there was worthwhile.
I don't feel like that anymore, and for a long time. The community also changed. When before, my correct answers would get accepted or at least upvoted, more and more often Questioners don't care anymore. That is not StackOverflows fault, but it still keeps me from investing the time to answer questions if I don't even get a thank you in return.
Now the community takes a friendly tone with this post, but it just feels like a layer of pretense, from an enterprise that doesn't care about anything than the money. It's fair enough, but not enough to really impact me.
I just don't care any more.
No matter how much research and debugging you did in advance, no question can be formulated correctly. That is also partially SO's fault for making it impossible to link other things on the web, and the text length limit, and the trigger happy mods closing new threads etc.
It's a wrongly designed game at this point that benefits monopolization of abuse of power instead of being a welcoming community.
In terms of my use, most questions and answers either were low quality, the question was a bit off of what you really wanted to know, or if it was a problem that required discussion or opinions, a ”real” hobbyist forum was better.
While at some point I felt like I (tried to) look up everything from SO, I now basically never use it anymore, but thanks for all the fish!
I'm pretty sure the people who posted answers weren't doing it in the expectation of getting paid.
For myself, I no longer find utility in the site. I now use LLMs to do what I used to use SO for, and find them to be far more useful.
I am aware that a lot of that usefulness, is because the LLMs trained on SO content.
Ongoing via OpenAI licensing of SO API live feed.
It should be locked due to lack of detail.
Never been a fan of the way questions/answers were managed.
Were those job listings from SO contributors, rather than HR departments?
Early on, the job posts were low volume, high quality. I assume this was because it was only SO users who thought to advertise there. But over time, they built a sales team and ended up with the same posts as everyone else.
I got my current job through the SO job board. When I applied, the first person to reply to my application was the technical lead of the role. He was also deeply involved in my hiring process, present at even the HR interview.
He was also very hands-on (in a good way) during my onboarding. In one of the first actual technical tasks he set me on, I was doing the usual SO research when I happened upon an important caveat with an orange amount of upvotes in one of the answers' comments. It was posted by my technical lead.
Our hiring practices have changed since. We now have the usual indirection layers of "Talent Acquisition Consultants". From what I know of the company now, posting on SO Jobs was very likely the initiative of my first TL.
----
I've always had the impression that most of the non-$BIGCORP posters on SO Jobs were there because they had a certain affinity for engineering. I've been to other interviews from companies posting there and while I didn't always end up talking to a technical committee, even the "usual headhunters" were surprisingly[1] technically-literate. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe it was the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Most likely a combination of both.
Though I'm still pretty satisfied with my current job, I was genuinely disappointed when they shutdown SO Jobs.
[1] "surprisingly" is carrying a lot of YMMV-weight in this statement.
Definitely disappointing they shut down the job board, because the quality of candidates was higher than any other board we've used since.
“please -anyone- validate our Marketing team’s existence.”
I won in behalf of my young son, whose graphics card had just expired, but when the SO folks noticed I was in the UK, they decided shipping the card to me was too much effort and didn't send it.
That's when I decided my knowledge and free input would be better appreciated elsewhere and I quit. That was perhaps 12-ish years ago and I think I've been back a handful of times just out of curiosity.
No, Jeff just changed his mind and decided that sending a card abroad was problematic.
Found it: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/3720/three-free-video-c...
While I don't know how well it generalizes, pages like this can't be replaced by LLMs, and still contain instructive technical content. There are certainly other little islands like this.
LLMs have probably forever replaced the "how do I center a button" type questions, but there are still lots of things they can't do that needs a human asking and answering.
We love AI as SO replacers today, as they have an unprecedented way of customizing the solution to people’s situations, but AI is built on the shoulders of… Well, overly moderated Q&A communities among others… And I think we still need them as ”engines” on the web.
Maybe this was it for them, but I would still want to appreciate what SO did for the global programming community (especially for people who have less means to access high quality information / education). Thanks!
Now on-prem Stackoverflow, (SO for teams?) now THAT is a cancer that should be killed.
But for anything nontrivial, the site sucks because a nontrivial question can almost always be framed as being “a lot like” some other, more trivial question, but the question you need answered is in what way is it different from the obvious.
Somehow, LLMs are better at understanding your question and delivering a relevant topic than SO mods.
The fact that multiple times I want to provide a very valuable answer that solves a problem for someone, but I cannot because of their very silly reputation system. I am stuck at 41 points, and cannot answer until I hit 50, and I find its impossible to get above that.
So why would I go to your site if I cannot help?
A perfectly reasonable question with 34 upvotes locked by a power tripping moderator.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79062092/how-does-chrome...
Still need an answer.
The message is telling you something is going to happen. You already figured out what that something is. You already figured out you are not in the 1% on which it is being tested. You are asking whether something that doesn't affect you somehow affects you anyway. The included screenshot tells you how to test what it otherwise would have done.
I think there's only so much oxygen on the 'net for a help site centered around programming. I think to some extent it's a zero sum game and we've been stuck with the local maxima of Stack Overflow, where the nature of social media network momentum has prevented a competitor from forming and overtaking them. I don't necessarily want them to fail or anyone to lose their jobs, but I am happy that LLM's have arrived and replaced my usage of their site. I'm sure a lot of folks love StackOverflow, and it does provide real value, but I'd bet a disproportionately high number of people feel similar to me because of the way they operate that site.
Pedantry
https://kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-offli...
> Stack Overflow is used offline in locations like The Ice Cube Lab, a remote research station at the South Pole and the world’s largest neutrino detector. “We constantly work on scripts, a lot of Python code.There’s always something that doesn’t work. That’s when Stack Overflow comes in handy,” says Ralf Auer, the Ice Cube Data Center Manager.
SO’s target market is developers looking for help with their coding problems. LLMs are a superior interface.
If one is answering a new question, SO is hostile in actively marking it as dupe. Or the Q never gets answered.
No amount of brand dancing will get to the root problem.
SO losing its core audience because it doesn’t do a good job of serving them.