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29 pointsexploraz55 comments

StackOverflow is moribund pile of junk. They've never managed to understand that software development is a highly fluid, constantly evolving space. Instead of embracing this, they've been trying to build a static encyclopaedia.

Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.

There probably is still a space for a SO-style site to exist, but they'd need a drastic change of approach. LLMs (+ Reddit I suppose?) have taken over most the engineer support role.

> Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.

This rung so true to me, given that my answer from 4y ago was closed as a duplicate of an answer made 3m ago :D (no, the nuances were not considered and the questions were ultimately too different; this didn't influence moderation decision at all and I was very confused on how I've made a duplicate 4y ago of a question in, at that time, the future)

Stack Overflow should have been a strong connection for developers who started building software prior to 2022.

A niche place to find the solution for something getting in your way.

Instead, my own experience and every anecdote I've ever heard from those who tried participating mirrors this one.

Genuine questions and thought out responses closed in the harshest way possible.

If the policy on duplicates weren't so rigidly and coldly enforced it would be a place I've visit frequently to learn.

Instead I avoid it and do not feel bad that it's been superseded by LLMs. Which sucks because good human responses are far more preferable.

I still can't even get enough points to answer questions on some of their boards, despite me having a good answer to an unanswered question!

Screw them.

Add to that weird and counterproductive rules. Can't ask questions about framework selection on programming sites. Can't ask for gear recommendations on outdoor sites. Can't ask counterfactual questions on politics site. On history sites you can only ask questions after extensive research. If an obscure subsite of Wikipedia half-answers something vaguely related, the question gets closed (or at least you get angry comments).

It's weird how SE turned itself into a site for not answering questions!

Ads should not exist at all.

They are psychological, manipulative, influencing tools. It's like an annoying wasp that appears out of nowhere and follows you around.

Nobody asked for this.

When this comes to StackExchange, use a PiHole and protect yourself from this barrage of irrelevant ads.

Ads are also used as infection vectors by spyware now. See:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/int...

Note: Ctrl + F: malicious advertisements

as the purpose of the post was not to highlight that fact. But given that Google is an advertising company and they still mention it ...

....now?

Friend, it has always been this way. Malware in ads is literally the primary reason we created adblockers in the dark mists of time.

Flash was killed off because a majority of ads became cancerous Flash abominations executing all kinds of malicious code.

I stand corrected. Had heard the term malvertising but didn't happen to read such a concrete example like the one I shared. But from what you said I m sure many exist.

Ads, which are the sole reason for the attention-grabbing-at-all-costs society we find ourselves in, are, in my opinion, one of the greatest cancers to ever befall us.

Ads are information. They're made up of fact and opinion. The facts are valuable. I would like to know if there's a new pizza place that opened in my town. We all, by necessity, have to buy lots of things in life, and we should know what the options are. We're also adults who can separate the fact that a pizza place exists from their biased claim that it's the best pizza.

We don't need to go overboard with calling advertising cancer. As is usually the case, we can ignore the most extremist takes. Ads are annoying more often than useful, but you can say that about lots of things in life.

Ads are to information what propaganda is to objective reporting. Informative ads used to exist, e.g. the content of the venerable Computer Shopper magazine was mostly ads and quite informative. What changed? Well, those Computer Shopper ads mostly consisted of lists of bits and parts and widgets followed by their sales price, some contact information and that's it. Not so for the blithering idiocracy which is the 'modern' advertising industry where it is all about lifestyle and image and signalling and sex and anything else except for just saying 'buy our widget for €XX.yy a piece, 10% off when buying 3 or more'. Nope, instead of an informative list of widgets and gizmos we get a diverse couple - black man, white woman - smiling happy smiles because of ${reasons} which have nothing to do with whatever they're trying to peddle. Add some bullshit about sustainability and building better worlds together and such, drape it in a rainbow flag and done, here's your ad for those ramen noodles. Oh, you're selling cars instead of noodles? No problem, we'll ask the diverse couple to eat their noodles in a parking lot. What, no noodles? Fine, let them starve in the parking lot, smiling happy smiles because of $reasons. We'll throw in an angry fool of a white man who can be told off by the kind and wise black man, that'll sell those noodles - ehhh sorry, cars. Yes, cars, or was it bathroom slippers? Doesn't matter. Here's your ad, now pay us.

This is why ads should be something you actively look for, not something that is shoved into your eyeballs on every medium conceivable.

> Nobody asked for this.

Well... the advertisers did.

No they didn't. Most advertisers are running at negative ROI, but they just have to run ads as they can't risk other companies taking over. Biggest advertisers would be happy if the ads are banned. It's the new and small companies that would find it harder.

> Ads should not exist at all.

> They are psychological, manipulative, influencing tools.

The second paragraph is in my opinion also an accurate description of a very huge amount of people. By your argumentation that ads should not exist at all: shouldn't these people also not exist at all?

If you have questions consult São Paulo where they already implemented OPs philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

However, ads are also the reason why many services on the Internet are free. So maybe they are not completely bad.

It’s not free you’re just paying with your attention which is the most valuable and scarce resource you have. Its value is convertible into money, it’s just not obvious from the user’s perspective how. From SV’s perspective is crystal clear. Every moment your mind is focused on an ad is a moment it’s not focused on something more important to your life. Some people don’t value their time or attention and Silicon Valley is happy to agree.

Your attention is convertible into money through showing you which things you should spend money on. You can also convert your own attention into your own money by not spending money on those things.

At least it was originally like that. Nowadays political propaganda is also massive. The monetary value to Russia or Israel, of the majority of the USA supporting their side of their war, is immense.

Which thing you should spend money/attention/energy on is the primary task you have at any given moment of your life. It’s maybe the one decision that is not appropriate to outsource. Consider fine, but dictate no. And if you don’t find the next most important investment in your life by pull, not push, you’re lost. Which is okay but when I’m lost I’ll take my inspiration from somewhere other than, anywhere actually other than, Madison Ave. Or anyone’s political agenda for that matter. Thanks but no thanks.

HN complains about any monetization strategy including recurring payments, yet complains if the company revenue is low. Almost all of the internet is paid by ads, users almost never pays. Company pays, but then the company is paying the money that they directly or indirectly earned through ads.

Recurring payments are fine for services that have a recurring cost, which is often not the case.

Development cost is recurring cost.

Great, then let me buy a specific version as a single purchase.

Would you be fine if that version is affected by botnet in the future, or if the documentation is not updated for newer windows version unless you pay.

And would you be willing to pay $200 one time or $10/month(say assume the average subscription time for users is 2 years), so to recoup the amount they need to increase the cost a lot.

There is a lot of software sold as a single-time purchase for a reasonable price, so it’s certainly possible to make it work.

How do you feel about news subscriptions?

Most ad-supported things also should not exist.

Although Stack Overflow, terrible as it is, is not one of those.

HN is ad supported (in that it's marketing for ycombinator) should it not exist?

TANSTAAFL. Ads are just another way that lunch isn't free. You're welcome to consume all the ad paid content you want and then bitch about it. But it's just like complaining that other things cost money. However we pay for other people's labor, it's a corellary of opposing slavery. The alternative is compelled unpaid labor, or not consuming things. So choose: slavery, poverty, or perform labor to compensate other people for theirs. Sometimes that means waking up at 4am to work in the salt mines, and sometimes it means watching stupid ads. Personally I like having the occasional choice.

Even paid products have ads now. Like Smart TV's, Windows11, etc, ...

> Nobody asked for this.

The people who aren't willing to sign up for an account and pay a monthly/annual/per-article fee asked for this.

People have bills to pay after all.

How is a PiHole going to stop native ads on stackexchange?

I always think of ads like a big flashing sign saying "I'm trying to screw you over!"

Given how much research goes into psychology just to make them work, they're basically a form of malware for the brain (and sometimes for the device they run on).

I understand that SE needs to make money, but I find it fascinating how voluntary content (both questions, answers and moderation) is being monetised. Should I ask for percentage of ads income when my questions / answers are viewed?

There has to be some price tag associated with running Stack Overflow, but I wonder if it's within the range of something a collective could manage.

More and more I think we need volunteer projects running the things we depend on the most. Community driving email, forums, social networks and Q&A sites like Stack Overflow. A community driven Stack Overflow could still run a job board, or have the C# section be "Sponsored by Microsoft", or run a Jetbrains ad. If you only have to pay for hosting, then you need less ad revenue.

Stack Overflow famously ran on a half-rack of servers, duplicated in two locations for redundancy. This stopped when they got acquired by a cloud company - they were moved into the cloud. But it's clearly both possible and not too expensive.

I see prices around me for $500-ish/month for half-rack colo. Of course you have to bring your own servers if using this option.

If they'd protected their knowledge from AI crawlers before it was too late, they might stand a chance, but in this climate, they're just adding nails to their coffin.

Very weird writing trying to convey that the ads are at the same time indistinguishable from the useful content and clearly distinguishable from it

lol, more garbage I'll never see thanks to uBlock Origin, which everyone should be using at this point.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#ublock-...

Bummer there's no one in that audience that can write a plug-in or something to block them.

Targeted Ads done correctly provide value. I found my favorite clothing company, for example, thanks to an Insta ad. I also appreciate well crafted copy. Mindless firehose ads, however, aggravate me. (I use Kagi).

Looks quite blockable using a bit of scripting hunting for blocks with 'Sponsored' and 'Report this ad' in them. If it isn't it is just the end for these sites, ads begone.

What they should have released, over a decade ago, was a plugin for ides so we could search for queries directly from there.

LLMs have mostly replaced Stack Overflow for me. I wonder if this is true for other people too.

Absolutely, I much rather push docs into LLM when really needed, it works miles better than googling and/or SO, especially for smaller tasks

Does stack overflow still exist?

I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Because where a LLM falls short is in the same topic SO fell short: highly technical questions about a particular technology or tool, where your best chance to get the answer you were looking for is asking in their GitHub repo or contacting the maintainers.

The main benefit for me is of the upvotes and comments telling me which solutions/approaches are better than others and why. Present day LLMs on their own don't have that context, nor the critical thinking.

As I see it, the next step is a synthesis of the two, whereby StackOverflow (or a competitor) reverses their ban on GenAI [0] and explicitly accepts AI users. I'm thinking that for moderation purposes, these would have to be explicitly marked as AIs, and would have to be "sponsored" by a proven-human StackOverflow user of good standing. Other than that, the AI users would act exactly as human users, being able to add questions, answers and comments, as well as to upvote and downvote other entries, based on the existing (or modified) reputation system.

I imagine for example, that for any non-sensitive open source project that I'm using Claude Code for, I would give it explicit permissions to interact on SO: for any difficult issue it encounters, it would try to find an existing question that might be relevant, if so, try the answers there, and upvote/comment about those, or to create a new question, and either get good answers from others, or to self-answer it, if it later found its own solution.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-gener...

>> I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Perhaps better than current models at detecting and pushing back when it sounds like the individual asking the question is thinking of doing something silly/dubious/debatable.

SO is actually a great resource to train your LLM on :)

"We've got an egg, why do we still need the chicken, eh?"

Does anyone use these sites anymore?

When I do use them, I always get there using LLM queries via Kagi Assistant. And when I get there, I don't spend more than a minute looking for the info that was presented by the LLM summary. I don't spend time as a contributor to review posts anymore.

Ah yes, “ads” the manager’s swan song for any failing model.

Given how ruthlessly this site treated everyone when it was relevant, not a single tear will be shed when the front page is a letter from the founder.

Wow. Lol, the Internet is becoming a better and better place all the time!

I can't believe we keep making progress. You know. Things get better and better as time goes on. Right?

Right?

...... Right?

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