Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.
I think the point is not their viability as a business but their relevance in the industry.
Amazing how much hate SO receives here. As knowledge base it’s working super good. And yes, a lot of questions have been answered already. And also yes, just like any other online community there’s bad apples which you have to live with unfortunately.
Idolizing ChatGPT as a viable replacementis laughable, because it has no knowledge, no understanding, of what it says. It’s just repeating what it “learned” and connected. Ask about something new and it will simply lie, which is arguably worse than an unfriendly answer in my opinion.
The advice on stack overflow is trash because “that question has been answered already” yeah, it was answered 10 years ago on a completely different version. That answer is depreciated.
Not to mention the amount of convoluted answers that get voted to the top and then someone with two upvotes at the bottom meekly giving the answer that you actually needed.
It’s like that librarian from the New York public library who determined whether or not children’s books would even get published.
She gave “good night moon” a bad score and it fell out of popularity for 30 years after the author died.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Typically answers are getting upvoted when they work for someone. So the top answer worked for more people than the other answers. Now there can be more than one solution to a problem but neither the people who try to answer the question, nor the people who vote on the answers, can possibly know which of them works specifically for you.
ChatGPT will just as well give you a technically correct, but for you wrong, answer. And only after some refinement give the answer you need. Not that different than reading all the answers and picking the one which works for you.
Of course older answers are going to have more uovotes if they technically work. That doesn’t mean it’s the best answer. It’s possible that someone would like to make a new, better, answer and is unable to because of SA restrictions on posting.
The kinds of people who post on SA regularly aren’t going to be the people with the best answers.
On top of that SA gives badges for uovoting and it’s possible other benefits I’m unaware of.
As we saw with reddit, uovotes systems can be inherently flawed, we have no way of knowing if that uovote is genuine.
I hear you. I firmly believe that comparing the behavior of GPT with that of certain individuals on SO is like comparing apples to oranges though.
GPT is a machine, and unlike human users on SO, it doesn’t harbor any intent to be exclusive or dismissive. The beauty of GPT lies in its willingness to learn and engage in constructive conversations. If it provides incorrect information, it is always open to being questioned and will readily explain its reasoning, allowing users to learn from the exchange.
In stark contrast, some users on SO seem to have a condescending attitude towards learners and are quick to shut them down, making it a challenging environment for those seeking genuine help. I’m sure that these individuals don’t represent the entire SO community, but I have yet to have a positive encounter there.
While GPT will make errors, it does so unintentionally, and the motivation behind its responses is to be helpful, rather than asserting superiority. Its non-judgmental approach creates a more welcoming and productive atmosphere for those seeking knowledge.
The difference between GPT and certain SO users lies in their intent and behavior. GPT strives to be inclusive and helpful, always ready to educate and engage in a constructive manner. In contrast, some users on SO can be dismissive and unsupportive, creating an unfavorable environment for learners. Addressing this distinction is vital to fostering a more positive and nurturing learning experience for everyone involved.
In my opinion this is what makes SO ineffective and is largely why it’s traffic had dropped even before chat GPT became publicly available.
Edit: I did use GPT to remove vitriol from and shorten my post. I’m trying to be nicer.
I think I see a core issue highlighted in your comment that seems like a common theme in this comment section.
At least from where I’m sitting, SO is not and has never been a place for learning, as in a substitute for novices learning by reading a book or documentation. In my 12-year experience with it, I’ve always seen it as a place for professionals and semi-professionals of various experience and overlap sharing answers typically not found in the manual, which speeds up the pace of investigations and work by filling eachother’s gaps. Not a place where people with plenty of time on their hands and/or knack for teaching go to teach novices. Of course there are those people there too but that’s been rare occurrence in my experience. And so if a person expects to get a nice lesson instead of a terse answer from someone with 5 minutes or less, those expectations will be perpetually broken. For me that terse answer is enough more often than not and its accuracy is infinitely more important than the attitude used to say it.
I expect a terse answer. I also am a professional. My experience with SO users is that they do not behave professionally. There’s not much more to it.
I don’t want to compare the behavior, only the quality of the answers. An unintentional error of ChatGPT is still an error, even when it’s delivered with a smile. I absolutely agree that the behavior of some SO users is detrimental and pushes people away.
I can also see ChatGPT (or whatever) as a solution to that - both as moderator and as source of solutions. If it knows the solution it can answer immediately (plus reference where it got it from), if it doesn’t know the solution it could moderate the human answers (plus learn from them).
That’s fair. You don’t have to compare the behavior. There’s plenty of that in the thread already.
Explains the huge swaths of bad advice shared on Reddit though. It’s shared confidently and with a smile. Positive vibes only!
What’s “Reddit”?
(I removed all my advice from there when it was considered “violent content” and “sexualization of minors”… go find your 3d printing, programming, system management and chemistry tips elsewhere, I did it anyway)
One aspect that I’ve always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn’t (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).
Now an obvious reply to this comment is “And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?”. That’s an excellent question – and that’s exactly the point.
In the end the judge about what’s correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That’s the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought “the notion of simultaneity is circular”. And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what “experts” says, and that majorities dictate what’s logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): “Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?”
Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.
I have to agree with this cause I have run into not a couple but many in recent years where when a proper answer is given, the accepted one despite being flawed or not recommended(Python 2->3 changes for example) anymore, it’s still the highest voted one. And proper answer is in 3rd or 4th place. And it’s where the old r/science shine cause you can properly ask some really specific domain question there and a qualified scientist might just pop up and answer you in detail. ( not that they can’t be wrong, just highly unlikely in current understanding of those topics. )
Science is based on peer review, which means that a scientific opinion will be accepted only if it can convince a sufficient number of other scientists. This is not too different from using an explicit voting system to rank answers.
All scientists accept the possibility that what they currently believe to be true may one day be considered false. Science does not pretend to describe only eternal truths. So it’s not a problem if the most popular answer today becomes the least popular answer in the future, or vice versa.
Peer review, as the name says, is review, not “acceptance”. At least in principle, its goal is to help you check whether the logic behind your analysis is sound and your experiments have no flaws. That’s why one can find articles with completely antithetical results or theses, both peer-reviewed (and I’m not speaking of purchased pseudo peer-review). Unfortunately it has also become a misused political or business tool, that’s for sure – see “impact factors”, “h-indexes”, and similar bulls**t.
Peer review is a general principle that goes beyond the formalities of journal publication.
Even if you never submit your work to a peer-reviewed journal, your scientific claims will be judged by a community of scientific peers. If your work is not accepted by your scientific peers, then you are not contributing to scientific knowledge.
For example, most homeopathic claims are never submitted to journals. They are nevertheless judged by the scientific community, and are not persuasive enough to be accepted as scientific knowledge.
You’re simplifying the situation and dynamics of science too much.
If you submit or share a work that contains a logical or experimental error – it says “2+2=5” somewhere – then yes, your work is not accepted, it’s wrong, and you should discard it too.
But many works have no (visible) logical flaws and present hypotheses within current experimental errors. They explore or propose, or start from, alternative theses. They may be pursued and considered by a minority, even a very small one, while the majority pursues something else. But this doesn’t make them “rejected”. In fact, theories followed by minorities periodically have breakthroughs and suddenly win the majority. This is a vital part of scientific progress. Except in the “2+2=5” case, it’s a matter of majority/minority, but that does emphatically not mean acceptance/rejection.
On top of that, the relationship between “truth” and “majority” is even more fascinatingly complex. Let me give you an example.
Probably (this is just statistics from personal experience) the vast majority of physicists would tell you that “energy is conserved”. A physicist specialized in general relativity, however, would point out that there’s a difference between a conserved quantity (somewhat like a fluid) and a balanced quantity. And energy strictly speaking is balanced, not conserved. This fact, however, creates no tension: if you have a simple conversation – 30 min or a couple hours – with a physicist who stated that “energy is conserved”, and you explain the precise difference, show the equations, examine references together etc, that physicist will understand the clarification and simply agree; no biggie. In situations where that physicist works, this results in little practical difference (but obviously there are situations where the difference is important.)
A guided tour through general relativity (see this discussion by Baez as a starting point, for example) will also convince a physicist who still insisted that energy is conserved even after the balance vs conservation difference was clarified. With energy, either “conservation” makes no sense, or if we want to force a sense, then it’s false. (I myself have been on both sides of this dialogue.)
This shows a paradoxical situation: the majority may state something that’s actually not true – but the majority itself would simply agree with this, if given the chance! This paradoxical discrepancy arises especially today owing to specialization and too little or too slow osmosis among the different specialities, plus excessive simplification in postgraduate education (they present approximate facts as exact). Large groups maintain some statements as facts simply because the more correct point of view is too slow to spread through their community. The energy claim is one example, there are others (thermodynamics and quantum theory have plenty). I think every physicist working in a specialized field is aware about a couple of such majority-vs-truth discrepancies. And this teaches humbleness, openness to reviewing one’s beliefs, and reliance on logic, not “majorities”.
Edit: a beautiful book by O’Connor & Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, discusses this phenomenon and models of this phenomenon.
But it’s not truth that is implied by voting.
Voting determines the sorting precedence. It’s a way of handling the fact that the site contains more content than a person can read. It’s a way of guiding what they should read first given limited time.
That’s how I interpret it. My question is if it’s generally interpreted that way, or misinterpreted.
Gibson was correct about much of our education system and Galileo was certainly right about the consequences of overvaluing mediocre wit that merely happened to well-timed. what neither of them had to content with, however, was the internet and how social media can combine the inability to reason critically and mediocre wit with crippling insecurities and anti-social personalities to what should be predictable results.
a least Gibson understood that a technocratic future didn’t imply that people’s lives would necessarily improve.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.
I miss when SO used to be a good place to ask questions.
I said I was a novice on the Code Review site and then the one answer I got told me to look into something like “mount genius and the valley of stupid” like dude, I fucking said I was a novice, I’m not claiming to be a genius. All over me using a term wrong. And when I asked what term they’d use they still smarted off. It wasn’t until I asked them again that they told me the term I was actually looking for.
I remember going to the vmware communities looking for help almost 20 years ago and some smug person was really upset that I didn’t use the right wording when I was starting out. He spent something like 2 whole days worth of posting. It was a chore to divine what he was saying while stumbling through his weird rant/lecture about proper terminology. I eventually called him out on it and never went back.
So long story short, communities and companies who don’t nip this kind of behavior in the bud and heavily moderate the assholes almost universally turn into the next expertsexchange community. Stack Overflow kind of leaned heavily into enshitification because of this, they eventually just stopped caring about what was being put on their forums, maintaining high content quality, and getting rid of argumentative power-users. Ironically reddit was a much nicer community and usually you’d find an answer or get help without the attitude, especially in the IT space.
SO claims a lot of this is because it is meant to be a tool where people go for correct answers and I get that, but getting downvoted or your question being closed as a duplicate feel mean regardless of how welcoming the admins claim they’re trying to make the place.
A big part of the problem is that users seek out reasons to close answers as opposed to seeking ways to try and fix them and avoid them being closed. And they’re rewarded for it! I think review queues overall are probably a positive but when you’re sitting there just going through them and you find one that could be closed as is but also could possibly be fixed, which are you going to try and do? Vote to close which takes like one second of effort or try and edit which could take a lot longer and may even involve input from OP? Then even if you do try and fix it, what if everyone else does vote to close?
I’ve had a question closed and my comments explaining why it wasn’t a duplicate deleted. The response from everyone was that because I have been using the site off and on for years they expected me to understand the process so they didn’t explain to me that I needed to edit and instead just deleted my comment and didn’t tell me anything.
The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up. I’ve sat there and been like “okay, people will probably think it is a duplicate of this, I really hate getting questions closed as duplicates so I’m going to preemptively explain why it isn’t a a dupe” and then they still close it as a dupe. It’s insane. Or they find the one magical combination of words that I didn’t quite think of despite spending a good ten minutes or so looking for dupes prior to asking that did ask my question the act smug about it.
I don’t really use the sites anymore. Not even the more lighthearted and fun ones like RPG and World Building. I’ve just been so soured to it.
The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up.
Yup that’s practically the same problem I had. I posted maybe one question over the past 15 years. I got crapped on by one of their power users for not doing something properly and I never posted or asked a question again. I don’t even remember what account I originally used, either.
This is sort of why I like ChatGPT, I don’t get harassed for asking something incredibly stupid, and the crappy answers are about as bad as the “marked as duplicate” nonsense that gets me nowhere anyways. Why bother trying to interface with those communities ever again? IT in general already tilts heavily towards salty misanthropes, I’ll pass on that.
chatGPT doesn’t chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.
It just invents the answer out of thin air, or worse, it gives you subtle errors you won’t notice until you’re 20 hours into debugging
so, like SO?
Just like real humans.
I agree with you that it sometimes gives wrong answers. But most of the time, it can help better than StackOverflow, especially with simple problems. I mean, there wouldn’t be such an exodus from StackOverflow if ChatGPT answers were so bad right ?
But, for very specific subjects or bizarre situations, it obviously cannot replace SO.
And you won’t know if the answers it gave you are OK or not until too late, seems like the Russian Roulette of tech support, it’s very helpful until it isn’t
Depending on Eliza MK50 for tech support doesn’t stop feeling absurd to me
How do you know the answer that gets copied from SO will not have any downsides later? Chatgpt is just a tool. I can hit myself in the face with a wrench as well, if I use it in a dumb way. IMHO the people that get bitten in the ass by chatgpt answers are the same that just copied SO code without even trying to understand what it is really doing…
Sounds the same as believing a random stranger.
How many SO topics have you seen with only one, universally agreed upon solution?
It’s funny because if you look at the numbers it looks like traffic started to go down before chat GPT was actually released to the public, indicating that maybe people thought that the site was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with before that and GPT is just the nail in the coffin.
Personally, of all the attempts I’ve had it positive interactions on that site I’ve had only one and at this point I treat it as a read-only site because it’s not worth my time arguing pedants just to get a question answered.
If I went to the library and all the librarians were assholes I probably wouldn’t go to that library anymore either.
If this and Reddit are going downhill, where will we look for our tech questions?! (/s, there will always be others)
My bets for the future:
- RTFM
- Have ChatGPT RTFM
- Read a book about general principles
- Ask ChatGPT to apply general principles to its own answer after RTFM, then ask it to double check it
- Spin up a VM, just try the thing. If it doesn’t work, ask ChatGPT why.
When everything else fails…
- Ask a question at any random place (SO, Reddit, Discord, Mastodon,Lemmy, etc.)
- Feed the answers to ChatGPT and have it summarize them, then double check its own answer
@ryan659 Activity Pub.
We may have to start reading the manuals!
There is a lot of Stack Overflow hate in this thread. I never had a bad experience. I was always on there yelling at noobs, telling them to Google it, and linking to irrelevant questions. It was just wholesome fun that briefly dulled my crippling insecurities
So you never had a bad experience, just were actively causing bad experiences for others?
Sarcasm
No “/s”, no sarcasm.
I think you just fell for quite an obvious case of sarcasm.
It isn’t obvious unless it has the slash s!
We should leave the /s back on reddit
Sadly, it really is necessary if one wants to be sure nobody actually takes the sarcasm seriously. It’s hard for people to tell in a textual medium.
Heck, my style of humor in RL is often sarcasm or deliberately ludicrous comments and people still sometimes go “wait, really?” Even though they know me well.
I’m going to go without it from now on. I can handle clarifying myself if it’s absolutely necessary for someone.
Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.
Encouraging and putting up with hair-splitting lawyerly un-generous readings of comments is what leads to people just straight up interpreting any “Plus I’m being genuine here” messages as lies.
We need to trust our readers, else we end up in an echo chamber culture where any deviation from the Party line is interpreted as “disruptive person who must be banned to protect our community”.
These things are linked.
The ability to deliver and detect sarcasm without training wheels is a layer of communication we need and can’t afford to abandon, in order to maintain a productive conversational environment.
Yeah but those people who take the sarcasm seriously are fools and you can’t make things foolproof.
Or you know, have a legitimatly very hard time distinguishing it for actual reasons.
chinesescholarshadasimilarst anceagainstallkindofpunctuat ionclaimingtheabilitytodeliv eranddetectmeaningwithouttra iningwheelswasalayerofcommun icationpeopleneededandcouldn otaffordtoabandoninordertoma intainaproductiveconversatio nalenvironmentwithanyoneunab letoreflectuponanddiscernthe intendedmeaningbeingafoolnot worthyoftheloftymessageswrit tencommunicationwasintendedf ortodiscernhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation
(This is a lesson in history, so I’ll let the discerning reader to decide for themselves whether there is sarcasm contained in it)
Sorry for being autistic ig
A “woosh” if you will.
I’m pretty sure they were being sarcastic.
In my experience many of the answers have become out of date. It’s gradually becoming an archive of the old ways of doing things for many languages / frameworks.
Questions are often closed as a duplicate when the linked question doesn’t apply anymore. It’s full of really bad ways of doing things.
I’m not really sure of the solution at this point.
Also ChatGPT.
It’s a last resort for me nowadays.
Ironic, since one of ChatGPT’s biggest weaknesses is that it’s an archive of the old ways of doing things. You can’t filter by time on ChatGPT, and ChatGPT isn’t being retrained on the latest knowledge live. These aren’t inherent to GPT, so it’s possible that a future iteration will overcome these issues.
On ChatGPT, if a solution doesn’t work, you can ask in real time for a different one. On SO, your post just gets locked for being a duplicate.
Asking in real-time wouldn’t help in this scenario (e.g. some mirror is no longer accessible). If anything, it’d just lead you further astray and waste more time, because GPT’s knowledgebase doesn’t have this knowledge.
Yeah, this is what they get and deserve. They rose by providing meaningful, helpful, and technically adept answers to questions. Then they encouraged an abusive moderator culture that marks questions as duplicate, linking to unrelated questions. They also still do not offer easy ways for the knowledge base to be updated as things over time change. Now the company abusing their abusive moderators, causing them to basically go on strike right now.
Here’s hoping the next thing doesn’t suck as much ass as Stack Exchange ultimately has.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Based on that, there is no “q&a” type of Fediverse software (a clear answer and a clear “voted best” answer).
Stack overflow had a huge number of “mod tools” to help curate the content (gold nuggets) given. They did not do the step of aggregating content (gold ingots) like Wikipedia has. The marking as duplicate could and should be tempered by “due diligence” or “age of the last time this was asked”, but how it is implemented is up to them.
To be fair™ they did at least do a little bit to deal with the existing answers becoming obsolete by changing the default answer sorting. The “new” (it’s already been at least a year IIRC) sorting pushes down older answers and allows newer answers to rise to the top with fewer votes. That still doesn’t fix the issue that the accepted answer likely won’t change as new ways of doing things become standard, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
One thing I’ve always wondered about stack overflow is why is there only one accepted answer ever possible even though this is programming and there are many different ways of doing any given thing?
People isn’t considering that documentation has greatly improved over time, languages and frameworks have become more abstract, user-friendly, modern code is mostly self explanatory, good documentation has become the priority of all open source projects, well documented open source languages and frameworks have become the norm.
Less people asking programming related questions can be explained by programming being an easier and less problematic experience nowadays, that is true.
I don’t entirely agree that more and better documentation removes bugs, problems, questions, concerns, or cuts too much into a 50% drop in site usage. Having documentation is just another tool in the toolbelt, to be used alongside community forums.
Discovery process for myself and many of my coworkers has always been; Look up obscure errors, problems, etc. to get an idea of what I’m dealing with, and then off to the documentation.
They don’t remove bugs, but it is easier to solve them without having to wait for some random guy to answer on stack overflow.
I don’t know now (I haven’t asked a question in ages) but to get a good answer on stack overflow it used to take weeks sometimes
GitHub issues are usually more useful
There’s an open source equivalent at https://codidact.com/
Thank you! never heard of, it looks very interesting!
I routinely skip SO unless I’ve already exhausted most possibilities. If it was ever a good place to get answers, I frankly didn’t see it. What I did see was infinite amounts of bitching about “bad” questions, non-duplicate duplicates, lazy-ass people who just wanted an excuse not to answer, and assorted people tripping on their little iota of perceived “power”.
Hell, even the indexed results on Google etc. just stopped being even remotely useful a few years back. After that, most shit I searched for ended up in an unanswered and possibly locked question with some passive-aggressive bullshit remark. It’s got the culture of helpfulness of a 2003 gaming forum - except the people telling everyone else to go fuck themselves are mods, not pubertal kids. (Although if the mods were pubertal kids that would actually explain quite a bit)
This hasn’t been my experience at all, but I’m old and have been using SO since it was new.
I have stopped visiting it to answer questions because the questions aren’t interesting anymore. They’re either “how to do this incredibly obscure thing in SOMELIBRARY” (where I’ve never heard of that library) or “why does my function exit early at the first return statement instead of continuing on” (basic “you misunderstand programming so fundamentally a single answer is unlikely to help” kind of questions)
As far as I can tell, the range of “I’ve tried this, and partially gotten it working, but this thing does FOO when it should do BAR” questions don’t show up, or at least it doesn’t show up when I open the site.
Answering basic questions again and again and again isn’t fun. It’s something I could be paid to do, I suppose, but I’m not paid for that.
Seriously, how should a community based on short two- to three-paragraph answers react to question after question like this:
I am new to python. I would like to write a program which can collect information from multiple excel and pdf documents to output that in one single excel document to show similarities and differences between the documents . Is this possible ? If so, how and where would I start writing such a programme in python? Thanks
I haven’t tried anything yet
I mean, I’m glad that someone looks at that problem and thinks “programming could do this”, because it could, but it’s kind of a big task and getting someone from “I haven’t tried anything and am brand new to python” to that is beyond any question-and-answer forum. Welcome to programming, you may be able to get there, but it’s going to be a bit of a hike.
Mostly it seemed to be people who didn’t know what they were talking about answering questions badly in an attempt to win points, presumably in the belief that this would bolster their resume somehow. And people who can’t tell a good answer from a bad one voting on the answers.
Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.
Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.
On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don’t. But again it feels like you’re expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.
Of course it isn’t all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It’s just a statistical trend.
Possibly the site should implement an archival policy, where questions and answers are deleted or archived after a couple of years or so.
No, they shouldn’t be archived. I say that because technology can change. At some point they added a new sort method which favors more recent upvotes and it helps more recent answers show above old ones with more votes. This can happen on very old posts where everyone else might not use the site anymore. We shouldn’t expect the original asker to switch the accepted answer potentially years down the line.
There’s plenty of things wrong with SE and their community but I don’t think this is one that needs to change.
The worst is when you actually read all that questions and clearly stated how they don’t apply and that you already tried them and a mod is still closing your question as a duplicate.
I can’t wait to read gems like “Answered 12/21/2005 you moron. Learn to search the website. No, I wont link it for you, this is not a Q&A website”.
Answers from 2005 that may not be remotely relevant anymore, especially if a language has seen major updates in the TWENTY YEARS since!
More important for frameworks than languages, IMO. Frameworks change drastically in the span of 5-10 years.
🤣
human nature remembers negative experiences much better than positive, so it only takes like 5% assholes before it feels like everyone is toxic.
True that! and a change from 2% to 5% may feel much larger than that.
I don’t usually use it,I had a problem a week ago and I thought about asking there.
I couldn’t. The question wasn’t written in a way that would pass the automod. No shit they are losing people… I gave up in the end
Google search going to absolute shit is what happened
I also attribute most of this to google. I am used to google a coding question and getting 10 SO results i can quickly scan through. Since a year I only get blogposts about the general behaviour of the thing i was googling.
I don’t understand. Google search has its issues for sure, but it always shows stack overflow highly when I search programming things.
This is the most likely explanation. It doesn’t make sense to have such a dramatic dropoff in user behavior without an obvious trigger.
Rather than cultivate a friendly and open community, they decided to be hostile and closed. I am not surprised by this at all, but I am surprised with how long the decline has taken. I have a number of bad/silly experiences on stackoverflow that have never been replicated on any other platform.
Like what?
Honestly I have a question I answered myself and was up for over 10 years with hundreds of views and votes only for the question to be marked as a duplicate for a question that verboten has nothing to do with the question I asked. Specifically I was working with canvas and svg and the question linked was neither thing. The other question is also 5 years newer so even if it were the same it would be a duplicate of mine, not the other way around.
Another one is a very high rated answer I gave was edited by a big contributor to add a participle several years after I wrote it and then marked as belonging to them now
Both times i issued a dispute only for it to be completely ignored. Eventually I used a scrubber bot to delete every contribution I ever made instead of letting random power mods just steal content on my high profile posts.
Can you give more context on the second one? Everyone can edit posts and it shows both the original poster as well as the most recent editor on the post. (I’m not defending SE. I dislike them too.)
Not the original commenter, but once I asked a small question when I was starting to teach myself Java (something about calendar not returning what I expected and me not understanding the documentation, but I can’t quite recall the details).
I got 9 upvotes and a few helpful answers, but the only thing i can clearly remember is one answer that said unless I had a severe learning disability I should understand the documentation and not ask (r-word) questions.I didn’t understand it because of a language barrier since I also had to teach English to myself at the same time. But that comment really hurt me for some reason. It was just unnecessary rude.
That answer eventually got removed but the first time I flagged it I got the response that the mod could not see anything wrong with the answer.
But it wasn’t even an answer! More like a comment, but even then completely unnecessary.Before that I really enjoyed the site, answering js and PHP questions, helping out a bit with formatting on other people’s questions or answers etc but ever since then I go there rarely and only if I am looking for something already answered.
