7 ms·
Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?
As the title says, what would happen if Stack Overflow decides to interrupt the service? Realistically speaking how much damage could that do to everyday work?
- aayala 6y agoI don’t use stack overflow to much, I usually prefer documentation or blogs
- dsrees 6y agoI find that as I get more familiar with a stack and start solving more "complex" problems, then documentation and blogs are the way to go. But if I'm learning something new and need to change the background color if a button blue then usually stack overflow is the fastest place to figure that out.
- shripadk 6y agoI prefer going straight to Github issues if documentation fails me. But yes, the more familiar I get with the stack, the lesser I have come to rely on Stackoverflow.
- gus_massa 6y agoThe Q&A have a very permissive license, so anyone can try to host a static version. (This was on purpose, the idea is that people would have been less prone to answer, if the answers were trapped in SO.) Moreover, there are a few spammer sites that already does this, and one of the problem of SO is to compete with them to be higher in the Google results. So ... probably you will be able to read the Q&A in other sites, and after a while there will appear SO-likes site for niches.
- QuadmasterXLII 6y agoThe app Kiwix let’s you keep a static copy of stack overflow on your phone, it’s only a few gigabytes. It also has Wikipedia!
- kevsim 6y agoDash on macOS also lets you download StackOverflow for offline use. It was my goto for working on airplanes, way back when traveling on airplanes was a thing.
- lmm 6y agoDoes it actually work? I tried a couple of times and the downloads never finished.
- livre 6y agoIt worked for me when I tried it but it was so slow that unless you are running from an SSD it's not worth it (I had it on an external disk). Don't download everything, only get what you really need, the phone app was (maybe still is) a bit buggy.
- layer8 6y agoIs there something like Dash/Kiwix for Windows?
- livre 6y agoYes, Kiwix is available for Windows: https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/ There's also Zeal: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ And DevDocs: https://devdocs.io/about https://devdocs.io/about
- layer8 6y agoThanks, somehow I managed to miss that for Kiwix.
- herodoturtle 6y agoI say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days. I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A sites like stackoverflow. But I still think it's one of the best places to seek assistance - plus, helping out programmers on IRC in real time is a good way to stay sharp and on top of the continuously evolving software landscape.
- gpanders 6y agoIRC is the first place I go if I can’t find an answer in the documentation or a search engine. If that doesn’t work, I’ll turn to a mailing list. Personally, I find both of these options have less friction than starting a new question on SO.
- herodoturtle 6y ago100% agreed. I also just simply enjoy lurking on IRC to assist other programmers in need. I learnt so much in those channels when first starting out, and these days I have a bit more spare time, so I enjoy "paying it forward" by helping others much like I was helped back in the day. Plus there are a bunch of really nice programmers hanging out there, so there's a social aspect to it as well.
- dan-robertson 6y agoThe key offering of stack overflow these days is less the ability to ask a stupid question and get told that you’re an idiot, and more the existing wealth of answers to questions that may be found by a search engine. I don’t think irc really produces answers which are easy to find.
- fiftyacorn 6y agoI think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway
- Macha 6y agoFinding more stuff on GitHub issues myself, but agree with the general sentiment that more content is elsewhere these days
- umvi 6y agoDepends. General language questions are amazing on stack overflow. Once you starting getting into the quirks and bugs of individual frameworks, GitHub issues can start to be more helpful.
- ksm1717 6y agoIt would be nice if those blog posts were as easily aggregated as stack. I know many have tried to solve the problem, but it always feels like great luck when I find a good blog post
- nonameiguess 6y agoThe US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared. Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
- netsharc 6y agoHow do you know that info in the first paragraph? On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way. Although I guess when you work for the spooks, they could figure out how to mask your IP that each query would come from a different IP from the world (basically I'm describing Tor, I wonder if they have their own Tor network).
- langitbiru 6y ago> On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way. When the security incident happened last year on SO, SO team monitored what information the attacker searched in SO. So I guess some people want some privacy in searching information in SO. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/25/a-deeper-dive-into-our-may-2019-security-incident/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/25/a-deeper-dive-into-our...
- rovr138 6y agoThe second part, regarding mirrors, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- rohan1024 6y agoI wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.
- swalsh 6y agoThere's a lot of metadata not being caputred by MetaData which would be insanely useful for a lot of purposes. It would be kind of neat if a lot more of that was captured... and if SO answers had more programatic access.
- rovr138 6y agoThe data is on archive.org and also on big query if you need it. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- hprotagonist 6y agowith a human in the loop, this is IRC.
- rovr138 6y agoWhile SO is geared for developers. If someone takes this on, ideally it would work like StackExchange sites where one can exist for each topic. - https://math.stackexchange.com/ https://math.stackexchange.com/ - https://stats.stackexchange.com/ https://stats.stackexchange.com/ - https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/ https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/ - https://ai.stackexchange.com/ https://ai.stackexchange.com/ - https://apple.stackexchange.com/ https://apple.stackexchange.com/ - https://serverfault.com/ https://serverfault.com/ - https://superuser.com/ https://superuser.com/ - https://drupal.stackexchange.com https://drupal.stackexchange.com There’s a ton more of these.
- ruslan 6y agoPreferably a knowlage DB accessable through whois(1) protocol.
- CryptoGhost 6y agoNone. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a person who has already published work somewhere else (eg. white paper, book, blog, documentation, etc).
- inglor_cz 6y agoThat seems to me like saying that Google Search is insignificant because it only shows content from elsewhere.
- rovr138 6y agoGoogle isn’t repeating as us from memory where it could loose information/context, it’s quoting verbatim. Also, Google can be annoying when it tries to be smart and the item you really need isn’t shown due to past behavior (the bubble it creates) Maybe that should be shown as prominent/original rank to the query done. But whatever.
- CryptoGhost 6y agoSO suffers from it's own version of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
- tartoran 6y agoThere are a lot of answers to questions that authoritative sources don’t make the best job of explaining. Also, the more ways of explaining something the better in my opinion. We don’t all think on the same frequency and the more answers the more likely to find one on your own understanding. SO helped me many times when I got stuck on something. When learning something new I wouldn’t go directly there, Id use a tutorial or some authotitative reference
- knighthack 6y ago
- anothernewdude 6y agoGiven how dated many of the answers are on Stack Overflow are, that refuse to get updated and prevent people from asking and answering similar questions on software versions that aren't from 2013, this has already happened but more slowly.
- dd_roger 6y agoIn my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.
- EamonnMR 6y agoStack overflow is very useful if someone already asked your question back when it was still accepting new questions.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThat depends on your environment. When programming in Haskell or Rust, going into SO is basically a waste of time, and the documentation or some specific search engine (yeah, hoogle) are the place to go. When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else. When programming in Python or Javascript, it completely depends on what libraries and frameworks you are using.
- sdevonoes 6y ago> When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else. Not even in the official documentation? Wow.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe basic C# libraries are full of undocumented surprising behavior, and surprising behavior that is documented only on thematic docs and not on the function docs. And most of the ecosystem follow the convention. There are many people that insist the .Net environment is well documented because there is documentation for every single item, but that documentation is far from complete.
- Netcob 6y ago
- touisteur 6y agoOh we could start fresh with actual up to date answers!
- rovr138 6y agoYou can add new answers to existing questions if the answer’s changed over time
- touisteur 6y agoI know, but most often the answer doesn't rise to the top and you have to look closely at the dates to have some context. Dead links and now-useless answers are my day to day stackoverflow experience.
- Maximus9000 6y agoFunny enough, the inception of stack overflow was because another Q&A site called "Experts exchange" suddenly put up a paywall.
- bena 6y agoThey had had a paywall for a while. They just had a bunch of bad answers and no way to judge whether the given answers were actually useful or not.
- Decabytes 6y agoI wonder if the reason documentation is so crappy is because stack overflow exists?
- rovr138 6y agoDocumentations explains internals usually. StackOverflow benefits from also having answers to things trying to combine libraries and other things.
- robntheh00d 6y agoIf it’s that important to daily work it sounds like there’s a fundamental issues with documentation, training, and education in the world of software development. Federated messaging seems popular these days. Maybe federated documentation is a good idea? Perhaps git could be leveraged to distribute docs, examples, and questions?
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI think I use Stack Overflow once a month at the most, generally when I go there with a problem what happens is one of the following: I have a problem I can't fix, I start writing down the problem, I realize as I am writing it down that it cannot be what I thought was the issue. I try other avenues for a few more hours and solve the problem. I have a problem that I can't fix. I realize that I cannot reliably cut the problem down in minimal code to get a response on Stack Overflow because it is not a minimal problem. I try some other route to fix the problem. I have a problem that as I am writing on StackOverflow I realize I have not tried a particular solution, I try it and solve my problem, I do not finish writing my problem. I have a problem that seems like it is pretty esoteric, I ask a question, it never gets answered, I either manage to solve my problem, finding some github issue or similar suggesting the solution is a bunch of dependency updates or just not solvable. I either solve my issue or find some hacky workaround or do decide the requested functionality should be replaced by something else. No one ever answers my question, 6 months later someone says they have the same problem and did I solve it. I have a problem that I actually finish writing and asking, someone responds and has misunderstood my question but their answer while wrong for what I'm answering gives me a clue on how to solve my problem. I have something I want to do but I do not have workable code because I know absolutely no way about proceeding with the idea, so I do not ask StackOverflow because they just aren't helpful for anything that isn't simple. I have a problem that is something like one of the previous situations, but I realize as I am writing it that it will get deleted or modded or something because it just won't work for StackOverflow guidelines, luckily most of the time when this happens I realize it should really be asked on one of the other Stack exchange communities. If I have progressed far enough to actually go ask a question on some other Stack Exchange community it tends to be answered reasonably quickly. I have a problem in some area I do not know much about, perhaps because I am just started using the framework or something, my problem is simple but it does not work as I thought, I ask, it is a simple misunderstanding of how I thought it would work, someone responds with a solution really quickly and I fix my problem. on edit: fixed bad grammatical error on further edit: if StackOverflow went away pretty much nothing would change for me.
- aaron695 6y ago$1 Billion damage I think is easy. $10 Billion before it's re-created. Maybe. It'll take years to re-code and re-build the community. $100 Billion. Doubt it. But not sure. 10 million visits a day, $1 per visit. Are we including all the Stacks? I think Server Fault could be much higher than $1. https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic
- jp1016 6y agopeople who knows how to use web archives , and the ones who can search and click on show cached version on google search wont be much affected, i have developed a snippet management tool , so people can search there too , its https://codekeep.io https://codekeep.io
- segmondy 6y agoprogramming quality would really improve.
- pan69 6y agoI remember something Jeff talked about during the original Stack Overflow podcasts, that Google was the main interface for Stack Overflow. As in, your entry into Stack Overflow would for the majority of people be through search. And to speak for myself, this is how I use Stack Overflow 99% of the time. This makes me wonder. Just having a copy of the SO data without the Google algorithms to bring you to the right question, the experience would probably be different when working of a copy.
- tubularhells 6y agoPeople would have to git gud I guess.
- simonblack 6y agoBefore the World Wide Web and Stack Overflow, we used plenty of Reference Books and specific UseNet newsgroups. Yes, it was a slower system, but it was just as good in the final result.