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I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The p

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language." When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.

eulers_secret 4y ago
I rarely respond to super recent comments, but you're 100% right. What SO didn't expect was that their real purpose was as feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them entirely.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  I look forward to the day that the LLM responds to a question like the users of SO do, duplicate, didn't do enough research before asking, etc.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  How can you not agree that the SO goal is to achieve whatever the owners of SO want it to achieve?
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    I didn’t disagree with the goal. I question the owner’s stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If latter then describing the site that way reads more like an ad. Like taking musk‘s statements on what Twitter is “for” at face value
    - watwut 4y ago
      But the stated goal is consistent with actual behavior in case of SO. Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        Inconsistent with community behaviors. Same with musk in that the community’s behaviors can’t be entirely owned by management
- rglullis 4y ago
  Because it's a reasonable justification. Why don't you agree?
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    SO is stagnant directly due to this policy. Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful. SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something better will replace it, not IF it will.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - politician 4y ago
        Time travelers preparing to travel to the year 2009 certainly find it invaluable.
- fishtoaster 4y ago
  What makes you think I agree? I certainly am saying what the SO owners have said. I'm repeating it here because I think it's a useful way to understand why SO is the way it is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead, optimizing around a different goal entirely.
tsgagnon 4y ago
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers. My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer
  - arp242 4y ago
    One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer. Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others. The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921 https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921 https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921
- ryandrake 4y ago
  SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.
  - 4y ago
largepeepee 4y ago
Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality. Pretty common trade off in large tech these days
Natsu 4y ago
The problem is that you need people getting their questions answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.
LastTrain 4y ago
If that is true, wouldn’t it be more effective to use noindex so as not to curtail interaction with the site?
_fat_santa 4y ago
> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery. S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.
- thedonkeycometh 4y ago
  [dead]
- the8472 4y ago
  > no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.
    - the8472 4y ago
      Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.
bena 4y ago
But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up to date. They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct. But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different. But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore. You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.
- ryathal 4y ago
  This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions. Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it ever will happen.
tsian2 4y ago
I think this is the reason why the site is found so useful now. The meta board is a good read for anyone who wants to understand more or find out how to resolve their issues with the site.
melling 4y ago
Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn’t go around closing questions because you didn’t “try hard enough before asking” I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions. I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and I would delete my account. They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete. Needless to say, I no longer feed the site. Hopefully, with more advanced AI’s we can scrape the web, organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered, skipping the searching. Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close 1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conversation.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conver...
ROTMetro 4y ago
This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.
- wwweston 4y ago
  Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming. What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue. To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community. I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).
- fishtoaster 4y ago
  I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc). [0] https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
AndrewPGameDev 4y ago
If we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on SO is toxic (with regard to that context).
arp242 4y ago
One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all. It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was. But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed. There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed. In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy. [1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html
- moremetadata 4y ago
  I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments to solutions reminded me of this https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.
noodles_nomore 4y ago
It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.
- stuartd 4y ago
  > What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation They tried. It didn’t work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/ https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/
_gabe_ 4y ago
I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge. Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site. Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: 1. Google question 2. Click 5-6 different SO links 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap 4. Go to the documentation 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer. I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
- siwatanejo 4y ago
  IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.
    - shagie 4y ago
      It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either: 1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer. 2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer. Neither of those are received well. The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.
tayistay 4y ago
SO is mostly a mechanism for spreading unhappiness, secondarily it produces a searchable corpus of answers.
qwertox 4y ago
In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to pipe the data.
caconym_ 4y ago
The author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to refute their point then you really have to make the case that SO is functioning as intended despite their implicit claim to the contrary. I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SimonPStevens 4y ago
This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered. If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead. Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead. Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fakedang 4y ago
And where do those searchable answers come from? The Sky God? If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.
kerkeslager 4y ago
This is just the deletionists vs. inclusionists debate from Wikipedia in the 90s/00s. The deletionists are still winning and the deletionists are still wrong. The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly. My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  By quality they simply mean lack of 'conflicting information' not 'correct information'.
mise_en_place 4y ago
People like to point out how incorrect ChatGPT or Copilot are, but in recent memory, SO has just been plain wrong for certain questions.
- textninja 4y ago
  I’ve found the criticisms regarding accuracy to be curious, not only for the reason you mention, but also because the apples-to-apples comparison isn’t ChatGPT vs Google so much as it’s ChatGPT vs an expert working on a test in a faraday cage with no substantial penalty for wrong answers. With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.
romwell 4y ago
>They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language. They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language." Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.
oxfordmale 4y ago
The problem with SO is that there are a lot of "high-quality answers" that are now 7 years old. The world of technology has moved on. Yes, you can post a better answer, however, it will never get the same amount of upvotes as the original answer. If someone asks new questions on the topic, it will get dupe-hammered with a link to these ancient questions.
motbus3 4y ago
I agree with you, but it is not a "free" exchange. People share there knowledge and helps SO to be alive and in exchange they can get answers. Their curation should be better like pointing to the correct answer before marking it as duplicated and then blocking it. I know it is as is because people are lazy sometimes and they expect to get it ready with no effort. In that sense, chat assistants are the biggest threat to SO as it does not complain to answer the same thing a thousand times. I am curious to know what they think about it
lenkite 4y ago
"The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers" Fixed to: "The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty OUTDATED answers"

eulers_secret 4y ago

I rarely respond to super recent comments, but you're 100% right. What SO didn't expect was that their real purpose was as feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them entirely.

stonemetal12 4y ago
I look forward to the day that the LLM responds to a question like the users of SO do, duplicate, didn't do enough research before asking, etc.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?

nextaccountic 4y ago
How can you not agree that the SO goal is to achieve whatever the owners of SO want it to achieve?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  I didn’t disagree with the goal. I question the owner’s stated goal vs the actual behaviors and utility to its audience. So is the goal descriptive or aspirational. If latter then describing the site that way reads more like an ad. Like taking musk‘s statements on what Twitter is “for” at face value
  - watwut 4y ago
    But the stated goal is consistent with actual behavior in case of SO. Musks claims are not consistent with his behavior.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      Inconsistent with community behaviors. Same with musk in that the community’s behaviors can’t be entirely owned by management
rglullis 4y ago
Because it's a reasonable justification. Why don't you agree?
- Someone1234 4y ago
  SO is stagnant directly due to this policy. Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful. SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out of date. Much like Twitter it is a matter of WHEN something better will replace it, not IF it will.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - politician 4y ago
      Time travelers preparing to travel to the year 2009 certainly find it invaluable.
fishtoaster 4y ago
What makes you think I agree? I certainly am saying what the SO owners have said. I'm repeating it here because I think it's a useful way to understand why SO is the way it is. As I said, I think people commonly misunderstand and think that SO is doing a bad job of optimizing around "being a good place to ask questions" when they are, instead, optimizing around a different goal entirely.

tsgagnon 4y ago

The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers. My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.

e_i_pi_2 4y ago
I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer
- arp242 4y ago
  One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer. Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others. The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921 https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921 https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921
ryandrake 4y ago
SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.
- 4y ago

largepeepee 4y ago

Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality. Pretty common trade off in large tech these days

Natsu 4y ago

The problem is that you need people getting their questions answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.

LastTrain 4y ago

If that is true, wouldn’t it be more effective to use noindex so as not to curtail interaction with the site?

_fat_santa 4y ago

> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery. S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.

thedonkeycometh 4y ago
[dead]
the8472 4y ago
> no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.
  - the8472 4y ago
    Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.

bena 4y ago

But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up to date. They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct. But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different. But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore. You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.

ryathal 4y ago
This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions. Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it ever will happen.

tsian2 4y ago

I think this is the reason why the site is found so useful now. The meta board is a good read for anyone who wants to understand more or find out how to resolve their issues with the site.

melling 4y ago

Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn’t go around closing questions because you didn’t “try hard enough before asking” I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions. I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then said if they felt that way to delete all my questions and I would delete my account. They agreed to delete my questions then quickly realized I had close to a couple hundred good questions then undid the delete. Needless to say, I no longer feed the site. Hopefully, with more advanced AI’s we can scrape the web, organize the knowledge, and have our questions answered, skipping the searching. Programmers could quickly become proficient in modern C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant.

mdaniel 4y ago
> by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close 1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conversation.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conver...

ROTMetro 4y ago

This is the problem with online communities in 2023. They no longer want to be communities. New people come and get told 'we already talked about that in 2012' or other super friendly things, and then leave. You have a core of grumpy longtime members slowly getting older and grumpier and a business model that doesn't want to be a community resulting in a 'community' with no interest in being a 'community'.

wwweston 4y ago
Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Yes, but for a brief period of time it felt like most people saw this as a weakness humanity was in the process of overcoming. What is sad is that several communities (not just SO by any means) discovered ways to rebrand this ancient vice into a modern virtue. To be fair to SO, I believe they have made enormous progress in the last several years. They've been making pragmatic compromises away from their early idealism in favor of the messy business of being a healthy community. I really enjoy the StackExchange sites these days (for the most part).
fishtoaster 4y ago
I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc). [0] https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

AndrewPGameDev 4y ago

If we accept this idea, I think we also ought to expect SO to rebrand their site so that it makes it clear to the average user what the site is. If, for example, SO looked more like Wikipedia - that is, it decreased the size and prominence of the "ask question" and "answer question" buttons, got rid of comments entirely, and focused on the core content then I would be happy to judge it as a wiki. Until then I'm going to judge it like a Q&A site, and I feel it's fair to say the behavior on SO is toxic (with regard to that context).

arp242 4y ago

One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all. It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was. But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed. There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed. In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy. [1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

moremetadata 4y ago
I found search engines kept directing me to pages on Stack Overflow where the code doesnt work and reading the comments to solutions reminded me of this https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm Currently, I'm finding no law firm in the UK that I email from protonmail ever replies, the only people who reply to me are the police and NHS, which perhaps gives others an example of the torture the state is prepared to carry out on people, which in my experience has been since before primary school.

noodles_nomore 4y ago

It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.

stuartd 4y ago
> What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation They tried. It didn’t work - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d... - the site is still there at https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/ https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/

_gabe_ 4y ago

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge. Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site. Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: 1. Google question 2. Click 5-6 different SO links 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap 4. Go to the documentation 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer. I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.

siwatanejo 4y ago
IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.
- metabagel 4y ago
  I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.
  - shagie 4y ago
    It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either: 1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer. 2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer. Neither of those are received well. The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.

tayistay 4y ago

SO is mostly a mechanism for spreading unhappiness, secondarily it produces a searchable corpus of answers.

qwertox 4y ago

In the last few years I've mostly used it to find the answers I've written because I've forgotten how to do it. Like yesterday: how do I use mongodump/mongorestore to transfer a database to another server, I knew I had answered that one a couple of years ago and the docs had no example about how to pipe the data.

caconym_ 4y ago

The author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to refute their point then you really have to make the case that SO is functioning as intended despite their implicit claim to the contrary. I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.

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SimonPStevens 4y ago

This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered. If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead. Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead. Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%

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fakedang 4y ago

And where do those searchable answers come from? The Sky God? If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.

kerkeslager 4y ago

This is just the deletionists vs. inclusionists debate from Wikipedia in the 90s/00s. The deletionists are still winning and the deletionists are still wrong. The result isn't a higher-quality StackOverflow or Wikipedia, it's a narrower StackOverflow or Wikipedia. And with the subject matter StackOverflow covers, narrower actually means lower quality, because answers fall out of date quickly, and new problems arise quickly. My most recent question on StackOverflow was about Valgrind on MacOS, and it was deleted quickly. I was pointed to a bunch of questions, which I had already looked at, which had only answers from before Apple made some changes that broke Valgrind. Last I checked, if you're running an up-to-date version of MacOS, everything StackOverflow has to say about Valgrind is useless. Quality? I think not.

worthless-trash 4y ago
By quality they simply mean lack of 'conflicting information' not 'correct information'.

mise_en_place 4y ago

People like to point out how incorrect ChatGPT or Copilot are, but in recent memory, SO has just been plain wrong for certain questions.

textninja 4y ago
I’ve found the criticisms regarding accuracy to be curious, not only for the reason you mention, but also because the apples-to-apples comparison isn’t ChatGPT vs Google so much as it’s ChatGPT vs an expert working on a test in a faraday cage with no substantial penalty for wrong answers. With that context in mind it’s easy to extract value from it now, and either by allowing ChatGPT to adopt a process, or by building systems around it that enable greater agency (as they seem to be doing with Bing) these issues will eventually be overcome.

romwell 4y ago

>They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language. They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language." Great! And the answer to that question being "we didn't allow anyone to answer it, good bye", it's a pretty awful goal.

oxfordmale 4y ago

The problem with SO is that there are a lot of "high-quality answers" that are now 7 years old. The world of technology has moved on. Yes, you can post a better answer, however, it will never get the same amount of upvotes as the original answer. If someone asks new questions on the topic, it will get dupe-hammered with a link to these ancient questions.

motbus3 4y ago

I agree with you, but it is not a "free" exchange. People share there knowledge and helps SO to be alive and in exchange they can get answers. Their curation should be better like pointing to the correct answer before marking it as duplicated and then blocking it. I know it is as is because people are lazy sometimes and they expect to get it ready with no effort. In that sense, chat assistants are the biggest threat to SO as it does not complain to answer the same thing a thousand times. I am curious to know what they think about it

lenkite 4y ago

"The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers" Fixed to: "The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty OUTDATED answers"