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The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, a

• JohnMakin 3y ago
  here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer did it.
  • Eduard 3y ago
    sprinkle in a 100K+ reputation user commenting "this is easily answered with `man Y`" — oblivious to the fact that Y's manpage is a 188 page monster, and manpages being awkward to search in. Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198 https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
    • Culonavirus 3y ago
      Here's a question maybe someone can answer for me, or maybe I'm just stupid and other people don't need it, but... What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of the man file.
      • no92 3y ago
        tldr pages do exactly this. https://tldr.sh https://tldr.sh
        • djmips 3y ago
          bless you - I had no idea this existed!
      • odysseus 3y ago
        brew install tldr tldr ffmpeg
      • Qwertious 3y ago
        `man` is "a documentation". It turns out there's more than one type of documentation, but lots of man-page writers didn't get the memo.
    • firefoxd 3y ago
      I may be missing something, but the top answer is pretty good. And the comments even explain why searching for an answer on google might be difficult, and suggests how to.
  • paradite 3y ago
    I'm assuming you are talking about XY problem? https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
    • dragontamer 3y ago
      They're talking about the XY problem-problem. The problem when other programmers mistakenly think you have an XY problem and ignore your words. Sometimes, the original poster is not mistaken. Especially when an expert asks a question, there's a reason for it. Assuming the expert to be a beginner who hasn't tried easier solutions is degrading, and forces experts off the site. Actively insulting your userbase, especially your expert-level userbase, is a bad idea. It leads to StackOverflow falling and collapsing over the years.
      • Rapzid 3y ago
        I was learning Golang nearly a decade ago while participating in a performance competition.. Asking questions about unsafe in Golang Nuts was nearly rage inducing. IMHO Copilot Chat has picked up on these bad habits.
        • lelanthran 3y ago
          I've noticed a similar tendency in ChatGPT (answering a question that was never asked), but at least in ChatGPT it doesn't act all condescending towards you. I literally cannot remember when last SO was useful time, due to the false positive identification of the XY problem. At least with ChatGPT, it's much faster to get it to answer the question asked and not the question that was not asked.
      • throwaway2037 3y ago
        the XY problem-problem I never saw this term before, but it is perfect. So many times I have experienced it when asking questions in mature tech domains. It is so frustrating. Frequently, my question is asked poorly from the view of an expert, so they sweep it aside as not a real problem. Only after getting help (from comments) to provide more info or improve the writing, does the expert suddenly agree it is an issue. This is also why I no longer waste my time raising bug tickets for open source projects. You just get shouted down and feel terrible about yourself. I raised many "WONTFIX" bugs in my career against open source projects. What a waste of my time and a harm to my self esteem.
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
    • cwillu 3y ago
      Telling people they're doing the wrong thing is extremely common. People actually wanting the wrong thing is common, but not _extremely_ common, and the mismatch is one of the more rage inducing things on the internet.
    • shriek 3y ago
      Often the better answer is to just explain what's being asked by strongly encouraging them in the Z direction. Sometimes people just want to understand what's happening behind the scenes rather than just looking to solve for Y.
      • berkes 3y ago
        But that's a different question. And should be asked different. "I'm trying to learn foo.js and attemt to do so by porting Tetris to it. I know foo.js is a terrible option for a game. So. How can I write to the canvas from foo.js?" Is often answered properly, if only because to many it's a nice puzzle. "How can I write to the canvas fro foo.js?" Is different in that it will attract a lot of people explaining that foo.js deliberately did not allow writing to the canvas, because Z"
        • dan-0 3y ago
          This is part of the problem. You know your constraints, other people do not, but like to assume they do. So you end up having to write a defensive argument about your problem rather than just plainly asking your real question. This may help less experienced engineers not understanding their problem set, but for a more experienced engineer it's absolutely obnoxious to think of all the ways to defend my question so I don't have to deal with a rush of "oh but you should do this instead" answers getting up voted that don't actually answer my question, then asking to accept the answer. To one set of users it's possibly helpful, to another it's useless if not also condescending, often condescending to both sets. The bottom line is now, SO is so filled with these types of responses, I can't expect to get a very specific question answered, which is really the only reason I'd ask a question in the first place, so why use it? There are plenty chat groups now via Slack and discord in my field where I can get much more direct answers. People aren't worried about getting down voted for a bad question, people aren't giving low quality answers to boost their points. So for me, SO is practically dead except for the occasional obscure error message that I can query for there.
  • boyka 3y ago
    It seems like most of us all have the same issue with SO. However, is there a viable alternative?
    • whstl 3y ago
      ChatGPT has replaced most of my usage of StackOverflow/Google. It probably won't last forever without people generating new answers somewhere else, but it answers a lot of things correctly, and the things it gets wrong are easy enough to verify. I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.
      • gvx 3y ago
        > I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change. It already has, and not for the better. SO is currently awash with nonsensical answers that are clearly the result of feeding the question into ChatGPT. Not to mention questions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-built-in-sum-function-works-on-dict-values#76748781 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-bui...
        • whstl 3y ago
          Well, perhaps that's what moderation should be focusing on blocking then, rather than driving away humans (as was mentioned a lot by other answers in this thread).
  • jalapenos 3y ago
    Usually prefixed by a condescending "why would you want to Y?"
    • IIsi50MHz 3y ago
      Or a befuddled asking of the same "Why?". Or an honestly curious asking. Yes, there are plenty of rude replies, but sometimes it helps to assume what somebody really means is they failed to do a context switch. Exchanging more details can help turn a 'madness' into a method. Even if they were outright rude, doing this can lead to an answer that might not otherwise be given (even though that answer may be provided by someone else).
  • revskill 3y ago
    Yes, it's stupid af. Rather to keep silence, than to answer indirectly the quesiton. Or even if you want to suggest "another problem", make it as indirect (not the accepted answer).
  • CodeCompost 3y ago
    The impression I get from commenters is that somehow they think their careers are tied to StackOverflow points. Trying their best to downvote correct answers and promoting their own in order to further their agenda.
    • JimDabell 3y ago
      Downvoting costs points.
    • Karunamon 3y ago
      SO ran a careers site for a while, and as a part of that, provided a resume/profile page upon which you were encouraged to share your score and/or your own questions and answers. I wonder if there was actually something to that…
  • newaccount74 3y ago
    The very popular Zalgo answer is a perfect example of this problem [1] The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem. Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts these people. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
    • cowthulhu 3y ago
      Hilariously, the accepted (I assume by default, not by the asker) answer is flagrantly breaking, like, half a dozen rules and guidelines… but because it’s cynically and unhelpfully crapping on a newbie, it stays up. Or maybe there’s a good reason for it to stay up, but at a glance it sure isn’t a good look. I actually think SO is a great site and resource, but I also think a lot of that is despite the bitter old timers in the community, not because of them.
      • underdeserver 3y ago
        Oh come on, it's not crapping on a newbie. It's a funny comment that serves as a reflection of the days and weeks this guy spent debugging these kinds of systems. As someone who was a newbie at the time when it was posted, who was looking for a way to parse HTML, I took away that it's just really the wrong way to go about it. I didn't feel crapped on at all.
        • stavros 3y ago
          The question isn't looking to parse HTML (or XML). Regexes are inappropriate for HTML because they can't adequately match the starting and ending tags, not because of black magic. The OP isn't looking to do that, so regexes look like a perfectly acceptable way to go.
          • 3y ago
  • enriquto 3y ago
    > here’s a classic SO thread My favorite example, from "TeX stackexchange" : https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/100574/really-wide-hat-symbol https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/100574/really-wide-h... Quote from the actual answer (which is not the bogus accepted one): The question wasn't "should it be done?" But, for the same reason men climb mountains, "could it be done?" The answer, [...] is yes. Thus, we introduce [...]
  • martin_a 3y ago
    I'd like to add the "in jQuery you can do it MUCH easier like this: [...]" when you are searching for Vanilla JS solutions.
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    Which is the correct response to this question? > How do I shoot myself in the foot? I’m pointing the gun at my foot and pulling the trigger, but nothing is happening. Is it: > A common reason for guns not firing is that they aren’t loaded. Try loading the gun and trying again. …or is it: > Woah, hang on a sec! What are you trying to achieve exactly? It seems like you are doing something very wrong here. I’m sure there’s a better way to do whatever it is you are trying to do. There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot. It’s not responsible to blindly answer the question regardless of the consequences. Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.
    • gvx 3y ago
      How I usually try to answer these kinds of questions is "Shooting yourself is generally not a good idea, for these reasons. If you really want to do it, you can try loading your gun and pulling the trigger again, but a better alternative might be to take off your shoe by untying your shoelaces and carefully pulling on your shoe, following the curve of your foot." But it's hard! On the one hand, you don't want to teach people to do the wrong thing (especially not on SO, where answers are often copied wholesale and pasted into production code), but also not answering the question as asked usually doesn't help the OP at all. If it's not clear what they're trying to achieve I usually leave a comment asking for clarification rather than answering, though.
    • Nursie 3y ago
      > There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot. Sure, but some of the stuff I've looked up in the past is answered with helpful comments like "You won't need to do this, your CA will do this for you" or "this is handled by your certificate verification stack, you don't need to be involved in this stuff". Well, thanks, but I'm actually implementing both of those things right now and I'm having an annoying issue with figuring out how the API for the (very popular but IMHO poorly documented) library I'm using for part of it hangs together. > Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot. I think sometimes its because comparatively the respondents are newbies, and are repeating received wisdom.
  • mihaaly 3y ago
    This is precisely what kept me away asking anything on SO. It is so much easier and quicker searching on or figuring out by myself than preparing a question defensively and then answering all the questions about why asking about that thing and the road getting there. When I find a straight and relevant answer that is great, I like browsing SO, but I wouldn't dream having a question just to find myself in a word duel with some very eager contributor steering me into his favourite domain. I want to get ahead with a task not being in the quest of finding The Ultimate Solution or having a social life over interesting and related topics.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • bjornasm 3y ago
    That is incredibly annoying to find when you search for help for your problem. While maybe OP could/should do something else, you have great reasons to do X by Y. Ofcourse if you make your own question about doing X by Y you get referred to the other question and have yours closed.
  • xertopertha 3y ago
    Should get rid of the reward system -- or at least reform it drastically to discourage pettiness. An accepted solution should not result in a reward to anybody. Somebody just starting to learn a topic posts a basic question and gets an answer from an old timer - and they both get rewarded! for what? There seems to be an army of "moderators" who are ready to pounce on easy questions and they end the answer by reminding the OP that he should upvote or accept the answer! Did any of them added anything to the knowledge base? You can get excellent answers to basic questions from ChatGPT anyway. Also they won't allow new members (perhaps experts) from commenting until they have picked up enough credits yet. The whole system is downright silly.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • o1y32 3y ago
    My experience is that the "real" answer depends on the situation. Sometimes one really should use the alternative (e.g. cleaner, more general solution, most updated API), while other times they should address the original question as is (e.g. avoid additional dependency/third-party library). This is one I ran into recently: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30196175/const-methods-in-golang https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30196175/const-methods-i... The question is very clearly formed. The accepted (and currently top) answer does a good job. But at one point the other answer which is badly worded and confusing was at the top. And I don't think it should ever get the top position of the answers.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    SO changed its policies a long time ago already... they don't want to answer your questions. They hate your questions (and by extension, they hate you!). It's ok, you deserve the hate. After all, you're asking the wrong questions. They want questions that are "textbook-worthy" or possibly "encyclopedia worthy". They're on record as having said this officially. If programming and technology is just messier than that, if it's more complicated than that, and you still have questions that don't fit because of it... well, fuck you. They don't exist to answer your questions, they exist to answer great questions that they can use to build up this pretty little sight that now has some purpose other than whatever it was you thought you were using it for. The Z guy, he's playing their game. He's awesome. You, you need to be punished until you comply.
  • zero_shift 3y ago
    This reminds me of my last ever SO question. It was many years ago, so I might be misremembering some details, but: I wanted some information on figuring out what texture serialisation was supported on a given client for a WebGL app. I needed to know this because I was optimising the client and had to deal with very large textures (it was an AR / augmented reality context). Cue a barrage of comments along the lines of "you shouldn't need to do this" "the abstraction means you can simply assume the GPU has infinite texture memory" (!) "just provide all the formats and let the GPU bridge figure it out". Then the question had a downvote and that was that, cast to the bottom of the pile. It seemed to me everyone responding to my question had this assumption "questioners are morons". A moron asking about texture serialisation is a paradox, ergo the question must have a faulty premise.
• hanniabu 3y ago
  On point 2, even worse is when you ask a question and the mods close it and point to another post that isn't the same. Or they mark the question as too open ended when it's not, or tell you to split up the questions into multiple posts even though that's dumb because they're dependent on each other's answers.
• andirk 3y ago
  I have seen similar. I wonder if a new set of people are old enough to use SO now, and their style is different than the original community.
  • choppaface 3y ago
    Copilot and ChatGPT have taken a lot away from StackOverflow.
    • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      This is true for me. I wanted good ways to deal with pointers to 2D arrays in C, which aren’t hard but you need to remember that [] has precedence over *, so (*pointer)[x][y] is needed to deference. It’s not the hard to mess it up. Ultimately GPT had an OK answer but… it had that immediately without searching and the didn’t have to craft some well written example, it picked up my dirty explanation no problem. I have the 2D array typedef’ed now, but it’s still confusing to read and hard to work with. I’ll search tomorrow on it.
      • noduerme 3y ago
        Asking anything C or C++ on SO has become an invitation to a ritual hazing. If, after dealing with everyone's ego, you can successfully demonstrate that you already know enough and you're not asking to pass a CS test, the Wise Ones may - may - deign to bestow you with an answer. Which usually won't relate to your specific issue. Also, in C++, you can set your clock to someone commenting that you should just use smart pointers. It doesn't matter if the question is entirely unrelated. As someone who spent a decade helping people answering code questions on Flashkit and later SO, I find the SO community and moderation now to be so off-putting that I avoid asking anything there if I can. I still give answers sometimes, but I'm much less likely to be on the site at all.
      • abdellah123 3y ago
        very good insight. Integrating AI into stackoverflow as a question refiner is a very good idea
• geitir 3y ago
  Yeah I noticed something happened late 2019 to SO Google results. I feel like today it is better than it was, but still a far cry from how it used to be. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503049#21504485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503049#21504485)
• fzeindl 3y ago
  This issue of having the answer in the comments definitely wasn't there 5-10 years ago and makes the site much more difficult to skim and read hence provoking more hapless questions. Maybe they should expire comments or remove them alltogether.
  • thomasz 3y ago
    That would remove a good percentage of correct answers. The obvious solution is to fix their weird and completely dysfunctional moderation.
  • IIsi50MHz 3y ago
    <userFoo> comment-body [<a href=#permalink-id> This comment has been promoted to an answer.</a>] #timestamp Or something vaguely like that?
• sedatk 3y ago
  Not to mention that you have no rights over the content you create on SO. You can’t take your content off the site if it happens to be an answered question or an accepted answer. Their reasoning is “but the content would be gone and would stop helping people”. The way it completely dismisses your efforts and your emotional connection with your own creation is the greatest indictment of how SO lacks the human perspective. No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this. The only exception could be Wikipedia, and it communicates its content format and collective editing mechanics very clearly. SO just isn’t that but thinks it’s whatever it works for them.
  • wodenokoto 3y ago
    > No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this. Doesn't hacker news also do this?
    • sedatk 3y ago
      It doesn’t. You just have to send an email.
      • jb1991 3y ago
        The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.
        • sedatk 3y ago
          That’s appalling. I thought they honored deletion requests. Terrible look on HNs side too. Edit: It seems like there’s a wiggle room, but still terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
• Scarblac 3y ago
  Also answers becoming obsolete because newer versions of the technology came out. E.g. Python 2 answers aren't relevant anymore, but still there.
  • rmuratov 3y ago
    SO prioritizes more recent good answers now.
  • namdnay 3y ago
    This is a huge problem for Spring (since the correct way of doing things changes every 2 years..)
  • dataengineer56 3y ago
    Exactly. The top answer is often wrong and you have to look at an edit on the third answer to see "Since 2021, this is solved by doing x y z".
    • smrtinsert 3y ago
      its a problem but once you know to look for the updated comment, it's not that bad.
      • ajmurmann 3y ago
        If they exist. That Google is bad at indexing SO aggravates this.
• camel-cdr 3y ago
  The worst part about xy problems is that even if the user could use a different approach, often the actual answer for the question would be very interesting. But because of SO, it's an xy problem, marked as duplicate and there no answer to the original question.
• throwaway2037 3y ago
  I have two opinions about your post. One: I agree. Two: I disagree. My point: I see both. I see "answer as comment" in my most mature tech subjects because people are afraid of downvotes. In my experience, the most mature tech subjects are carefully guarded by a small community of very unfriendly "fastest gun in the West" types. The C++ community is incredibly unwelcoming and negative towards most questions. Note: Comments can only receive upvotes. (In theory, comments can be flagged as off topic, or offensive, but assume -- for my commentary here -- they are not.) Examples of more mature tech subjects: Python, Ruby, ASP.NET, Java (language/foundation libraries), C# (language/founding libraries), C (but not yet C++!), Win32, etc. For less mature tech subjects (or faster moving), you see many more answers. Example of less mature tech subjects: Python AI/ML libraries, Java/C# open source libraries (Spring, etc.), C++, Qt, Gtk+, Zig, Swift, Golang.
  • feoren 3y ago
    > people are afraid of downvotes People are afraid of downvotes because people will throw out downvotes without even reading your answer, and once you get the first downvote, everyone else will pile on, also without reading your answer.
    • inglor_cz 3y ago
      It is interesting how a tech-oriented community still replicates monkey or chicken behavior against unpopular individuals.
      • throwaway2037 3y ago
        So, regular humans, right? I am unsurprised.
        • inglor_cz 3y ago
          I am not very surprised either, but it also indicates that we may be overvaluing education when it comes to behavior improvements.
• spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Google keeps returning SO answer threads that are way too old to be relevant. Like a question with a top answer from 2013.
  • scrollaway 3y ago
    Not all ecosystems disintegrate after a couple of years. Many times an answer from 10 years ago is still extremely relevant.
    • spaceman_2020 3y ago
      Not when the answer references libraries that haven't been maintained in five years or have fallen out of favor completely (like jQuery).
      • scrollaway 3y ago
        I understood what you meant. But first of all, many languages have libraries relevant for several decades; second, asking questions about legacy code is often valid (and often where you need the most help); third, some people even still use jquery! (Poor guys)
        • spaceman_2020 3y ago
          I understand all of that - I just question Google's algorithm that prioritizes answers from 2013 vs answers from 2021 for similar queries.
  • nubinetwork 3y ago
    I recently was looking into why wget --quiet --content-on-error didn't output anything with a 403. Turns out its an ancient bug they never fixed... it's not documented anywhere, except some crusty old thread on SO.
• casenmgreen 3y ago
  Seconded re moderation. Also, the site itself - the ethos of the owners; I used to have an account, became disenchanted with the mods, decided to delete my content, close the account. I then discovered; 1. You cannot delete answers which have been accepted. 2. The mechanism for deleting your own content allows you to delete a max of something like five replies per day. I then took the time to look at the T&C, and SO as I remember it simply make all of your work their property. I deleted everything I could, over the course of a significant number of days, and left.
  • kentrado 3y ago
    If you live in the EU, you could do a GDPR request to delete all your data. https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/gdpr/request https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/gdpr/request
    • casenmgreen 3y ago
      Mmm! thankyou - I will give it a go.
    • sznio 3y ago
      I mean, they will remove your personal information from their databases. Your answers will most likely stay, just anonymized.
      • pasc1878 3y ago
        The answers will stay they are licensed through Creative Commons Attribution licences so anyone can copy them.
  • _visgean 3y ago
    I think not allowing deleting answers is ok, this is something like asking wikipedia to delete content you contribute; at some point it isn't really your content and its part of an article. If your asnwer is accepted others are discouraged to post another answer, so deleting content retroactively is really demaging. But also none of the answers should contain personal information so don't really see a reason to delete it.
• specproc 3y ago
  I honestly feel that Google and increasingly LLMs are the challenge here. Behaviour of users on SO has always been, well, as all the complaints here suggest. It's never really bothered me that the top answer's someone going off on their favourite approach, most questions have multiple answers, and I've learned a lot about coding from reading the top few and trying to understand where the answers are coming from. The discussion's as important as the answers sometimes, and that's why a potential collapse is a problem.
• sznio 3y ago
  Your first point seems to be most important. > - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always will be worse than stackoverflow. I don't have a clue what their algorithm is doing but it's surely trying to kill Google search as fast as possible. Another joke is the fact that searching for "[language] [symbol]" also brings me to these content farms instead of the documentation. You seriously can't find useful anything these days using Google.
  • fouc 3y ago
    Google search results have a filter for time, so could potentially improve the results by changing the date range back to 3 years ago.
  • gpgn 3y ago
    I have noticed that Wikipedia is often pushed to the bottom of the page compared to a few years ago where it would always be at the very top.
    • stavros 3y ago
      And it's always the result I want.
      • OJFord 3y ago
        Then consider using DDG & '!w term', or some other method (searching Wikipedia, extension, I think Firefox has something engine-agnostic built-in) instead?
        • stavros 3y ago
          Oh I do use DDG. I think it might suffer from the same problem, actually, since now I'm wondering why I see Wikipedia results very far down in Google when I don't really use Google.
• littlestymaar 3y ago
  > google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago Oh, so maybe DDG is ahead of Google in terms of quality alone in at least one domain now? Because it definitely still gives answers from SO at the top.
• iLoveOncall 3y ago
  > google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago I haven't noticed that at all. I also haven't noticed any degradation in the results on Google overall contrarily to what people claim. What I have noticed though is that every time someone complains about search results and shares the way they search on Google, it becomes obvious that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and not in Google. For example my girlfriend always get completely unrelated results when searching. But she searches an unintelligible mess that even a human wouldn't understand.
  • JohnMakin 3y ago
    I’ve been using stackoverflow for 15 years. Search results were fine for at least 10 of those. But yea, I’m sure it’s me and all the other people agreeing search got worse are also dumb like your girlfriend, thanks for the condescending and helpful answer, mr google turfer
• devjab 3y ago
  For me personally it’s the rise of good documentation. 12 or 13 years ago I needed to build something for our sharepoint 2010 in a world where sharepoint 2013 was out. I’m not a share point developer, at all, it was my first time with it. I am of the old school however, so figuring out how systems work by reading the manual or specification isn’t foreign to me. I’ve worked with the bitmap format, I’ve worked with solar inverters, I’ve worked with embedded construction software and so on, so sharepoint should’ve been easy. But I couldn’t have done it without StackOverflow. Fast forward to 2023 and I need to build something for sharepoint again. Haven’t touched it since I was sort of dreading it. Only this time the official documentation made it so easy I never needed anything else. I’m sure StackOverflow could have helped me, but I didn’t need it. Those are very isolated examples, but really, that is my personal experience with almost every thing I work on these days. Yes, I’ve also got 10 more years of experience under my belt, but I do think it’s because we as an industry have become much better at working through the official channels. I mean, when you have a problem with something today, so you go on StackOverflow or do you go to the GitHub issues (or whatever else they have)?
  • arethuza 3y ago
    Out of interest, do you think your recent experiences with SharePoint were because Microsoft decided to unify pretty much all of their services behind the common Microsoft Graph API? SharePoint used to suffer from having multiple different overlapping styles of APIs depending on what API style was fashionable at the time that feature was developed - which could make development a nightmare... (OK, an even bigger nightmare).
    • devjab 3y ago
      I sort of like ODATA on the client end of things. It's an absolute nightmare on the server side, at least with .NET, but for clients it's usually fairly easy to consume. This is true for every part of the Microsoft Graph API that I've worked with except for the SharePoint part. Which for whatever reason works differently when you query things. It's sort of hard for me to answer though. I've spent quite a lot of time in enterprise organisations, and I've integrated with basically everything, and it's almost all bad in one way or another. On that scale I think the Microsoft Graph API in general is a 8/10 maybe even a 9/10, but the SharePoint parts of it are at most a 5/10. I'm not 100% sure this is the fault of the API, if it's because of SharePoints indexation, if it's because of the 3rd party meta-data indexation that we buy for our document library or if it's because of how terrible our own architecture for the data flow is. But I've had to build a lot of redundancy and caching into the terrible piece of gaffa tape which is our integration, because SharePoint won't give me every document everytime that I ask for them. So a bad experience? But at least it's not FTP (yes not sftp) pulling different file formats from 9000 solarplant inverters bad.
• pptr 3y ago
  Out of curiosity: what programming language are you searching for? I never had problems finding SO answers for C++.
• ACV001 3y ago
  It is not about SO at all. This is about chatGPT.
• DeusExMachina 3y ago
  > google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago One thing I noticed in the first chart displaying visits is that there is a sharp drop in April, which is just after Google deployed its last core update: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Cou8Tr74r7EXNthuEsaG https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Cou8Tr74r7EXNthuE...
• lloeki 3y ago
  A typical pattern I've repeatedly seen in various shapes and forms: Q: [very explicit title about F in context X] I'm specifically not asking about F in context Y which I know about but is irrelevant; I'm specifically not asking about libT which may accept it in accordance with standard U; instead, in context X, is F working for libS? A1 [100+] [+50 bounty] [auto-accepted] [date d]: "it works" + long winded answer about decontextualised substring of F proposition working for libS in context Y Comment 1: this is not the correct answer, see A15 Comment 2: complaint that A15 note about U is from a second hand site so answer is warrant of discredit [even though authoritative docs about U are not publicly available] A2 through A7 [30+]: "it works" (rehash of A1, posted within d+[1..365]) A8 [30+]: Q is a dupe, see this answer [link to question and answer about libS in context Y] A9 through A14 [30+]: "it works" (gives example for libT, which behaves differently) A14 through A17 [30+]: "it works" (gives example of standard U, which libS does not comply with) A15 [5] [d+5]: Q being explicit about F for libS in context X and explicitly _not_ about context Y, let's address it for libS in context X: *it does not work* because foo (link to libS doc || source code || example). Tangent for the sake of completeness, context X is irrelevant because bar is orthogonal to foo + context Y. standard U does not apply because libS is not compliant [quote or link about U] Comment 1: this is the correct answer Comment 2 [d+1095]: answer is invalid because libS vN+1 has just been released and adds F in context X A16+ [<0]: completely haphazard lottery answers
  • the_af 3y ago
    > A1 [100+] [+50 bounty] [auto-accepted] I don't think SO "auto accepts" answers. The only one who can do that is the original asker, manually. See: https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer On meta.so this has been asked repeatedly and the consensus is that no, it cannot be done and furthermore, "accepted" doesn't mean "the best", it just means whatever the original asker marked as helpful for their situation, so "auto-accepting" would be meaningless. Also see: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262915/147346 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262915/147346 As for upvotes: if a question is upvoted that means the community upvoted it. The "community" in SO is just regular people, programmers both knowledgeable and newbie. I don't know that any "open access" platform can solve the problem of people upvoting the "wrong" answers; it's not a tech problem. It happens here on HN, too!
• qwery 3y ago
  Ironically(?) I seem to have little trouble getting search hits for SO questions that have been closed with some vague explanation as to why...
• iib 3y ago
  There is also a bizzare thing that I noticed only when I enabled RSS for some of the tags I wanted to watch. My RSS reader routinely had questions that were nowhere to be found on the site, even though they did not seem to be offtopic or have some other kind of structural problem. Of course the users themselves could have deleted the questions, but regardless, I did not expect to see that. It could be a nice experiment to enable RSS for some niche topics and checking automatically after a number of days to see which are gone.
• weinzierl 3y ago
  "I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever." Stackoverflow once set out - with the very best intentions - to be better than expertsexchange et. al. I think that's why they are so strict with their moderation. The issue, of course, is that this is a hard problem. To moderate a community of experts you need to be an expert yourself. With Stackoverflow I feel most moderators are just overwhelmed with the task, so they aggressively shut down everything they don't understand. Many of them are probably aware of that and just don't know how to handle it better. Others are so clueless that they do not even recognize the good questions.
• rendall 3y ago
  Seeing these issues many years ago led me to predict the downfall of Stack Overflow then, and I see these identical issues with Wikipedia now.
• mmusson 3y ago
  The sweet spot for SO for me is workarounds for esoteric problems, not for more common issues because the solutions tend to be out of date (but correct for an older version of the library or whatever).
• ur-whale 3y ago
  > moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. Can't agree more. So many relevant questions shot down by an anal retentive mod you end up having to find the answer on another site.
• rustybolt 3y ago
  This. Stack overflow contains many diamonds. We just can't find them anymore because Google randomly decided to stop being a proper search engine at some point.
• pg5 3y ago
  My least favorite thing is how many highly upvoted answers are telling the OP to "do something else" instead of actually answering the question. Sometimes requirements come from above and we don't have a choice!
• coliveira 3y ago
  I'm glad SO is going down, because it is a really nasty site. Every time I click on a page it asks again for cookie permission. Probably they want me to register to the web site, which I refuse to. So, no wonder people who are not already members think it is not a good search result.
• tzs 3y ago
  > moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever. Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y. I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me. Then I find another question on how to do X, and the mods close it as a duplicate of that earlier question. Even when the questioner specifically notes in their question that it is not a duplicate of that earlier question because they really need to do X the idiot moderators close it.
  • harimau777 3y ago
    I ran into that a lot when I was doing low level firmware programming. The answers to someone's question would be something like "that feature is only intended for ultra-specialized low level programmers". And it's like "in this case, I am an ultra-specialized low level programmer". I'm thinking of things like assigning constants to pointers in C and/or manipulating pointers directly.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y. > I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me. I know what you mean. Whenever I (rarely) ask a question on Stack Overflow, I always have to defensively load it up with language anticipating misinterpretations and instructing people to answer my question and not some other one. Otherwise, internet-point-chasers will fall through the woodwork giving easy, worthless advice. Even with all the defensive language, a few always show up.
    • firesteelrain 3y ago
      > defensively load it up Agree. This isn't a problem on the partner/sister sites as much. They are very helpful too. But they don't show up on Google
• lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Owners of the SO sites are control freaks. Mods have started ruining the site around 10 years ago. Now, when I do a fresh registration I can't do basic things like upvote an answer or write a helpful comment, because I need X reputation. So I can't add relevant info/feedback to a topic I landed on via google, because I don't have reputation, so in essence the site strangles itself. Because in 2023 I'm not going to farm(!) 50 points just to share my info. All this because a few bad apples tried to game a system and someone came up with this lame idiocy of you must have X reputation... But you can ask questions. But if noone upvotes your answer because it's a hard one, and/or noone knows the reply to your problem, then you are stuck. So should you ask some blatant question, like, is the sky blue and why? But it will be a duplicate. No reps for you. So it's a totally braindead system, they deserve to die. Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. But that will not be implemented, because it would make a dangerous precedent where you could harness other's valuable knowledge in almost an instant.
  • dugmartin 3y ago
    > Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. I think the problem with that is how do you prove it's a good or bad answer? Say you offer a bounty and I generate a great answer. You look at the answer and use it and then flag the answer as bad so you don't have to pay.
    • lofaszvanitt 3y ago
      Then you will have that next to your profile. Non paying customer...
      • Qwertious 3y ago
        Someone reading your profile will have to parse whether the not-paid answer actually answered the question, before they can determine whether it's a "non-paying customer" or just someone refusing to pay for an irrelevant non-answer.
• _zoltan_ 3y ago
  yep, moderation is pretty horrible.
• taylodl 3y ago
  moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever. Yup. And that's why I stopped using SO quite a while (years) back.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  I just realized how much SO's role has changed for me as a dev. Like most devs, I used to use it as a common reference. However, I realized just now that it's been months since I've looked as SO. That's not because I was intentionally avoiding it, but a natural side-effect of it becoming much less useful, largely because of the thing you're citing here. The quality of answers has fallen quite a lot, and SO seems to actively avoid hard questions (and if I'm searching a site like SO, it's because I have a hard question.)
• oldnet 3y ago
  The last 2 reasons are why I stopped to post on SO 10 years ago ... I tried to explain something and some mode was kicking my english and for being "off topic" SO burried itself
• JimmaDaRustla 3y ago
  I responded to a question on SO once where I elaborated on the accepted answer - my solution was more functional as it provided assignment operator override. Some hot shot user with an absurd amount of badges told me, in a condescending tone, that my solution did not answer the question and linked me to some TOS article or something about staying on topic. This was the first time I had ever answered a question on SO. My takeaway from the situation is that SO is full of accounts that farm badges/rep. To what end, I do not know - perhaps they reference it on their resume or portfolios. I called the guy out, seems he has since deleted the comment.
• jjtheblunt 3y ago
  I am old. I find what you wrote resonates with my SO experience, and, in my antiquity, I wonder, grumpily, why "RTFM" isn't faster than stack overflow, and i think the answer is the quality of the manuals to 'freaking' read has decreased. I'm just old enough to realize the Unix manpages were excellent in proprietary Unixes, and then the Linux manpages got complicated by some emacs based reader. Anyway, Unix manpages used to be a quality go-to in order to answer questions, BSD and Sun (BSD and SysV variants) and NeXT and Sequent etc. I'm still inclined to do that, but it's not always adequate.
• cogman10 3y ago
  I'll add one more with moderation. I've seen far too many cases where person asks "how do I solve X" and it's closed as a duplicate for a question of "how do I do Y". 2 unrelated questions but they have some similar wordings so the moderator shuts it down.
• justinhj 3y ago
  IME moderation was bad after a year or so of SO. Something about the moderation role in general seems to attract certain personalities that have a negative effect on the content they are supposed to be moderating. That said I find SO still very useful, you can always ignore the moderators and caustic comments. Often a question has a high quality answer that I can use even though the question is locked for being off topic or the comments are filled with irrelevant argument.