16 ms·

The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?

158 points by cryptoz 3y ago

cratermoon 3y ago
Google the rentier
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zeptonaut22 3y ago
If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the publishers. I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs. moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel like an icky place to be.
- rg111 3y ago
  It could have been a community, like Quora, but focused towards CS/IT. But it absolutely missed the mark on that one. It is a high pressure, toxic, unwelcoming place. I contributed a lot of Math and CS content to Quora where I had ~1.5m views on answers. I really liked engaging there. OTOH, SO felt like a toxic exam hall on a bad day. Every year SO asked in the survey if I felt I belonged to the community or something similar, I chose the most negative response from the list- every year. If SO behaved like a community, then it could have had organic growth, and organic visitors, not depending so largely on Google.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    Huh. I've long had the opposite impression of the two communities. Quora seemed to celebrate showing off in a way that SE didn't.
oarsinsync 3y ago
It’s worth reading right to the end, for the joke about Overflow AI. Enjoyable article. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to form an opinion on the accuracy, but it’s well written.
gsich 3y ago
Those search examples is the reason why Google also declines.
jcrawfordor 3y ago
I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow seems to have hit the same problem even harder. Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask a question to get an answer, or a repository of information? There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells‚ and now we see posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for Business") this way. StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which were very much curated and written to an audience of people who want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers, etc. The most prominent public resources for programming, websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase in a Wiki-like way. And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a forum, it's a resource, and that means the "questions" are supposed to be evergreen, curated references. Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange headquarters settled on their answer: aggressive removal of duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new moderation tool that gamified closing questions, sending moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow/destroy decisions that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the direction of "if in doubt, close the question." From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the websites that the best way to maintain a high-quality information resource is to close as many questions as possible. A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the perspective of running a Q&A website? absolutely not! StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A websites that were openly hostile to people asking questions. I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora, which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being just extremely weird and frankly right on par with Yahoo Answers for quality. Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale. But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I always wanted. My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty obvious why. No one knows what it's for exactly. If you want to ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team's Slack channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice information for people to look up later, you put it in the documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain documentation.
boredumb 3y ago
A big take away for anyone reading this, if you have a massive digital asset that relies on google you should probably be planning and leveraging yourself for a 50% drop in traffic and revenue over the weekend at random.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Regardless of how you feel about Stack Overflow’s users and moderators, running a site like that is not cheap. StackOverflow runs on less than 25 servers, its infrastructure is incredibly cheap considering just how much traffic they serve. And their UI, thankfully, hasn't changed much over the last decades either. [1] https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance
- toshk 3y ago
  Staff is much more expensive then servers, especially in the west.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    The vast majority of moderators are unpaid volunteers though.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  interesting to see how underutilized all of that hardware is ... "peak 1%, peak 2%" etc
  - ec109685 3y ago
    Because clearly they have way less traffic now ;)
- byw 3y ago
  I'm guessing they're doing some aggressive caching since it's read-heavy?
  - adventured 3y ago
    Yeah it's very aggressively cached for read purposes. You could write most Q&A pages to static html files if you felt like it. Stack has a similar age-toward-zero outcome that Wikipedia has (the % of new content as a total share of all content on the service chases toward zero over time); the more you fill out the site, the balance of aged content to new content inverts to an extreme, so mostly what you end up doing is serving up cached reads on older content. They're fairly well over-provisioned on server capacity. It's so relatively light to operate on the infrastructure side that they could safely further reduce the server count. There's no need in their case however, since infrastructure cost isn't one of their big problems.
Legend2440 3y ago
I think this article (and other online discourse) overestimates the value of StackOverflow to ChatGPT's training data. Sure, it's in there - but so is all the library documentation ever written, billions of lines of code, and millions of tutorials. StackOverflow is just one small part.
- acdha 3y ago
  Stack Overflow has tons and tons of things which aren’t in the documentation and almost all of them are questions from people who couldn’t find the answer in the documentation – exactly what ChatGPT needs since it also doesn’t understand anything about how a given program works, only what patterns are common in public examples.
Pannoniae 3y ago
Probably "unpopular opinion™" but I feel like the ban on "opinion-based" or recommendation questions also didn't help. Not everything can be answered purely objectively, there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python" or something. Stackoverflow removed itself from that process which has driven people elsewhere. Answers are also often more focused on the cosmetic aspects than actually answering a question. Just see the example in the article. The questioner asked about a lambda reference to a public field, and they got told "just don't use public fields lol". That's not help, that's just being a condescending asshole and not actually answering the question. Combined with the toxicity and elitism rampant, I am not surprised.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  This is a multi-year trend and doesn't explain the sudden and significant decrease. The article points to Google search algorithm changes for the first big drop, and ChatGPT release for the second one.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Oh, it can explain a sudden and significant change. Just because something changes slowly, it doesn't mean that the effect will appear slowly too. The article points at two causes that coincide in timing with the change. But even if it's correct, it doesn't mean that those are the two only causes or even the most important ones.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Things work.... until they don't. A bunch of things can accumulate and not be a problem until it suddenly is.
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    Slowly, then all at once.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python" You know what I'd love? Framework or language authors publishing a curated set of FAQs and "best practices". It can't be that hard to get a list of the most common tasks people google for, and provide links to the commonly used libraries as well as code examples. AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these days, although I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions.
matsemann 3y ago
> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer. Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown. It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the community has to deal with. What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers for a long time. And with no stewards, it will become toxic. And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.
- xmprt 3y ago
  > 99% of the times it was really a dupe I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    > But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years. Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old question.
password4321 3y ago
Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 (5 days ago; 290+ comments) Overflow AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 (4 days ago; 97 comments)
alextingle 3y ago
Love the punchline at the end.
padolsey 3y ago
> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer Is this true? Wondering if there's a more objective way to know than endless anecdotes. I think programming communities stereotypically are pretty mean. I don't really see reddit as a "safe place". But maybe there are smaller subreddits where being wrong doesn't make you feel awful? > You can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging I'm quite perplexed by this same talking point being regurgitated. These LLMs do indeed hallucinate. But I've found, with coding problems, that it's very easy to see it's wrong if you're working in a domain you're familiar with. I am doing a lot of react development with chatgpt(gpt4) as a kind of intern-on-steroids and it's working really well. I can usually identify when it's being silly as I've worked with react for a few years. Ofc without that it's hard. But even if I'm in unfamiliar territory I can ask it to write tests to confirm its code works. I can also hand it stack-traces and it'll usually be very helpful at debugging its own code. An e.g. I am not competent at shell stuff but it's been such a boon at helping me hack and pipe stuff together. Actually two days ago I wanted to generate a big bird's eye grid of a huge PDF document. I had no idea how to and asked it point-blank to write some code. Within a couple messages it generated a python script w/ PIL and a pdf2image imports and shell commands to get things installed and $PATH properly configured. One cycle of debugging because I was missing a dependency, and boom, done. Took me 5 mins. Would have taken 30mins or more otherwise (and a tonne of pointless cognition/research/rabbit-holes).
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, I actually laughed out loud at the idea of Reddit programming being nice at all, let alone nicer than SO. My wife has plenty of horror stories when she was learning to program.
  - arkitaip 3y ago
    The problem is that SO is so toxic that it makes Reddit's toxicity seem rather tolerable.
- soulofmischief 3y ago
outsidetheparty 3y ago
Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good. But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission: > ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.
- prepend 3y ago
  This hasn’t been my experience at all and I’ve found that chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO. I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing “duplicate” answers. It’s hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods. It’s a tough place to be and I don’t think it’s possible to make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original founders sold a few years ago.
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    > a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods. Tell me you don't know how Wikipedia works without telling me you don't know how Wikipedia works
    - prepend 3y ago
      The mods of Wikipedia operate very differently than the mods at SO. I think there are more rigorous rules with SO than Wikipedia and they also have their tiers of users who upvote messages. Wikipedia has nothing like this.
- oezi 3y ago
  Unless you are living on technologies edges, ChatGPT gets it right plenty of times and isn't a rude brick about it. If it gets it wrong it usually is pretty apparent quickly and normally gives enough hints for avenues to explore. At least my SO use (and programming related googling) has fallen dramatically...
dvt 3y ago
Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on. The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time. On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco
- saganus 3y ago
  > it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers This is one of the things that baffled me the most. Until very recently you could not even sort by "newest answers first" (I just checked and it seems it has been added now, but it looks like it was added this year?), which seems a pretty strange decision considering technology changes so fast. As years went by, it became more and more difficult to look for answers as you would need to search through piles of old answers to find the most recent one (which was not necessarily the accepted answer or even the one with the most votes). I mean, most places I've seen, that show data with a sortable Date field, let you sort by olders or newest, but not SO, no. I could never find an answer fot this, but always seemed like a big obvious oversight.
EGreg 3y ago
What about the other StackExchange sites, though!
ElemenoPicuares 3y ago
I quickly rose to the a top contributor role of a non-programming stack exchange site. I had more technical subject matter expertise (including formal training) than seemingly anyone else there, was friendly, thorough, empathic, upbeat, technically competent, and prolific. Not too long after getting involved, I just got too sick of unhelpful, pedantic, self-important moderators nitpicking at my posts and making passive-aggressive edits, so I just left. That was years ago and I still regularly collect points in upvotes and get positive comments from people. Many people in those roles claim they're uptight because they want to maintain the quality of the posts. Well, I assure you that particular SE, at least, is much worse off for it.
Scofield67 3y ago
[flagged]
tedivm 3y ago
>Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered. I experienced this just last week. I answered a question that was never asked before, and one of the "powermods" closed it as a duplicate while pointing to a question that was similar but vastly different. Since I have enough karma there I was able to start a reopen vote, but it took a week before it was opened again. The user who asked the question was justifiably upset, and probably not going to come back. At the same time the community lost access to an actually useful question without any real reason.
kristianc 3y ago
One of the biggest features of ChatGPT, for me, is that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" when you ask it a question.
- belfalas 3y ago
  "ChatGPT, where does John Lennon live?"
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Interesting. But one of the faults of ChatGPT is also that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" There's a place for asking that question - not as often as SO asks it, but more often than never.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
I have noticed their SEO drop. That may not even be their fault. Every day, I see more and more garbage sites trying to capture coding questions with blocks of text.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: The Fall of Stack Overflow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 - July 2023 (781 comments)
j45 3y ago
When technology can solve a problem equivalently well in so many ways discussion and debate is the way to learn from the experiences of others to help navigate your own course. When it comes to adult learning, some people with some topics prefer to only know the answer of what they’re after or other times want a bigger picture. Last but not least learning to read the code and system design decisions of others are both required for competent software development. The part that stack avoided is maximum value comes from is understanding that decision making is the key in a lot of the underlying intent of users coming there … not just a snippet of code in system design. Not know what you should be looking for or if there’s other ways to do things is a big lose in the development of software engineers. How do I know this beyond my subjective interpretation and preference? I was an early user of stack overflow. It was a heavy time of software development, and I could easily spent 4-6 hours a day on it. So I decided to write. I learned so much, and shared anything I could. It really was a great early community. I really disliked Experts Exchange and it was one of the major inspirations for SO to happen. Little by little, I noticed some of my posts of hard earned lessons attached to a solution, started getting locked down. People deciding how things should be interpreted one way. Correcting answers they don’t understand. Answers started getting rejected. Context had no value. That’s not a great recipe for success. The strange thing is I still sit in the top X percent of stack users for not having answered anything in a while, and still get upvotes and comments. How to schedule multiple parties to ensure eveyrone has dace tkme? Sorry, explaining steps in English is not code or acceptable. It apparently can’t be translated to different programming languages. Software is for people in the real world, not strictly a technical pursuit. SO started their network of other sites but the bar to entry was too high. There’s lots of extremely valuable but esoteric design knowledge that remotely being aware of or having access to can be tremendously helpful. Stack overflow didn’t understand or care it was helping system design to be better. Architecture goes bad in hand with code and I don’t know how you can talk about either effectively on the whole with the ability to refer to the other. With out it the trees don’t always become a forest.
criloz2 3y ago
A community that is unwelcoming to new users, is dying? who would have thought?
moralestapia 3y ago
I used to be mad at SO but after some time now (haven't been there in years) I understand is just another instance of an Eternal September. At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot; people who, in general, loved technology. Anyone who really enjoys what they're doing usually enjoy helping others who know less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the internet is an amazing place. With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance, there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on others all over the site, just because they were after some imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is something that happens to all online communities that need moderators, at some point. At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO being run de facto by knowledgeable and passionate people to being run de facto by these kind of moderators who completely missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was still a Q&A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around 2014, maybe a bit earlier. To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just couldn't? SO fell into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining ventures. Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever use SO?. Compared to Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite personality, I'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or whatever. Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its place in the future (which, btw, I don't think it is ChatGPT). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA
hcks 3y ago
I never really got stack overflow. When I look for something I know, I find all the most upvoted answers kinda bad and/or suboptimal. Sometimes look like written by experienced beginners.
stupidcar 3y ago
The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated. Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards. For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.
- sedatk 3y ago
  That's why SO has shot itself in the foot with its attitude towards duplicate content. Duplication would have allowed modern answers to bubble up. It's impossible to do that on SO.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - twelve40 3y ago
    um... unclear? you can provide a new answer to the old question and have it bubble up via votes. Does not change other issues though.
    - sedatk 3y ago
      No, imagine this: you have a 14 year old question with 50 answers, all have tens of upvotes, an accepted answer from when the question was asked, many other answers similar to the accepted answer but with questionable validity from different times, and you add a new answer with zero upvotes under that pile. See the problem? No way that someone could find that without huge effort, it'll stay buried under the fold. That dynamic would discourage you from contributing that answer. The design is simply not suitable for living content.
rurp 3y ago
One point I'm surprised this article didn't include was hostility towards users and mods from SO staff. I wander into Meta stackexchange on occasion and it's shocking how often the top threads are full of well reasoned posts from established users being ignored or bulldozed by SO employees. Maybe I've just happened to look on bad days but I have the strong impression that SO is a platform that I absolutely don't want to get more invested in, despite a lot of interesting and knowledgable posters. It reminds me to the disdain Reddit has been showing towards its power users lately. An established platform can get away with that sort behavior for a while, but is utterly toxic to its longterm quality and growth.
- acdha 3y ago
  I saw a related aspect of this years ago trying to incubate a professional sub-community. It wasn’t a huge group (thousands of people, not millions) but important and long-lived, and the SE community was active, but it was closed for not being active enough. Years later, that conversation still happens but not on SE since everyone got the message that mods only care about advertising metrics. That’s a common business decision but it seems short-sighted for what SE wants to do.
slashdev 3y ago
I rarely ask questions on stack overflow anymore. When I do, the question is usually closed for being similar to something else or off topic or whatever. Whenever I forget why I don’t use it, I’m quickly reminded. I find the moderation and some of the comments very unwelcoming. It’s still great for finding information though. It’s likely the most visited site for me from Google search. Edit: you guys are not too welcoming either sometimes… I don’t know why someone feels this is worth a downvote.
renewiltord 3y ago
It's unfortunate because the people who most want to answer SO questions often are completely obsoleted by LLMs because they just don't have unique skills. Usually, they try to bucket into questions they know the answer to. Sadly, this means that an actually hard question will just result in their not knowing the answer and confusing it for an easy question they know the answer to. The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this at a trivial point. I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else. You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO / everything. Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things right: - prioritize questions which have clear answers - gated functionality - CC licensing - data dumps I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.
eth0pal 3y ago
StackOverflow is one of the most toxic places on the web. Glad to see it is being replaced by a AI tools.
lolinder 3y ago
Point #1 (May 2022 Google analytics changes) completely undoes the argument that this isn't caused primarily by ChatGPT. With a 15% drop in traffic from the cookie change, the new school year baseline should go down from 20mil to 17mil, and the summer trough should go from about 17mil to 14mil. In 2022 we see the trough stabilize at 14mil, then climb back to 16mil before plummeting again in November with the advent of ChatGPT. That looks very much like the initial decline was the combination of the cookie change with the regular summer drop, and ChatGPT killed traffic before it could quite get back up to the new baseline.
segfaultbuserr 3y ago
The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It's meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of "authoritative" answers to "general-purpose" questions. For better or worse, it's not a forum by design. In fact, forum-like behaviors are effectively banned. Stack Exchange wants the site to be an FAQ database, "there's no chit-chat." This mode of operation, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the Web, unlike most things that came before or after it. A question must be asked and answered in a very particular way. For example, one is expected to do the following: 1. Show one's knowledge. Whenever a question is asked, one should write an introduction to present the background of the question to fit inside the knowledge base format. One should also write down all the previous solutions one has already attempted and why one has failed so far. 2. Case minimization. If one has a question from a large system, one must extract the core part via minimal reproducible example and present the problem in isolation (but also introduce just enough background to show a clear motivation and that it's not an X-Y problem). Ideally, the question must have a laser focus on an extremely narrow technical point. Come up with a proper minimized case may take an hour, just like when one's submitting bug reports to Bugzilla or mailing lists. 3. Encyclopedic tone. Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question. If anyone's asking for clarification, it means this question is probably not properly asked. A question must be as "non-specific" and "objective" as possible. Similarly, the answer must also be as "authoritative" and "objective" as possible. I found Stack Exchange is a great site and the knowledge base model works extremely well if you have a suitable question, or if you have the writing skill to frame the question into the proper form, as I've received helpful answers from multiple experts in the fields. However, the fact that Stack Exchange is not a fourm is completely alien to most visitors, and there's an strong and serious need of forums. The large amount of negative feedback from new users is hardly a surprise. Another problem is that it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. If the question is opinion-based, it's out of scope. If a question is extremely specific for your setup, the question is out of scope. If the question needs discussions for clarifications and conversations, it means the question is probably out of scope. It's also extremely difficult, by design, to debate on anything should a disagreement arise, since the site intentionally does not support replies or threads (comments are only usable for quick remarks) - anything that can't be answered with hard facts is out of scope.
janalsncm 3y ago
I’m wondering if there isn’t a better solution to the “closed as duplicate” issue. If you post a question it might be closed as a “duplicate” even if: 1) your question relates to a newer version of a technology, and previous answers do not address it 2) your question is similar to others but asks a more specific question, especially if it demonstrates having read prior knowledge 3) your question is more well-written than others I don’t know what the solution is to this problem, but I think SO needs to give it more thought. Another low hanging fruit is rude comments. I don’t know what the policy is now, but SO needs to tighten it up.
jaylittle 3y ago
"ChatGPT is actually notoriously good for coding. I don’t even use it for anything else at this point." I can't take a coder who says this seriously. Come on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to expose the fact that ChatGPT is actually a pretty shitty coder once you get beyond the most dirt damn simple shit. With that said, fuck Stack Overflow.
simonblack 3y ago
"Post hoc, propter hoc" - or "After this, so must be because of this." fallacy. Stack Overflow has always been a disaster. When it started, I used to add a lot of answers. But I got disillusioned quickly because of the Smart-Alec Culture that has always existed at Stack Overflow. I have refused to go to the site of my own accord since about 2010. (Or thereabouts. I can't remember quite back that far.) I do sometimes go via Google when an answer is relevant to my needs at the time, but otherwise no. I don't think any sort of AI is responsible, though AI is the fad 'catch-all' for everything right now. I think it's just that the tipping point that was always going to happen to Stack Overflow, finally did. I couldn't wish it on a nicer bunch of folks. /s
jokoon 3y ago
That sort of explains why I started going to irc to ask. But yes, interacting with pedantic or toxic people often makes things difficult, and I even met toxic people on IRC. Of course it's my job to do my research before I ask since I'm using somebody else's time, but there are limits. I often spent an afternoon to prepare a question to thoroughly explain a problem I had, to make sure an autistic user could not criticize how I did things or have anything to say. I have nothing against autism, but sometimes it explains why some people are just toxic for no reason. I do remember having a question closed for being opinion based. That was funny. Setting up a bounty helps, but last time I used one, nobody answered.
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
> Stack Overflow is ranked 4th here, but I don’t even need to click because the featured snippet answers it for me. Amazing. Every word of what those three snippets say is wrong.
firemelt 3y ago
why people seems bother much about it? the site is really toxic especially to a new comer I always try to avoid asking question to that site because the cesspool of elitist self entitled moderator I contribute by answering though and also I think the site have bloated reputation system. I mean some guy with 100k reputation is not a legend anymore because after I check their profile the contribution that they have done is basically just asking or answeing basic shits kn JavaScript/git/python/pandas question that is already on the doc or manual fucking hypocrite
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> The most obvious answer is AI, because ChatGPT is extremely useful as a coding companion. People keep saying that but every systematic test of LLM coding ability suggests otherwise. For example, another article linked to this table of GPT-4 results on various tests yesterday: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Schulman-image-1.png https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Sc... The table is from OpenAI's article on GPT-4: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 And it shows how well GPT-4 did on verious tests, like LSAT, etc. One of the tests is listed as "Codeforces Rating". The score is: 392 below 5th [percentile]

158 points by cryptoz 3y ago

cratermoon 3y ago

Google the rentier

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zeptonaut22 3y ago

If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the publishers. I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs. moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel like an icky place to be.

rg111 3y ago
It could have been a community, like Quora, but focused towards CS/IT. But it absolutely missed the mark on that one. It is a high pressure, toxic, unwelcoming place. I contributed a lot of Math and CS content to Quora where I had ~1.5m views on answers. I really liked engaging there. OTOH, SO felt like a toxic exam hall on a bad day. Every year SO asked in the survey if I felt I belonged to the community or something similar, I chose the most negative response from the list- every year. If SO behaved like a community, then it could have had organic growth, and organic visitors, not depending so largely on Google.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  Huh. I've long had the opposite impression of the two communities. Quora seemed to celebrate showing off in a way that SE didn't.

oarsinsync 3y ago

It’s worth reading right to the end, for the joke about Overflow AI. Enjoyable article. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to form an opinion on the accuracy, but it’s well written.

gsich 3y ago

Those search examples is the reason why Google also declines.

jcrawfordor 3y ago

I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow seems to have hit the same problem even harder. Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask a question to get an answer, or a repository of information? There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells‚ and now we see posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for Business") this way. StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which were very much curated and written to an audience of people who want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers, etc. The most prominent public resources for programming, websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase in a Wiki-like way. And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a forum, it's a resource, and that means the "questions" are supposed to be evergreen, curated references. Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange headquarters settled on their answer: aggressive removal of duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new moderation tool that gamified closing questions, sending moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow/destroy decisions that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the direction of "if in doubt, close the question." From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the websites that the best way to maintain a high-quality information resource is to close as many questions as possible. A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the perspective of running a Q&A website? absolutely not! StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A websites that were openly hostile to people asking questions. I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora, which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being just extremely weird and frankly right on par with Yahoo Answers for quality. Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale. But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I always wanted. My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty obvious why. No one knows what it's for exactly. If you want to ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team's Slack channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice information for people to look up later, you put it in the documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain documentation.

boredumb 3y ago

A big take away for anyone reading this, if you have a massive digital asset that relies on google you should probably be planning and leveraging yourself for a 50% drop in traffic and revenue over the weekend at random.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Regardless of how you feel about Stack Overflow’s users and moderators, running a site like that is not cheap. StackOverflow runs on less than 25 servers, its infrastructure is incredibly cheap considering just how much traffic they serve. And their UI, thankfully, hasn't changed much over the last decades either. [1] https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance

toshk 3y ago
Staff is much more expensive then servers, especially in the west.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The vast majority of moderators are unpaid volunteers though.
whalesalad 3y ago
interesting to see how underutilized all of that hardware is ... "peak 1%, peak 2%" etc
- ec109685 3y ago
  Because clearly they have way less traffic now ;)
byw 3y ago
I'm guessing they're doing some aggressive caching since it's read-heavy?
- adventured 3y ago
  Yeah it's very aggressively cached for read purposes. You could write most Q&A pages to static html files if you felt like it. Stack has a similar age-toward-zero outcome that Wikipedia has (the % of new content as a total share of all content on the service chases toward zero over time); the more you fill out the site, the balance of aged content to new content inverts to an extreme, so mostly what you end up doing is serving up cached reads on older content. They're fairly well over-provisioned on server capacity. It's so relatively light to operate on the infrastructure side that they could safely further reduce the server count. There's no need in their case however, since infrastructure cost isn't one of their big problems.

Legend2440 3y ago

I think this article (and other online discourse) overestimates the value of StackOverflow to ChatGPT's training data. Sure, it's in there - but so is all the library documentation ever written, billions of lines of code, and millions of tutorials. StackOverflow is just one small part.

acdha 3y ago
Stack Overflow has tons and tons of things which aren’t in the documentation and almost all of them are questions from people who couldn’t find the answer in the documentation – exactly what ChatGPT needs since it also doesn’t understand anything about how a given program works, only what patterns are common in public examples.

Pannoniae 3y ago

Probably "unpopular opinion™" but I feel like the ban on "opinion-based" or recommendation questions also didn't help. Not everything can be answered purely objectively, there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python" or something. Stackoverflow removed itself from that process which has driven people elsewhere. Answers are also often more focused on the cosmetic aspects than actually answering a question. Just see the example in the article. The questioner asked about a lambda reference to a public field, and they got told "just don't use public fields lol". That's not help, that's just being a condescending asshole and not actually answering the question. Combined with the toxicity and elitism rampant, I am not surprised.

nerdponx 3y ago
This is a multi-year trend and doesn't explain the sudden and significant decrease. The article points to Google search algorithm changes for the first big drop, and ChatGPT release for the second one.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Oh, it can explain a sudden and significant change. Just because something changes slowly, it doesn't mean that the effect will appear slowly too. The article points at two causes that coincide in timing with the change. But even if it's correct, it doesn't mean that those are the two only causes or even the most important ones.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Things work.... until they don't. A bunch of things can accumulate and not be a problem until it suddenly is.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  Slowly, then all at once.
mschuster91 3y ago
> there are many situations where people just want to ask "what are the options for generating a PDF in python" You know what I'd love? Framework or language authors publishing a curated set of FAQs and "best practices". It can't be that hard to get a list of the most common tasks people google for, and provide links to the commonly used libraries as well as code examples. AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these days, although I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions.

matsemann 3y ago

> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer. Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown. It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the community has to deal with. What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers for a long time. And with no stewards, it will become toxic. And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
josephcsible 3y ago
> It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.
xmprt 3y ago
> 99% of the times it was really a dupe I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years. Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old question.

password4321 3y ago

Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36889703 (5 days ago; 290+ comments) Overflow AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311 (4 days ago; 97 comments)

alextingle 3y ago

Love the punchline at the end.

padolsey 3y ago

> Instead, you head over to Reddit where the programming community is much nicer Is this true? Wondering if there's a more objective way to know than endless anecdotes. I think programming communities stereotypically are pretty mean. I don't really see reddit as a "safe place". But maybe there are smaller subreddits where being wrong doesn't make you feel awful? > You can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging I'm quite perplexed by this same talking point being regurgitated. These LLMs do indeed hallucinate. But I've found, with coding problems, that it's very easy to see it's wrong if you're working in a domain you're familiar with. I am doing a lot of react development with chatgpt(gpt4) as a kind of intern-on-steroids and it's working really well. I can usually identify when it's being silly as I've worked with react for a few years. Ofc without that it's hard. But even if I'm in unfamiliar territory I can ask it to write tests to confirm its code works. I can also hand it stack-traces and it'll usually be very helpful at debugging its own code. An e.g. I am not competent at shell stuff but it's been such a boon at helping me hack and pipe stuff together. Actually two days ago I wanted to generate a big bird's eye grid of a huge PDF document. I had no idea how to and asked it point-blank to write some code. Within a couple messages it generated a python script w/ PIL and a pdf2image imports and shell commands to get things installed and $PATH properly configured. One cycle of debugging because I was missing a dependency, and boom, done. Took me 5 mins. Would have taken 30mins or more otherwise (and a tonne of pointless cognition/research/rabbit-holes).

sillysaurusx 3y ago
For what it’s worth, I actually laughed out loud at the idea of Reddit programming being nice at all, let alone nicer than SO. My wife has plenty of horror stories when she was learning to program.
- arkitaip 3y ago
  The problem is that SO is so toxic that it makes Reddit's toxicity seem rather tolerable.
soulofmischief 3y ago

outsidetheparty 3y ago

Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good. But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission: > ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.

prepend 3y ago
This hasn’t been my experience at all and I’ve found that chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO. I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing “duplicate” answers. It’s hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods. It’s a tough place to be and I don’t think it’s possible to make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original founders sold a few years ago.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  > a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods. Tell me you don't know how Wikipedia works without telling me you don't know how Wikipedia works
  - prepend 3y ago
    The mods of Wikipedia operate very differently than the mods at SO. I think there are more rigorous rules with SO than Wikipedia and they also have their tiers of users who upvote messages. Wikipedia has nothing like this.
oezi 3y ago
Unless you are living on technologies edges, ChatGPT gets it right plenty of times and isn't a rude brick about it. If it gets it wrong it usually is pretty apparent quickly and normally gives enough hints for avenues to explore. At least my SO use (and programming related googling) has fallen dramatically...

dvt 3y ago

Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on. The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time. On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco

saganus 3y ago
> it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers This is one of the things that baffled me the most. Until very recently you could not even sort by "newest answers first" (I just checked and it seems it has been added now, but it looks like it was added this year?), which seems a pretty strange decision considering technology changes so fast. As years went by, it became more and more difficult to look for answers as you would need to search through piles of old answers to find the most recent one (which was not necessarily the accepted answer or even the one with the most votes). I mean, most places I've seen, that show data with a sortable Date field, let you sort by olders or newest, but not SO, no. I could never find an answer fot this, but always seemed like a big obvious oversight.

EGreg 3y ago

What about the other StackExchange sites, though!

ElemenoPicuares 3y ago

I quickly rose to the a top contributor role of a non-programming stack exchange site. I had more technical subject matter expertise (including formal training) than seemingly anyone else there, was friendly, thorough, empathic, upbeat, technically competent, and prolific. Not too long after getting involved, I just got too sick of unhelpful, pedantic, self-important moderators nitpicking at my posts and making passive-aggressive edits, so I just left. That was years ago and I still regularly collect points in upvotes and get positive comments from people. Many people in those roles claim they're uptight because they want to maintain the quality of the posts. Well, I assure you that particular SE, at least, is much worse off for it.

Scofield67 3y ago

[flagged]

tedivm 3y ago

>Often, if you try to ask a question on Stack Overflow, it’ll get marked as a duplicate with a link to a question that is absolutely not a duplicate. Or the duplicate will be to a question that was never answered. I experienced this just last week. I answered a question that was never asked before, and one of the "powermods" closed it as a duplicate while pointing to a question that was similar but vastly different. Since I have enough karma there I was able to start a reopen vote, but it took a week before it was opened again. The user who asked the question was justifiably upset, and probably not going to come back. At the same time the community lost access to an actually useful question without any real reason.

kristianc 3y ago

One of the biggest features of ChatGPT, for me, is that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" when you ask it a question.

belfalas 3y ago
"ChatGPT, where does John Lennon live?"
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Interesting. But one of the faults of ChatGPT is also that it never asks "Why would you want to do that?" There's a place for asking that question - not as often as SO asks it, but more often than never.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

I have noticed their SEO drop. That may not even be their fault. Every day, I see more and more garbage sites trying to capture coding questions with blocks of text.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: The Fall of Stack Overflow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 - July 2023 (781 comments)

j45 3y ago

When technology can solve a problem equivalently well in so many ways discussion and debate is the way to learn from the experiences of others to help navigate your own course. When it comes to adult learning, some people with some topics prefer to only know the answer of what they’re after or other times want a bigger picture. Last but not least learning to read the code and system design decisions of others are both required for competent software development. The part that stack avoided is maximum value comes from is understanding that decision making is the key in a lot of the underlying intent of users coming there … not just a snippet of code in system design. Not know what you should be looking for or if there’s other ways to do things is a big lose in the development of software engineers. How do I know this beyond my subjective interpretation and preference? I was an early user of stack overflow. It was a heavy time of software development, and I could easily spent 4-6 hours a day on it. So I decided to write. I learned so much, and shared anything I could. It really was a great early community. I really disliked Experts Exchange and it was one of the major inspirations for SO to happen. Little by little, I noticed some of my posts of hard earned lessons attached to a solution, started getting locked down. People deciding how things should be interpreted one way. Correcting answers they don’t understand. Answers started getting rejected. Context had no value. That’s not a great recipe for success. The strange thing is I still sit in the top X percent of stack users for not having answered anything in a while, and still get upvotes and comments. How to schedule multiple parties to ensure eveyrone has dace tkme? Sorry, explaining steps in English is not code or acceptable. It apparently can’t be translated to different programming languages. Software is for people in the real world, not strictly a technical pursuit. SO started their network of other sites but the bar to entry was too high. There’s lots of extremely valuable but esoteric design knowledge that remotely being aware of or having access to can be tremendously helpful. Stack overflow didn’t understand or care it was helping system design to be better. Architecture goes bad in hand with code and I don’t know how you can talk about either effectively on the whole with the ability to refer to the other. With out it the trees don’t always become a forest.

criloz2 3y ago

A community that is unwelcoming to new users, is dying? who would have thought?

moralestapia 3y ago

I used to be mad at SO but after some time now (haven't been there in years) I understand is just another instance of an Eternal September. At the beginning, SO used to be great because its community was mostly comprised of curious developers, hackers and whatnot; people who, in general, loved technology. Anyone who really enjoys what they're doing usually enjoy helping others who know less and enjoy having curious and intellectually rewarding conversations. SO (ten years ago) put you in the company of those people. Ask anything and you would get back a thoughtful reply from one of the most knowledgeable people in that particular topic, for free. The first time I experienced this my mind was completely blown, that is the kind of thing that made me feel the internet is an amazing place. With time, as SO started to accrue users, people started to join and use SO motivated by entirely different things. For instance, there was the one group of people who used SO as some sort of "do my homework because I'm too lazy to figure out trivial things for myself", I don't think these people were actually toxic to the SO community, perhaps they were just a nuisance, but that paved the way for ... another group of people (who I think had actual mental and social problems IRL) who decided to start policing on others all over the site, just because they were after some imaginary internet points and/or because they needed to fill some emotional void in their real lives with brief periods of menial amounts of power over others. This isn't unique to SO, it is something that happens to all online communities that need moderators, at some point. At some point, gradually or whatever, there was a switch from SO being run de facto by knowledgeable and passionate people to being run de facto by these kind of moderators who completely missed what was the soul of the site they came to leech on (most of them joined way after SO was up and running). A lot of people sensed that and slowly became uninterested in the site, since the initial experience that SO provided to them was now replaced by an entirely different thing (even thought, in the surface, it was still a Q&A site). Whenever this happened, SO started to die and it wasn't around April 2022 (as TFA says); I'd say it was around 2014, maybe a bit earlier. To this day, I still don't know why the people running SO (not the dumb moderators, but the actual owners of the site) let this happen and actually encouraged the exact kind of behavior that led to the site's demise. I guess because the numbers were looking good anyway? I also think they thought of themselves "too big to fail" in a sense. I like Jeff and Joel and I'm sure they saw this coming years ahead, I have no idea why they didn't do anything to prevent this. Perhaps they just couldn't? SO fell into the VC trap and now had investors to please and milestones to reach and whatnot (I had a good laugh when they announced their series E [1]). I guess that's why they both stepped down from SO at some point and went to much more entertaining ventures. Their current CEO is completely oblivious of all this. Here's him talking nonsense for about an hour [2], he really missed the point as to why SO was dying. Did he ever use SO?. Compared to Jeff and Joel I think of him of someone with a complete opposite personality, I'd be surprised if he has ever wrote an actual line of code (aside from the usual "Hello World" stuff). At least he made some money out of this, put some bread on his table or whatever. Sad to see the site go, but excited to see what will take its place in the future (which, btw, I don't think it is ChatGPT). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23978387 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aA5bzzSYAA

hcks 3y ago

I never really got stack overflow. When I look for something I know, I find all the most upvoted answers kinda bad and/or suboptimal. Sometimes look like written by experienced beginners.

stupidcar 3y ago

The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated. Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards. For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.

sedatk 3y ago
That's why SO has shot itself in the foot with its attitude towards duplicate content. Duplication would have allowed modern answers to bubble up. It's impossible to do that on SO.
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- twelve40 3y ago
  um... unclear? you can provide a new answer to the old question and have it bubble up via votes. Does not change other issues though.
  - sedatk 3y ago
    No, imagine this: you have a 14 year old question with 50 answers, all have tens of upvotes, an accepted answer from when the question was asked, many other answers similar to the accepted answer but with questionable validity from different times, and you add a new answer with zero upvotes under that pile. See the problem? No way that someone could find that without huge effort, it'll stay buried under the fold. That dynamic would discourage you from contributing that answer. The design is simply not suitable for living content.

rurp 3y ago

One point I'm surprised this article didn't include was hostility towards users and mods from SO staff. I wander into Meta stackexchange on occasion and it's shocking how often the top threads are full of well reasoned posts from established users being ignored or bulldozed by SO employees. Maybe I've just happened to look on bad days but I have the strong impression that SO is a platform that I absolutely don't want to get more invested in, despite a lot of interesting and knowledgable posters. It reminds me to the disdain Reddit has been showing towards its power users lately. An established platform can get away with that sort behavior for a while, but is utterly toxic to its longterm quality and growth.

acdha 3y ago
I saw a related aspect of this years ago trying to incubate a professional sub-community. It wasn’t a huge group (thousands of people, not millions) but important and long-lived, and the SE community was active, but it was closed for not being active enough. Years later, that conversation still happens but not on SE since everyone got the message that mods only care about advertising metrics. That’s a common business decision but it seems short-sighted for what SE wants to do.

slashdev 3y ago

I rarely ask questions on stack overflow anymore. When I do, the question is usually closed for being similar to something else or off topic or whatever. Whenever I forget why I don’t use it, I’m quickly reminded. I find the moderation and some of the comments very unwelcoming. It’s still great for finding information though. It’s likely the most visited site for me from Google search. Edit: you guys are not too welcoming either sometimes… I don’t know why someone feels this is worth a downvote.

renewiltord 3y ago

It's unfortunate because the people who most want to answer SO questions often are completely obsoleted by LLMs because they just don't have unique skills. Usually, they try to bucket into questions they know the answer to. Sadly, this means that an actually hard question will just result in their not knowing the answer and confusing it for an easy question they know the answer to. The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this at a trivial point. I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else. You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO / everything. Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things right: - prioritize questions which have clear answers - gated functionality - CC licensing - data dumps I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.

eth0pal 3y ago

StackOverflow is one of the most toxic places on the web. Glad to see it is being replaced by a AI tools.

lolinder 3y ago

Point #1 (May 2022 Google analytics changes) completely undoes the argument that this isn't caused primarily by ChatGPT. With a 15% drop in traffic from the cookie change, the new school year baseline should go down from 20mil to 17mil, and the summer trough should go from about 17mil to 14mil. In 2022 we see the trough stabilize at 14mil, then climb back to 16mil before plummeting again in November with the advent of ChatGPT. That looks very much like the initial decline was the combination of the cookie change with the regular summer drop, and ChatGPT killed traffic before it could quite get back up to the new baseline.

segfaultbuserr 3y ago

The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It's meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of "authoritative" answers to "general-purpose" questions. For better or worse, it's not a forum by design. In fact, forum-like behaviors are effectively banned. Stack Exchange wants the site to be an FAQ database, "there's no chit-chat." This mode of operation, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the Web, unlike most things that came before or after it. A question must be asked and answered in a very particular way. For example, one is expected to do the following: 1. Show one's knowledge. Whenever a question is asked, one should write an introduction to present the background of the question to fit inside the knowledge base format. One should also write down all the previous solutions one has already attempted and why one has failed so far. 2. Case minimization. If one has a question from a large system, one must extract the core part via minimal reproducible example and present the problem in isolation (but also introduce just enough background to show a clear motivation and that it's not an X-Y problem). Ideally, the question must have a laser focus on an extremely narrow technical point. Come up with a proper minimized case may take an hour, just like when one's submitting bug reports to Bugzilla or mailing lists. 3. Encyclopedic tone. Ideally, each answer must be written as if it's a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question. If anyone's asking for clarification, it means this question is probably not properly asked. A question must be as "non-specific" and "objective" as possible. Similarly, the answer must also be as "authoritative" and "objective" as possible. I found Stack Exchange is a great site and the knowledge base model works extremely well if you have a suitable question, or if you have the writing skill to frame the question into the proper form, as I've received helpful answers from multiple experts in the fields. However, the fact that Stack Exchange is not a fourm is completely alien to most visitors, and there's an strong and serious need of forums. The large amount of negative feedback from new users is hardly a surprise. Another problem is that it's only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. If the question is opinion-based, it's out of scope. If a question is extremely specific for your setup, the question is out of scope. If the question needs discussions for clarifications and conversations, it means the question is probably out of scope. It's also extremely difficult, by design, to debate on anything should a disagreement arise, since the site intentionally does not support replies or threads (comments are only usable for quick remarks) - anything that can't be answered with hard facts is out of scope.

janalsncm 3y ago

I’m wondering if there isn’t a better solution to the “closed as duplicate” issue. If you post a question it might be closed as a “duplicate” even if: 1) your question relates to a newer version of a technology, and previous answers do not address it 2) your question is similar to others but asks a more specific question, especially if it demonstrates having read prior knowledge 3) your question is more well-written than others I don’t know what the solution is to this problem, but I think SO needs to give it more thought. Another low hanging fruit is rude comments. I don’t know what the policy is now, but SO needs to tighten it up.

jaylittle 3y ago

"ChatGPT is actually notoriously good for coding. I don’t even use it for anything else at this point." I can't take a coder who says this seriously. Come on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to expose the fact that ChatGPT is actually a pretty shitty coder once you get beyond the most dirt damn simple shit. With that said, fuck Stack Overflow.

simonblack 3y ago

"Post hoc, propter hoc" - or "After this, so must be because of this." fallacy. Stack Overflow has always been a disaster. When it started, I used to add a lot of answers. But I got disillusioned quickly because of the Smart-Alec Culture that has always existed at Stack Overflow. I have refused to go to the site of my own accord since about 2010. (Or thereabouts. I can't remember quite back that far.) I do sometimes go via Google when an answer is relevant to my needs at the time, but otherwise no. I don't think any sort of AI is responsible, though AI is the fad 'catch-all' for everything right now. I think it's just that the tipping point that was always going to happen to Stack Overflow, finally did. I couldn't wish it on a nicer bunch of folks. /s

jokoon 3y ago

That sort of explains why I started going to irc to ask. But yes, interacting with pedantic or toxic people often makes things difficult, and I even met toxic people on IRC. Of course it's my job to do my research before I ask since I'm using somebody else's time, but there are limits. I often spent an afternoon to prepare a question to thoroughly explain a problem I had, to make sure an autistic user could not criticize how I did things or have anything to say. I have nothing against autism, but sometimes it explains why some people are just toxic for no reason. I do remember having a question closed for being opinion based. That was funny. Setting up a bounty helps, but last time I used one, nobody answered.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

> Stack Overflow is ranked 4th here, but I don’t even need to click because the featured snippet answers it for me. Amazing. Every word of what those three snippets say is wrong.

firemelt 3y ago

why people seems bother much about it? the site is really toxic especially to a new comer I always try to avoid asking question to that site because the cesspool of elitist self entitled moderator I contribute by answering though and also I think the site have bloated reputation system. I mean some guy with 100k reputation is not a legend anymore because after I check their profile the contribution that they have done is basically just asking or answeing basic shits kn JavaScript/git/python/pandas question that is already on the doc or manual fucking hypocrite

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> The most obvious answer is AI, because ChatGPT is extremely useful as a coding companion. People keep saying that but every systematic test of LLM coding ability suggests otherwise. For example, another article linked to this table of GPT-4 results on various tests yesterday: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Schulman-image-1.png https://www.thenewatlantis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Sc... The table is from OpenAI's article on GPT-4: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 And it shows how well GPT-4 did on verious tests, like LSAT, etc. One of the tests is listed as "Codeforces Rating". The score is: 392 below 5th [percentile]