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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 obj

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 AWS for example puts out very high quality documentation - it's rare to find an AWS help page that has outdated commands these days, although I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions I imagine they'd rather you use CloudFormation?
  - scubbo 3y ago
    :s/CloudFormation/CDK/, but yes :)
    - evantbyrne 3y ago
      My $0.02 is use boto3 if you're working in Python. It's gross, but stable. When I built my CD service I went with boto3 because CDK had 10x the issues on GitHub. Not an exact comparison since the CDK repo seems to include more than one language, but still. Skipped Terraform because it took three months to merge a two line bugfix I submitted, has a similarly massive number of issues, and to this day it still doesn't seem to support some critical API endpoints.
      - scubbo 3y ago
        boto3 is an SDK for the AWS API, CDK is an SDK for CloudFormation. boto3 is imperative, CDK is declarative. You can do CDK-like things _in_ boto3, but past a certain level of complexity you'll end up reimplementing so much functionality that you would have done better to just learn enough to use the CDK. Comparing issues is particularly irrelevant in this case since (as you say) the boto3 API is pretty much stable (since it is "just" a language-specific client to an established API), whereas there are regularly requests for higher-level Constructs in CDK.
the_af 3y ago
StackOverflow set out to be a place for Q&A without "debate", to varying success. It's a fundamental part of its mission that questions that are really prompts for debate ("what is your favorite...?", "what do you recommend for...?") are not accepted. I agree with this decision. It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate. StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y". Again, with varying success and not always consistently, but it'd be even harder to accomplish if it accepted "what are the best things about X?". edit: example, from the article: > If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma. This is by design. Comments in SO are meant for correcting minor details or asking for clarification. They are not a form of "engagement" or debate; extended discussions are a symptom of impending flamewars and usually get promptly moved to the chat section of SO, where they belong. If you lack karma to comment, focus on asking & answering questions instead -- the primary active use of SO (other than just looking for answers, that is).
- hn8305823 3y ago
  > StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y" StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or Y is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that way, why would you even ask that?"
  - the_af 3y ago
    Sometimes. Not always. I do know I almost always find the answer I need, and someone has already asked it, so no need for me to write anything. I also don't care if it's closed as a dupe, since all I care about is whether it answers my question, not about reputation or status. I even contributed some useful answers! Did I get into pointless back and forths with aggressive users (and of course, sometimes I was the one in the wrong)? Sure! But so have I here on HN. I'd say of the last 5 years or so, the worst, most aggressive, and draining flamewars I've been involved in were here, in HN. Much worse than StackOverflow. Would you say HN is useless or failing because of this? I wouldn't!
  - glenstein 3y ago
shagie 3y ago
The ban on opinion based and recommendation questions grew out of the inability for people to make sure that they didn't overrun the entire site and crowding out the information / goal that Jeff and Joel wanted the site to be about. It is so easy to post a "{background}, what do you think?" which is more of a discussion than a Q&A format... or "I'm looking for XYZ" and getting a page of recommendations... and then people keep adding them without checking for duplicates. The administrative / curation time requirements of such content then grows faster than the number of people willing to do it. There are other, smaller, SE sites where such questions are allowed because with the slower amount of daily activity they are able to handle every question every day and a post suddenly getting an abnormal amount of time isn't that much more time. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=Active https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=... isn't a problem when they get 38 questions per day... while Stack Overflow gets 100x more, but doesn't have 100x more people doing curation. The result of that is that the question types that are most time consuming for doing curation and moderation get cast out and it becomes the easier, more objective ones that remain. As to answers... gamification hurt it there. While its part of the onboarding / understanding the site, people went after the numbers and so any answer, no mater how poor was ok. The culture became one of "don't remove an answer if it is any attempt to answer a question (not the question)" and getting 10 points for an upvote and only losing 2 points, unless you've written something awful, as long as you get one up vote its typically a positive point gain. The example question that is in the article is from 10 years ago. The current attribution of the comment is: a -> a.id. Why are you using public fields in the first place? - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:27 @JBNizet, I like public final fields in classes which are data structures. They don't implement interfaces or have deep hierarchies. - Daneel S. Yaitskov Dec 14 '14 at 9:31 You're making your own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown by your question). This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected. I'd really not do that if I were you. If generating getters is what bothers you, then use a decent IDE, or use Lombok to generate them for you. - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:42 There is no "lol" in that comment. The question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-reference-to-a-field https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-referenc... The screen shot is old ( https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline - it was at +29 by Dec 14th, 2014). In the article this is described as: > For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb. I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the problem. The "7% of comments are unwelcoming" - if there's a problem, flag them. If a pattern of unwelcoming comments from a person, they can get suspended. Not taking action on unwelcomeing comments perpetuates them. I would call out that calling someone a condescending asshole for asking about why public fields are being used is more unwelcoming than asking why public fields are being used.
oxfordmale 3y ago
It is worth noting that this article only uses one of the four graphs in the original articles to fit the narrative it is ChatGPT that is responsible for the decline. Other metrics show that the decline set in earlier.
- glenstein 3y ago
  I know they sometimes change links at hn, but the article I'm reading is emphatic that it's not due to Chat GPT.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The decline set in earlier such that that GPT Chap could swoop in and be "as good".
rg111 3y ago
In Mathematics SE, you can ask the community which are the best books on Point Set Topology or Linear Algebra. But you can't ask about the best Algorithms book in SO. This was a bummer. You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is stupid. Math SE is a much nicer community and I have enjoyed contributing there and also got a ton of help there.
- shagie 3y ago
  Math.se gets 1/10th the questions per day and 1/100th the visits per day of Stack Overflow. ( https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday ) It is able to handle the wider scope more easily. The fewer questions per day and the more people there to help guide a not-quite-right question to become more useful the more that variation in scope can be handled. Stack Overflow has the difficulty that as they scaled up in activity, the number of people willing to spend the time to curate and the corresponding tooling didn't scale with it. This resulted in a reduction of time that can be spent on a question to help it be a good question and so people do the least friction fastest action as they can. If, for every person in https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats you got 10 people to show up in https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats it might be feasible to have a more similar level of topic deviation. Note that Math, a small fraction of the size of Stack Overflow has done as many close vote reviews today as Stack Overflow.
  - nickpsecurity 3y ago
    You keep saying that about effect of moderation on fact- vs opinion-based questions. You haven’t proven it, though. Let’s look at an alternative. They could’ve created different categories of questions where some are fact-based and some are opinion-based. Then, focused moderation on the precise questions that need higher quality. Their search engines can also put them ahead of opinion-based questions. In that way, they keep the questions they prefer at a high, quality level while others are hit and miss. The latter are still there to benefit people. Users will then go where they prefer to go. StackOverflow would have both types of traffic.
ciupicri 3y ago
For this kind of questions there's Software Recommendations https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
They need at least one forum where people can ask questions that challenge the accepted status quo in software development.
skrowl 3y ago
[dead]
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
Fortunately the recommendation part is often ignored. I am an amateur developer and I am so glad that some people say "use X" instead of a block of code which is "native" and pure. In Python this was requests and arrow, in Go it was resty (despite the Go community being extremely toxic in SO). These are fantastic for casual coders. Answers with expensive code instead of a simple lib are useful too, but only when you gain expertise in the language.

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.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> I would love to see them publish some curated Terraform examples as well given how better IaC is compared to manual actions I imagine they'd rather you use CloudFormation?
- scubbo 3y ago
  :s/CloudFormation/CDK/, but yes :)
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    My $0.02 is use boto3 if you're working in Python. It's gross, but stable. When I built my CD service I went with boto3 because CDK had 10x the issues on GitHub. Not an exact comparison since the CDK repo seems to include more than one language, but still. Skipped Terraform because it took three months to merge a two line bugfix I submitted, has a similarly massive number of issues, and to this day it still doesn't seem to support some critical API endpoints.
    - scubbo 3y ago
      boto3 is an SDK for the AWS API, CDK is an SDK for CloudFormation. boto3 is imperative, CDK is declarative. You can do CDK-like things _in_ boto3, but past a certain level of complexity you'll end up reimplementing so much functionality that you would have done better to just learn enough to use the CDK. Comparing issues is particularly irrelevant in this case since (as you say) the boto3 API is pretty much stable (since it is "just" a language-specific client to an established API), whereas there are regularly requests for higher-level Constructs in CDK.

the_af 3y ago

StackOverflow set out to be a place for Q&A without "debate", to varying success. It's a fundamental part of its mission that questions that are really prompts for debate ("what is your favorite...?", "what do you recommend for...?") are not accepted. I agree with this decision. It's not as if there's any shortage of other places to ask for opinions and debate. StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y". Again, with varying success and not always consistently, but it'd be even harder to accomplish if it accepted "what are the best things about X?". edit: example, from the article: > If you try to post a comment.. wait, you can’t! Because you don’t have enough karma. This is by design. Comments in SO are meant for correcting minor details or asking for clarification. They are not a form of "engagement" or debate; extended discussions are a symptom of impending flamewars and usually get promptly moved to the chat section of SO, where they belong. If you lack karma to comment, focus on asking & answering questions instead -- the primary active use of SO (other than just looking for answers, that is).

hn8305823 3y ago
> StackOverflow tries to be the site where "the answer to X is Y" StackOverflow is widely known as the place to get insulted for asking how to do X with Y. It doesn't matter what X or Y is, the answer is always "you shouldn't be doing it that way, why would you even ask that?"
- the_af 3y ago
  Sometimes. Not always. I do know I almost always find the answer I need, and someone has already asked it, so no need for me to write anything. I also don't care if it's closed as a dupe, since all I care about is whether it answers my question, not about reputation or status. I even contributed some useful answers! Did I get into pointless back and forths with aggressive users (and of course, sometimes I was the one in the wrong)? Sure! But so have I here on HN. I'd say of the last 5 years or so, the worst, most aggressive, and draining flamewars I've been involved in were here, in HN. Much worse than StackOverflow. Would you say HN is useless or failing because of this? I wouldn't!
- glenstein 3y ago

shagie 3y ago

The ban on opinion based and recommendation questions grew out of the inability for people to make sure that they didn't overrun the entire site and crowding out the information / goal that Jeff and Joel wanted the site to be about. It is so easy to post a "{background}, what do you think?" which is more of a discussion than a Q&A format... or "I'm looking for XYZ" and getting a page of recommendations... and then people keep adding them without checking for duplicates. The administrative / curation time requirements of such content then grows faster than the number of people willing to do it. There are other, smaller, SE sites where such questions are allowed because with the slower amount of daily activity they are able to handle every question every day and a post suddenly getting an abnormal amount of time isn't that much more time. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=Active https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/big-list?tab=... isn't a problem when they get 38 questions per day... while Stack Overflow gets 100x more, but doesn't have 100x more people doing curation. The result of that is that the question types that are most time consuming for doing curation and moderation get cast out and it becomes the easier, more objective ones that remain. As to answers... gamification hurt it there. While its part of the onboarding / understanding the site, people went after the numbers and so any answer, no mater how poor was ok. The culture became one of "don't remove an answer if it is any attempt to answer a question (not the question)" and getting 10 points for an upvote and only losing 2 points, unless you've written something awful, as long as you get one up vote its typically a positive point gain. The example question that is in the article is from 10 years ago. The current attribution of the comment is: a -> a.id. Why are you using public fields in the first place? - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:27 @JBNizet, I like public final fields in classes which are data structures. They don't implement interfaces or have deep hierarchies. - Daneel S. Yaitskov Dec 14 '14 at 9:31 You're making your own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown by your question). This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected. I'd really not do that if I were you. If generating getters is what bothers you, then use a decent IDE, or use Lombok to generate them for you. - JB Nizet Dec 14 '14 at 9:42 There is no "lol" in that comment. The question is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-reference-to-a-field https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27467946/lambda-referenc... The screen shot is old ( https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline https://stackoverflow.com/posts/27467946/timeline - it was at +29 by Dec 14th, 2014). In the article this is described as: > For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb. I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the problem. The "7% of comments are unwelcoming" - if there's a problem, flag them. If a pattern of unwelcoming comments from a person, they can get suspended. Not taking action on unwelcomeing comments perpetuates them. I would call out that calling someone a condescending asshole for asking about why public fields are being used is more unwelcoming than asking why public fields are being used.

oxfordmale 3y ago

It is worth noting that this article only uses one of the four graphs in the original articles to fit the narrative it is ChatGPT that is responsible for the decline. Other metrics show that the decline set in earlier.

glenstein 3y ago
I know they sometimes change links at hn, but the article I'm reading is emphatic that it's not due to Chat GPT.
bombcar 3y ago
The decline set in earlier such that that GPT Chap could swoop in and be "as good".

rg111 3y ago

In Mathematics SE, you can ask the community which are the best books on Point Set Topology or Linear Algebra. But you can't ask about the best Algorithms book in SO. This was a bummer. You got a bunch of smart people with proven expertise in topics, and yet, I cannot ask about their opinion. This is stupid. Math SE is a much nicer community and I have enjoyed contributing there and also got a ton of help there.

shagie 3y ago
Math.se gets 1/10th the questions per day and 1/100th the visits per day of Stack Overflow. ( https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday ) It is able to handle the wider scope more easily. The fewer questions per day and the more people there to help guide a not-quite-right question to become more useful the more that variation in scope can be handled. Stack Overflow has the difficulty that as they scaled up in activity, the number of people willing to spend the time to curate and the corresponding tooling didn't scale with it. This resulted in a reduction of time that can be spent on a question to help it be a good question and so people do the least friction fastest action as they can. If, for every person in https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats https://math.stackexchange.com/review/close/stats you got 10 people to show up in https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats it might be feasible to have a more similar level of topic deviation. Note that Math, a small fraction of the size of Stack Overflow has done as many close vote reviews today as Stack Overflow.
- nickpsecurity 3y ago
  You keep saying that about effect of moderation on fact- vs opinion-based questions. You haven’t proven it, though. Let’s look at an alternative. They could’ve created different categories of questions where some are fact-based and some are opinion-based. Then, focused moderation on the precise questions that need higher quality. Their search engines can also put them ahead of opinion-based questions. In that way, they keep the questions they prefer at a high, quality level while others are hit and miss. The latter are still there to benefit people. Users will then go where they prefer to go. StackOverflow would have both types of traffic.

ciupicri 3y ago

For this kind of questions there's Software Recommendations https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

They need at least one forum where people can ask questions that challenge the accepted status quo in software development.

skrowl 3y ago

[dead]

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

Fortunately the recommendation part is often ignored. I am an amateur developer and I am so glad that some people say "use X" instead of a block of code which is "native" and pure. In Python this was requests and arrow, in Go it was resty (despite the Go community being extremely toxic in SO). These are fantastic for casual coders. Answers with expensive code instead of a simple lib are useful too, but only when you gain expertise in the language.