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I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.

by jf22 3y ago

jasonjmcghee 3y ago
Anecdotally, every single time I’ve put effort into answering someone’s question, I got shot down by mods for various reasons despite (generally) being the only answer. Quickly stopped contributing.
- rezistik 3y ago
  Yeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out. The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
  - nineplay 3y ago
    I've seen python questions marked as 'duplicate' when the question was python 3 and the "answer" was python 2.
    - bachmeier 3y ago
      Love the duplicates that link to questions that have two answers, neither of which solves the question.
- digitalsushi 3y ago
  reminds me if how i havent added to wikipedia since about 2008
JAlexoid 3y ago
SO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  I wonder whether Reddit can be a serious medium/long-term threat. My usage of Reddit has gone to 0 ever since "the incident". I've heard the rumors that overall usage is up but I'm curious about whether the niche of developer content has gone down. The assumption is that developers are more likely to understand and be affected by the incident. Reddit won't be a medium/long-term threat if developers don't continuously invigorate it with new content.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- TIPSIO 3y ago
  I'm not I agree if under threat from reddit, but I have noticed that Google has gotten significantly worse at showing me the correct relevant SO post I need. It usually takes a few tries. There are even the same perfect/simple posts that I have visited tons of times over the years (small JS/CSS stuff I can never remember) that have disappeared or became near impossible to find via Google.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  The the types of technical questions I get SO results for I’ve not once got Reddit results. That said there are other queries for which Reddit is the only answer and SO not capturing this is a failure on their part.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Just because Reddit is throwing handfuls of money at Google to prop up their results doesn't mean it's a better resource for programmers. In fact, it's completely, utterly the opposite. The programming subs are just getting caught in the crossfire. It's also one of the main reasons I finally switched to DDG permanently.
kalleboo 3y ago
Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  A lot of people say to use Reddit instead of StackOverflow, but IMO Reddit is even worse for this than SO, since most old threads are locked.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    When you hear someone say something like that, what they mean is get involved with the related community on Reddit, or Discord, or a forum. SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group. Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.
  - Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
    What I found those information in Reddit is that they are current with the information than SO. The results from SO are dated back to '08 to '17 and they are often outdated. If the thread is locked in Reddit, they can create a new post and add the link to locked thread in the comment and seeking for more solutions, they are often keep it up. Compared to SO which will locked it up for being "dupe". This is particular annoying when it comes to CLI tools. Often the search top result will show outdated SO post that the command arguements are depreciated, it took me hours to find this out after couldn't figure out why the command are not working. If I search the problem with site:reddit.com, the answer are usually relevant and current with a working command. SO's overaggressive moderation are preventing the new information from being relevant. That's why people flocks to GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums because they don't share the SO moderation philosophy.
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago
  > Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?
huytersd 3y ago
And chatGPT, I rarely need stack overflow anymore
maldev 3y ago
I'm a boomer, how do I find Discords of people coding?
- rgoulter 3y ago
  I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting. e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.
  - AndroTux 3y ago
    Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and hope someone bothers to help me before my question drifts off into oblivion. For real, though, who though this is a good idea to do project documentation and issue tracking? It's stupid.
    - inanutshellus 3y ago
      Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs". It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow. I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.
      - AndroTux 3y ago
        Yeah, I can understand that it's quite okay from a maintainer point of view. But still, you have to moderate the Discord server, which in itself can be quite the hassle. Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.
latchkey 3y ago
What I'd love to see is ChatGPT trained on GH issues/prs for a project and then use that to summarize things into something that looks like SO output.

I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.

by jf22 3y ago

I'm not surprised. These days, I use SO a lot less often. Github issues, first party documentation, Discords, and Copilot are much better ways to get help.

jasonjmcghee 3y ago

Anecdotally, every single time I’ve put effort into answering someone’s question, I got shot down by mods for various reasons despite (generally) being the only answer. Quickly stopped contributing.

rezistik 3y ago
Yeah, the moderation became insane. Every question is a duplicate, every answer is moderated out. The answers on github and across the web are always much much better and more up to date. I can't remember the last time SO had the answer I wanted or needed.
- nineplay 3y ago
  I've seen python questions marked as 'duplicate' when the question was python 3 and the "answer" was python 2.
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    Love the duplicates that link to questions that have two answers, neither of which solves the question.
digitalsushi 3y ago
reminds me if how i havent added to wikipedia since about 2008

JAlexoid 3y ago

SO is under serious threat from Reddit. Look at your Google results, that are now presenting Reddit much more prominently than a few years ago.

kaycebasques 3y ago
I wonder whether Reddit can be a serious medium/long-term threat. My usage of Reddit has gone to 0 ever since "the incident". I've heard the rumors that overall usage is up but I'm curious about whether the niche of developer content has gone down. The assumption is that developers are more likely to understand and be affected by the incident. Reddit won't be a medium/long-term threat if developers don't continuously invigorate it with new content.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
TIPSIO 3y ago
I'm not I agree if under threat from reddit, but I have noticed that Google has gotten significantly worse at showing me the correct relevant SO post I need. It usually takes a few tries. There are even the same perfect/simple posts that I have visited tons of times over the years (small JS/CSS stuff I can never remember) that have disappeared or became near impossible to find via Google.
kalleboo 3y ago
The the types of technical questions I get SO results for I’ve not once got Reddit results. That said there are other queries for which Reddit is the only answer and SO not capturing this is a failure on their part.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
Just because Reddit is throwing handfuls of money at Google to prop up their results doesn't mean it's a better resource for programmers. In fact, it's completely, utterly the opposite. The programming subs are just getting caught in the crossfire. It's also one of the main reasons I finally switched to DDG permanently.

kalleboo 3y ago

Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff. Like they’ve lost all their authors or at least they’re not being indexed by Google.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
A lot of people say to use Reddit instead of StackOverflow, but IMO Reddit is even worse for this than SO, since most old threads are locked.
- bombcar 3y ago
  When you hear someone say something like that, what they mean is get involved with the related community on Reddit, or Discord, or a forum. SO had various communities and they were quite helpful for the time, and if you hung around for a bit you got quite a good group. Most of that has (sadly, imo) migrated to Discord.
- Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
  What I found those information in Reddit is that they are current with the information than SO. The results from SO are dated back to '08 to '17 and they are often outdated. If the thread is locked in Reddit, they can create a new post and add the link to locked thread in the comment and seeking for more solutions, they are often keep it up. Compared to SO which will locked it up for being "dupe". This is particular annoying when it comes to CLI tools. Often the search top result will show outdated SO post that the command arguements are depreciated, it took me hours to find this out after couldn't figure out why the command are not working. If I search the problem with site:reddit.com, the answer are usually relevant and current with a working command. SO's overaggressive moderation are preventing the new information from being relevant. That's why people flocks to GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums because they don't share the SO moderation philosophy.
JPLeRouzic 3y ago
> Even when there aren’t better sources I’ve found that the SO results are just all outdated and don’t cover any newer stuff I think their algorithm is the problem, answers should be slowly deprecated over time. Who in real life would trust an answer written 10 years ago when languages, OSes and frameworks change every year?

huytersd 3y ago

And chatGPT, I rarely need stack overflow anymore

maldev 3y ago

I'm a boomer, how do I find Discords of people coding?

rgoulter 3y ago
I think Discord is typically used for domain-specific chatting. e.g. the QMK website links to a Discord server; but you'd only join that if you were interested in QMK.
- AndroTux 3y ago
  Exactly. And I HATE it! Instead of just being able to use a search engine to find a related issue, I now have to look up the project I'm having a problem with, find their Discord, join it, accept the rules, assign roles, click through their onboarding, and then finally I'll be able to use the builtin search that probably doesn't return an answer anyways so I have to ask the question in an ever moving chat room and hope someone bothers to help me before my question drifts off into oblivion. For real, though, who though this is a good idea to do project documentation and issue tracking? It's stupid.
  - inanutshellus 3y ago
    Project owners/maintainers like it because community members answer peoples' questions in Discord. In a Github bug report everyone expects the answer to come from the owner/maintiner, even if the answer is "Ugh, i answer this so often, just read the docs". It's clear there's room for innovation in this space... something that democratizes Q&A but also where the answers aren't lost to oblivion come tomorrow. I expect a tailored per-project chatgpt would help here. Let it read your discord, let github (or myproject.com) users search its knowledgebase directly: voila. curated user-generated answers to project-specific questions.
    - AndroTux 3y ago
      Yeah, I can understand that it's quite okay from a maintainer point of view. But still, you have to moderate the Discord server, which in itself can be quite the hassle. Imo we shouldn't have moved away from forums. Forums offer searchability, threads and allow community members to answer questions. Not sure why we collectively decided that forums are no longer cool.

latchkey 3y ago

What I'd love to see is ChatGPT trained on GH issues/prs for a project and then use that to summarize things into something that looks like SO output.