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Ask HN: When and how did StackOverflow become so terrible?
Things have changed. It seems there are now certain gatekeepers who just shut down every question or mark it as related to other questions which it is not related to. The folks are not even polite and have a holier than thou attitude. These are only my issues but I have heard several concerns from other folks as well.
What happened, what went wrong for it to become like this?
- uberman 2y agoI'm not sure what you mean by: "Things have changed ... What happened, what went wrong for it to become like this?" Has this not essentially always been the critique of StackOverflow?
- philomath_mn 2y agoA quick search shows this item [0] from 7 years ago -- I remember this critique well before then. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942
- bityard 2y agoI gave up asking questions on Stack Overflow at least a decade ago. Questions get closed as dupes, even when you mention them right there in the original question. Answerers want to believe that every non-trivial question is an X/Y problem. Answerers will nitpick irrelevant technicalities instead of answering the question. Stuff like that. My biggest problem with SO right now is that the most popular questions are outdated and temporally incorrect. A big problem when you are trying to learn a programming language that has evolved considerably in the last 10 years. Go ahead and take 3 common beginner-level tasks in Javascript and Google them. The first result on at least two of them will have been last updated in, say, 2012. Even if the modern answer is there, it won't be the accepted answer.
- dyingkneepad 2y ago100% of the times I search for something and click on a stackoverflow link for the answer, it gives me a captcha. I hate this, so now I actively avoid clicking stackoverflow results. I've been slowly replacing those searches with questions to ChatGPT.
- lostdog 2y agoCould you give some examples of questions that should not have been closed? I'm still glad when google sends me to a good stackoverflow answer, because it's usually high quality and helpful. I don't ask many questions there, so it's hard to know if the problems are serious.
- muzani 2y agoAsk a legitimate question, and you'll likely feel it. But here's an example I picked up within a minute: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78580749/draw-a-cube-with-opengl/78581607 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78580749/draw-a-cube-wit... The code is neat. The person clearly says what they tried. It is an answerable question. Maybe it would be better or more useful if it were a wiki-able question. But also this person was new, and was not guided in any way how to improve the question. There's a review queue for cleaning up first questions but all these moderators don't give a damn about that. They're just mods because they want to hurt people.
- muzani 2y agoThis is where it went right: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvotin... They thought about the system really well. It's based off HN's. And it worked. HN's system still works. Years later, they removed the reputation penalty from downvoting questions. They trusted the community to be mature with this new privilege. And it all went to hell. I don't have the data for this. I found the article above while searching for it. But this is the hypothesis.