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Ive honestly never intentionally visited it (as in, went to the root page and started following links) - it was just where google sent me when searching answers
by ido 10mo ago
Ive honestly never intentionally visited it (as in, went to the root page and started following links) - it was just where google sent me when searching answers to specific technical questions.
- jv22222 10mo agoIt became as annoying as experts exchange the very thing it railed against!
- wizzwizz4 10mo agoWhat was annoying about it?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- forgetfulness 10mo agoThey SEOd their way into being a top search result by showing crawlers both questions and answers, but when you visited the answer would be paywalled Stack Overflow’s moderation is overbearing and all, but that’s nowhere near at the same level as Expert Exchange’s baiting and switching
- rkachowski 10mo agothe gatekeeping, gaming the system, capricious moderation (e.g. flagged as duplicate), and general attitude led it to be quite an insufferable part of the internet. There was a meme about how the best way to get a response is to answer your own question in an obviously incorrect fashion, because people want to tell you why you're wrong rather than actively help.
- nxor 10mo agoWhy do you think those people behave that way?
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoUnpaid labor finds a variety of impulses to satisfy
- 12_throw_away 10mo agoMemories of years ago on Stack Overflow, when it seemed like every single beginner python question was answered by one specific guy. And all his answers were streams of invective directed at the question's author. Whatever labor this guy was doing, he was clearly getting a lot of value in return by getting to yell at hapless beginners.
- wizzwizz4 10mo agoThat doesn't seem like the kind of thing that's ever been allowed on Stack Overflow.
- wahnfrieden 10mo agoSo? It is commonplace there. The comments are even worse.
- rkachowski 10mo agoI don't think it matters. Whether it was a fault of incentives or some intrinsic nature of people given the environment, it was rarely a pleasant experience. And this is one of the reasons it's fallen to LLM usage.
- marcosdumay 10mo agoOften the answer to the question was simply wrong, as it answered a different question that nobody made. A lot of times you had to follow a maze of links to related questions, that may have an answer or may lead to a different one. The languages that it was most useful (due to bad ecosystem documentation) evolved in a rate way faster than SO could update their answers, so most of the answers on those were outdated... There were more problems. And that's from the point of view of somebody coming from Google to find questions that already existed. Interacting there was another entire can of worms.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoThat despite their url's claim, they didn't actually have and sex change experts.
- theamk 10mo agoNope. The main problem with expertsexchange was their SEO + paywall - they'd sneak into top Google hits by showing crawler full data, then present a paywall when actual human visits. (Have no idea why Google tolerated them btw...) SO was never that bad, even with all their moderation policies, they had no paywalls.