10 ms·
We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
- pinus-cembra 9mo agoIsn't this a sign that LLMs are self-cannibalizing? What data will LLMs be trained on when sites like StackOverflow die?
- ronbenton 9mo agoI have always wondered this. As more and more content on the internet becomes AI generated, does it become some kind of feedback loop where the hallucinations amplify themselves? Maybe someone smart can come along and help me understand the plan for this, if there is one.
- wang_li 9mo agoThey'll turn sites like wikipedia into free labor for training LLMs.
- Tostino 9mo agoYou are now often debugging problems directly in an LLM context window, providing back console output, error logs, etc. there is an absolute mountain of data to mine from developer chat logs.
- MattGaiser 9mo agoI'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
- ronbenton 9mo agoMe too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.
- JohnFen 9mo agoYeah, I think I gave up on SO myself right around then. Maybe a little earlier. The combination of decreasing usefulness and increasing unpleasantness made it easy to walk away.
- ronbenton 9mo agoI know I always asked far fewer questions than I wanted to there for fear of being chastised. Maybe that's what the community wanted?
- spelk 9mo agoIt may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.
- canjobear 9mo agoThe chart is questions posted. Almost all my SO usage was looking at answers already posted. I only posted questions when I couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the pre-2023 decline is just because more and more of the questions people had were already covered.
- throwway120385 9mo agoI'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of the moderators doing that did not know enough to be moderating. And so SO became a place where obsolete solutions got cemented in time and where once a question was answered somehow nobody ever tried to answer it again.
- foobarian 9mo agoSeems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago>Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. There are people at the periphery of my life that I suspect are little more than biological LLMs. Their drivel has much in common with AI slop. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences. >Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement. This might be like putting Skynet in charge of traffic court penalties.
- ourmandave 9mo agoThat's what's odd to me. When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason.
- zahlman 9mo ago
- zahlman 9mo agoThere was already tension in, like, 2011 or 2012. If you check the meta site there's a huge volume of posts from 2014, including probably the majority of the "classics" that experienced curators trot out to try and explain policy to people. A lot of the time I think about how something has been a problem for years, and I search on the meta site for previous discussion, and find someone from 2014 saying that it had already been a problem for a while.
- gnabgib 9mo agoRelated: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time (1526 points, 3 days ago, 1004 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
- zabzonk 9mo agoSpeaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt! What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels. But when it got really bad was when the new owners, after Jeff & co sold out, took over. Woke nonsense sprouted everywhere, people with no technical knowledge did moderation. And, whoa, if you criticised this, you were banned. That's when I gave up.
- kstrauser 9mo agoHow on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”
- zahlman 9mo agoThe complaint is about back-room drama rather than user-facing activity. https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=monica https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=monica is a good starting point.
- zabzonk 9mo ago> How on earth did wokeness even come up there? Wokeness is a control mechanism. If you tread one inch off the "correct" path (as any normal person is going to do occasionally), you will get stomped. For example: [jane] Using "delete this" is perfectly safe in C++ [neil] Jane, not at all. For example ..... [moderator] neil, i think you are disrespecting jane - 6 hour ban. And I am not joking about this. But it was only the company employee moderators that did this, and they did it excessively. They also got rid of the few mods who knew how to mod and wouldn't toe the line.
- CommonGuy 9mo agoStackOverflow always wanted less low-quality questions, which is now the case. Whether they still receive some high-quality ones... But I'm sure the website still receives a lot of views, as it still is highly ranked in Google.
- ronbenton 9mo agoDo we know that it's fewer low-quality questions? Or is that just assumed because it's fewer total questions?
- ted_dunning 9mo agoThat was a tongue-in-cheek inference from the number of new questions going to near zero.
- jrjeksjd8d 9mo agoLike so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.
- spiderfarmer 9mo ago> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.
- okaleniuk 9mo agoWalking doesn't change as often as C++ standard.
- jakeydus 9mo agoThe issue here is borrowing from the future to pay for the present. The bicycle analogy (unless I'm missing something huge here) does not seem relevant at all.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoWhy do you think source code and documentation are not enough for an LLM to train on?
- xeromal 9mo agoI think they are positing that LLMs do not produce new thought. If a new framework (super magic new framework) is released, current LLMs will not be able to help.
- ndriscoll 9mo ago
- voidUpdate 9mo ago> "Recently, a graph of the total number of Stack Overflow questions over time started making rounds on the internet" Isn't that a graph of questions per timeframe, not total questions? If it was total questions, that would imply a massive cull of existing questions, not a decline in usage
- zahlman 9mo ago"New questions over time", I suppose, was the intended phrasing; and yes. Also, this is a new set of "rounds" it's making. Graphs like this have been getting shopped around off and on for a few years now. Previous rounds of discussion famously include https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433864 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433864 . The decline was even noted before ChatGPT, e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/413657 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/413657.
- pixelesque 9mo agoA couple of thoughts: That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question. Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?
- moralestapia 9mo agoHyper-cope. But on your 2nd question, >Would LLMs be as good for answers [...] Yes.
- ronbenton 9mo agoI very much disagree with the first point that there had somehow been a critical mass of questions achieved to explain the slowdown. With the change in tech, outdated answer, and increasing population of people writing code, I just don't buy it.
- Groxx 9mo agoYeah, I'm fond of this graph personally: https://mastodon.social/@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe/115835753323870462 https://mastodon.social/@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe/1158357533238... StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- qsera 9mo ago[flagged]
- tapete1 9mo agolol true. It is like "problematic".
- pixelat3d 9mo agoThe whole premise of this is kinda wrong. Google killed SO more than anything else. Much like how they’re killing the rest of the web today. AI certainly didn’t help, but it is/was not the root cause, nor was the ‘toxic’ environment
- okaleniuk 9mo agoThere should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
- onesandofgrain 9mo agoI’d reckon a set of mods with no superiority complex is one step though lol
- kstrauser 9mo agoAnd a vetted set of mods, put in place by the site’s leadership, with the power to overturn martinet decisions.
- zahlman 9mo agoYou mean, like, the actual moderators, overseeing the actions that people keep attributing to "moderators" who objectively are nothing of the sort? It's honestly really frustrating to keep reading these takes.
- kstrauser 9mo agoYes, that's exactly what I mean. Suppose HN allowed regular users to perform certain moderation actions. I use that and start powertripping and deleting all your posts, for instance. In that scenario, I expect dang would reach out to me pretty quickly and tell me to please stop doing that. In that case, dang would be part of the "vetted set of mods" I mention with the power to overturn my decisions, because HN is paying him to make sure the site runs in line with its vision, even if that means disagreeing with the "ground-level" moderators. I'm pretty sure you and I see eye to eye on this, given your other comments on the topic here.
- Permit 9mo agoStackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there. Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.
- ronbenton 9mo agoI disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
- stackskipton 9mo agoAs Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly in response to someone acting like "I just need to convince them"
- j_w 9mo agoThere are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: <code> and here is the issue I have <output or description of issue>. <More details as relevant>" This does two things: 1. It demonstrates that the question ask-er actually cares about whatever it is they are doing, and it's just trying to get free homework answers. 2. Ideally it forces the ask-er to provide enough information that an answer-er can do so without asking follow ups.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- surgical_fire 9mo agoThe correct way to use StackOverflow was not to ask questions there. You either found your answer coming in from a search engine, or you pretend the site does not even exist. I don't think it was supposed to be sustainable, but oh well.
- zahlman 9mo agoIt was explicitly supposed to be a thing that turns out to be inherently unsustainable. But I'm not sure that Atwood and Spolsky (especially Atwood) realized that nature.
- Planktonne 9mo agoStackOverflow wasn't a toxic hellhole. I struggle not to see the people describing it as full of exclusionary rants as telling on themselves.
- smithkl42 9mo agoI can only speak for myself, but I very much resonate with this. I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself. For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer. I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time. It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
- smithkl42 9mo agoIf you're interested, a perfect example would be this question here ("should I enable application insights profiling on production Azure web apps"): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enable-azure-application-insights-profiler-in-production/78524471 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl... That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as being off-topic. Shrug. They get to make the site they want. It doesn't mean it's the site folks want to visit.
- zahlman 9mo agoHave you tried https://devops.stackexchange.com https://devops.stackexchange.com? The question as written is still opinion-based (try instead something like "what negative consequences could occur from..."; the point is that the site should not be trying to weigh pros and cons for you, but just stating what they are, so that people can make their own decisions). This sort of thing gets marked off topic because it pertains to the matter of hosting the program, rather than creating it. See also https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425628 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425628, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276579 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276579, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271279 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271279 etc.
- frou_dh 9mo agoI feel this topic is approaching circlejerk status. Basically any mention of StackOverflow on HN/Reddit is just teeing up everyone to go on about how the SO moderators are the worst people ever.
- akpa1 9mo agoI really don't like this sentiment: > "Because I can get an answer from an LLM (which does need to be verified) in less than a minute versus the hours or days I would have to wait to get a toxic and potentially useless reply on stackoverflow. They should really downsize or just kill the company it’s a relic of the past and most developers won’t miss it." To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. Sure, new questions might be falling off and it might be decreasing in relevance, but that in no way means that a massively resource-intensive LLM regurgitating paragraphs of semi-duplicated text is better enough to justify canning it. (There's also the matter of all the other StackExchange sites, I have no idea what the state of the world is on those but I imagine they also have value in themselves.) To this day, I find almost all of my low-level questions are still readily answered by StackOverflow, and it holds lots of discussion on higher-level questions that I find useful. Does StackOverflow have an attitude problem? Absolutely. It is fair to say that most developers won't miss it? No.
- JohnFen 9mo ago> To me, the value of StackOverflow is not in the ability to ask new questions, it's as a huge archive of questions that have already answered. What made SO no longer useful to me, though, is that far too many of the existing answers are either obsolete or incorrect.
- triceratops 9mo agoI think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out. SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful. I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility. If they'd had AI weeding out low quality questions before they ever got to a human (and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time) I think the mods would be a more helpful bunch.
- bachmeier 9mo agohttps://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine-learning-contest/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine... They were on it in 2012! And no, it didn't help. The site's value was in providing users with answers to their questions, but that was never on the radar of the folks running SO. I guess they just assumed the free labor of the people that built the place would continue forever. Edit: I even told them at the time that this was not the right way to proceed. They had no reason to close questions or even review them. All they needed was a holding pen where first-time questioners posted questions, and they needed to be promoted by users viewing them as worthy of an answer. Guess what. They deleted my comment.
- triceratops 9mo agoAs I said in my comment > and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time
- zahlman 9mo agoYou might also be interested in the Staging Ground feature introduced a few years ago.
- ge96 9mo agoI get the point of moderating things, try to reduce duplication, low-effort, etc... but it is funny the gut reaction I feel (angry) when my post is auto-deleted (Reddit for example). For SO I remember having questions get blocked and accounts being blocked from downvoted questions. But I understand too, I could have researched more, it's one of those "I want the immediate reward/answer" vs. searching the old questions. This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.
- zahlman 9mo ago> This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb. It is. The consensus in the meta community is basically: we don't want AI on the site (although clearly the owners do); people who would benefit from generative AI can get basically all its benefit by using it off-site, as it's heavily trained on Stack Overflow (and agents can presumably search it) anyway. It's fine if people use that off-site; it keeps out unsuitable questions and is basically filling the role that conventional search used to before Google got so enshittified.
- jjice 9mo agoThis may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource. For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise. For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits. I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse. SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.
- ACS_Solver 9mo agoStackOverflow was great because it's not like a support forum or a mailing list. It's more like a repository of knowledge. It's been extremely helpful to me when arriving from Google, and I've gotten a couple useful responses to my own questions either. Awesome resource. Where SO started failing in my opinion is when the "no duplicate questions" rule started to be interpreted as "it's a duplicate if the same or very similar question has ever been answered on the site". That caused too many questions to have outdated answers as the tech changes, best practices change and so on. C# questions have answers that were current for .NET Core 1.0 and should be modified. I have little webdev experience but I know JS has changed rapidly and significantly, so 2012 answers to JS questions are likely not good now.
- luma 9mo agoThis echoes my own experience. The very few times I attempted to post a question it was later flagged as duplicate, pointing to some other question which matched the keywords but didn't at all match the actual use case or problem. I don't know if this was the result of an automated process or zealous users, but it certainly put me off ever trying to engage with the community there.
- groundzeros2015 9mo agoWas stack overflow the last stand of web gamification?
- zahlman 9mo agoThe gamification was in large part misaligned with the site's objectives. It's a shame Atwood and Spolsky didn't realize the problems and didn't explicitly solicit and incorporate feedback about it basically ever. (Not that random user proposals were ever especially good, but.) At Codidact we're trying to build systems that hand out privileges based on actions taken that are relevant to the privilege. There's still a reputation system but the per-user numbers are relatively de-emphasized. And posts are by default sorted by Wilson score, with separate up/down counts visible to everyone by default, so that downvotes on an upvoted post (and vice-versa) have meaningful effect and "bad" voting can be more easily corrected. There's also a system of "reactions" for posts so that people willing to put their username behind it can explicitly mark an answer as outdated or dangerous.
- gtirloni 9mo agoI've had countless questions closed and received even more patronizing comments from mods. I wonder who these people were and why were they empowered in such a way by StackOverflow the company.
- otikik 9mo agoI must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.
- cr125rider 9mo agoStupid people hated stack overflow because it didn’t allow them to be lazy.
- sodafountan 9mo agoThis was my experience using StackOverflow. I've commented, asked questions, and received answers. Aside from a few questionable downvotes I received occasionally, I never felt like the community was toxic.
- e_i_pi_2 9mo agoAnecdotally, I have used SO much less in recent years, but I think a lot of what gets labelled as toxicity is just dedicated curation. I remember asking my first question - I got a quick response that it wasn't well written and was likely a duplicate, and they were totally correct. The next time I asked I made sure to put the work in beforehand to make sure it was well written and included any relevant info that someone would need, as well as linking potential duplicates and explaining the differences I had to them. That got a much better response and is more useful for future readers.
- OutOfHere 9mo agoSO remains a vital site for providing training data to AI.
- mahirsaid 9mo agoThe sarcasm and rudeness to rookie questions was unbearable at times. Talking to new comers as if they were stupid. Those new comers become knowledgeable later on and i suspect many did not come back to that platform instead they are on reddit and various other platform where they are welcomed.
- bachmeier 9mo agoThis topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO. It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness. I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant. That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.
- xtracto 9mo agoExactly. I dare to say that it was a matter of UX. The experience i got was that you arrived at a SO question from Google and the accepted answer was from years ago and irrelevant at the present time. They did a quick patch by letting you sort answers by some attribute, but darn, that's low effort product/ux dev. What did those teams do in 10 years??
- zahlman 9mo agoThe founders have not been around for years. The remaining community understands perfectly well why people have left. It's just deemed irrelevant. Way too many people joined the site, way too quickly, based on a false understanding of the intended premise. Gradually they filtered themselves out as they realized the mistake. Those few who saw value in the actual idea remained. It was always going to be relatively few people who truly want to participate in something like that. And that's fine. Ideas don't have to be popular to be worthwhile or valid.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
- kstrauser 9mo agoThis is a prime example of why I prefer HN’s moderation. On SO, even though you’re objectively wrong — this is a link to a completely different site and discussing it from a different angle — your active participation on the site would probably have given you the ability to close this conversation and ruin the discussion for those interested. I’m glad that HN doesn’t allow that, so we can roll our eyes at the obviously incorrect tag and get back to participating without having the rug yanked out from under us.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoThere is nothing in the submitted article that isn't part of or significantly different than the large discussion already ongoing/passed. The discussion about toxic community etc. The short blog post is basically just another comment on that greater discussion. The discussion which is already over there. No need to split it up or repeat it again days later. It's a duplicate discussion.
- kstrauser 9mo agoI disagree, and that’s what I value here: you can add your tags, and we can opt to follow or ignore them as we see fit. That’s far better than the SO model of a site participant having the ability to shut down the conversation for everyone. But also, a note: conversations are never finished. People talked about this broad topic yesterday, but I didn’t see it yesterday to be able to weigh in. I’m here today, saw this topic, and started talking about it with the other people who stumbled across it just now. I would be highly annoyed with a friend if I brought up an interesting subject and they replied that they’d already discussed it with someone else over dinner last night so there’s no need to talk about it again. I wasn’t there last night. Even if there was a recording of it, that would be a stale artifact I could interact with, other than to contact last night’s debaters and try to continue on with a subject they’d already finished with.
- nix0n 9mo agoThe average answer writer on SO is not actually that toxic: really it's the voters. The top answer will almost always be an explanation of why the asker is wrong to want to do the thing they want to do. But that's not most answers, or most answerers, just the top ones. The bottom answer will almost always be an honest attempt to write code that answers the question. Sometimes the code doesn't work, or needs explanation: these problems will be solved a couple answers up from the bottom. My technique for years has been to click the SO link in search results, then hit End on my keyboard to jump to the bottom of the page. This a little slower than reading a cached LLM answer, but faster than waiting for the LLMs to generate something.
- zahlman 9mo agoPlease show an example of a question following this pattern. That is radically different from my experience.
- nix0n 9mo agoSure, just look at the famous question about how to parse HTML with Regex[0]. Since this question has received so much attention, even the bottom answer has a positive score. Otherwise the pattern looks typical. [0]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
- dvh 9mo agoIn retrospect they should have allowed dupes so that new wave of moderators (and new users) had place to grow. It's like in that mice utopia. Same way it got killed.
- threaaaaaat 9mo agoWas it because the platform's communication model based on upvotes and downvotes, or was it because us engineers are arrogant assholes by nature?
- man8alexd 9mo agoA more interesting metric is a steadily declining percentage of answered questions. It used to be above 90% in the first year and since then dropped to 35% but stabilized around this number for the last 2-3 years. Source: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426250/unanswered-questions-on-the-rise https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426250/unanswered-q...
- ramblerman 9mo agoI disliked the pedantic nature of stackoverflow like the next guy but this seems like a naive take. SO solved a problem, that problem is now gone
- beeboop0 9mo agoWell, I was a top 2%er, and answered more questions than I asked, with about 20k, and I made a point to be nice to newbies being mean is a personal choice, not a requirement. being courteous and considerate and being experienced or knowledgeable can both co exist
- beeboop0 9mo agoone thing that grabbed me right away about chat gpt is how it understood my question. it wasn't obtuse, let alone intentionally so. it wasn't pedantic; it just helped. And without a side dish of attitude.
- aeuropean12 9mo agoCompletely agree. SO is full of self-proclaimed "experts" who simply are not helpful. It is a toxic site. Amusingly, I have noticed how the most unwelcoming, unreliable, and lone wolf developers (colleagues) in my past five companies used their SO metrics as signs of their worth. That says plenty.