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Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge.
by legitster 5mo ago
Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming.
But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time:
If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only thing the average user could expect was a snippy response from someone who barely stopped to read your post. And/or a mod deletion because a similar-ish question already existed (regardless of whether it had a satisfying answer).
At a certain point, all the meaningful questions have already been asked. The site exists to collect novel new problems and not help people with iterations on existing problems.
(Also, underrated is the extent that the industry has homogenized around a couple of frameworks that are used for everything. I think it's telling that the peak of StackOverflow coincided with the era that React was taking off, to just name one).
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoEarly years SO was optimized for people helping people. Later on they ruined the site by optimizing for tidiness ... and griefing users (especially new ones) off the site in the process.
- andrekandre 5mo agoa.k.a enshitification
- mattmanser 5mo agoThat's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.
- bjourne 5mo agoEternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!
- superjose 5mo agoThe best was when the duplicated question was ranked higher on Google haha
- selcuka 5mo agoIt doesn't matter because the duplicate is linked to the original, so most visitors coming from Google would still view the actual answer. It works like a soft HTTP 302 response.
- mandevil 5mo agoThe reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user. So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc. That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago. And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.
- iso1631 5mo agoenshitification is not a synonym of "went bad"
- trumpdong 4mo agoCory said we're allowed to use it to mean "went bad on purpose" because language evolves and he's not the English police.
- hintymad 5mo agoStackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
- JadeNB 5mo agoI think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.
- bjourne 5mo agoIme, math.SE had a much friendlier vibe than most other SE sites. Primarily because you could ask about a problem you were struggling with and get help. No moderator would instantly show up and close the question as a dupe of a ten-year-old question about double integration techniques or some such. People asking questions mostly wanted help, but most moderators thought they were curating some kind of question-answer form encyclopaedia. Very different perspectives.
- legitster 5mo agoFair point! I suspect the toxicity/usefulness has a linear relationship with how well trod the particular community is.
- hutao 5mo agoI'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow? Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
- firesteelrain 5mo agoMost are reasonable and not so heavy handed. There are a few outliers
- sshine 5mo agoLike the Internet, it got less friendly the more popular it got. And there were no measures in place to retain and reward the friendliness. Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.