4 ms·

I think this is harsh criticism. It's because not many people use SO any more. One of SO's selling points was that outdated answers get replaced with the more

by BeetleB 2mo ago

I think this is harsh criticism. It's because not many people use SO any more. One of SO's selling points was that outdated answers get replaced with the more modern, better ones - and it worked for many, many years.

hungryhobbit 2mo ago
... until they decided it was a good idea to train all power users to grief new users off the site.
- jatora 2mo ago
  The rise of AI and the death of SO is a beautiful beautiful thing. That community is the worst, and this opinion seems to be shared universally by anyone who had extensive interaction with it.
  - hotelsacher 2mo ago
    AI could gorge itself once on (probably stolen) training data from SO, among others, but who will answer new questions now, and where will new training data come from?
    - jatora 2mo ago
      It seems you're coming from the school of 'LLM's can only say what has been baked directly into their weights' This is clearly not the case. You can make up your own programming language and feed it to an LLM and it can reason and answer questions on it.
- da_chicken 2mo ago
  It was always like that. It's due in part to the number of people that kept posting screenshots of their code in their question, and the number of people that couldn't search to save their life. The noise ratio on incoming questions was always ridiculous, and the number of people who don't know how to ask a technical question is staggering. I do wish they had started to ask a series of questions to people for their first 5 or 10 posts to force them to ask questions in a useful way that was conducive to getting answers. The whole site never got over being hostile to new users. SO had a number of fundamental issues. If you found a duplicate and flagged it as such, you couldn't explain why you thought it was a dupe in the flag. This meant that "this is a different question but the answer is the same" was just tagged a dupe the same way "this is literally the identical question" was. I stopped participating entirely after a single event. When I was moderating the moderation, and the site decided to give me a trick question to "test if I was paying attention". Yeah, no. I don't have time for that bullshit. Apparently I'm still a top 1% user, though, and I think I've gained another 8,000 or 9,000 points since I left and stopped answering at anything.
locknitpicker 2mo ago
> One of SO's selling points was that outdated answers get replaced with the more modern (...) I don't think this is description is right. What you describe as "outdated answers" are actually answers to apply up to specific releases. Just because a project launches a release that rolls out a new feature that doesn't render the old answers wrong or stale.
- schacon 2mo ago
  Not only this, but it's not super simple to update to the newest version anymore. I actually tried this today and I'm on `2.50.1 (Apple Git-155)`. It turns out I don't actually know how to update that. `brew install git` does not overwrite the system binary. I'm not the smartest person in the world, but if I had issues getting to the latest version, I assume a very small percentage of users actually has a Git version that will run `git history`. It was introduced in 2.54, which was in April of this year, so less than 4 months ago. Almost nobody can run this command unless they're _really_ on top of things.

by BeetleB 2mo ago

hungryhobbit 2mo ago

... until they decided it was a good idea to train all power users to grief new users off the site.

jatora 2mo ago
The rise of AI and the death of SO is a beautiful beautiful thing. That community is the worst, and this opinion seems to be shared universally by anyone who had extensive interaction with it.
- hotelsacher 2mo ago
  AI could gorge itself once on (probably stolen) training data from SO, among others, but who will answer new questions now, and where will new training data come from?
  - jatora 2mo ago
    It seems you're coming from the school of 'LLM's can only say what has been baked directly into their weights' This is clearly not the case. You can make up your own programming language and feed it to an LLM and it can reason and answer questions on it.
da_chicken 2mo ago
It was always like that. It's due in part to the number of people that kept posting screenshots of their code in their question, and the number of people that couldn't search to save their life. The noise ratio on incoming questions was always ridiculous, and the number of people who don't know how to ask a technical question is staggering. I do wish they had started to ask a series of questions to people for their first 5 or 10 posts to force them to ask questions in a useful way that was conducive to getting answers. The whole site never got over being hostile to new users. SO had a number of fundamental issues. If you found a duplicate and flagged it as such, you couldn't explain why you thought it was a dupe in the flag. This meant that "this is a different question but the answer is the same" was just tagged a dupe the same way "this is literally the identical question" was. I stopped participating entirely after a single event. When I was moderating the moderation, and the site decided to give me a trick question to "test if I was paying attention". Yeah, no. I don't have time for that bullshit. Apparently I'm still a top 1% user, though, and I think I've gained another 8,000 or 9,000 points since I left and stopped answering at anything.

locknitpicker 2mo ago

> One of SO's selling points was that outdated answers get replaced with the more modern (...) I don't think this is description is right. What you describe as "outdated answers" are actually answers to apply up to specific releases. Just because a project launches a release that rolls out a new feature that doesn't render the old answers wrong or stale.

schacon 2mo ago
Not only this, but it's not super simple to update to the newest version anymore. I actually tried this today and I'm on `2.50.1 (Apple Git-155)`. It turns out I don't actually know how to update that. `brew install git` does not overwrite the system binary. I'm not the smartest person in the world, but if I had issues getting to the latest version, I assume a very small percentage of users actually has a Git version that will run `git history`. It was introduced in 2.54, which was in April of this year, so less than 4 months ago. Almost nobody can run this command unless they're _really_ on top of things.