Stack overflow is almost dead
Stack overflow is almost dead
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
Stack overflow is almost dead
Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely "yes:"
139 comments
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My experience with SO is that I'll look up a question about how to do something using X method and all the answers are like "why are you using X?" or "here's how to do it using Y.". You rarely find people answering the questions and instead find people trying to spread gospel about a certain tech that you aren't using.
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That's strange. It's almost never my experience on stack overflow.
What you're describing happens mostly on reddit and lemmy.
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Thats been my experience as well.
On SO it seems much more likely that the answers answering a different question have a negative score.
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This was the majority of my experience as well. As a newer programmer, I'm more than happy to always know a better option. But if the way I'm looking to solve my problem is wrong, don't just give me Y, explain to me why it may not work how I think it will. Tell me about X and some pitfalls or reasoning for it not going to work, then recommend Y. Because if others only see the Y answer to my question about X, they'll probably just keep searching for a solution to X not knowing it may not work like I didn't know.
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Yep, they aggressively XY problem your question until you give up. Also why many questions do not give the answer to the problem what most people asking that question would ask.
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Then the author marks the question as answered because doing Y solves their problem…
Good for you, but I actually need to do X and Y wouldn’t work for me. At least change the title so it doesn’t come up as the top result in search engines.
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This is honestly the reason why it's going downhill, forcing people to do Y or use Z because of some problem irrelevant to the question being asked.
It limits creativity and depth of discussion on a forum designed to discuss all principles of programming
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My experience with SO is somewhat the same, but sometimes (actually maybe most times) you're trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw.. If you read the suggestions and take them into account you can often find the actual question, and then the actual answer.
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I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.
- Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
- See if this is an XY problem.
I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.
The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.
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I very rarely ask questions on stack overflow but I appreciate much more as a sanity check on what I'm attempting to do.
In my experience, the majority of people have a flawed initial approach to what they're trying to do, and if they all follow it they'll produce a lot of really shitty software and learn very little in the process.
But they're likely gonna anyway and didn't even appreciate the sanity checks, so I fully expect software quality will continue to go down.
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Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.
I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.
Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.
I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.
I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.
I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.
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Yeah I mean that all sounds reasonable. I'm rooting for stack overflow to continue because it's frequently helpful. I've basically never found chatgpt to be helpful.
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My experience has been more like this:
OP: I’m trying to make lasagna from scratch but my noodles aren’t turning out right. Here’s my noodle recipe and settings for my pasta machine.
Mod: duplicate post of “How to make canned spaghetti bolognese” thread locked.
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I think all that needs to be said is if you search how to install a new CA in a given runtimes cert store, odds are the first and accepted answer will almost without fail describe how to disable ssl.
A lot of times the accepted answer on a locked question will be extremely outdated and/or not even functional anymore.
Modern tech charges at a break neck pace and stack overflow can't keep up because the people who run the community created rules that artificially led to it not keeping up
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In my experience has been like "that's a bug and was solved on version 2.1, update" and I'm having the exact problem in version 2.2 so what now?
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Or I don't actually get to update the version my company is using, is there a workaround?
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I've been in your position and in the other person's position many times. It can be frustrating but we need to think about the big picture. It's possible you hadn't considered a certain approach, and it's probable that many other future readers will not have considered a certain approach. So even though you might have said that you want to do something specific, it's often helpful to some people to provide general information of another way to tackle the same issue.
And of course you know your own situation, so now there are these comments that appear off topic, and they kind of are, for you, and that's just how it is on forums.
The other situation that comes up a lot is that people are doing it wrong. They are misusing some piece of technology and while their kluge might kind of work right now, it's setting themselves up for bigger issues in the future. Of course no one appreciates it when you tell them they're doing it wrong.
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People don't like when you don't answer their question because it doesn't give them an answer to their question. Just answer the question first and then hop on your high horse to tell them why it's not going to work.
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139 comments