The Fall of Stack Overflow
The Fall of Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
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Maybe I would post more if I didn't get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.
I've had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don't have the "reputation" to.
Honestly a really dumb system imo.
Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I'm not going to keep bothering with SO.
Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don't have enough reputation :/
Never got into it because of that.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there's even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don't know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don't know if that's feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it's not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you'd definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial.. just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that's as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they're looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it's a good question... my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it's full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.