The Fall of Stack Overflow

Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.

I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more "run on sentence" and " 'emails' and 'helps' both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like "there-there, Timmy".

So I said "you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead." And they agreed.

So I'm read-only there now too. :-D

You mean shitty code which you can just check and ask them to change in almost real time, over posting your question on SO and waiting for months for an answer?

People who fail to understand the value of peer-reviewed code are just going to copy/paste bad, but popular, code practices.

There irony here is that Stackoverflow was considered a common source of copy/pasted code.

Chatgpt is still a tool and it's up to the user how to use it. If you google "bolognese recipe" you get one result; if you Google "traditional ragu from Bologna" you get another. Same for ChatGPT.

You can have it generate shitty code and then compare it against examples it finds online to iterate that code. Also, it was trained on the whole internet, including those good solutions, and can often reproduce them on its own. but you have to tell it, explicitly, to do all this to make better code, rather than just asking for the code.

Can you write a code that would sort the input string from smallest to largest?

You would like to have it, wouldn't you? You fucken nerd.

I agree that it isn't as good as it was. The last two updates have definitely decreased its effectiveness for multiple things, not just dev. It is still my starting point when looking for something. It is just not as good as it used to be.

Obviously, you can't take what it gives at face value, but you shouldn't do that from SO either. In general, I see faster results using GPT than I do with Google and SO. You can also extend the responses with any customization or changes specific to what you are trying to do, where you can't with SO.

I'm not saying SO is bad. Not by any stretch. I still use it a lot. It just isn't my starting point anymore.

It's a little more decent than you give credit for. I use it all the time for easy generic subroutines and functions. It struggles a bit with specific, complex requests but is generally pretty versatile as a miniature code assistant. It's good at catching human errors like loops starting or ending at the wrong specified integer, so I use it as a debugging tool.

I'm not sure what you mean.

What if the documentation is lacking? Experienced users will still know how a library works because they've tried some things, but that information won't be available if they never talk about it online

how do people still have this much faith in the tools humans build after seeing the climate change caused by the industrial revolution.

I was working on a hobby project where I used a niche framework in a somewhat uncommon way. I was stuck on a concept that I think the documentation didn't explain well enough, at least for me, and I couldn't find any resource on it aside from the docs.

I asked Bing to write a piece of code that does what I wanted and explain each line. It was perfectly working and the explanation was also understandable. All it did was search for its official documentation. It really blew my mind.

It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence

That's not happening anytime soon.

It's unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are... free, convenient, and where the people are.

Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.

Because there are no free and quality alternatives.

Because it's free and reliable

I don't really have any Insights into Quora. I know StackExchange hardliner always joked about the site and felt like SE is better. I joined that because I thought it was fun to feel superior, but I don't even have an account on that site

Ah. Feels similar to the relevance discussions on the German Wikipedia. Gatekeeping at its finest.

My favorite part of stackoverflow was asking a question because every result from Google at the time was either not helpful... Or lead to a SO page with the same question with no answer, but was marked as a previously answered question by a moderator... And was then told by them to use Google

Like bitch I did use Google, the first 2 pages of answers filtered only for SO results were all marked as previously answered and closed by moderators!

That was the last time I used SO. Never figured out the answer to my problem either. At least chatGPT might point me in the right direction to figuring out the problem

No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.

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 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.

I'm so sorry.

Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the "question" tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I'd get a "good" answer out of it.

So why did they structure it as a forum?

It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.

Often the question marked as a duplicate isn't a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn't spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don't get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn't great these days and hasn't been for a while.

Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.

Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.

A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.

A year ago, my answer would have been r/sysadmin and r/learnprogramming.

Now my answer is GPT-4.

I would ask on reddit, IRC channels or read the documentation. I found that I rarely get an updated answer on stack overflow for my area of work.

Yeah, I don't know if it's a bug or a feature. I got a similar problem before with one of my posts. I think a workaround would be to post it as a link and paste the image in the Body.

The perversity of SO rewarding people for ensuring that the answers on SO are becoming increasingly outdated absolutely befuddles me.

Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don't want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I'd be surprised if not even better than SO posts.