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
I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
the search engine ignores -string
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder…
Hyphen (-) means you don’t want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.
Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.
SO is a shithole, just like Reddit. All the work is done by volunteers. When it was time to cash out with the platform, they also did several things to fuck with their community. I’ve contributed quite a bit to the trilogy sites, and served as a moderator. I regret every second of it. But at least a few people got rich in the process.
I don’t get why programmers, especially ones actually working on open source projects, insist on using proprietary services. Stack Overflow is one, also GitHub.
Stack Overflow reached its maximum “duplicates”. So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
I actually go there more often now that I try to avoid reddit in my search results. Sometimes valuable posts have been edited or deleted.
I really like using code.whatever.social as an alternative frontend to Stack Overflow. It has way less distractions and allows me to only look at the question and the answers and nothing else.
I really like this, never saw it before. Thanks!
No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.
I really hope it burns to the ground. One of the most toxic dev “forums” I’ve seen. I made a point of never clicking their site when looking for answers even if it took me longer.
Damn man, how do you get any work done without it?
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.
I bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution
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 are delusional and will be left behind if that is your view point. The code is usually largely accurate only needing a few tweaks. Easily one of the most powerful scaffolding and learning tool I’ve used in 25 years. Our developers embracing it are more efficient then ever and passing static analysis, owasp scans, coding standards just fine if not better than cranky old devs who think they couldn’t possibly be helped by a dumb machine.
I prefer being delusional and a cranky old dev, rather than trusting AI by giving all of my workplace code and logic. Powerful? Maybe. Helping you ship products faster? I don’t know ; no metrics have been published about that in controlled settings, and I still think people will get lazy and after some time even the ones that tweaked the code and analyzed it thoroughly will just stop caring.
Go ahead, jump in that bandwagon, and prove me wrong in 5 years. All I want is proof.
Also, I didn’t know one could be a cranky old dev after a few years of experience only
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.
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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 think it’s the junior dev blog spam and search results putting them higher.
jQuery is also dying. Coincidence?
i use jquery daily… maybe now that it’s dying ill have a real reason to move to something a little more cutting edge. haha
If you don’t mind me asking, why do you still use jquery and what do you use in jquery?
one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.
I’m so sorry.
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
what other forums do you use ?
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.
Oh wow, thanks. I didn’t realize that making this an image post got rid of the link
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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.
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I’m trying to SSH into my Window 11 machine and it keeps saying “Connection refused: port 22”. Wut do?
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Probably questions that can be answered by RTFM
LLM has RATFM and you can ask it directly
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If it’s simple then it has been asked tens of times in SO
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A lot of my answers I get answered with ChatGPT. And I can always ask ChatGPT to tell me where I can look to verify the answer. I find myself on stack overflow for very specific or very technical topics.
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
“you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”
That’s one of my favorites: ignore the problem, only pick on the scope we can’t change.
You have to build Rust from source, then install the dependencies with cargo, then update your node.js because it uses npm to manage it’s configurations and if your npm isn’t at least the current unstable version, the configs will be outdated. This worked for me on Arch, which is what I use btw.
You have to build Rust from source
As someone who actually did out of interest at one point, you’d be surprised how easy this is to do.
x.pyis a godsend.For the rest of your comment, it was immediately invalidated when you said you use Arch. The reality is that more people use Ubuntu, so you should be using Ubuntu too. Don’t use
apt? Figure it out yourself :P
I asked for advice on how to express something in UML once:
“No one cares whether you follow the UML standard, just make something up”
“But my company uses waterfall and requires UML diagrams to move onto the next phase of development!”
“That’s an issue with your company then. Ask your boss how to do it. Question closed.”
I think it’s a behavior from work got carried over answering questions in StackOverflow. Usually when there’s a request from client/PM/PO, I usually ask them what they want to achieve by requesting said feature, usually after asking that question they will think and find out that making that pet feature is not the best way to achieve that goal.
As a Software Engineer we’re conditioned to respond that way to a question, and when we go to websites that’s specifically to answer questions, we are still answering questions from fellow technical people in that same mindset, which is not helpful.
However, I’ve used the condescending answers from StackOverflow to my advantage. Sometimes in a project we’ll get businesspeople with a technical background, either they used to be an engineer 15 years ago or they studied computer science in university but transitioned to product management after graduation. If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
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I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was “this has already been asked before”. No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.
I sometimes also suffer a case of “explaining until I figure the question myself”, where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.
You were able to post on there at all? Don’t they have extremely high barriers to entry for even question comments?
Honestly, I put some effort into get some of their reputation points. Then I asked one question that I didn’t realize was dumb and I can’t post questions anymore. You’re welcome to see my profile and try to figure out how I did it 👍
lmao, how dare you be inquisitive
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
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It’s usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.
I can see for myself that I go way less often since I use github copilot
