News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by Silhouette on Monday April 19, 2021 @06:51PM (#26868748)
I'm trying to think what's changed

Among other possibilities:

SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors.

SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. In that respect, it has become its own worst enemy, with old answers about obsolete versions and practices often ranking highly in search results.

The first of those problems then exacerbates the second, because the same cultural issues get in the way of both updating answers to old questions and asking new questions that might be superficially similar to ones that already exist but actually need a different answer.

Meanwhile, in many areas of programming, documentation from other sources has become both better in quality and more readily located thanks to other well-known sites and high search engine rankings. Relatively speaking, SO simply isn't as useful if there is already primary documentation that answers questions correctly and comprehensively.

And finally, you personally may have grown as a developer over time, becoming both more capable of solving problems for yourself and more familiar with whatever tools you use regularly, so you might not need external help so often.

FWIW, I'm also in the "rarely visit SO any more" camp. I think I have a kind of banner blindness for SO hits on search results pages now, perhaps because I'm assuming that following a SO link is unlikely to provide a useful answer so I almost always check other plausible sources first. On those occasions when I do get as far as visiting SO, I'm usually reminded of why I tend to work this way now.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by troutwine on Monday April 19, 2021 @08:07PM (#26869266)
> SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors.

This rings very true to me. The GP's comment made me consider that I very rarely go to Stackoverflow anymore, no longer contribute and what stuff I do find there useful is from well before the cultural shift in moderation, back when questions could be a little more open and answers a little more freewheeling.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by nerdponx on Monday April 19, 2021 @08:12PM (#26869300)
It's a wasteland now. Legitimate, perfectly answerable questions get hostile comments and close votes.

The other sites in the Stackexchange network aren't nearly as bad, fortunately. English Language Learners and Math/MathOverflow are very positive places. Software Engineering is pretty good, too.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by flukus on Monday April 19, 2021 @11:23PM (#26870355)
There's also a lot of people karma farming (for employment reasons?). A couple of years ago I was searching for something and the same question was asked by someone else on SO and this came up repeatedly while I was looking, but after 4 years there was no answer so it was a very low quality result. A couple of days later I did find/discover an answer so I went back to SO and added my reply, miraculously after 4 years someone else added an answer about 12 minutes later, it was the same answer as mine with a little more formatting and marked themselves as correct.

So after that experience would I go to the effort of contributing back again? Maybe in this case, because the answer was shorter than this post, but the equation might change if it required more effort.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by dkersten on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @12:29AM (#26870675)
I actually deleted my account some time ago via GDPR request. So I haven’t contributed in a long time (but wasn’t a heavy user anyway). But I have noticed a major decline in my using it at all, even for just reading answers. Yes, I did look up that C++ thing a few days ago, and ended up finding the answer on SO, but before that, I have no idea when I used it last. Could be months.
Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by fnord77 on Monday April 19, 2021 @11:19PM (#26870336)
There are weird people on SO who are both trolls and knowledgeable. There is one person who edits EVERY SINGLE question regarding a certain programming language. Then attempts to close every question as "already asked", even where it is somewhat questionable whether it had been asked already or not. He knows his stuff really well though so he ends up not getting banned.

I do not get it.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by svnpenn on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @12:45AM (#26870768)
If you're talking about Flimzy, yeah, he's a tool.
Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by fnord77 on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @11:56PM (#26885262)
ha, no somebody else. maybe this um, personality quirk is not uncommon.
Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by physicsguy on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @06:38AM (#26872890)
> SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem. In that respect, it has become its own worst enemy, with old answers about obsolete versions and practices often ranking highly in search results.

Oh god yes, this is a nightmare.

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by ollysb on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @02:58AM (#26871520)
Also the moderation is often hidden. Last week I ran into one of my answers for a language I haven't used in a while. When I read the answer I thought it was odd because the english was very poor. Then I checked and found that a moderator had made a really poor edit of the original answer. Maybe this is reasonable on a site like SO but I really felt that somebody had essentially impersonated me and entirely changed the tone of some writing which was attributed to my name.
Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by baud147258 on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @09:10AM (#26889179)
> SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem.

I think the SO leadership is currently searching for a solution with this issue. Whether they deploy it and it works is another matter.

Regarding the moderation and unwelcoming culture, I don't really see it, but maybe it's because I follow different tags?

Re:How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? by Spooky23 on Monday April 19, 2021 @09:17PM (#26869722)
Once SO killed expertsexchange and similar sites, it became less useful to me!