OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?”
top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.”
buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)”
then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer did it.
Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/q/19622198
What's up with the "man Y" aversion towards the usage of examples in the man pages? I don't expect some behemoth like ffmpeg to have a billion examples in the man files, but damn, every other reasonably sized CLI app would be so much easier to use, if you had just a dozen or two of examples at the end of the man file.
tldr ffmpeg
Sometimes, the original poster is not mistaken. Especially when an expert asks a question, there's a reason for it. Assuming the expert to be a beginner who hasn't tried easier solutions is degrading, and forces experts off the site.
Actively insulting your userbase, especially your expert-level userbase, is a bad idea. It leads to StackOverflow falling and collapsing over the years.
IMHO Copilot Chat has picked up on these bad habits.
I literally cannot remember when last SO was useful time, due to the false positive identification of the XY problem.
At least with ChatGPT, it's much faster to get it to answer the question asked and not the question that was not asked.
the XY problem-problem
This is also why I no longer waste my time raising bug tickets for open source projects. You just get shouted down and feel terrible about yourself. I raised many "WONTFIX" bugs in my career against open source projects. What a waste of my time and a harm to my self esteem.
So I do know this problem (problem-problem) very well and I've since stopped asking or answering on SO.
This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists.
But I think it will always be up to the user of SO (not the poster or answerers) to make the real judgement on what is useful.
Often I think SO is useful to use as a bunch of puzzles folks solved. You gotta decide if they are relevant.
SO is at its best when it’s actual error debugging IMO. When you google some specific error whoever else has the similar error it’s right there. I feel like GitHub is replacing this more and more though - I often get the GitHub ranked specific error higher than Stackoverflow these days. Usually you get better discussions on the GitHub issues too, for a multitude of reasons. Two off the top of my head:
1. all of the people working on the stuff related to the issue are very close by
2. the moderation is not nearly as heavy handed as SO.
ChatGPT is also much better than SO as well if you can give it enough context and the thing you are working on wasn’t built on stuff released after 2021
I also really like Stackoverflow for current event type stuff, like black swan type events. One recent example is when google’s Paris data center was on fire and infra guys were helping each other out trying to get systems online.
All of this combined means that StackOverflow the forum is probably on its way out though. They made the mistake of taking VC money and the model hasn’t really proven profitable so they have really made some poor decisions to please the vc overlords.
I won’t miss Stackoverflow much other than nostalgia unfortunately - better alternatives have arrived. Seeing the decline of all of the other Stackexchange sites kind of sucks though. There aren’t better alternatives for many of those
Both sides can identify ChatGPT answers as being wrong. The question is how can they be deleted. The moderators say they can delete a lot by manual inspection. SO say that AI tools were deleting wrong ones.
Which is more than Google, or a previously answered StackOverflow question, can say.
But then, it’ll probably greatly vary depending on the problem you are facing.
Bots closing issues because someone doesn't spam the page. Closing as duplicate of (non related bug). A slew of random solutions that are only tangentially related and don't really solve the problem.
Comes up all the time when people ask how to do things in bash/sh. I know there are better tools for the job, but this is the one I have.
Explaining what the XY problem is to people who are telling you about it's high false positive identification is, itself, an XY misdiagnosis.
Your reply is an example of what people are complaining about - you are addressing the issue you wished was asked, not addressing the issue you were presented with.
But those are correctly diagnosed XY problems. No one is complaining about those.
My parent was told the issue is too many incorrectly identified XY problems, and responded with an explanation of what the XY problem is.
That is the example of a misdiagnosed XY problem, which was kinda my point. This sort of behaviour makes the actual experts leave the site in droves.
If, when answering a question, one where to discard the answer the minute they write "Why would you want to do this?", you'd get much fewer incorrectly diagnosed XY problems.
As I said in a different thread, ChatGPT sometimes does this as well, but at least with ChatGPT, when it is answering a question that was never asked, it doesn't also act like a condescending jackass. There are no "Why would you want to do this?" type of questions.
But on second consideration, I suppose you would not, either, and I suppose you are specific'ly talking about responses which, each taken as a whole, are easily interpreted as some form of hostile.
I responded to the person above me when there were literally two other comments in this thread.
> Your reply is an example of what people are complaining about
Defining something is not an example of an XY problem.
> - you are addressing the issue you wished was asked, not addressing the issue you were presented with.
As I am not much of a programmer but work on electronics and computer hardware I deal with different types of people than would be on SO, so I am not addressing anything but my own experiences.
And then to ice the cake you find the question because your question has been marked as a duplicate of the older question where they answered using unix binary tools… and you specifically asked about doing something in “pure shell script” or something similar to that phrase.
Stack overflow is fundamentally a system design that breaks down at scale due to misalignment of incentives that are necessary for it to work well at smaller scales (as can be seen in the successful operation of various smaller Stack Exchange sites for various topics such as Law, Aviation, Physics, etc)
I must admit that I don"t buy in to that philosophy and like using one tool so for scripting I would do all in python, so I would not be asking that question.
Many Linux users think that their way is the only and thay means bash as the shell and many others like GNU coreutils, gcc etc.
You may know, but someone else asking the exact same question may not.
So sorry then, but listing every constraint and design descision it is.
You don't need to do that, a simple "I know what the XY problem is, and this isn't it" prefixed to every question you ask should be enough to stop the race to tell you all about the XY problem.
I mean, at this point it's clear that more people know about the XY problem than people ho don't.
True, but that logic goes both ways: Unless told otherwise, whoever reads the question, isn't required to assume that there is a constraint.
If I get asked how to water plants with a sieve, without getting told why getting a watering can is impossible, "You don't, use a watering can", is a perfectly acceptable answer.
Especially when the question is aked in a question archive, rather than a help-forum.
If specific constraints apply to a question, then they should be a part of the question.
I’m sure if you’re twitter Kafka is actually a better solution, for everyone else, it isn’t.
"I'm trying to learn foo.js and attemt to do so by porting Tetris to it. I know foo.js is a terrible option for a game. So. How can I write to the canvas from foo.js?"
Is often answered properly, if only because to many it's a nice puzzle.
"How can I write to the canvas fro foo.js?" Is different in that it will attract a lot of people explaining that foo.js deliberately did not allow writing to the canvas, because Z"
This may help less experienced engineers not understanding their problem set, but for a more experienced engineer it's absolutely obnoxious to think of all the ways to defend my question so I don't have to deal with a rush of "oh but you should do this instead" answers getting up voted that don't actually answer my question, then asking to accept the answer.
To one set of users it's possibly helpful, to another it's useless if not also condescending, often condescending to both sets.
The bottom line is now, SO is so filled with these types of responses, I can't expect to get a very specific question answered, which is really the only reason I'd ask a question in the first place, so why use it?
There are plenty chat groups now via Slack and discord in my field where I can get much more direct answers. People aren't worried about getting down voted for a bad question, people aren't giving low quality answers to boost their points. So for me, SO is practically dead except for the occasional obscure error message that I can query for there.
My experience is that it's not so much a defensive argument, but context. My example was poor in that it could be misread as a defensive argument, sorry about that.
I meant it to show how adding some context changes the question. Because, in programming, it is all about context. AKA that "It Depends" meme.
Want to host videos on a laptop (which has a big SSD) and stream them to a Pi (which is attached to a big screen) over a LAN? Hey, here's a post about how to host videos on a Pi and stream them to a laptop! Upvote and share! My point is, you don't even have to be trying to do something all that strange for people to apply the XY Problem logic and refuse to help you.
(Solution: NFS mount and a patient understanding that the Pi cannot play certain kinds of video, so you'll need to transcode some of them first. See? Nothing bizarre, but surprisingly outside-the-box given what I could find online at the time.)
One common example I've run into lately, as I've been reading about state machines, is people asking how to implement a simple react component as a state machine, and others objecting to the premise of the question since using a state machine for a simple react component is obviously a bad idea.
It’s fine, I think, to answer a question and then suggest a better method. It’s presumptuous in the extreme to dismiss a question with some pseudoacademic neologism.
IOW, any time you think you have spotted an XY problem, you're probably wrong.
And that's the problem with SO moderators and regulars. They classify everything as an XY problem because it allows them to answer the question they know the answer to rather than answer the question that was asked.
The thing people don’t get is: when you answer on SO you’re not answering that poster. You’re answering anyone who will ever have this question. It’s quite arrogant to assume it will be an XY for every single person forever more.
The proper way to answer is to answer the question exactly as ask and then insert your “but you probably should be doing Y instead” at the end.
Doing things the right way is BETTER.
If you can't, you should add a bit to your question saying "I know the standard way is to do Y, not X, but because of reason Z I can't do it."
Most readers will be able to use the "right way".
My experience with less experienced developers is that they ask the exact question as that is where they have stuck but they are ignorant of the better ways.
I do tend to answer differently depending on the questioners reputation. If they have a higher rep then I can assume they know what they are doing.
Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wrong way, because they don't know what the right way is, an answer that simply tells them how is a bad resource.
It's not enough to tag caveats onto such dangerous answers, because people can't read. Instead, newbies should have to overcome a sufficient amount of opposition to filter out those who don't know why they're doing what they want to do, and the rest can make the little effort of being very explicit about why they want to do something the wrong way.
Can't be done, will be marked as duplicate.
Then Googling for doing X with Y gets you a bunch of closed questions and a labyrinth of links all leading to a question that was answered 10 years ago on a different software version where Z possibly was the right way to do it but now isn't.
And of course there's no way to reopen the question because it has been closed by a level 15 Magister Templi moderator and a lowly level 3 apprentice moderator like yourself needs to either answer 146 more questions or moderate 192 other questions to clear enough arbitrary hurdles to achieve holy question reopening powers.
And there's possibly an appeals process but that involves recruiting 13 moderators who you have to convince to give this question special treatment and declare that one of their number of sacred moderators made a mistake.
Some of it is that SO has gamified shitting on and suppressing the question/asker instead of gamified providing the answer, and built a culture of toxicity that tolerates the abuse of the tools in this fashion.
And when the CEO asked them to tone it down maybe 5 years ago they basically did a collective “am I so out of touch? no, it’s the askers who are wrong”. Extremely funny to read the meta responses to that at the time.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942
(admittedly "women and people who don't speak english well are particularly unlikely to adopt to the pedantic neckbeard culture we've built" is a spicy take for your average SO'er, or wikipedian, but it's also not actually a wrong one either. SO's culture problems probably do disproportionately chase away users with marginal engagement, nobody likes putting up with formalized neckbeard culture.)
Then you have to do two things in your answer:
1. Correctly answer the question as asked.
2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.
If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
You know that's not your responsibility. If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
And frankly, I think you overestimate how valuable and essential your non-responsive answer is.
> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.
Quit coming up with excuses for not answering the question.
Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
Put another way - when was the last time you used a development tool, or a library, or some other resource, and sat down to read the full documentation of it? I would posit that that's very rare as an activity, even for developers who need to develop a deep understanding of what they're using.
It's much more common to learn by doing, and the limit of that learning is very often what the developer can't do. Answers which easily enable developers to do something are overwhelmingly likely to lead to developers doing that thing - much in the same way that a long page of library documentation which gives an example is likely to lead to developers repeating that example, even if at the end of the docs, there's a little caveat saying that you shouldn't follow the example for so-and-so reason.
>If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
But is it a good experience? Sure, maybe they'll learn that they always have to read the whole answer before they use any part of it. But we sensibly have abandoned this no-guardrails approach to teaching in almost every arena where it's been used, because it's not really suited to the way people do things in real life - and in real life, people often end up affecting others with their mistakes.
Does junior developer who learns how to glue SQL strings together in their favourite programming language, and makes the "small mistake" of not learning anything about SQL injection in the process, benefit from the learning experience when they cause a data leak? Do their customers? Or should the learning resources they access maybe use the pedagogical tools available to make sure those kinds of mistakes are really hard to make, even if it occasionally inconveniences a seasoned pro?
The are a lot of different kinds of "users," and I think the kind of thinking in that article is totally inappropriate when applied to developer Q&A board.
To be perfectly blunt: the result if what you're advocating is to condescendingly treat experienced people as newbies so dumb that their question should not be answered, because you think they're so dumb the real answer might distract them from the lecture you want to condescendingly give them.
People like that are super annoying and almost always unhelpful.
Every single fucking question I ask on SO has some lazy condescending dude chiming in to answer the easy question he thinks I should have asked, after he totally failed to understand the constraints that made my question hard. Of course, lazy condescending dude always thinks he knows better.
Here, I'll coin a name for a problem I see much more often, which is called the XX problem:
1. User has problem X, and asks for a solution for it.
2. People viewing the question decide that the original user actually has problem Y.
3. Those people tell the original user that they actually want to solve problem Y, flame the original user, and if they have the power to do so, edit the original user's question to be asking about problem Y.
4. Those people use poorly-thought-out pop-social-psychology to justify their shitty behavior.
5. The original user still doesn't have a solution to problem X, because they really needed a solution to problem X all along.
You realize that it's dismissive and condescending to ignore the problem I'm describing and respond with an assumption that I'm unaware of the tone of my post, right? Pot, meet kettle.
Because you're propagating the idea that you (or anyone asking questions) knows better what a person asking needs than the person asking does. Telling people you know what they need better than they do is pretty close to the definition of condescending.
People are emotional because nearly everyone who asks a question on the internet has to deal with people telling them "You don't actually want an answer to your question, you want an answer to this other question." By boosting the signal of the horrible XY problem idea, you're contributing to that problem.
I'm not saying this kind of miscommunication never happens, but the opposite is actually far more common.
Unfortunately I had no idea about the perverse incentives for question answering and the terrible moderator practices on SO, so I walked into a minefield giving an answer here that I thought was helpful based on my experience as a hands on technician working directly with people -- but it turned out to be a lightning rod for people's frustrations on these issues.
But apparently I can't comment as a new user so I guess the discussion will just be "because calculus classes use matrices in examples".
[0] https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/26417/why-...
What's the name for the "I don't want to use a sledgehammer to solve a problem that should be solvable with a screwdriver" problem?
Or in this case, the "spinning up 300 lines of code to integrate an XML parser vs. a dozen lines of code based on regexes" problem. For reasons that are unclear to me, XML parser libraries tend to be painfully difficult to use (speaking from personal experience with 4 different XML parser libraries).
I don't think it's a surprise to anyone involved that an XML parser is going to solve the problem.
1. To do Q that way you would to <solution, or at least pointers to how to find the solution elsewhere> but you will likely it far more efficient/easy/whatever to do <something else> instead.
2. Q can be achieved far more efficient/easy/whatever by doing <alternative>, but if you are stuck with using Y then try <solution or pointers as above>.
Of course this relies on you correctly deriving that they are trying to achieve Q, or them explicitly stating the fact. Maybe instead they are trying to get to K.
It probably won't last forever without people generating new answers somewhere else, but it answers a lot of things correctly, and the things it gets wrong are easy enough to verify.
I really hope ChatGPT causes StackOverflow to change.
It already has, and not for the better. SO is currently awash with nonsensical answers that are clearly the result of feeding the question into ChatGPT. Not to mention questions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76748781/how-pythons-bui...
Yes, there are plenty of rude replies, but sometimes it helps to assume what somebody really means is they failed to do a context switch. Exchanging more details can help turn a 'madness' into a method. Even if they were outright rude, doing this can lead to an answer that might not otherwise be given (even though that answer may be provided by someone else).
The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem.
Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts these people.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
As someone who was a newbie at the time when it was posted, who was looking for a way to parse HTML, I took away that it's just really the wrong way to go about it. I didn't feel crapped on at all.
But the asker is very clearly a newbie. The question does not contain further context. The asker's suggestion is wrong (I think). And we've all worked with junior engineers who try to use the wrong tool.
The answer is a whimsical way of making an appropriate suggestion in this inferred context.
Also, to be fair, I think it's not mathematically impossible to use dark regex magic (with look-behinds and such) to parse HTML, but that's a discussion for another day...
If you scroll down long enough, you will see answers explaining that. But they arent upvoted as the answers suggesting the questioner is an idiot.
I and I think many other are sad that S.O. removes many serious work related questions (have lost count of how many times I saw the perfect question with the perfect answer, with a note that this isn't what Stack Overflow is made for and these questions only exist for historical reasons).
As mentioned elsewhere, this is an old question and both the kind of question and answer wouldn't be allowed these days.
However, I also fundamentally disagree that questioning the assumptions in a question is unhelpful. You want to solve a problem, find an approach and want help because you have problems with the approach? What if the approach you took _is_ wrong? Its very helpful especially for advanced beginners or at the intermediate level, to be given a different way of solving the problem even if that is not what you asked.
It depends on context if this is just pedantry or genuinely helpful. The best answers I found start with answering the question that was stated, but then proceed in showing how the problem behind the question can also or better be solved.
I'm fine with indirect, "question-the-premise" comments, but they should be posted as comments, not answers, because they are in fact not answers.
Stack Overflow isn't a site for beginners, it's for "professionals". At least, that's what all the Stack Overflow defenders tell me every time I criticize the snarkiness, rudeness and patronizing manner of many answers/comments you receive on Stack Overflow.
Jesus this is cringe
So the answer is actually on topic.
It may be a bit… stylistically unusual, but I think I came away with a pretty good idea of what the answerer thinks.
Yes, and they are factually correct in doing so. The correct answer to the question: "How do I use a hammer to tighten a screw" isn't a lengthy description of how to perform some magic with a hammer. The correct answer is: "You don't. Use a screwdriver."
HTML isn't parseable with regex. The various answers under the question explain in great detail why [1] that is the case.
SO isn't a help forum, it's a question archive. The purpose of an answer isn't to solve one guys specific question, but to provide an answer that is useful to all people who ever stumble upon this question.
My car broke down in the middle of the desert because of a screw that came loose and all I have is a hammer. You have just condemned me to death because you assume you know better.
Yes, and answers on that very page, with lots of upvotes, do exactly that. People looking for answers online, can reasonably be expected to scroll down a page with results.
Poster is not asking for this. He is asking how to parse a specific subset of HTML. And it is demonstrably parseable.
> The correct answer to the question: "How do I use a hammer to tighten a screw" isn't a lengthy description of how to perform some magic with a hammer. The correct answer is: "You don't. Use a screwdriver."
It is not the appropriate way to tighten a screw, but there likely is a correct way to do it with a hammer.
It is fine to point out that there are better ways to parse that HTML, but it is not wrong to do it with regexes.
Sorry to be blunt, but having coworkers like you make the job really annoying. I'm not a newbie, but a seasoned programmer. If I'm asking a question and am in a domain with a fair amount of experience, don't give me patronizing answers.
Poster is not the one answers are for. Answers are for everyone who stumbles upon this question in the future, and the general topic of the question is very much about parsing some HTML with regex.
Again: SO != Help FOrum
> but there likely is a correct way to do it with a hammer.
No, there isn't. Because the correct way is to use a screwdriver. There is certainly a way to do it with a hammer, same as there is a way to write a webserver in brainf__k. Doesn't mean that way is good or should be done.
> Sorry to be blunt, but having coworkers like you make the job really annoying.
Bluntness is fine. I will be blunt as well: Having to fix code full of hammers used to tighten screws is a lot more annoying than having colleagues who try to prevent that from happening in the first place.
So, no, the top 3 answers are all bullshit.
The questions isn’t about parsing, the question is about recognizing a token.
So here is the reason: the top voted answers are wrong.
"Some" is an understatement.
My favorite example, from "TeX stackexchange" :
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/100574/really-wide-h...
Quote from the actual answer (which is not the bogus accepted one):
The question wasn't "should it be done?" But, for the same reason men climb mountains, "could it be done?" The answer, [...] is yes. Thus, we introduce [...]
> How do I shoot myself in the foot? I’m pointing the gun at my foot and pulling the trigger, but nothing is happening.
Is it:
> A common reason for guns not firing is that they aren’t loaded. Try loading the gun and trying again.
…or is it:
> Woah, hang on a sec! What are you trying to achieve exactly? It seems like you are doing something very wrong here. I’m sure there’s a better way to do whatever it is you are trying to do.
There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot. It’s not responsible to blindly answer the question regardless of the consequences. Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.
But it's hard! On the one hand, you don't want to teach people to do the wrong thing (especially not on SO, where answers are often copied wholesale and pasted into production code), but also not answering the question as asked usually doesn't help the OP at all.
If it's not clear what they're trying to achieve I usually leave a comment asking for clarification rather than answering, though.
Sure, but some of the stuff I've looked up in the past is answered with helpful comments like "You won't need to do this, your CA will do this for you" or "this is handled by your certificate verification stack, you don't need to be involved in this stuff".
Well, thanks, but I'm actually implementing both of those things right now and I'm having an annoying issue with figuring out how the API for the (very popular but IMHO poorly documented) library I'm using for part of it hangs together.
> Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.
I think sometimes its because comparatively the respondents are newbies, and are repeating received wisdom.
Thus, the first response is the correct one.
On preventing people from doing what they intend to do...I think the main issue is the world is a large place, people face many situations, and most advices given in good faith only have an extremely limited view of what people might need to do. And it's kinda awkward to ask for someone's whole life to decide if they are right in wanting to straight rename a table column on their live production DB.
Something could be a bad idea 99% of the time. But that leaves millions of people in the 1% for whom it's the best course of action.
When I find a straight and relevant answer that is great, I like browsing SO, but I wouldn't dream having a question just to find myself in a word duel with some very eager contributor steering me into his favourite domain. I want to get ahead with a task not being in the quest of finding The Ultimate Solution or having a social life over interesting and related topics.
This is one I ran into recently:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30196175/const-methods-i...
The question is very clearly formed. The accepted (and currently top) answer does a good job. But at one point the other answer which is badly worded and confusing was at the top. And I don't think it should ever get the top position of the answers.
It's ok, you deserve the hate. After all, you're asking the wrong questions.
They want questions that are "textbook-worthy" or possibly "encyclopedia worthy". They're on record as having said this officially. If programming and technology is just messier than that, if it's more complicated than that, and you still have questions that don't fit because of it... well, fuck you. They don't exist to answer your questions, they exist to answer great questions that they can use to build up this pretty little sight that now has some purpose other than whatever it was you thought you were using it for.
The Z guy, he's playing their game. He's awesome. You, you need to be punished until you comply.
I wanted some information on figuring out what texture serialisation was supported on a given client for a WebGL app. I needed to know this because I was optimising the client and had to deal with very large textures (it was an AR / augmented reality context).
Cue a barrage of comments along the lines of "you shouldn't need to do this" "the abstraction means you can simply assume the GPU has infinite texture memory" (!) "just provide all the formats and let the GPU bridge figure it out". Then the question had a downvote and that was that, cast to the bottom of the pile.
It seemed to me everyone responding to my question had this assumption "questioners are morons". A moron asking about texture serialisation is a paradox, ergo the question must have a faulty premise.
I wanted good ways to deal with pointers to 2D arrays in C, which aren’t hard but you need to remember that [] has precedence over *, so (*pointer)[x][y] is needed to deference. It’s not the hard to mess it up. Ultimately GPT had an OK answer but… it had that immediately without searching and the didn’t have to craft some well written example, it picked up my dirty explanation no problem.
I have the 2D array typedef’ed now, but it’s still confusing to read and hard to work with. I’ll search tomorrow on it.
Also, in C++, you can set your clock to someone commenting that you should just use smart pointers. It doesn't matter if the question is entirely unrelated.
As someone who spent a decade helping people answering code questions on Flashkit and later SO, I find the SO community and moderation now to be so off-putting that I avoid asking anything there if I can. I still give answers sometimes, but I'm much less likely to be on the site at all.
Rather than ask it to write a full ansible job, try asking it the question you would ask on Stack Overflow (i.e. you probably wouldn't ask Stack Overflow to write the full job for you).
Maybe they should expire comments or remove them alltogether.
Or something vaguely like that?
Edit: It seems like there’s a wiggle room, but still terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237
Reddit is actually a lot better in this regard
I wrote paragraphs only to be closed by mods as “opinion based” or whatever, so I had to turn them into blog posts, and they got picked up by popular publishing channels, like this one: https://medium.com/hackernoon/are-interfaces-code-smell-bd19...
Of course I care about how my work and my relationship with it is treated. Why don’t you?
And I wasn't talking about the issue of mods deleting entire answered questions. I was talking about single contributions, and mods deleting things is the exact opposite of what my post was addressing!
On the other side, that compiler post is fun but it's not some big effortful thing. Caring about it some makes sense, but I wouldn't care about it that much.
It wasn't a blog post on the site; I extended it to a blog post after mods closed it and flagged it for deletion. As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for.
> but it's not some big effortful thing
It doesn't have to be. It's my thing. It sounds like me, it carries my spirit. Nobody else would have written it then. It reflects a period of my life, how I perceived things; and more importantly, its continued existence has an impact on me regardless how it's licensed. Say, if my writing style, or my choice of words, or my tone were associated with a traumatic event in my past, SO's insistence on keeping it up would be explicitly abusive, don't you agree?
Even if no such event had occured, SO's or HN's insistence on keeping my content online against my wishes is also abusive; it deprives me of control over my thoughts and my words. Is it legal? Yes, 100%. But, is it ethical? No, I don't think so. And for what? For keeping the answer for "how can I simulate a click on a DOM element?" online, as if that problem immediately becomes "unsolveable" when that comment, heck, the whole SO web site goes down. What a pretentious excuse to keep your income stream steady.
> I wouldn't care about it that much
You would if you were me.
No, I'd say your trauma is causing you to make an unreasonable demand. The writing style in a short technical post existing somewhere should not be harmful.
> SO's or HN's insistence on keeping my content online against my wishes is also abusive; it deprives me of control over my thoughts and my words. Is it legal? Yes, 100%. But, is it ethical? No, I don't think so. And for what?
It's supposed to be a collaboration, especially SO, and keeping things intact is important for that.
Just yesterday I found a helpful guide on reddit where half the posts were "." It's pretty clear how a site where the primary purpose is guiding people would do a worse job if it worked that way.
> And for what? For keeping the answer for "how can I simulate a click on a DOM element?" online, as if that problem immediately becomes "unsolveable" when that comment, heck, the whole SO web site goes down. What a pretentious excuse to keep your income stream steady.
If it would affect the income stream, then it's something that makes the site bad for users. You can't argue both sides of that at the same time.
> As a top 0.5% or whatever contributor of SO, believe me, I know what the site is for.
Maybe? I don't think most contributors would be anywhere near as upset about an inability to delete posts.
SO wants text like you gave them, I don't think they want the level of emotional investment in those pieces of text. (They might want emotional investment into the site itself, but that's a different thing.)
Most contributors of any platform wouldn't be upset about anything. Conformance of the majority doesn't imply the rightfulness of the action.
But many people are upset about it, rightfully so; see for yourself: 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=why+can%27t+i+delete+my+cont... 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=why+can%27t+i+delete+my+cont...
> I don't think they want the level of emotional investment in those pieces of text
Of course they don't. They want you to be a free ChatGPT as much as possible. The less human you are, the better for them. That doesn't mean that what they are doing is okay or harmless.
This is a lot better than almost every other comparable site with user-created content. In most cases the company has the rights there and can do whatever they want with it, and users have no right to reuse the content of the site.
E.g. Python 2 answers aren't relevant anymore, but still there.
I see "answer as comment" in my most mature tech subjects because people are afraid of downvotes. In my experience, the most mature tech subjects are carefully guarded by a small community of very unfriendly "fastest gun in the West" types. The C++ community is incredibly unwelcoming and negative towards most questions. Note: Comments can only receive upvotes. (In theory, comments can be flagged as off topic, or offensive, but assume -- for my commentary here -- they are not.) Examples of more mature tech subjects: Python, Ruby, ASP.NET, Java (language/foundation libraries), C# (language/founding libraries), C (but not yet C++!), Win32, etc.
For less mature tech subjects (or faster moving), you see many more answers. Example of less mature tech subjects: Python AI/ML libraries, Java/C# open source libraries (Spring, etc.), C++, Qt, Gtk+, Zig, Swift, Golang.
People are afraid of downvotes because people will throw out downvotes without even reading your answer, and once you get the first downvote, everyone else will pile on, also without reading your answer.
Also, the site itself - the ethos of the owners; I used to have an account, became disenchanted with the mods, decided to delete my content, close the account.
I then discovered;
1. You cannot delete answers which have been accepted.
2. The mechanism for deleting your own content allows you to delete a max of something like five replies per day.
I deleted everything I could, over the course of a significant number of days, and left.
Your answers will most likely stay, just anonymized.
Do note that your posts on SO are published with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license:
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
so regardless of who owns them, they can be reproduced, and probably are. So in many senses there is no deleting them.
Also, don't understand why you wanted to delete. Despite its problematic policies, SO is an important public resource and I assume so were your answers on it...
So remeber it was never your property.
Behaviour of users on SO has always been, well, as all the complaints here suggest. It's never really bothered me that the top answer's someone going off on their favourite approach, most questions have multiple answers, and I've learned a lot about coding from reading the top few and trying to understand where the answers are coming from.
The discussion's as important as the answers sometimes, and that's why a potential collapse is a problem.
> - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago
SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always will be worse than stackoverflow. I don't have a clue what their algorithm is doing but it's surely trying to kill Google search as fast as possible.
Another joke is the fact that searching for "[language] [symbol]" also brings me to these content farms instead of the documentation. You seriously can't find useful anything these days using Google.
Only way below this block (which takes about 120% of my whole screen's height) come the "organic" results, that aren't great, but probably match what Google assumed I wanted to see.
I would say at this point you could just use wikipedia as your default search engine.
The business reasons why Google doesn't take steps to remove the bad content and make their product pleasant to use again is so far from my understanding it might well be aliens running the company for all I know.
Thinking of it, it would be an interesting test to compare the ranking of two similar sites, one with google ads, another with ads from another provider. Might be good evidence for antitrust litigation. But what do you do if they just prefer sites with more ads? Because due to their market position, that benefits them, but it isn't anti-competitive against other ad-pushers.
Just managers doing what they get more money for or devs hunting promotions by increasing ad revenue by 0.01% in the short term one sting at a time.
It's really good and IMO more than worth the price.
[0] https://kagi.com
Some people argue that Google possibly can't win the fight vs spam sites, but obviously it works perfectly fine manually blacklisting them.
It takes time to build ranking.
The underlying reason is probably that the spam sites use Google Ads (revenue which is tied to 1000s of PMs and managers bonuses) and that Google as an org is deeply dysfunctional at this point.
And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”
> Yeah, but then they're editorializing.
> And not in a generic “this kind of content is bad for our users” but very specifically “site x.com is bad for our users.”
Except that shouldn't be a problem because I'm pretty sure Google already blacklists domains.
These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them, if you open devtools you'll often see pages of warnings about deprecations and/or invalid html, and despite having the same scraped text always score higher on Google.
If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.
I looked into it and some other websites benefited from the update, so who knows what changes they made and why.
I think Google search has just declined a lot. I guess they’re losing the constant cat and mouse game with SEO. It seems worse than it has ever been, I’m relying more on ChatGPT and copilot now.
I can only imagine that LLMs will be the end of any content based search ranking. I don’t know how they’ll adapt to that.
Only if you're not googlebot. The crawler sees a much nicer site.
"If you operate a paywall or a content-gating mechanism, we don't consider this to be cloaking if Google can see the full content of what's behind the paywall just like any person who has access to the gated material and if you follow our Flexible Sampling general guidance."
I wonder if they just gave up
This is why Google has basically surrendered and why so many search result categories are now dominated by whatever sites Google has arbitrarily declared the winner through editorial decision making. In many search categories, we are effectively back where we started with Yahoo directories and hand-picked search rankings. What you see on the first page SERP is the best that they can do under the circumstances based on the fundamentals of how search works.
The web was a fun idea while it lasted, but if you are using it as a primary information resource, you are wasting your time.
I for one welcome back our new library overlords.
Published by Pearson (January 14, 2022) © 2021
Richard G. Lyons1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model.
2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.
There's just a lot of fraud on the internet related to search and advertising manipulation, but it's under-policed in part because of the internationalized nature of it and because it is hard to bring fraud cases in the United States because of the particularized pleading standard. That should not stop the feds from bringing criminal cases, but generally the feds care about large dollar value frauds (as they probably should be) rather than on policing very large numbers of small dollar value frauds that have a major aggregate impact on the online economy. They like going after the guys who steal $100 million from deaf children with Lupus rather than doing 200 $500k fraud prosecutions.
Duck-Duck-Go returns the up-to-date documentation link 2nd, and the MDN result in 3, with W3Schools in 1. Bing returns actual content on the results page, describing exactly what you need to understand a TS Array.
Google have the incentive to push the poor sites, because they earn revenues from doing so. Bing and DDG don't have that incentive, and return much more relevant and useful links. That doesn't feel like a coincidence.
Failing at what though? Is it anything they care about, that they want to do?
If not, then it's not so much failure as it is a change of plans on their part. They don't want to do that anymore, and there's no one else to pick up the slack.
https://kagi.com/search?q=typescript+array&r=us&sh=Qa5cXHvwj...
We simply downrank sites which display a lots of ads on them which is incidentally the whole purpose of existance of the most of these poor quality dev sites clones.
Unfortunately it still doesn't solve the issue that sometimes the good results are still buried pages away or simply not come up at all due to google's shitty algorithm.
I really need to look into SearXNG or something.
This will hurt them long term I presume, but they won't care because they earned money.
Now, I do have a Stackoverflow user as well, but I actually prefer publishing my ideas on my own site rather than help build someone else's content farm for free. Stackoverflow is, itself, a content farm, and it can be very hard for new users to join the site. You can not even post comments without first earning enough points. For a very long time I would actually resist joining the site for that reason. I have only recently earned enough points to comment.
Now, I happen to own a so-called "content farm" too, and the choice can either be between creating a standard blog with very little traffic or try and cover everything you can possible think of in order to compete with other "content farms" in your niche. It is very difficult if not near impossible for a single individual to create a valuable resource and maintain it, and it is simply not sustainable if you have paid authors working on it as well. There is no way you can monetize it decently. Stackoverflow probably found a way around this problem by simply leaning back and monetizing their users content.
Once your site grows big enough, you also deal with a ton of spam- and hacking attempts. Everything combined just requires an inhumane amount of time to deal with.
Of course, authors are desperate because of how difficult it is, and perhaps especially authors from poor countries that might not have other sources of income. Their basic business model seem to be: create a content farm with ads, fill it with copy-written spam and hope Google indexes. Often these sites even have multiple authors, which is quite baffling given the extra expense it must create for them. But I do not think they have actually thought the idea through – because it is just not profitable.
Weirdly it's often in the technology niche, which they are clearly not proficient in, and more or less containing stolen solutions with little original content added.
I have seen a few sites like this, ripe with some of the most nasty grammar too. It interesting they are able to rank simply based on their volume? Of course they must be using blackhat techniques, including linkbuilding if you analyze their link-profiles, because there is no way that something so poorly designed and maintained is getting that much attention compared with official sources or stackoverflow.
For those of us who own blogs, such sites are often easily outranked simply by writing a comprehensive article on whatever tiny topic they have posted about.
I have no allegiance to SO ownership so when the fake SO sites show up in results instead of SO, usually reading them will just give me the answer more quickly than finding the actual SO source.
There's a good reason for that. Sites come and go and as a result links to solutions die and you wish someone had just answered the question instead of just linked to it.
now, in an ideal world competition would solve this problem, but the cosmetics companies heavily collude and anti-compete to prevent this
I suppose the real frustration is that Google became so pervasive that bookmarking a website and using its own search functionality is a total afterthought.
The problem is, they won't, because active moderation beyond responding to legal (DMCA, right to be forgotten, anti-CSAM) demands would massively endanger their "we are an impartial search engine" defense.
SO had an expert sexchange.
1. Respect exact match searches - this used to work enclosing the search terms in "" quotes, but no longer works. If there are no exact match results, return nothing.
2. Allow blacklisting or removing results from certain websites entirely e.g. I want to be able to configure geeks4geeks to never show up in any results ever
If someone could make this new search engine they would have a good shot at replacing Google :)
We are not trying to replace Google though, but offer an alternative to people who care so much for the quality of their search experience, that they are willing to pay for it.
[1] https://kagi.com
And if you find a result that got included despite not being an exact match you can report it and see it get fixed in a few days.
To be honest I think your pricing is to high. $25 for unlimited queries might be fine for somebody who needs a good search to work and earn appropriately.
But as a (former) PhD student I ran through the 100 free queries in 2 or 3 days and just would not have been able to afford 25€.
I would gladly pay 10€ (for unlimited searches) or 15€ (for a unlimited family option). But to me, 25€ just seems to high. That's 5 meals at my workplaces cantina right now (Germany, NRW).
(I assume you are aware of pricing issues as pricing options have changed at least once while kagi is on my radar)
Unlimited for $10 is something we are working towards.
Also thanks for creating kagi. Kagi was the first "alternative" search that convinced me that there can be competition to Google. YaCy just does not work, most competitors (DDG, etc) just repackage the big engines. I use presearch as my daily driver right now, but am somewhat turned down by the NFT shenanigans behind that. Kagi looks like the only engine that stands on its own and is definitely something worth paying for.
probably my new default search engine. Thnx
Perhaps 10 years ago Stack Overflow was able to do some minimal SEO and then get by on content strength. Perhaps nowadays Google is doing a good job preventing basic stuff from working, so the only people to get good results are SEO-ologists that only know about exploiting SEO, and have nothing interesting to say on any other topic.
The competing answers paradigm is also fundamentally broken, I don’t want to see 15 answers to “How do I get the length of a string in Python?” I just need to see
len(x)
For more than 10 years I thought the world needed a search engine for programmers. You really ought to be able to upload your POM file or equivalent and have the system automatically search the correct version of documentations. (Any attempt to look up things in the Java manual has to be written like “JDK17 javadoc {className}”; Javascript libraries like reactstrap, react-router and such often have a few wildly incompatible versions and I don’t want to waste a millisecond with the wrong version doc, …)
I wouldn’t mind searching answers from stackoverflow but I only want the best correct answer and I don’t want to read a long confused question, etc. As this would clearly save coders time maybe they’d pay for a subscription as they do for Jetbrains tools.
Maybe there's a point where the internet, with decades old information pilling up, becomes unbearably big for indexing services to handle all of it in a efficient manner. Hence the recent "optimizations" that companies swear haven't worsened searchability.
The flip side of that is a large proportion of those are no longer fine or operant.
I already go to ChatGPT to cut through the SEO-optimized crap that Google offers me in the first couple of result pages. I would bet that a lot of the responses given by ChatGPT come from Stack Overflow.
Now, what if we had StackGPT which offered me similar funtionality as ChatGPT, but better? E.g. respond with some code and an explanation, but also link to the sources (which are probably within their site, so they have prime access to them). Or offer as an explicit option to respond using sources other than their archive, but perhaps without citing sources.
Are they just fine today, too? To judge that, you have to look at the date of the question and its answers, make an educated guess at what OS/language/library versions they are about, judge whether that makes a difference for the version(s) you’re using, and only then evaluate whether the reply even was correct at the time (it may have had a thousand upvotes, but still be dated)
I think a really good Q/A resource would require posts to be tagged with version info. Most people think manual tagging isn’t fun, though, so it’s hard to get such a set from volunteers.
An alternative would be to require test cases that the site can run to check what version(s) replies are valid for, but writing such tests that do not break over time is hard, and, again, in general volunteers don’t like writing them.
That leaves generating tags or test cases. I don’t think we’re there, quality wise, to do that.
"how to load a file all at once in python" returns a first hit pointing to a blog post answering the question correctly, a second pointing to a SO answer that is actually for a slightly different problem but contains the correct answer, answer #3 is a youtube video that probably answers the question correctly.
Geeks4geeks doesn't show up until #4, well below Stack Overflow. (FWIW, their answer was fine too).
> You seriously can't find useful anything these days using Google.
That really feels more like a meme than reality. Are there other subareas where the SEO is doing better than this one? It seems like a pretty representative question.
Oh, so maybe DDG is ahead of Google in terms of quality alone in at least one domain now? Because it definitely still gives answers from SO at the top.
I haven't noticed that at all. I also haven't noticed any degradation in the results on Google overall contrarily to what people claim.
What I have noticed though is that every time someone complains about search results and shares the way they search on Google, it becomes obvious that the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and not in Google.
For example my girlfriend always get completely unrelated results when searching. But she searches an unintelligible mess that even a human wouldn't understand.
I’m not a share point developer, at all, it was my first time with it. I am of the old school however, so figuring out how systems work by reading the manual or specification isn’t foreign to me. I’ve worked with the bitmap format, I’ve worked with solar inverters, I’ve worked with embedded construction software and so on, so sharepoint should’ve been easy. But I couldn’t have done it without StackOverflow.
Fast forward to 2023 and I need to build something for sharepoint again. Haven’t touched it since I was sort of dreading it. Only this time the official documentation made it so easy I never needed anything else. I’m sure StackOverflow could have helped me, but I didn’t need it.
Those are very isolated examples, but really, that is my personal experience with almost every thing I work on these days. Yes, I’ve also got 10 more years of experience under my belt, but I do think it’s because we as an industry have become much better at working through the official channels. I mean, when you have a problem with something today, so you go on StackOverflow or do you go to the GitHub issues (or whatever else they have)?
I'm not 100% sure this is the fault of the API, if it's because of SharePoints indexation, if it's because of the 3rd party meta-data indexation that we buy for our document library or if it's because of how terrible our own architecture for the data flow is. But I've had to build a lot of redundancy and caching into the terrible piece of gaffa tape which is our integration, because SharePoint won't give me every document everytime that I ask for them.
So a bad experience? But at least it's not FTP (yes not sftp) pulling different file formats from 9000 solarplant inverters bad.
I never had problems finding SO answers for C++.
One thing I noticed in the first chart displaying visits is that there is a sharp drop in April, which is just after Google deployed its last core update: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Cou8Tr74r7EXNthuE...
Q: [very explicit title about F in context X] I'm specifically not asking about F in context Y which I know about but is irrelevant; I'm specifically not asking about libT which may accept it in accordance with standard U; instead, in context X, is F working for libS?
A1 [100+] [+50 bounty] [auto-accepted] [date d]: "it works" + long winded answer about decontextualised substring of F proposition working for libS in context Y
Comment 1: this is not the correct answer, see A15
Comment 2: complaint that A15 note about U is from a second hand site so answer is warrant of discredit [even though authoritative docs about U are not publicly available]
A2 through A7 [30+]: "it works" (rehash of A1, posted within d+[1..365])
A8 [30+]: Q is a dupe, see this answer [link to question and answer about libS in context Y]
A9 through A14 [30+]: "it works" (gives example for libT, which behaves differently)
A14 through A17 [30+]: "it works" (gives example of standard U, which libS does not comply with)
A15 [5] [d+5]: Q being explicit about F for libS in context X and explicitly _not_ about context Y, let's address it for libS in context X: *it does not work* because foo (link to libS doc || source code || example). Tangent for the sake of completeness, context X is irrelevant because bar is orthogonal to foo + context Y. standard U does not apply because libS is not compliant [quote or link about U]
Comment 1: this is the correct answer
Comment 2 [d+1095]: answer is invalid because libS vN+1 has just been released and adds F in context X
A16+ [<0]: completely haphazard lottery answersI don't think SO "auto accepts" answers. The only one who can do that is the original asker, manually. See: https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer
On meta.so this has been asked repeatedly and the consensus is that no, it cannot be done and furthermore, "accepted" doesn't mean "the best", it just means whatever the original asker marked as helpful for their situation, so "auto-accepting" would be meaningless. Also see: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262915/147346
As for upvotes: if a question is upvoted that means the community upvoted it. The "community" in SO is just regular people, programmers both knowledgeable and newbie. I don't know that any "open access" platform can solve the problem of people upvoting the "wrong" answers; it's not a tech problem. It happens here on HN, too!
Of course the users themselves could have deleted the questions, but regardless, I did not expect to see that.
It could be a nice experiment to enable RSS for some niche topics and checking automatically after a number of days to see which are gone.
Stackoverflow once set out - with the very best intentions - to be better than expertsexchange et. al. I think that's why they are so strict with their moderation.
The issue, of course, is that this is a hard problem. To moderate a community of experts you need to be an expert yourself. With Stackoverflow I feel most moderators are just overwhelmed with the task, so they aggressively shut down everything they don't understand.
Many of them are probably aware of that and just don't know how to handle it better. Others are so clueless that they do not even recognize the good questions.
Can't agree more. So many relevant questions shot down by an anal retentive mod you end up having to find the answer on another site.
Related: I've often been looking how to do X, find an SO question asking that, but the answerers there refused to answer until the person explained why they wanted to do X, and then all the answers (correctly) told the person that they actually needed to do Y and explained quite well how to do Y.
I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.
Then I find another question on how to do X, and the mods close it as a duplicate of that earlier question. Even when the questioner specifically notes in their question that it is not a duplicate of that earlier question because they really need to do X the idiot moderators close it.
I'm thinking of things like assigning constants to pointers in C and/or manipulating pointers directly.
The best you can hope for is some answer down the page that says something like "to answer the actual question..."
> I actually need to do X, so those answers are useless to me.
I know what you mean. Whenever I (rarely) ask a question on Stack Overflow, I always have to defensively load it up with language anticipating misinterpretations and instructing people to answer my question and not some other one.
Otherwise, internet-point-chasers will fall through the woodwork giving easy, worthless advice. Even with all the defensive language, a few always show up.
Agree. This isn't a problem on the partner/sister sites as much. They are very helpful too. But they don't show up on Google
I call them pseudo-trolls because I think they are well-meaning, but they function as trolls: overrunning a web site, hijacking discussions with repetitive and irrelevant content, and making most potential users feel that participating isn't worth the time and effort of interacting with them.
So I can't add relevant info/feedback to a topic I landed on via google, because I don't have reputation, so in essence the site strangles itself. Because in 2023 I'm not going to farm(!) 50 points just to share my info. All this because a few bad apples tried to game a system and someone came up with this lame idiocy of you must have X reputation...
But you can ask questions.
But if noone upvotes your answer because it's a hard one, and/or noone knows the reply to your problem, then you are stuck. So should you ask some blatant question, like, is the sky blue and why? But it will be a duplicate. No reps for you. So it's a totally braindead system, they deserve to die.
Why don't they introduce a system where you can say, I need this answer for 5 bucks. But that will not be implemented, because it would make a dangerous precedent where you could harness other's valuable knowledge in almost an instant.
I think the problem with that is how do you prove it's a good or bad answer? Say you offer a bounty and I generate a great answer. You look at the answer and use it and then flag the answer as bad so you don't have to pay.
Yup. And that's why I stopped using SO quite a while (years) back.
That's not because I was intentionally avoiding it, but a natural side-effect of it becoming much less useful, largely because of the thing you're citing here. The quality of answers has fallen quite a lot, and SO seems to actively avoid hard questions (and if I'm searching a site like SO, it's because I have a hard question.)
SO burried itself
Some hot shot user with an absurd amount of badges told me, in a condescending tone, that my solution did not answer the question and linked me to some TOS article or something about staying on topic. This was the first time I had ever answered a question on SO.
My takeaway from the situation is that SO is full of accounts that farm badges/rep. To what end, I do not know - perhaps they reference it on their resume or portfolios.
I called the guy out, seems he has since deleted the comment.
- google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago
- moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.
- because of the previous bullet, oftentimes the best answer is buried in comments and has very negative feedback despite answering the exact question
Due to a combination of these things, filtering against the noise for what I wanted became increasingly more difficult and often the solution to my problem was easier found searching github comments or random blogs.