[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-about-t...
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-rudeness...
SO could have been a place where someone could post a question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers from previously answered questions; if it was a unique question then it could be opened to answers. Instead, SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a question by answering questions posed by others. That right off the bat excludes a ton of people who don't have the time to wait for a question in their domain, and answer it before 1000 other people.
Sure, it's the Eternal September for tech sites. Comes with the territory. If you don't want people to visit your site (and contribute moderation and content for free), be hostile to new users. Reward aggressive closing of questions. Sure is a good way to drive away anyone but the most pedantic control freaks.
I used to refer people to SO when they would come to me with a question I couldn't answer, (I even have an SO t-shirt hanging in my closet) but now I'd only do that to my worst enemies.
This is false. You can post both questions and answers without any rep.
How people get the basics of SO wrong and still have such a strong opinion on how it works baffles me all the time.
It already does that, though. The current iteration of the 'Ask question' page finishes with box proposing existing questions
And yet, the site died exactly because of that ...
SO's toxic moderation isn't strict.
strict /strɪkt/ adjective demanding that rules concerning behaviour are obeyed and observed.
Proper moderation for rules can be no more strict than are the rules themselves, and SO's are appallingly slack.
E.g. try and find the rule prohibiting duplicates. Mods have fabricated their own definition: "Questions may be duplicates if they have the same (potential) answers" (verbatim).
Using that bogus grounds to close a question that fully follows the delared rules is, yes, toxic.
If ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow and Reddit/Twitter block API access, where will it gets its answers from?
Over time I've got used to it, but my colleagues tend to use me as a personal StackOverflow because I actually read the manuals for things we use/depend on. I regularly "amaze" them by answering obscure questions and when they ask how did you know that, the answer is always some variant on "by reading".
Now I just accept that most programmers hate reading and will prefer either just splashing around until they stumble on the answer by accident, or asking other people. It's frustrating but just how it is. I've had a senior programmer at a well known tech company tell me that now LLMs exist they+their team suddenly feel like writing documentation is worth it, because something will actually read it, and he was serious! They work on the assumption that if they write docs, zero programmers will read them! I don't think that's literally true but it might be directionally true.
I don't quite understand the assumption that LLMs are learning to code by reading StackOverflow anyway. Sure, it sounds plausible but we don't know how ChatGPT was trained. But it seems irrelevant now. GPT-4 has clearly learned programming to the level that it could generate self-training material just by reading the docs, writing experimental programs to try things out, and then summarizing its own findings which can be fed back into the next training round. At the moment it's not wired up to programming environments closely enough to do this, but it could be.
When working with new software components, usually we're able to either work into our sprints an experimentation/PoC task, that'd include reading the doc or we just include into the estimation of the development task some time to read
Usable documentation has to exists in the first place, though.
nowhere, they are cannibalizing their own source of data. They own Github so that's helpful, but still mostly just code, not a whole lot of discussion.
I agree that sometimes it was really a dupe. Or even that most of the time it's a dupe. But when the answer was written in 2011 with the latest update in 2017, maybe it's worth reopening the question because there's probably a better answer in the last 6 years.
Even in that case, you don't need a new question. You should instead just edit and/or post a new answer to the old question.
Really if I want and answer, I usually ask a question... I'm confused.
This truly is a new question because what is really being asked is what was the breaking change that occurred in $FRAMEWORK between the original question was answered and this latest version.
Though SO has made some small progress on this problem recently by changing the default sorting algorithm to no longer prefer old, entrenched answers over new, better ones.
As far as I know the original asker owns the question, so I, modern asker, can't edit it asking for a modern answer or de-select the selected answer for being now wrong or out of date.
The sorting has also been recently changed, to no longer strongly favor the checkmarked question the original asker back in the day liked.
"overblown" == "who ya going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
At Google I interviewed a refugee from Theranos, when they were still around. (It was just lunch, so I wasn't expected to ask him anything.) Still, I mentioned the bad press, and he said the news was "exaggerated."
When people mention something again and again, it's usually not "overblown" -- it's real.
If I look at Yelp reviews, one or two bad reviews are standard. But if there are 30-40, all different, then I suspect something's up.
It doesn't matter about "the ratio of good to bad." If you're pissing off a lot of customers, you are bad. Period.
It's not irrelevant. I didn't even mention yelp so that's a straw man. You said the ratio didn't matter. I claimed it does, as looking at absolute numbers of complaints makes no sense. That's it.
"So that is your opinion, experience and thoughts? WRONG!". Add in some offhand slights, that will teach them!
And nice straw man in your last sentence. Quite ironic while complaining about SO being the toxic ones..
Maybe that's not you, of course.
You're probably going to accuse me of some bias. I'm however going to claim I then know more of the state of SO, given my active membership there...
Even in my very first post in this discussion, I mentioned review queues and what I feel is wrong with SO recently. It's pretty clear to everyone with reading skills that I'm therefore an active member there. And no sane person would think my "objectivity is open to question" based on me commenting a few lines about an article. I'm not a "writer", I'm just commenting on an article. What a weird thing to demand "full disclosure" of.
(And if you knew anything about SO (which I think one should do when discussing it..), you'd know that the badges you mention is just things normal members can do. I have no extra privileges or responsibility, as you seem to imply)
Edit: the comment I'm replying to has been massively edited since I wrote this.
As for my 15 comments: it's me in the root of the discussion. I'm not all over the comments, I'm just responding to comments in the tree of comments I've started. I don't think that should be discouraged.
It's toxic enough that neither I nor any of the programmers that I personally know would ever dare to ask a question there. We see how other questioners get treated.
Exactly. Multiple times on HN, someone has said something along the lines of that myself. Whenever I've seen it, I've asked for a link to the question that it happened to so I can confirm it myself. Nobody has ever provided such a link.
Subreddits deal with the same issue (tons of identical basic questions) but have better processes to divert them and educate the user while still letting legitimate mid-level questions live by default.
There are bad subreddits where moderators make it hard to get help, but since redditors can move to better communities on the same topic (and duplicate all the content!) users don't feel stuck with the current moderation in the same way they do on SO, which doesn't let competing Q&A communities exist for the same topic.
I understand that SO has done some work to address these issues in the last few years and want to credit that too. That work is another indicator that there is a problem.
I also agree that leadership-moderation relations are a problem on SO.
Oh? What work?
Citation needed. "Everyone", really?
Don't mind me, in every thread about SO in here there are lots of comments mentioning the same, and I agree. Your experience may not be the same and that is ok.
SO has built up a toxic reputation over many years. And yet somehow, according to you it's false? Why don't you just let this one die? You can collect your paycheck from SO now; you've done your bit.
it's "founded" because you are all over this topic, and it's legitimate to ask why.
Not in my experience.
Almost 10 years ago, I asked a question about PHP. I wanted to know if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` always contained a _valid_ IP address. I specifically wrote down in my question that I knew it wasn't always the IP of the client, that it could be spoofed, but I wanted to know if it contained a valid IP, even it's a fake IP.
Without surprise I god closed as duped and redirected to the question asking if `$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]` was reliable to get the IP of the client, which is specifically what I didn't ask. And I wrote down that this wasn't what I asked, because I knew some rando would close it as dupe.
This is just one example, from almost 10 years ago, but it's only gotten worse. I routinely search for a specific question in Google and find a "marked as dupe" StackOverflow answer, which is not a duped, and I'm left with no answer. I almost don't click on StackOverflow links anymore because of this, I consider them as clickbait
Lol. I always feel the "toxicity" claimed of SO is way overblown. It's always "closed as dupe but not really a dupe and I got downvoted for asking a legitimate question". But 99% of the times it was really a dupe, or a poorly worded question, or something strictly off topic. Getting told that isn't toxicity. It's what keeps the community somewhat sane. If you try to look through the review queues, you'll see all the low effort posting the community has to deal with.
What I feel is killing SO isn't the community, but the leadership. They've ostracized their own moderators and reviewers for a long time. And with no stewards, it will become toxic. And a wasteland of low effort duplicate questions.