The Fall of Stack Overflow

Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by wtallis on Monday July 31, 2023 @06:44PM (#36949878)

> you essentially encourage inhumane communication

Yes, because StackOverflow—like Wikipedia—is not about interpersonal communication. Neither is intended to be a forum. They're intended to be repositories of reference information. Nobody wants their encyclopedia or dictionary to engage in idle chit chat with them.

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by petsfed on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:14PM (#36950172)

There's a difference between "I am appalled that they edited my perfectly poetic prose in this article about nematodes" and "the revert comment said 'I'm taking a machete to this bloated garbage. This is wikipedia, not Weird Tales', when a simple 'section is not succinct' would get the point across"

The question is not "should wikipedia/stackoverflow be a cold reference?", but rather, "do the editors of wikipedia/stackoverflow have to be such jerks about accomplishing that goal?"

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by sedatk on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:02PM (#36950051)

This kind of perspective ("but <web site whose content is created by humans> isn't about <essential notion of humanity>") is the bane of such platforms. I think it stems from an engineer mindset that considers users as abstract entities rather than people. Almost as if people are like sun's rays that energize your web site, rather than actual beings who experience it, have emotions and all kinds of complexities and individual differences.

Any web site that relies on humans for its content must accept humanity, and commit to serve the needs of the humane sides of its users. Otherwise, you'll end up with all kinds of toxicity, abuse, and finally abandonment that is observed with SO.

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by wtallis on Monday July 31, 2023 @07:07PM (#36950101)

I think you're just being narrow-minded, and much of what you consider "essential" to "humane" communication is what many other people consider distracting bullshit. Impersonal technical writing is hardly a new phenomenon, and it has been widely accepted within academia for centuries, so clearly what you consider essential is not at all essential.

Stop and imagine if the search results you get for programming were as polluted with "personal touches" as the results you get when searching for recipes.

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by sedatk on Monday July 31, 2023 @09:02PM (#36951032)

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by shagie on Monday July 31, 2023 @09:10PM (#36951084)

https://stackoverflow.com/tour

> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.

That's been in the tour since the earliest captures. https://web.archive.org/web/20140113033915/https://stackover...

Stack Overflow was designed with the goal of removing personal biases from the writing and working from the content - not the person who edited it.

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by mschuster91 on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @03:38AM (#36953425)

> Any web site that relies on humans for its content must accept humanity, and commit to serve the needs of the humane sides of its users. Otherwise, you'll end up with all kinds of toxicity, abuse, and finally abandonment that is observed with SO.

And with Wikipedia, for what it's worth. The amount of behind-the-scenes bullshit there is amazing - and on top of that come all sorts of "external" bad agents, anything from hired ghostwriters to whitewash a company's or a person's Wikipedia article to enemy nations' troll crews.

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Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow by fmajid on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:03AM (#36954944)

But they have a Meta tab that mostly hides it from the average viewer. It can’t handle debates like Israel vs. Palestine or Donald Trump, but nothing can.

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