Technology

There is a lot of Stack Overflow hate in this thread. I never had a bad experience. I was always on there yelling at noobs, telling them to Google it, and linking to irrelevant questions. It was just wholesome fun that briefly dulled my crippling insecurities

Rather than cultivate a friendly and open community, they decided to be hostile and closed. I am not surprised by this at all, but I am surprised with how long the decline has taken. I have a number of bad/silly experiences on stackoverflow that have never been replicated on any other platform.

All questions have been asked and all answers have been given

Amazing how much hate SO receives here. As knowledge base it's working super good. And yes, a lot of questions have been answered already. And also yes, just like any other online community there's bad apples which you have to live with unfortunately.

Idolizing ChatGPT as a viable replacementis laughable, because it has no knowledge, no understanding, of what it says. It's just repeating what it "learned" and connected. Ask about something new and it will simply lie, which is arguably worse than an unfriendly answer in my opinion.

Google search going to absolute shit is what happened

Honestly.

Stackoverflow is a horrible place to ask anything.

I have had 100% legit, well documented questions, closed as duplicate of unrelated other question.

Its... honestly, just not a friendly place to go. Full of a bunch of assholes....

Most of the answers actually suck too. Many times, you will find the correct answer downvoted, and incorrect or bad answers upvoted.

Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.

Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.

On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don't. But again it feels like you're expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.

Of course it isn't all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It's just a statistical trend.

Possibly the site should implement an archival policy, where questions and answers are deleted or archived after a couple of years or so.

chatGPT doesn't chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.

It's hostile to new users and when you do ask you will likely not get answer might get scolded or just get closed as duplicate. Then there is the fact that most has answers doesn't matter if it's outdated or just bad advice. Pretty much everything has GitHub now. Usually I just go raise the question there if I have a genuine question get an answer from the developers themselves. Or just go to their website api/ library doc they have gotten good lately. Then finally recent addition with chatgpt you can ask just about any stupid question you have and maybe it may give some idea to fix the problem you encounter. Pretty much the ultimate rubber duck buddy.

SO is such a miserable and toxic place that oftentimes I'd rather read more documentation or reach out to someone elsewhere like Discord. And I would never post a question there or comment there.

There's an open source equivalent at https://codidact.com/

In my experience many of the answers have become out of date. It's gradually becoming an archive of the old ways of doing things for many languages / frameworks.

Questions are often closed as a duplicate when the linked question doesn't apply anymore. It's full of really bad ways of doing things.

I'm not really sure of the solution at this point.

Also ChatGPT.

It's a last resort for me nowadays.

Why is everyone saying this is because Stack Overflow is toxic? Clearly the decline in traffic is because of ChatGPT. I can say from personal experience that I've been visiting Stack Overflow way less lately because ChatGPT is a better tool for answering my software development questions.

One aspect that I've always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn't (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).

Now an obvious reply to this comment is "And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?". That's an excellent question – and that's exactly the point.

In the end the judge about what's correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That's the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:

But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.

For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought "the notion of simultaneity is circular". And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what "experts" says, and that majorities dictate what's logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): "Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?"

Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Tried to answer a question got shutdown by mods immediately. I was wondering how stack overflow is going to survive. I know now it won't.

Stack Exchange has been making a large number of bad calls over the past few years. Basically pissing off their moderators. The first one was Monica who actually sued them for it (libel or defamation or something, basically they said she was being transphobic or something when she wasn't) and they settled. Around that time, possibly before, they removed a site from their Hot Network Questions because of a single tweet. Combine that with them constantly ignoring Stack Exchange Meta (where users and admins are meant to interact for the better of the site and discuss the sites themselves). Moderators were understandably furious when their posts get ignored in the place where Stack Exchange says they're meant to communicate when a random tweet gets more attention and immediate action.

More recently they've given different instructions privately to moderators than what they said publicly with regards to suspected AI content.

I mean, combine all of that with how hostile the users of the site are. Accusing you of not searching before posting and marking your question as a duplicate because they think it is and refusing to listen to why you say it isn't.

Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.

If this and Reddit are going downhill, where will we look for our tech questions?! (/s, there will always be others)

As alluded to by comments here already, a long coming death.

Will probably go down as a marker of the darker side of tech culture, which, not coincidentally (?) manifested at time when the field was most confused as to what constitutes its actual discipline and whether it was an engineering field at all.

People isn't considering that documentation has greatly improved over time, languages and frameworks have become more abstract, user-friendly, modern code is mostly self explanatory, good documentation has become the priority of all open source projects, well documented open source languages and frameworks have become the norm.

Less people asking programming related questions can be explained by programming being an easier and less problematic experience nowadays, that is true.