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Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
the search engine ignores -string
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder....
Hyphen (-) means you don't want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.
Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.
Wait, what? On Google??
On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can't get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -"website name". Luckily -site:address still works.
That's crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn't noticed. I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.
SO is a shithole, just like Reddit. All the work is done by volunteers. When it was time to cash out with the platform, they also did several things to fuck with their community. I've contributed quite a bit to the trilogy sites, and served as a moderator. I regret every second of it. But at least a few people got rich in the process.
I don't get why programmers, especially ones actually working on open source projects, insist on using proprietary services. Stack Overflow is one, also GitHub.
Because it's free and reliable
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I'm basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they're trying to be a sort of "wikipedia" of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
I don't think they see that as a problem, that's the goal
