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
Maybe I would post more if I didn’t get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there’s even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don’t know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don’t know if that’s feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it’s not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you’d definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial… just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that’s as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they’re looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it’s a good question… my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it’s full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.
I’ve had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don’t have the “reputation” to.
Honestly a really dumb system imo.
Never got into it because of that.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don’t have enough reputation :/
Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I’m not going to keep bothering with SO.
Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.
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Can you give an example how you use copilot? Why is it better than using chatgpt and how exactly do I use it?
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I I have been programming with Matlab for 8 years and am switching to Python. I’m focusing on deep learning applications and have been using ChatGPT to answer general questions about Python as interactive documentation. Would you say Copilot would be better for this use case or only better when I am a bit more advanced with Python?
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If it’s simple then it has been asked tens of times in SO
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Probably questions that can be answered by RTFM
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LLM has RATFM and you can ask it directly
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Oh, thank you. Your use of reduplication helped my smooth brain process your comment properly.
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Code is something used by the Germans to defeat the Allies, they put code in their tanks and drove all the way to London to greet the English prime minister with a barrage of advanced warfare and AI-enabled crypto currencies.
This is my favorite comment on lemmy so far
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I’m trying to SSH into my Window 11 machine and it keeps saying “Connection refused: port 22”. Wut do?
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Ah, the prime example of a stack overflow user. Nice.
The prime example of a SO user is being intentionally obtuse, demanding more detail even if the typical programmer would have a pretty clear picture of what is being asked. So yeah, projection much?
And then asking, “why would you even try doing it like this?”
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That’s fair.
Is there a fediverse alternative yet?
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
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I mean discourse exists now
How does it replace SO? Oh wait, it doesn’t.
It uses the format the benefit of SO is the format
What?
Are you brain dead? It’s literally made by the exact same people.
do you mean discord?
no
cool thx
This doesn’t tell us much without also including the quality of the posts. Are we sure this isn’t just idiots who ask stupid question that can be found on Google over and over not doing that now that they have chatgpt
Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT’s launch.
For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don’t actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I’ve answered someone’s perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.
All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.
My favorite part of stackoverflow was asking a question because every result from Google at the time was either not helpful… Or lead to a SO page with the same question with no answer, but was marked as a previously answered question by a moderator… And was then told by them to use Google
Like bitch I did use Google, the first 2 pages of answers filtered only for SO results were all marked as previously answered and closed by moderators!
That was the last time I used SO. Never figured out the answer to my problem either. At least chatGPT might point me in the right direction to figuring out the problem
Ah. Feels similar to the relevance discussions on the German Wikipedia. Gatekeeping at its finest.
Do we have a community on lemmy to ask questions like stackoverflow?
I think for specific platforms, like rust questions in the rust community.
It wouldn’t be very good.
Most people want answers, not questions, and with Stack Overflow the answers are usually already there and easy to find. Plus they are maintained and kept up to date, so if something was correct six years ago but isn’t anymore, that will usually be obvious before you try the solution.
Some kind of federated stack overflow alternative could be awesome, but Lemmy is not it and never will be.
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jQuery is also dying. Coincidence?
i use jquery daily… maybe now that it’s dying ill have a real reason to move to something a little more cutting edge. haha
I’m so sorry.
If you don’t mind me asking, why do you still use jquery and what do you use in jquery?
one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.
I mostly end up with answers from a handful of top tier devs… I’m kind of glad they prevent junk and noise so I get the answers I need, ymmv
I really like using code.whatever.social as an alternative frontend to Stack Overflow. It has way less distractions and allows me to only look at the question and the answers and nothing else.
Annnnd bookmarked. Thanks, this is really cool!
I really like this, never saw it before. Thanks!
No problem. You can use extensions like LibRedirect in order to make it automatically change SO to this one.
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
what other forums do you use ?
Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the “question” tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I’d get a “good” answer out of it.
I can see for myself that I go way less often since I use github copilot
Is this due to the chatgpt?
Its so exhausting having to train chat gpt to be condescending and to close all my threads as duplicates though
The perversity of SO rewarding people for ensuring that the answers on SO are becoming increasingly outdated absolutely befuddles me.
Probably chatgpt getting all the easy high volume questions, yeah.
ChatGPT went public at the start of the last kink downward. It can not be the reason for the big drop untill 2023.
A lot of my answers I get answered with ChatGPT. And I can always ask ChatGPT to tell me where I can look to verify the answer. I find myself on stack overflow for very specific or very technical topics.
Stack Overflow reached its maximum “duplicates”. So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
Isn’t it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
But then would you be like “Oh boy let me get slapped next time too”
I’d be like “Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too”.
I don’t understand why you would frame that as being “slapped”. Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?
No but it feels redundant then to ask it anyways.
Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.
Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.
Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.
A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.
Same thing came to my mind. Is it so bad if the content grows at a slower rate and the traffic of adding new content drops to a new equilibrium.
Tbf it’s a normal problem to have, it wasn’t meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven’t considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. 😄
So why did they structure it as a forum?
It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.
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.
Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don’t need to Google the symbol!
I’m still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.
It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.
UI-wise, though, it’s toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It’s something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)
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.
Hmm, not really used to the idea of paying for search, but I understand.
Is it good at filtering AI generated sites and sites that are clearly copy pasted. Or do you kind of have to identify that yourself and manually block?
I think it’s worth testing it with the free 100 searches. All you need is an email address (no credit card unless you’re actually subscribing). I’ve only been using it a few days but I don’t think it filters out AI generated sites. But you can set a ranking by site (block, lower, normal, raise, pin) so you can make stack overflow be priorised and block quora.
They have a ranking board of top sites in each category so you can go through it and set the rank of a bunch of sites upfront.
Thanks
There’s no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has “listicle” detection. If you ask “best lawn mower”, all these “the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023” websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.
Wait WHAT? I was just asking on discord the other day if there existed a search engine that allowed you to blacklist websites as a user setting. I need to curate out all AI written garbage from my results.
Don’t forget that Duck Duck Go is even worse at it now. It will literally change your results if you go back after clicking a link.
Why is that?
I think they’re trying to implement a sort of “smart prediction” thing, where it assumes that if you go back the link you clicked wasn’t relevant. And so it tries to remove closely related results. Which works the opposite if you get two results from the same page and you click the wrong one. Which makes looking up technical or programming related issues a nightmare.
I used to spend a lot of time on Google and stack, now I ask phind more often than not, which violates information for me.
