Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?
During last years I started seeing less good answers, and discussions around that website.
It's clear Google Search algorithm is favoring other websites. And probably AI and the new LLM models are being another reason devs will stop going directly to StackOverflow.
What do you think? Will StackOverflow keep up, or will slowly dye?
193 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadhttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
I really need to try using Kagi more.
You can setup your own self-hosted instances or existing third party ones. It's a game changer both for privacy and UX.
[0]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
The only outcome is see from that attitude is it fueled hundreds of spammy SO clones with names like “nerdsolution” and “geekanswer”.
We’d be better iff with SO keeping the data private.
If that is the case then new questions are mostly on new frameworks and new languages which are often niche tags and don't have as much engagement as the popular tags once had.
Almost all questions newbies could ask are ripe for getting closed as duplicate and complicated questions are rarely getting answers since they require too much context to fit into SO's format.
Yes SO is looking at altering its colours to improve accessibility https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/386102/accessibilit...
It was interesting to hear a diverse (in occupation) non-tech group lamenting the search decline. I felt so validated!
- for reference I land on official documentation
- for issues I usually land on GitHub issues and source code
- for random stuff I still hit SO - like some SQL problem, CSS, algorithm implementation
- for design stuff I land on blog posts
Personally I see stack overflow value reduce with good reference documentation and GitHub issues/open source dev discussions.
The fact that SO is purely QA and closes opinionated/discussion topics makes it less valuable. It made sense in the past when you couldn't communicate with devs so easily or when reference documentation wasn't that good. Especially for closed source stuff.
Just means the maintainers haven't gotten around to fixing it/implementing it yet, nothing wrong with that - they don't owe anyone a timeline for fixing issues.
The only way to fight the stale bot is to constantly spam your issue with "bump" comments, which nobody's going to do (and if they do, surely the maintainers will just complain that you're spamming, and rightfully so).
So if the maintainers don't have time to deal with your issue within X months, it just won't get fixed. They won't even be aware that those issues are still there (because who goes through closed issues looking for stuff to do?).
And so I hit google for an issue I'm having with Project X, stumble upon a "closed" issue, scroll to the bottom, and see "closed by stale bot". WHY IS IT CLOSED WHEN IT IS STILL AN ISSUE.
The bot doesn't really change the outcome (if maintainers don't engage, they don't engage), but it a huge bunch of noise.
Remember the stale bot is an opt-in feature. It is the maintainer (s) who decided to configure it.
So like I've said - as the reference docs improve SO loses value.
1. It understands the versions more clearly, it won't generate the code for Bootstrap 2 when my question is about Bootstrap 5
2. Asking follow up questions is easy. So the code didn't work. I tell it that and instantly it tells me what I need to do to fix it (leave missing config file, etc) or gives me an alternate.
3. Its answers instantaneously except when their site is down.
4. Its more customised as the answer is not a generic question posted an year ago.
5. It spans multiple domains of knowledge, so if lets say I get an error curl.so not found, it can tell me what I must run on the command line to fix that on my system too.
6. Its so much faster because there are no stupid questions. It's just like typing on google vs SO where you need to proof read and make sure its not a duplicate.
ChatGPT has the user interface of an oracle sitting alone in a cave in the mountains, but it isn't as accurate as an oracle is expected to be. That makes it useless to me.
And yes, often I do follow up google searches for some things - but it has already saved me days of research time compared to Google
I'm so sick of these people on SO.
The most important comment on SO is the one where the OP says "I did this and that, and can confirm it's working". There is no such data when you only use the chat bot. It's a major problem. Perhaps the solution is a more tailored "stack gpt", where the "conversations" are published along with the human responses.
For instance, I needed to write a simple script that gave me all of the roles containing a list of policies where you can specify multiple policies from the command line using “-p” multiple times.
If I look it up on Google, I get this response which is close enough
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66127551/list-of-all-rol...
And I still have to make slight modifications.
Of course I could write the entire thing myself just by looking at the boto 3 docs.
But instead I told ChatGPT
“ Write a Python script that returns a comma separated list of arns of all AWS roles that contain policies I specify with the “-p” parameter using argparse”
Then I told it, “that won’t work with more than 50 roles”. It then corrected the script and used a paginator.
Yes, I had to know enough to recognize the bug. But I count have written or modified a Python script that fast and I write boto3 based Python scripts all of the time.
I definitely could have told it that the first version wasn’t returning all of the results and it would have corrected itself like it did and added a paginator
You would still have documentation published by originators of the technology but a lot of programming is figuring out the quirks of things that aren't in the documentation or getting past bugs.
Though to be fair, it's not like Stack Overflow, or even some of the less updated parts of the official documentation, will do any better than ChatGPT, but with ChatGPT you don't get a date on the knowledge and you don't get the comments from other people telling you that it's wrong or outdated. For me personally, there is also some thing about its confidence that makes me "trust" it more than the internet that I've spent 20+ years not trusting. I'm not sure if that's just me or even why that is exactly. I'm fully aware that the language model is basically just the internet, and still I believe it? I'm happy the first thing I asked it was on a subject I knew a lot about so that I could see straight away that its answer was very outdated. Because if it had been on a subject I didn't know much about, I'm not sure I would have even found out its cutoff point was in 2021. I only learned that fact because the answer it suggested was with a library that I knew was abandoned, to which I asked if it knew that, and it told me when it had stopped "learning".
Gone are the days of custom documentation layouts and designs that are hit or miss.
It might also be that SO was good for arbitrary and shallow questions, but most problems with more modern frameworks that aren't covered by the docs get domain specific and complex quick.
I still rarely use stackoverflow to ask questions, but I've given up on answering them. I don't mind giving answers elsewhere, but stackoverflow specifically discourages that, somehow.
A few effects that are clearly harmful (IMHO):
- Stackoverflow's game mechanics strongly discourage duplicate questions. But this is pretty dispiriting when it happens to you - both as questioner, and as answerer. Additionally, duplication is often not exact; there can be significant difference that are sufficient to really change the appropriate solution. Stackoverflow is really bad at finding those.
- Even where questions are in essence duplicate, that is clearly not always obvious to the novices asking the questions. It's just not very helpful to close their questions in a rather toxic fashion and effectively berate them for not already seeing the parallels they were looking for in the first place.
- Stackoverflow discourages discussion. However, discussion is useful in finding the best solution or even merely discovering the context and limits of that solution.
- When discussion happens despite the SO UI, gamification rewards almost exclusively the primary asker and answerer; to the extent discussion is permitted, it's not encouraged to be constructive or healthy therefore.
- Stackoverflow's attention algorithm highlights new questions and highlights first answers to those questions. However, this encourages answers that are essentially "First post!!1!", and then maybe editing those into something better. It discourages well thought out responses. This isn't intrinsic in gamification; it's simply due to the way they've tuned the knobs.
- There's an intrinsic tension in how they've tuned their gamification: on the one hand, they encourage knee-jerk responses because speed is of the essence, and on the other, they discourage questions that benefit from quick-n-dirty answers. That tension doesn't lead to a healthy middle ground, it just leads to frustration and a bad experience.
Fora like this one and reddit also use gamification - we all see and respond to votes - but they do so differently. Stackoverflow could try to learn from that. And stackoverflow could make the gamification more collaborative, and less zero-sum. Whether they'll do so... I guess at this point I kind of doubt it.
https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/38660/was-chatgpt-tra...
I wonder what its contribution was to chatgpt’s ability to answer coding questions. And what happens if chatgpt (or similar) displaces it.
Also interesting is that SO has banned chatgpt from answering but I suspect that will be another shadow “AI vs humans” war.
Many have notes that they are out of date in sub-comments. But its hard to be noticed against a 700 upvote selected top answer.
Out of date answers are useful when you need to fix something based on old / un-updated OS and/or software. Not every installation uses the latest versions of everything.
I've asked a couple of questions I'd hope would be fairly simple (like how to run a program in cgroups v2), set a big bounty on them, and never got a single useful answer.
When I go to SO, I frequently find the answer is not what I was looking for and I've probably missed some keyword to get where I'm going - so I'm back on Google within seconds.
Google doesn't need much smarts to see I'm bouncing off of SO and hardly ever sticking around - if this is a common pattern then it's not favouring other websites that provide a more sticky experience - implication being that answered my question as I didn't return to further refine it.
And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”
It’s possible that new content is getting lower quality on SO, but for any area where a 10 or 15 year old answer is as relevant today as it was when it was written, it’s still a goldmine.
The current situation... If you're a noob who's learning, then your question will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked as question is deemed low quality..
If you're a pro, then your question will be about something obscure which the mods don't understand, and also will require a more nuanced answer, so it will be downvoted to hell and u will be blocked.
So it's aimed at mid-level devs to ask things with certain answers, the kind of answer which would most likely be found in documentation. So the people who require help/answers the most are kicked off, whereas people who need answers/help the least are encouraged.
If your question is hard or highly specific then you're indeed less likely to get a lot of responses, because, well, your question is hard or highly specific. People on Stack Overflow are not omniscient.
Also, most subreddits accepts posting detailed "Am I doing this wrong?" questions instead of only perfectly asked ones that have never been asked before. I find it a better balance than SO removing a question I spent 30 minutes formatting because someone asked a tangentially related question 5 years ago.
It could be argued that the vast majority of questions are deserving of downvotes, but that itself is a problem and a turn-off and the definition of what qualifies as a good or bad question could be adjusted so that the majority aren't downvoted.
"Punishing" people for asking questions that would when the site was new be showered in upvotes feels like kicking out the ladder from under those of us who climbed it.
In my opinion, this has led to two types of questions being asked on StackOverflow: very basic ones that the asker could have easily found in the documentation, and very advanced ones. Unfortunately, the number of basic questions far outweighs the number of advanced ones. As a result, the platform is losing popularity as users become increasingly less willing to answer questions that could have been easily researched.
Got better results on reddit
P.S.: this is also an issue with hn, though at least dang et al. work tirelessly to identify reposts. It still makes it awkward when the best discussion that you would like to contribute to is locked, or worse, has now bits spread in consecutive discussions...
(if they were really the first and not just failing to find previous occurrences of the same question being asked - because of the popularity of Reddit and how it works, the netiquette rule of searching first and avoiding duplicates seem to be forgotten in other spaces)
-but about those coming later with similar questions.