The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.
Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .
And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."
It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.
The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
Sure, but copying 1 or 2 sentences verbatim into a long program probably isn't enough to win a copyright suit (de minimis). Or at least it would be pretty grey. Similarly, the simpler the program, the less likely the creative intent shines through.
(Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)
Cursor once wrote a comment, I prompted then « what is the source of the comment » and it replaced the comment with a stackoverflow url in which the page contained the said comment verbatim. I didn’t expect cursor to paste the full url
Good luck with that. The last thing I used SO for was getting answers for SwiftUI and I can assure you the official docs did not contain the needed information.
I've been trying to get ChatGPT to write some Emacs Lisp for me and it sucks. Few things are better documented than Emacs. There's several hundreds of pages of documentation, and several million lines of Elisp, but apparently that's not enough.
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
The other people's code which will have been AI generated by older, dumber models in many if not most cases? Possibly even written and committed by AI agents with no human review at all? European royalty tried this kind of thing and it didn't end well.
You got this exactly right. I've been trying to sound the horn on this issue for years now, since GPT-3 got released and exploded into the mainstream and you could read and hear "you don't need to {x} anymore with AI" all over the place.
The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it.
All the "overflow/exchange" sites suck, not just the stack overflow. Too many questions being closed. I had a question closed in mathexchange because, I surmise, it was "too obvious" even though easier questions were asked as recently as 2021, even much more elementary ones. Moreover, my specific question had never been asked there before, and the point of math exchange is to ask easier questions, compared to mathoverflow.
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.
Given the speed at which tech evolves, I do not see how that can be true.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
The graph shows monthly questions asked, not monthly questions answered. It makes total sense that the slope of that graph would be much higher earlier in the life of the site; as time goes on, many common questions will have already been answered.
Doesn't feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed.
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
> Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
Yes, it can combine multiple sources and make up an answer that makes no sense. Even if it explains how "it works", it does not help when the API or a function has never existed.
One aspect I haven’t seen anyone mention contributing to the decline is GitHub (part of your “improved tooling”)
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
> each new question is more and more likely to be already answered
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
I answered one question 13 years ago where I still gets points for. Computing as a whole isn't so much in constant flux, it is only JavaScript that changes so much. Hell, I learned to use Apache 30 years ago, and I didn't need to learn anything new the last 25 years of that.
The change to Python 3 effectively either invalidated or deprecated tons of Python questions, or else required new answers to be written. In many cases we ended up with an annoying pair of popular questions to capture major 2->3 differences, because you'd get clueless users who thought they were running a 2.x interpreter but were actually running a 3.x interpreter, and also the other way around.
> except for when there should be current answers.
Yes.
They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.
New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)
Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
There was a noticeable inflection in the question-rate-vs-time curve around the time that ChatGPT was released.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be".
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
AFAICR they've always said these lines about now is about better moderation from the slop. The reality is that the rule of thumb for that moderation was already out of date with advances that preceeded LLMs.. Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. Content can be triaged from someone who may be human to others who may be human and maybe there's value or maybe you just didn't alienate anyone and some people will still climb to making higher levels of content that is worth condensing.
> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.
Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
Antisocial people flood the site with low quality answers to low quality questions and not indexing everything to the web is just too hard.. Imagine if every town and school was filled with the same pricks? Your kids are stupid and don't understand PhD level research so they should shut up.
It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.
They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".
>They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions"
Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.
>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
????? I said nothing of the sort.
>other than "we are great".
This, too, is your wording, not mine.
But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.
> Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
I think these sorts of things are just an unfortunate side effect of scaling. The bigger you get the more people get lost in the bureaucracy. However if you don't build up the bureaucracy the system collapses under its own popularity.
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
The "good" thing is, they're back to 2009 levels of postings. Now obviously that's what the mods let through but my guess is that traffic to the site is down precipitously as well. They can roll back their bureaucracy and head back to a lean path that worked for them in the past.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration.
Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.
Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.
The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.
This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".
As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:
Two thirds of the wikipedia article i wrote in 2003 have been deleted by rabid editors. It was a biography of my father, written based on interviews with my mother. I have found that restoring any of the rabid editor deletions results in threats of me being banned from editing my own article.
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.
There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.
> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add
... And?
> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.
As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.
So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
> it would become easier to find what you want.
It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.
Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.
> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.
But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.
Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?
> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead
I don't think that is relevant, either. Nobody who asks or answers a question on Stack Overflow, nor comments, nor edits an existing post, does so with the specific intent of increasing the market cap of Stack Exchange, Inc.
To add a bit more nuance, SO has a question-answer type format, which leads very well into prompt-rely format to train these chat applications. Most of the other sources do not, except for Github issues maybe. Without this question-answer format, there'll be a need for a bigger data labeling effort to train LLMs on new stuff, no?
This was my question. There's a weird sort of self-cannibalism that this hints at. The LLM is only as good as it is because it's been able to train on existing SO answers. But if over time, SO content production declines, then the LLM results will be less reliable. It seems that a new equilibrium could be one in which -- for newer questions/concerns -- both SO and LLMs will be worse than they are now.
My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free.
As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more.
So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it.
But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!
These models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.
They can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.
Yes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions.
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
They can indeed, but 1) this takes up an inordinate amount of context, and 2) the more you force model to think about that, the less effective it is at actually writing code.
My point is that there won't even be any data to steal! The novel human-written and human-rated answers just won't exist anymore. Where will it get its answers on C++26 features from? Not the non-existing StackOverflow, that's for sure.
Ah in the training data sense, yeah that makes sense. My bet is that "code artisans" will see a revival in the 300k+ usd range that will drop into your codebase like a special forces team to unfuck the AI garbage all the prior "Seniors" implemented.
But a priori you don't know if the code you find on Github is "good", plus it doesn't come with a handy explanation. The quality of the data is much, much worse.
Fair point, but large, popular and well maintained/healthy repos would likely be better to learn from than SO. Lots of stack overflow convos have moved to GitHub issues as well.
Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
> Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely on such inputs, I am concerned about the medium to long term impact. A lot of people grew frustrated with SO for various reasons and went back to unhelpful behaviors that SO resolved at its zenith (rather than dead ends and flame wars in newslists and irc channels, they do it in random subreddits and discord servers instead). Now what if we circle back after degenerative LLM experiences only to find there’s nothing to circle back on?
Are you implying he is running ChatGPT from his gaming machine?
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
I mean, we already know the answer to that: you should sell all the non-AI stocks that you own, and invest everything into AI companies. Because if you don't, a future benevolent AGI will torture your simulation for eternity. ~
But then you can just ask it to write that missing library! Some day in the future you can probably ask it to author the whole package and publish it itself.
"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."
I've run into this a few times and did just that. It hallucinates a js or python or micropython package, I get annoyed trying to find or use it because it lacks features I explicitly stated I needed, or it just doesn't exist, and then make it write the whole thing for me from scratch. I don't use ChatGPT anymore (the model they have on the free tier has become terrible in the past few months), but Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview free through AI Studio (ex-API) is generally up to the task here.
Most recently when this happened, I made it write an SF2 loader/parser/player and a MIDI parser/"relay" library compatible with it for javascript to use in a WebGL game. It's familiar enough with ABC notation that you can have it write a song and then write a converter from modified ABC notation to MIDI, too. It can generate coordinates for a xylophone model with individual keys in WebGL with no fuss and wire it up to the SF2 module to play notes based on which key was struck. We can do things like switch out instruments on tracks, or change percussion tracks, or whatever, based on user interactions without fuss.
It's not worth setting up a whole repo for and documenting, because when I make something with it, I inherently prove making it is trivial.
Mixed feelings on SO. It was helpful, but it was also a website you dread having to post on because it was filled with the most intolerable people of the internet who you just had to endure abuse from if you wanted help.
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
The next AI totally needs to be more snarky to make it feel more like we're dealing with actual "thinksperts", people that think they are experts even if their answers are demonstrably wrong.
"You are Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. You are very knowledgeable in the _____ language; in fact, you believe you are the foremost expert on it. You have taken time from your busy schedule to help the unwashed masses by answering the following question..."
>Oh, the pain... the sheer agony of having to explain basic React concepts to someone who likely thinks JSX is a new boy band. But fine. For the sake of humanity—or at least to preserve what little remains of good developer practices—I shall lower myself to answer your question.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
> You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
Not to dismiss you - but it's important to understand what the standard is for "duplication". This has changed over the years because the original (very narrow) interpretation turned out to be unviable - it doesn't scale. (And "it doesn't scale" is a big part of why Stack Overflow was created - where "it" is the traditional discussion forum model.)
>but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
Because your search query is equally suited to find a bunch of garbage questions that should have been closed (and then deleted when they weren't improved) - often ones that are about something completely different, but click-bait because of the words in the title (often a result of OP completely misidentifying the problem and not producing a proper MRE).
>asking a meaningful question takes effort
It does. In fact, when I've written self-answered Q&A to share knowledge, I've often found the question harder than the answer.
The reputation system was very poorly conceived. It incentivizes terrible behaviours, while the best results will come from intrinsic motivation anyway. (Plus it carries the implicit assumption that answering questions demonstrates an understanding of site policy, when the opposite is often true: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357021 )
> my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue
Duplicates are not inherently bad. They help others find the original, and the duplicate count statistics help identify important questions and topics. Furthermore, it's 100% in keeping with policy to close something as a duplicate of a newer question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697 ). If you ask something well, and get a good answer, and then someone notices that it was asked before, your version is likely to stand instead. (And the target for a duplicate closure must have an accepted or upvoted answer.)
Your point makes totally sense and it also sounds like a robotic overlord from some SF dystopia: cold and following its own programmed rules to the painful detail. As the other commenter pointed out: you are definitely right and we see your point. But it's a also because of it that I stopped using SO years except for maybe causally searching. Let me draw an inaccurate parallel: security, if done perfectly, lets nobody achieve anything.
Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base.
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
How ironic. For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo) and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
> For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo)
This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.
> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.
What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.
It's absolutely true. I've had my posts edited to remove phrases like "thanks for any advice which you can provide". I've had people leave comments and ding my reputation because I've expressed gratitude. Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing". OK, let's agree to disagree. (BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you.)
>I've had my posts edited to remove phrases like "thanks for any advice which you can provide"
Yes. Doing this makes your post better, because it means everyone who reads it later saves time. Your post is not there to talk to people. Your question is there to ask a question. Your answer is there to answer the question.
> Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing"
What you miss is that it is not communication between the person who asks and the person who answers. It is publication of a question and answer so that everyone can benefit.
When you see someone say "thanks for any advice which you can provide" directly to someone else, does that feel welcoming to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like suddenly I'm unintentionally eavesdropping on some conversation, and that I'm not supposed to be there. But I only came to learn (or teach) something.
> BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you
You appear to be making multiple throwaway accounts rather than risking your HN reputation. From the guidelines:
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Stop assuming the worst. Someday you'll get on the wrong train before you check its destination. I happen to be signed in with two accounts on two different devices because I had forgotten my password and was having trouble with the recovery process. So ding me for it. It's what you do best.
I think the appeal of SO to its users (besides getting help for programming when you find someone willing) is that its also a source of narcissistic supply for the powerusers that can be maximized due to SO's gatekeeping policies.
It especially hurts to see words like "narcissistic" used to describe my friends who volunteer copious amounts of their time to try to be polite to hordes of others who clearly don't give a damn about what they're trying to accomplish and seem to assume that their usual way of interacting with web sites that have a submission form is the only way that exists.
The last time I used it I was asking a math question that was somewhat beyond me. I'd already spent hours researching it. Part of the problem was I knew I didn't know the right terminology but I could describe the problem in detail. I asked on SO, got one slightly snarky comment that answered the wrong problem. It did give me a clue to the right wording to look for though so in a way I got my answer. But the general attitude, and your attitude, is "why are you asking this question?"
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.
It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content.
It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.
I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.
I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.
Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.
That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
You are a volunteer. You can stop volunteering. If the job is becoming corrosive to your mental health and you don't have the emotional energy to engage with the job in manner that involves empathy, then I think the healthier option for everyone is to stop volunteering and let someone new come in who still has the empathy to handle it.
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
> Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify.
There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.
As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.
The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.
So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.
>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening
Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.
Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.
But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.
> (with seemingly little recourse)
As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:
> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)
> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.
Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How ca...
I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)
Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.
I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them.
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.
Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself.
Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again...
... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).
But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on.
I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists!
Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
> not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation.
I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.
I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.
They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).
> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.
> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.
Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.
But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
So you have paid attention and read countless examples of people's experiences with Stack Overflow, but have concluded that, in fact, they are all in the wrong?
Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.
> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
> while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)
Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already right here in HN comments, but every time you do the equivalent of "la la la can't hear you" in response.
It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.
I know why one top contributor left (cancer) and I heard the same about another. I haven't heard what you say about any, except in sweeping statements like yours.
I can think of multiple users offhand with 500k+ rep that I think are more damaging to the site than any newcomer ever could be. (No, I will not name names.) And I previously showed you a link of someone with 60k+ rep (slightly more than me) who went 14 years without even trying to use the meta site for anything and demonstrated a complete failure to understand the basic standards for questions.
If I'm part of the problem, then that's because of something I do, or else something I don't do.
The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem
You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)
If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.
If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)
If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
Stack Overflow has its own notion of what a question is. In short, a question has to be suitable as part of a searchable knowledge base.
If you want to post something that isn't SO's idea of a question, then you're really just posting off-topic. And if you then insist that people should help you with your off-topic posting, you're being overly presumptious.
I don’t disagree… However, that leads you to your eventual demise. They coasted for a long time being as toxic as they have been because there was virtually no alternatives. Now that we have alternatives it is no wonder the website is as dead as it gets. Make the bed, lie in it…
> The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
> > Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
>And this is why stack overflow now has as many questions asked as it did in 2009
So now there is a manageable volume of new questions that allows for enough people to review them properly and apply question standards properly, instead of letting most things seep through and set bad examples for the next batch. And more time to sift through the existing questions to polish up the best.
Existing questions, by the way, that outnumber Wikipedia articles by more than 3:1. Even though they're only supposed to be specifically about programming rather than about literally anything notable.
If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution.
9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.
I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.
You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.
Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.
If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.
We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.
> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.
Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.
The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.
It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.
> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.
Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.
> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.
> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?
It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.
It is not about you.
> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.
A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.
> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?
No, in fact. It is not social media, either.
Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)
All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.
Stack Overflow does not. By design.
Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).
By design.
> Don't ding people for saying please and thank y...
Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.
Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing.
OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
> Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism.
So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ?
By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended.
So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them.
> Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement
I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is.
But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics.
It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design.
> and let the poster bring the post into compliance?
Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it.
> do you think that by damaging my reputation
Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.)
> Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you.
My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.
I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards and, at the same time, preserve your audience. Your response is basically "shrug, that's the way the system works". Reminds me of Hal trying to talk to the onboard computer in 2001 Space Odyssey. "I can't do that, Hal. That's just the way I work, Hal."
>I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards
No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.
Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.
Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.
I just hope that we can continue to find sources of high quality training data like SO. If people don't publish their mutual learnings somewhere then there's no data to train on.
I've asked dozens of questions on SO, and never had a single one closed. I hear your sentiment often, but have no idea whether my experience or yours is more common.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
It was downvoted because the entire purported "threat" is based on a misconception.
It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.
But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
The point of an LLM is that it can take your problem as input, along with answers to previously asked questions (perhaps implicit) in its training data, and attempt to synthesize a solution to a problem as output. Here, a "question" is something that can be found with a search engine - something that directly presents the/a crux of an issue, which is identified after a debugging session (for a problem in existing code; for projects still in the design phase, a how-to question emerges after coming up with user stories and breaking tasks down into their logical steps). The point is that the question can be relevant to many different people who have written different code which encounters different problems - all caused fundamentally by the same conceptual misunderstanding (or non-understanding).
Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.
This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.
Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
How will there be new programming languages after people stop practicing programming and the skills decay because an AI is performing the deliberate practice?
From my perspective LLMs shine in programming languages because they (languages) are invented by people to be more formal so they are more predictable. Even for syntactically different programming languages there are similarities we don't see with our own eyes, but the training has no problem detecting. My favorite example is when I tried to find how to represent an int array for reflection in Kotlin. Ask ChatGPT or a sufficiently large model about this, the answer will be IntArray::class.java , but try to find the exact line with google - few or nothing, more on github search in the sources, still not much. So LLMs "detected" the system of making type signatures in Java/Kotlin and were able to successfully predict because the rules are consistent. In human language it also works, but to a lesser degree, so if you give it a verb/subject pair that makes sense and ask for the equivalent ones, you will get some that still make sense but are literally absent in the full corpus of the web.
Are there any similar articles on the state of the rest of the Stack Exchange network? There are many, many other SE sites that have nothing to do programming and are often less amenable to being answered via LLM.
> The question seems to be when Stack Overflow will wind down operations, or the owner sells the site for comparative pennies, not if it will happen.
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
Set up StackOverflow according to "cloud native" recommendations and whoops, that's gonna be quite the bill, which is my point. You'll have Cloudfront for global load balancing, ELB to provide a bridge between Cloudfront and Kubernetes, EFS for storage, RDS for the database, EKS and EC2 for compute, ElastiCache for KV cache, add in CodeBuild for build/deploy pipelines... AWS has quite the hefty overhead.
Oh definitely. AWS is where you go to set money on fire.
However servers aren't the sort of thing you can just plugin and forget when running a major website. Things go down, users trigger edge cases, people try and DOS you, disks fill up, etc. You do still need some staff to take care of things
No wonder, the CEO basically said they'll use the free labor of love of all member devs to sell training data for AI in order to replace such devs so why would anyone keep contributing there?
You don't start and run StackOverflow because of the money. You do it because you really care. Running niche communities isn't a lucrative path, and (as we're seeing now) they can be quite fickle.
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
They really only have themselves to blame. Yeah AI has massively accelerated the decline but I think it's mainly provided an option that isn't so frustrating to use. ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
> ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
> It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content.
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
The short version: Stack Overflow was always, explicitly intended to be the site that you think "went wrong", and is made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team. There is abundant historical documentation of this, but it took time for that intent to be explained coherently and the site initially grew far faster than it could be properly gatekept. This was aided by a broken and ill-conceived reputation system that never got the rethinking it needs, even after overall feedback was finally explicitly solicited in 2023. It was also aided by several naive ideas about human nature and incentive systems in general.
----
Again, the people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
I have the view of a curator - an informal role that anyone can adopt by simply reading the meta site, understanding policy, and trying to help out with the process. Granted, it takes 3000 reputation to cast close votes, but anyone can submit edits, and it only takes 5 reputation to participate in meta (waived if it's about your own question being closed), 15 reputation to flag posts, and 50 to comment (and explain what's wrong with a question).
You say you have 100k reputation there. That's more than me. Yet I take all the actions you complain about, and have at times been very active doing so (for example, I added or moved hundreds of duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , and have gone weeks at a time running out of daily close votes). I'm not a mod.
There are 29 million user accounts, of which about 100k may cast close votes. There are 24 moderators.
Questions are in fact much too hard to close. Three separate people - who, by the above stats, are outnumbered almost 300:1 by those entitled to post answers - must agree. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from being answered until it meets standards; questions that could in principle meet standards are supposed to get fixed. But anyone can come along and just post whatever in the answer section; getting that deleted (answers can't be "closed" separately) is even harder; and the presence of that answer causes further problems.
The primary reason questions rarely get reopened is because closed questions overwhelmingly come from new users who don't care in the slightest about any of the process or goals, don't read the information that's given to them about what has happened, and thus never make any attempt to fix the question. (They may do this indefinitely, even after "deletion", by the way - and are expected to do so rather than reposting.)
What you think of as "normal users" aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is or how it works. How people want an already existing site with 16 years of history to work is completely irrelevant. The fact that people have wanted it to work that way for 16 years is also irrelevant given that a) there are countless places already on the Internet that do work that way that they could use instead; b) they have been getting told off all that time, with varying degrees of tact and sophistication.
If people started trying to use actual Wikipedia as a Q&A forum, it would be correct for them to be shut down no matter how many people wanted to do that. I get that people's views on immigration vary a fair bit around here, but I imagine you'd agree that immigrants shouldn't get to write new laws for a country when they arrive.
Stack Overflow, and every Stack Exchange site, is not a forum, by design. The classic explanation of this (https://meta.stackexch...
> made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team.
When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges.
You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want. Doesn't change the fact that it was popular in spite of that, not because of it.
Personally my usage of S.O. was significantly reduced just by sticking to the same stack and tools for the last 7 or 8 years and letting depth accumulate instead of always being in the midst of learning a new framework / language / whatever that necessitated googling how to do x in y or z.
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
Stackoverflow answers kind of provided a source of truth by being confirmed / upvoted by people trying them out. We're completely abandoning this medium (on which LLMs are trained), even as technologies keep changing. Perhaps coding agents should start posting to stackoverflow too...
Interestingly, the site stopped growing at about the same time when the "fun killers" [0] took hand of it. Notably, when they deleted the all-time highest voting question
"New programming jargon you coined?".
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
> June 2021: Stack Overflow sold for $1.8B to private equity investor, Prosus. In hindsight, the founders – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky – sold with near-perfect timing, before terminal decline.
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
284 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadAs far as its demise? AI ate its lunch. I use to use Stack Overflow all the time and haven't even gone to the site for a couple of years now.
The cc lience only applies to the presentation of the information, it doesn't apply to the factual content of the information. Which part openAI used is a matter of much controversy.
And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."
It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.
The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.
(Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)
> ... and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to ...
(As someone who is all too often hired tomorrow, at a fraction of the before rates, to clean up this mess)
And I'm not asking for some beautiful architecture from ChatGPT, I'm just asking for simple hacks that get the job done. Elisp is designed to make simple hacks easy, but not easy enough for ChatGPT I guess.
Like, I asked it to make a command which would move the "mark" and the "point" so that the full line was selected. If a selection covered only part of a line, I wanted the selection to expand to cover the full line. To do this, all you have to do is move the mark and the point so that they surround a line. ChatGPT couldn't do it. It would only move the point, but not the mark, it wouldn't do anything with the mark. I explicitly told ChatGPT "no, you have to set both the point and the mark correctly", and then it wrote even more code that only adjusts the point, but not the mark--it would move the point to the beginning of the line, and then move the point to the end of the line, never touching the mark--it's stupid.
Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
But it's also possible it's pivoting to a Wikipedia-like model where it becomes a repository for answers, and less about contributions. In which case, this is not the same as it dying. As seen with Wikipedia, it can still get a lot of traffic and revenue even if few people contribute to it anymore.
I wonder what developers started using during that time.
I think it may answer most questions from five years ago, but I would phrase it as “it has answers for most questions, but many are outdated and there’s no easy way to tell whether an answer is outdated”
Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
AI has the ability combine answers from multiple sources and tailor-make to your exact prompt details. Now that is something we call glove fits the hand. Plus it can explain its answers.
These days you can go to the repo and there’s usually already an issue open with the problem and a workaround. Or if someone has a question on how to use the tool/software they ask there.
Before GH boomed it was often SO doing this job.
This, and first party developer forums. iOS questions will go directly to Apple's community forums. Same for SalesForce, or Elastic search etc.
There's just a higher noise/signal ratio, a real chance to get answers from experts, and it makes for a stepping stone if the issues needs to be bumped to paid support.
Yeah, except for when there should be current answers. Most of computing is in constant flux. There's a mountain of 10+ year old answers that simply don't apply any more.
Yes.
They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.
New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)
Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.
(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.
Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.
It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.
I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.
They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".
Because they have not shown that they understand what a good question is, or what the standards are. Or because they presume that they are the ones who should get to say what makes a question good or not.
>you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".
????? I said nothing of the sort.
>other than "we are great".
This, too, is your wording, not mine.
But, again. Show concrete examples in a suitable manner, or there is nothing to discuss.
How is this not something of that sort?
> Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted.
You're presuming that the current volume of questions represent novel, unique posts instead of something you can find over and over again if you do a decent query.
Wikipedia has a similar issue where editing declined around 2007, which is often blamed on stricter enforcement of rules, more complex rules, etc. I think its just a natural stage of growth. You can't be a free for all forever.
But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.
Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.
Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.
The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.
This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".
As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/
Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.
> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing
So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.
> and now it's dying
Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
> Maybe something was better before
Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?
If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.
The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).
> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?
There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.
There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.
> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add
... And?
> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.
As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.
And as far as I can see, it is dying.
> If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem.
So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
> it would become easier to find what you want.
It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions. It has happened, though, that I could not find what I wanted because it was not there. And when I added it, I was closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
Again, I am not saying that it should be forbidden to close questions. What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?
> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.
Yes.
You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.
QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).
> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.
Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.
> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).
This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.
But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.
Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?
> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.
Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.
Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.
Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.
the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead
Sorry, I hadn't realised I could barely write coherent English.
> QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either
Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?
I was clearly referring to different kinds of questions, not to your writing.
> Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
"Growing" by an utterly irrelevant metric.
Popular != good.
- Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos
The list goes on
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
Nothing in computing is ever static.
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."
Most recently when this happened, I made it write an SF2 loader/parser/player and a MIDI parser/"relay" library compatible with it for javascript to use in a WebGL game. It's familiar enough with ABC notation that you can have it write a song and then write a converter from modified ABC notation to MIDI, too. It can generate coordinates for a xylophone model with individual keys in WebGL with no fuss and wire it up to the SF2 module to play notes based on which key was struck. We can do things like switch out instruments on tracks, or change percussion tracks, or whatever, based on user interactions without fuss.
It's not worth setting up a whole repo for and documenting, because when I make something with it, I inherently prove making it is trivial.
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there.
"Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658)
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
See: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/384711 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254697 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385343 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205
Not to dismiss you - but it's important to understand what the standard is for "duplication". This has changed over the years because the original (very narrow) interpretation turned out to be unviable - it doesn't scale. (And "it doesn't scale" is a big part of why Stack Overflow was created - where "it" is the traditional discussion forum model.)
>but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
Because your search query is equally suited to find a bunch of garbage questions that should have been closed (and then deleted when they weren't improved) - often ones that are about something completely different, but click-bait because of the words in the title (often a result of OP completely misidentifying the problem and not producing a proper MRE).
>asking a meaningful question takes effort
It does. In fact, when I've written self-answered Q&A to share knowledge, I've often found the question harder than the answer.
The reputation system was very poorly conceived. It incentivizes terrible behaviours, while the best results will come from intrinsic motivation anyway. (Plus it carries the implicit assumption that answering questions demonstrates an understanding of site policy, when the opposite is often true: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357021 )
> my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue
Duplicates are not inherently bad. They help others find the original, and the duplicate count statistics help identify important questions and topics. Furthermore, it's 100% in keeping with policy to close something as a duplicate of a newer question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697 ). If you ask something well, and get a good answer, and then someone notices that it was asked before, your version is likely to stand instead. (And the target for a duplicate closure must have an accepted or upvoted answer.)
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/368072 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373801 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334870
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352575
Rudeness happens all around, really:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326494
Related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/523612
(And, of course, all of this really blows up once assumptions start getting made about who is or isn't especially sensitive: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665)
This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.
> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.
What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.
Yes. Doing this makes your post better, because it means everyone who reads it later saves time. Your post is not there to talk to people. Your question is there to ask a question. Your answer is there to answer the question.
This is explicit policy:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131009
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/328379
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/behavior ("Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat.")
And it follows directly from it not being a discussion forum (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107).
> Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing"
What you miss is that it is not communication between the person who asks and the person who answers. It is publication of a question and answer so that everyone can benefit.
When you see someone say "thanks for any advice which you can provide" directly to someone else, does that feel welcoming to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like suddenly I'm unintentionally eavesdropping on some conversation, and that I'm not supposed to be there. But I only came to learn (or teach) something.
> BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you
You appear to be making multiple throwaway accounts rather than risking your HN reputation. From the guidelines:
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Let me introduce you to the internet. It's this public access network where literally the entire world comes to exchange information in open forum.
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.
I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.
I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.
Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.
That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.
As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.
The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.
So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.
>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening
Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.
Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.
But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.
> (with seemingly little recourse)
As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:
> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)
> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.
"Edit your question" is linked to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21788/how-does-edit... .
> Find out more about duplicates and why your question has been closed.
Links:
https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions
Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How ca...
Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)
Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.
... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).
But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists!
Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.
I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.
They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).
> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.
> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.
Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.
But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.
> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)
Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.
The only thing that any of you have explained is that the site doesn't measure up to your standards.
You have given me no reason why I should evaluate the site by your standards.
I know why one top contributor left (cancer) and I heard the same about another. I haven't heard what you say about any, except in sweeping statements like yours.
The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)
If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.
If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)
If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
If you want to post something that isn't SO's idea of a question, then you're really just posting off-topic. And if you then insist that people should help you with your off-topic posting, you're being overly presumptious.
What does this word mean, in context?
> > Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
So now there is a manageable volume of new questions that allows for enough people to review them properly and apply question standards properly, instead of letting most things seep through and set bad examples for the next batch. And more time to sift through the existing questions to polish up the best.
Existing questions, by the way, that outnumber Wikipedia articles by more than 3:1. Even though they're only supposed to be specifically about programming rather than about literally anything notable.
9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.
I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.
You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.
Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
Stack Overflow is by design not there to help you with this:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569
If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.
If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.
We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.
> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.
Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.
The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.
It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.
> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.
Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.
> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.
> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?
It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.
It is not about you.
> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.
A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.
> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?
No, in fact. It is not social media, either.
Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)
All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.
Stack Overflow does not. By design.
Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).
By design.
> Don't ding people for saying please and thank y...
How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard?
> who seem to take glee
Why do you imagine so?
OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ?
By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended.
So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them.
> Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement
I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/
But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics.
It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design.
> and let the poster bring the post into compliance?
Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it.
> do you think that by damaging my reputation
Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.)
> Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350
My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.
No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.
Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.
Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.
Again: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436
I'm not surprised it's on the way out.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...
It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.
But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.
This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.
Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
What a miserable future to look forward to
unless LLMs can be instantly trained on all new software frameworks and languages that come out, im not worried stackoverflow will still have a place
I see the latter option, but the former? SO, at least judging by their hardware posts, was running on nine servers two years ago [1]. That's barely anything in costs - electricity, uplink and occasional rotation of the hardware, but probably a single person working a decent job can afford to run the entire hardware for the site.
Truly shows how far a tight budget can go when you don't waste untold amounts of money and energy on layers upon layers of complexity.
> I'm sure we'll see spaces where developers hang out and help each other continue to be popular – whether they are in the form of Discord servers, WhatsApp or Telegram groups, or something else.
Yeah fuuuuck that. It's so annoying that everyone and their dog moved to these walled gardens. Google can't pierce them, unlike IRC of ye olde days where it was common to let a bouncer publish logs, WA/Telegram come with privacy risks and Discord is a hellscape.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
However servers aren't the sort of thing you can just plugin and forget when running a major website. Things go down, users trigger edge cases, people try and DOS you, disks fill up, etc. You do still need some staff to take care of things
[0] https://openai.com/index/api-partnership-with-stack-overflow...
Additionally, it's not just the owners... it's the millions of people who contributed.
I think if they had actually fixed moderation they may have had a chance of surviving, but I think they got trapped by relying on volunteer moderators who thought that it was good that so many valid questions were closed.
They did actually make some attempts to fix things, e.g. I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Definitely some shadenfreude, and I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.
> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.
Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.
The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.
I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
That's fundamentally where SO went wrong. The mods think they're building programming Wikipedia, but normal users are using it as a Q&A forum.
> Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure.
No it doesn't. It's far too easy to close a question and they very rarely get reopened. The suggestion was that users only get to unilaterally reopen it once.
> I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work.
See this is exactly the problem. You have the mods' view of how it is supposed to work, but that isn't how people want it to work!
Mods want it to be this highly curated reference site where only perfectly written questions that exactly fit an FAQ style of questioning. They don't care that that makes it useless (or at least extremely frustrating) as a Q&A forum.
----
Again, the people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.
I have the view of a curator - an informal role that anyone can adopt by simply reading the meta site, understanding policy, and trying to help out with the process. Granted, it takes 3000 reputation to cast close votes, but anyone can submit edits, and it only takes 5 reputation to participate in meta (waived if it's about your own question being closed), 15 reputation to flag posts, and 50 to comment (and explain what's wrong with a question).
You say you have 100k reputation there. That's more than me. Yet I take all the actions you complain about, and have at times been very active doing so (for example, I added or moved hundreds of duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , and have gone weeks at a time running out of daily close votes). I'm not a mod.
There are 29 million user accounts, of which about 100k may cast close votes. There are 24 moderators.
Questions are in fact much too hard to close. Three separate people - who, by the above stats, are outnumbered almost 300:1 by those entitled to post answers - must agree. The purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from being answered until it meets standards; questions that could in principle meet standards are supposed to get fixed. But anyone can come along and just post whatever in the answer section; getting that deleted (answers can't be "closed" separately) is even harder; and the presence of that answer causes further problems.
The primary reason questions rarely get reopened is because closed questions overwhelmingly come from new users who don't care in the slightest about any of the process or goals, don't read the information that's given to them about what has happened, and thus never make any attempt to fix the question. (They may do this indefinitely, even after "deletion", by the way - and are expected to do so rather than reposting.)
What you think of as "normal users" aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is or how it works. How people want an already existing site with 16 years of history to work is completely irrelevant. The fact that people have wanted it to work that way for 16 years is also irrelevant given that a) there are countless places already on the Internet that do work that way that they could use instead; b) they have been getting told off all that time, with varying degrees of tact and sophistication.
If people started trying to use actual Wikipedia as a Q&A forum, it would be correct for them to be shut down no matter how many people wanted to do that. I get that people's views on immigration vary a fair bit around here, but I imagine you'd agree that immigrants shouldn't get to write new laws for a country when they arrive.
Stack Overflow, and every Stack Exchange site, is not a forum, by design. The classic explanation of this (https://meta.stackexch...
When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges.
You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want. Doesn't change the fact that it was popular in spite of that, not because of it.
And while that was happening VS Code started integrating MDN as well, so when I come across something I don't recognize I have a lot of extra information right at my fingertips anyway.
This blatantly undemocratic and destructive behavior was of course duely punished by the (former) users of the site.
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
Hey, if it all crashes and burns, at least it’s the so-called smartest guys in the room going down with the ship. Just a bunch of VCs learning the hard way that they had no idea how to actually run or grow the company they bought. “Look at how well we optimized it!” Yeah — right into the ground.
Something like 1000x more views than posts/comments… I wonder if that statistic has changed over the years?…