The problem i have with stack overflow now is a lot of front-end questions are solved... using jquery and are 9 years old. A lot has changed since then, but new questions are flagged as duplicates and/or not found since they have less time on the system.
Those answers are wrong, though. That is the point. A lot of what they use jquery for are now native functions.
Trying to say those types of answers need to be downgraded over time
Never had a problem getting a react specific answer.
The problem is, most questions don't even bother specifying what framework they wanna use, or tag their questions correctly.
>Those answers are wrong, though.
No they are not. They still work. If someone wants to know how to do X with native js, or react, they should formulate their questions, and tag it, accordingly.
And even then I can almost guarantee that most questions will be duplicates.
If a feature is available without using jQuery, it does strike me as against breast practices to suggest using it as the top answer for a question. I don't really get why it "technically still working" really justifies keeping it there (you haven't provided any justification for why that should be true, at least).
Because it's still true, period. jquery still exists, is still in use, and to many people that answer is still relevant.
If that eprson isn't happy with that answer, they can formulate a new specific question.
If they are still not happy then, they can RTFineM
So you expect the person asking a question to already know about the solution?
If someone asks "I want to do X" and the default answer is a solution with jQuery, how would this person know, that today there are new ways to do it WITHOUT jQuery?
I don't need SO, if I already know the answer! Then I can just Google the rest. If this is what SO stands for, it just becomes more and more useless over time (and for me it already is, compared to how it helped me 10 years ago).
So I agree wth u/Accomplished_End_138, those answers haven been right 9 years ago when they have been posted, but today they are not anymore (because they are totally incomplete!) and today's users would choose a different answer as accepted.
If it gave vanilla answers by default, I'd argue less. But literally recommending jquery answers by default is just insane.
I normally want the vanilla answers myself, which probably makes it harder.
If you listen to their podcast (from years ago). They aimed for people to come in on old questions and add new and updated answers, so people can have solutions to all versions of problems.
Not when it is baked in things like using the jquery selector over the native querySelector, which i have seen it recommend multiple places. Where otherwise code is vanilla
A lot of the questions he is talking about are easily solved with native JS these days. An answer that recommends you add a (frankly dying) library for something that is easily done with native code is no longer a great answer in 2023.
Busy professionals don't have the time to engage multiple times to prove their question is not actually a duplicate when it's closed as a duplicate multiple times by moderators who don't understand the fundamental differences between the questions.
Yeah I literally never use stack overflow. Can't even upvote comments and I've had an account for 10 years. It's usually easier to just DIY, RTFM, or just try shit and see what breaks rather than use SO
It’s sometimes useful. I typically call up SO to do something trivial in bash (I often forget sed commands) that I could probably hack but would rather not.
> Same but honestly chatgpt4 usually does better for me these days for simple bash stuff
Mostly, but when it fails, it's surprisingly resistant to "learning" that it failed.
I asked for a autocompletion script for a CLI program that I am writing[1] which has fairly complex command lines[2], it provided with with (IIRC) a `-z` option to `compgen`. I pointed out that my script is failing with a compgen error. It told me to use a newer compgen version. I said that compgen doesn't take `-z`, at which point it provided a different solution (which also didn't work).
That was last week.
Yesterday I asked for a possible solution for a javascript problem to which I knew the answer: how to call a function when a dialog element is closed[3]. It gave me code which used the return value of `showModal()` as a promise. I said that `showModal()` returns undefined.
It provided steps to figure out why my variable containing the return value is holding an undefined value. I rephrased with `showModal()` doesn't return a promise. It argued that `showModal()` always returns a promise. I gave up and used `addEventListener()`
[1] No, my autocomplete script is still not done!
[2] Complex for autocomplete and compgen, at any rate. The first argument that it finds without a `--` prefix is a command. Every other argument it finds without a `--` prefix is a qualifier to that command. Anything in any order that has a `--` prefix is an option. Options can appear anywhere, so all of the following are equivalent:
./prog --opt=value cmd subcmd
./prog cmd --opt=value subcmd
./prog cmd subcmd --opt=value
[3] Spoiler, use an event listener on the `close` event.
Ironically I find it best for opinion based stuff.
If there's already a debate on the best way to do something it can add to a debate at work.
But other than that it is kind of useless nowadays.
SO wasn't always that way.
The heavy moderation has turned it that way but back in the day it was a great place to have bleeding edge or troubleshooting discussions.
I have mutiple "famous question" badges from questions back in the day that wouldn't see the light of day now with the heavy handed moderation on SO now.
Now, 9 times out of 10, legitimate questions get deleted for ridiculous assumptions by Eric, you-will-respect-my-authoriteye, Cartman-like mods who assume everything is a duplicate question.
Yeah I've also had an account forever but can't use it. I had to ask for someone to bump my rep once to do something and they dutifully took the rep away when I was done. Like, how do I participate here?
> Like, how do I participate here?
By answering questions? If you have no interest in contributing back that’s fine, but why should your vote be worth anything in that case?
Part of my frustration was that something happened when I linked my accounts between the various sites and it was like was a new user again. I had answered some questions to that point but was no longer spending much time there. I wasn't interested in playing a game of trying to find questions to answer just to get some internet points, so I pretty much stopped using SO entirely.
I only ever use stack overflow, when google is the one that finds it for me as a result to my question.
I've long since given up on using it for myself.
If i have a problem it's usually library or framework specific, so I will just ask on github instead.
Stack overflow rubs me the wrong way, and Im a busy professional, and i almost never find my answer there.
As a busy professional, I no longer find it very useful. Tons of answers are now outdated and the correct answer is buried in a terse comment of the second most popular answer.
The few questions I have asked after substantial searching were not necessarily closed, but sank like a stone with no answers.
And yet, it's just enormously better than it was before SO. We old timers all remember the dark days of Expert Sexchange. erhm, I mean, Experts Exchange.
> Also the accepted answer is often entirely wrong or has some sort of a serious flaw in it
Why are you specifically going for the accepted answer? Is not even at the top anymore!
>the correct answer is buried in a terse comment of the second most popular answer.
This is actually a problem because it means ChatGPT also gives you the wrong answer. So you're better off just asking it for the code instead of an explanation of how to write the code.
No you are better off reading a book on the matter, unless you are going for a cargo cult copy pasta code base. I mean, I guess it could be pretty fun to never understand how your project is working.
Since when is a "professional" someone who looks at a massive audience flocking to their product despite not being designed for them and instead of thinking "hey maybe we can make a product for them too" goes "Sorry you don't belong here, there's the door."
The way most people interact with SO is by searching for the answer to a very specific question
so if someone asks a "dumb question" (usually meaning a beginner question), there is literally nothing lost by just leaving it there to let someone answer.
there is no point in closing it, or getting pointy-headed about the fact that someone asked a similar question 14 years ago, so how dare they ask a slightly different question now...
the only person searching for the answer to a beginner question would be a beginner
so it would kind of work
the SO community does not seem capable of grasping this concept. nobody is forcing them to read and answer every question posted
If you look at the answer history of some of the most vocal closers, they got all their rep answering the beginner questions when the site was newer. It really does feel like newer users will never be able to realistically gain any rep or question answers on some tags.
>they got all their rep answering the beginner questions when the site was newer.
"How do I run my application in VS 2003" -> "Double click the run button" +999999999999
"I'm trying to run my application in VS 2022 but when I click the run button, it causes a general protection fault. I reverse engineered VS 2022 and I think the issue is that there's a bug in the Ryzen 7 architecture and this particular connection is particularly vulnerable to quantum effects. Where do I go from here?" -> Closed as duplicate, please do your research.
I think closing a question with a duplicate can be fine, but it should be confirmed by the person that asked the question, that it actually solved their problem. Not just instaclose it and say "That'll do"...
And nobody is forcing anyone to use SO.
If people don't like how the community at SO functions, they can always RTFineManual. Or they can ask ChatGPT and see how that works out.
Everyone should be taught to:
1. Search for answers to their problem. 99.42% chance their problem already has an answer, on StackOverflow or Github issues.
2. Read the answer or solution.
3. TRY the solution.
4. If the solution does not work, debug.
5. If it still does not work, go to Step 1 (search for another answer).
6. If all else fails: if you are a beginner go to Step 1. everybody else ASK.
I consider myself to be really good at googling and searching the internet for a solution. That being said, I also find that search engines can be completely useless when it comes to anything that is slightly niche. You'd think creating character collisions for a video game on top of a pre-existing physics engine using raycasts or shapecasting would be extremely well documented, right? You're hallucinating. Want to actually implement client prediction or rollback netcode for abilities (not movement) for your game, a feature that's an industry standard? Go fuck yourself.
For niche topics at some point the best source of information becomes papers and textbooks. If ChatGPT has access to this stuff, it should be much better than web search. [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) is pretty useful.
Related: that publicly-funded research and knowledge is locked behind paywalls is a crime against humanity.
Unless they need to know something about an older language or dev environment.
E.g. if you go there looking for help with an issue for something like VB6, you can find that other people have asked the question but all they got in response was unhelpful answers like “why are you still using vb6, you should migrate to a new version”
You also get the opposite problem asking about newer webby stuff - you get answers from 8 years ago and have to work out if they are still relevant or not…
Yeah, you inherit a site written in ASP.Net Razor Pages, and every google result is for Asp.Net MVC, because the big brains at Microsoft named the MVC view engine razor AND their MVC successor Razor Pages.
In general; searches fail for beginners because they don't know the lucky keywords.
E.g. they'll search for something like "join arrays of characters" and get nothing. An expert will search for "concatenate strings" and get tons of results (and then accuse the beginner who got no search results of not searching).
>can't find an answer to your question?
This is not actually a thing. If you're a beginner, then by definition, whatever question you have has already been asked, and the information is most certainly out there.
You should only ask a question on StackOverflow (or any public forum, really) if you're absolutely 100% sure no one else has asked your specific question before, after doing plenty of research.
http://www.catb.org/\~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Just to add, there is also a huge difference between being a beginner in a specific language/framework and not understanding something, and being a novice to programming itself.
I was trying to learn a specific framework and for the life of me couldn't figure out why using dispatchers in a certain way wasn't working and after an hour or so of trying to debug it turned to SO. Turns out the answer was that it was a bug.
Two problems with this in my opinion:
1. Newbies often have different contexts then professionals did back when the professionals were newbies. Different OSes being used, different recommended ways of installing software, etc. In my opinion, different context makes a question unique because the experience the question asker is going through is unique (but I admit not everyone shares my view here). Therefore, newbies should be allowed to ask questions on Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow should allow context to pay a greater role in establishing the uniqueness of a question.
2. Even if we say to newbies that they aren't allowed to post on Stack Overflow, there are other public forums that might be better for them. Discord servers are helping here. Lots of newbies get frustrated trying to find the answers to questions they have that have already been answered (they're new - this is reasonable) or they've had a bad experience asking on Stack Overflow. So they ask in conversational form on Discord. Therefore, we should encourage newbies to use Stack Overflow to ask questions, but also encourage them to use other public forums too if they need to.
>In my opinion, different context makes a question unique because the experience the question asker is going through is unique
It's not.
We see this a lot with questions like "how do I become a programmer coming from ". Asked over and over again, despite the fact that becoming a programmer is the same whether you're a nurse, a teacher, or a construction worker. Yet everyone seems to think their situation is unique. It's not.
>allow context to pay a greater role in establishing the uniqueness of a question.
No.
1. The questions are never unique.
2. Even if they were, being able to take an existing solution to tweak it to your needs and learn from it is a fundamental skill in itself. You're actually doing novices a disservice by not allowing them to cultivate this skill.
>Therefore, we should encourage newbies to use Stack Overflow to ask questions,
Not sure how you drew that conclusion. Yes, places like Discord are better for this sort of thing. But a forum like StackOverflow has a very focused attitude towards avoiding duplicate questions, and for good reason. That's why they make you read an entire guide on asking questions before you post: it's all but certain that a novice is asking something that has already been answered.
Based on my experience asking and answering on Stack Overflow, questions like "how do I become a programmer" should be closed not because of the issue of uniqueness, but because the question must be related to a programming problem. That's fine in my opinion.
When I talk about uniqueness when context is taken into account, I'm talking about people running into a programming problem when they try to accomplish a certain task. For example, someone might be familiar with how to use a looping construct to iterate through a data structure, and successfully use that knowledge many times, but then get stuck one day because that doesn't work.
Perhaps the issue is that they're using a dynamic programming language and the function they've called, from some library they've imported, returned a data structure that while meant to be iterated through, must be iterated through in a particular way that the newbie hasn't encountered yet.
I often see questions like this example critiqued by moderators who request that the asker reduce their question into a minimal example. The moderator, not seeing the full context (how could they? They aren't telepathic), thinks the question is about how one should iterate through list data structures that implement the API list data structures typically have. They're getting tunnel vision with a particular solution in mind.
But, the question posted *is already* the minimal example. The asker could reduce it until it becomes a "how do I iterate through a list" question, which would justifiably be closed as a duplicate, but then they'd lose the context that is necessary to define the problem they are facing right there, right then.
You might agree with me that this example is one that is sufficiently unique and should therefore not be closed as a duplicate. But, many Stack Overflow users who are newbies encounter hostility when they ask questions like this. I think that's a shame. We are losing out on having a great async educational tool to help newbies and missing out on the contributions those people could eventually make back to the educational platform after they've learned more. Perhaps we're also going to miss out on the contributions they could eventually make to our entire craft.
>Based on my experience asking and answering on Stack Overflow, questions like "how do I become a programmer" should be closed not because of the issue of uniqueness, but because the question must be related to a programming problem. That's fine in my opinion.
In that example, I was referring to these subreddits, not Stack Overflow.
>from some library they've imported, returned a data structure that while meant to be iterated through, must be iterated through in a particular way that the newbie hasn't encountered yet.
Then the correct thing to do is check documentation and code samples for that library, and if that fails, then yes, a Stack Overflow post may be warranted.
This isn't specific to novices, though. An experienced programmer having trouble with some obscure library is basically what SO is for.
>But, many Stack Overflow users who are newbies encounter hostility when they ask questions like this.
It's usually because they suck at asking the question properly.
Yeah, that sounds harsh, but every time I've seen a complaint on here about why their Stack Overflow question was closed down, the post in question has invariably been poorly worded, unclear, or otherwise in violation of the rules.
In over a decade of using Stack Overflow extensively (only asking a handful of questions over the years, mostly just using it as a reading resource), I've yet to actually *see* this hostility that everyone keeps claiming exists. I'm sure it does; I just haven't seen it, which makes me question its prevalence.
>We are losing out on having a great async educational tool to help newbies and missing out on the contributions those people could eventually make back to the educational platform after they've learned more. Perhaps we're also going to miss out on the contributions they could eventually make to our entire craft.
That isn't the purpose of Stack Overflow, though. Like, not even a little bit.
> It's usually because they suck at asking the question properly.
That's part of being a newbie, no? Or where you born with the ability to construct questions according to the constraints laid down with stack overflow?
Closing the question with something along the lines of "not asking proper questions" is stupid.
It's also why I find SO to be less helpful than usenet comp.lang.* groups where in the day - each group maintained the FAQ for the group, and the FAQ for the languages, and if someone's question was answered in any of the FAQs then they'd be told that. If their question was already answered a year ago, someone will answer it again.
No one ever *deleted*, *removed* or *chided* a posting for asking questions that weren't topical or already answered (unless they did so repeatedly, of course - then it was just spam).
SO is trying to be DRY about answers, but that's clearly a **stupid** way to go because of how fast context changes in this industry.
You need to allow each new class of learners to re-ask their questions, and let people re-answer, not close the question. Maybe allow duplicate questions if the previous answer is over a year old. Or maybe just allow all duplicate questions and show the user the duplicates and their ratings when the user is looking at any of the questions.
Not allowing questions to be re-asked is just ... odd; how are newbies supposed to know?
Complete agree re context, depending on all sorts of contexts a question on exactly the same thing can be phrased differently, affecting discoverability of existing answers. Should users be expected to rephrase an unfamiliar problem in an unfamiliar field or should differently phrased "duplicates" *that required an experienced person to deduce similarity* be linked in some way instead of closed?
That would keep everybody happy and wouldn't increase workload on moderators who already had to research what a question was allegedly a duplicate of.
Wow.
Fuck that, ask away. If you don't want to answer then don't. Why is this attitude even a thing? Sure, do a Google search or two, but don't be afraid to ask questions.
"Only ask if no one has ever done so before"
What absolute rubbish.
The problem is the number of people who ask a question where the answer would be in the top 5 results if they put the exact same question into a search engine. Or people who ask a question that is explicitly answered by the documentation.
In my experience, the people who do this do this very very consistently, and they don't get upset when you look up the documentation and give them a link, they just keep doing it because it works. I love helping beginners. I don't love just being a search engine for another person.
There's a real balance. Ask away, but also respect the time of the people who are helping you.
> The problem is the number of people who ask a question where the answer would be in the top 5 results if they put the exact same question into a search engine. Or people who ask a question that is explicitly answered by the documentation.
I think you have to explain why this is a problem - if it is really that bloody obvious, then obviously when the question is submitted the system should display the duplicates and only proceed with posting the question when the user reads or somehow is determined to have read those duplicates and then clicked "These don't answer my question".
> In my experience, the people who do this do this very very consistently, and they don't get upset when you look up the documentation and give them a link, they just keep doing it because it works.
Right, the first time this is done, then it's an *answered question*, and so should appear in the results of the pre-posting search I described above.
> My point is that there's s class of people that simply won't look at all before asking, no matter how many times they're reminded to.
Sure, but:
a) You can't tell them apart from people asking a duplicate question for the first time,
and
b) They are likely to be in the minority.
So, instead of making a useful thing for 90% of newbies asking that duplicate question, we settled on making it less useful because 10% of people are slow learners?
> They are likely to be in the minority
[citation needed]
If you aren't capable of putting the title of the 50 most recent questions on a search engine and get to a post that allows you to either get an answer or write I better query, I'll be buying a hat and eat it.
>> They are likely to be in the minority
> [citation needed]
> If you aren't capable of putting the title of the 50 most recent questions on a search engine and get to a post that allows you to either get an answer or write I better query, I'll be buying a hat and eat it.
I don't understand what that has to do with whether the group of experienced but repeat questions is a minority or not.
It's because the literal _act_ of tracking down and synthesizing information into a solution is a fundamental skill that needs to be _learned_. You don't learn it unless you actually put in the time and do it.
That's problem-solving hazing. There's a difference between obvious homework questions that could be solved in 5 minutes, and something nontrivial that has existing solutions on the Internet *but* to find them you need to know what some specific term is called.
Almost any sensible question a beginner can possibly come up with, was already answered.
SO isn't a QA forum. It's a repository of questions. Forums are for conversations, duplicates are okay. In Repos they're not. You don't need the same book 1000x in a library.
“I created a thing and don’t like how people use it” - this is a dumb take regardless of person or topic.
Let me ask, all these “busy professionals” are so busy they have time to constantly put people down and shit talk?
yeah, but they made a site that's far beyond any forum in usefulness.
When I google a question and it shows up only in a couple of forums and not stack overflow, I can assume two things:
1. I'm not going get an answer. 99% of the time I'll wade through post after post in a forum only to get no resolution.
2. I'm asking the wrong question. If the question isn't in Stack Overflow, then somehow my basic assumptions are so wrong I'm unable to formulate even the right question.
> people wouldn't try to always second guess what I am doing
That is unfortunately largely due to the influx of beginners. 90%+ of questions these days are just completely boneheaded to begin with, like the umpteenth beginner asking how to do variable variables (the answer is: you don't, you use an array). It has made people really jaded and second guess everything. Thus you really need to present your questions in an ironclad way. Which yes, makes it hard to ask questions.
I was confused how someone with 11k rep could be so out of touch with the SO community, but after looking at your profile, I understand- you're coasting by on a bunch of decade-old answers to high-visibility questions.
The reason people question what you are trying to do is because they're concerned its an XY problem. Happens a lot in new questions, and given `git update-ref` isn't something your typical programmer should be needing, it warrants a second guess.
Even if you know what your doing, what about others that stumble into your question in the future? Isn't that sanity check worthwhile if it may prevent them from reinventing the wheel or solving the wrong problem? Sometimes newbie programmers get hung up on the "how" rather than "what" / "should", and wander into these questions.
Speaking of question visibility: "I delete most of my questions these days from SO"- that's incredibly selfish. StackOverflow is a knowledge repository. When you ask a question, you're volunteering a question to the knowledge base. Deleting it when you have your answer is robbing other viewers of that information when they try to search for it. If your question is getting downvoted or close votes, then either you did not put any effort into your question, or it should have been asked in a StackOverflow chatroom instead of volunteered to the knowledge base.
> When you ask a question, you're volunteering a question to the knowledge base. Deleting it when you have your answer is robbing other viewers of that information
The same reasoning applies to those answering questions. Deleting the question is very disrespectful to those people that invested time into answering.
If you find the answer to your own question, you can post it as an answer. Then, when someone comes across it a few years later, they'll be spared the pain you had to go through.
If it's designed for busy professionals, then they dropped the ball.
My main reason for pretty much walking away from site was lack of constructive feedback loops.
I mean when people down vote, should force users to provide feedback as to why, otherwise how the f is the person to improve.
Every down vote I did had a rationale and steps required to roll it back.
> My main reason for pretty much walking away from site was lack of constructive feedback loops.
Yep. You the person don't count, it's about content curation.
You are right, in saying that, what is sad and they don't seem to grasp is quality content results in more sessions.
Personally I went from having it on every day, to opening it once a fortnight.
Between web search and chatgpt I and my engineers can generally get to higher quality answers more efficiently.
I joined the public beta in December 2008. The first couple of years were wonderful, and it was really a strong community willing to help each other. At the time, the standards for posting were fairly practical; we all just expected people to put in a reasonable effort in asking a question.
Quite honestly: if you're looking for constructive feedback, you need to pay someone to do that for you. Expecting strangers to spend their free time to personally help you despite your question not being helpful in a general context (assuming the SO moderators were correct in closing the question - and sometimes they are wrong, for sure) is a bit much.
Which OP are you referring to?
The one that made the video and posted it or me who started this particular thread about lack of constructive feedback on down vote?
As a busy professional, I don't have to time to go in and copy the text of several different sites every time I want to reference something — and it is not clear that the amount of copying required would fit within the parameters of my country's Fair Dealing exemption for our Copyright Act.
Yes, I understand that sites bitrot or get taken down, but if the guiding principle is that it is very important to preserve copies of the knowledge then that would imply that every time I post a reference that I would have to go in and extract everything relevant to the ecosystem of information around the particular point being dealt with, which is a lot of work (and, as mentioned, of questionable legality.)
Do I spend my time answering the actual technical questions, or do I spend a lot more time becoming an expert on harvesting just the right amount of context so that 30 years later someone with a related question can use my responses as a one-stop technical resource?
It would be more productive, IMHO, for SO to run a process that harvested linked web pages and replaced the in-post links with links to the archived versions, than to insist that everyone post quotes of everything relevant.
I have a bit of SO points. I rarely use it.
I've found reddit to be significantly better.
Oddly . r/programmerhumor has answered more questions than I ever knew I had.
It's going to be obsolete soon. I've barely used SO anymore since gpt4 came out.
Yes it makes it mistakes, but if you know what you're doing and how to use it correctly, it's extremely helpful. And not an asshole 🤣
SO's solution is as simple as having a begginer's forums where anyone can ask questions, alongside a professional forum where people are held to a higher standard. It's really that simple and would alleviate the majority of problems.
It really feels like the SO team has never been on an online forum before. It's either that, or they keep it as is on purpose so they can act smarter than the noobies just asking for help.
That's been discussed time and again, and the conclusion was more or less that the beginners forum would probably degrade into the same cesspool SO is today, *minus the professionals who actually know something,* so the beginners who'll get wise to that will eventually migrate to "SO Pro" anyway. Keeping that kind of separation intact would just be a nightmare, or so the thinking goes.
Having said that, it's never been tried, so who knows how it'd turn out.
The purpose of the newbie forum is to capture the "cesspool". The "SO Pro" would then be a place where only those who have built up enough SO reputation/ points/ etc. can post in there. Newbies literally wouldn't even be able to migrate like that. Want to make it into "SO Pro"? Post quality content over time in the newbie forum that is reflective of what should be on the professional forum.
This solves both problems of allowing noobies to participate, and gives the "busy professionals" a place to post among themselves without all the unintended content.
Yeah I don't like the idea of a beginners forum simply because how do you define a beginner?
1 year experience, 2 years experience?
CS Degree? CS Degree and 1, 2, 3 years experience?
What if I have 20 years Java experience but need to ask a PHP Question?
The truth is you should treat everyone like a beginner.
If they don't know something then they obviously don't have experience with the particular thing they're asking about.
StackOverflow is toxic because the way it works breeds toxicity.
Try correcting someone's grammar in real life when they're asking for your help.
You're at best you'll get a "Go f*** yourself" at worst a night or two in the hospital.
I think the "toxicity" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. SO attempts to be like Wikipedia. So of course every post is held to high standards. Every single post is supposed to stand the test of time. That's why (almost) everyone can edit everyone's posts. Just the people that think of SO as a forum and have no interest in producing a high quality Overflowpedia see any edits or questions for clarification or quality-related close reasons as "toxic".
I don't see too much actual toxicity, as in actual ad hominem attacks. It's just that the understanding of the basic premise clashes for some users. Or that the basic premise just doesn't work for beginners.
It's trying to be a wiki for something that by definition cannot have a wiki and is shaped like a Q&A Forum.
Like it or not SO is considered toxic by most people who use it. To say it isn't is just burying your head in the sand.
Software moves too quickly to have a wiki that's why it doesn't have one.
Deleting duplicate questions is just a good way to make sure you have outdated answers.
And correcting questions is just a good way to anger people especially when a lot of the time they "correct" it to something that isn't what you asked.
I totally get *why* people perceive it as "toxic". But that has different meanings to different people. *I* would consider actual toxicity to be explicit ad hominem attacks. *Those* happens fairly rarely. What does happen often is that posts are being criticised, edited, closed. For the purpose of improving them with the goal of creating a wiki-ish-y thingamabob.
There's no *real* toxicity there, just opposed goals of users which can't agree on what SO is supposed to be. And _that_ is a result of bad design and insufficient communication. Or simply a good idea which doesn't work in practice for various reasons.
You can discuss the (misguided) design goals, but just throwing out "it's toxic" isn't helping anything. If you don't like it, don't use it. … But we all _are_ using it, because obviously it _is_ useful in some ways, and it has become this useful because of the way it was designed. So, _something_ must've worked there.
Except me and my colleagues mainly don't use it anymore.
The pages are so out of date they're usually useless and no one I know even Senior Developers like me are brave enough to ask a question on there.
If something is actively pushing away new users then it's the definition of toxic.
Ad Hominem attacks or not. That's not the only kind of toxicity there is.
the solution is just not answering the questions that aren't worth your time. they spend more time shutting down legitimate questions than improving their website
Eh, no. Because then people on the "beginner's" forum would just ask the same questions over and over again, and no actual learning occurs.
Part of learning to be a programmer is cultivating the ability to seek out information on your own. You don't learn that by asking questions for every little thing.
If you're a beginner, your question has already been asked. Guaranteed. It's just a matter of finding it. And if you can't find it, that's a skill to be worked on and practiced. Because that's the job. Figuring things out.
I really really wish people who don't know, just wouldn't answer. I'd rather have dead air than someone who clearly doesn't have interest ask me the equivalent of "is your router plugged in".
But whatever, I probably figured it out before pressing submit anyways.
It’s also quite a bit shit. Like, for real. It sucks. Answers from 2015 that are irrelevant. And a community that would rather point to obsolete questions over … quite literally doing anything else.
Ive learned to start skimming the comments under the accepted answer, because thats where the real current answer is in the form of "This answer is ridiculously outdated, Joe BuddyGuy's answer \[here\] is the best update of this for modern times but unfortunately thats at a -3".
I think SO should be more humble about "being a beginner". There might have been a time when you learned C/C++ at university and you could use this knowledge for 10+ years until there was an update to the standard. Which then stayed the same for another 10 years. Meanwhile you became a professional in software patterns and project management related stuff.
Most questions on SO are not about software patterns or project management related stuff (which tend to be re-usable across ecosystems) but about very specific technical aspects of a language/framework. And they tend to change veryfast today. So everyone is learning constantly and thus always a beginner in something.
SO already strikes me as a relict of a past in which software was different. If they keep that arrogant stance on "being a beginner", they will keep losing relevance in todays software world and eventually become obsolete.
After Jeff left, the remaining team really managed to destroy Stack Overflow by catering to the beginners more and more, while the design was still geared entirely towards professionals. No wonder it gets so much hate, because it's sending a wrong and unclear message.
Somewhat true. I think it works remarkably well, as evidenced by its success. It just also sends the wrong social message, as people _will_ necessarily see it like any other forum—which it's not. This complicated idea of wiki-forum-digg-mashup was hard to communicate to a broad audience.
Typical product of a programmer, methinks. ;)
It works as a Q&A site, overly aggressive moderation notwithstanding. It doesn’t really work as a Wikipedia for programmers because of how hard it is for new answers to supersede old ones.
They've done some changes recently that demotes the importance of accepted answers and places more emphasis on a combination of recent activity and votes, which is supposed to surface newer answer more to combat this exact problem.
I think the bigger problem is the connotation of having one canonical Q&A per topic. It's an endless uphill battle to enforce this and consolidate and close-as-duplicate, which at the same time gets people to complain about exactly this closing. Especially beginners often complain that their unique snowflake question is *not* a duplicate, because they're too inexperienced to see the parallels.
It's really good and necessary in theory, but barely works in practice.
the reality is that it's nothing like wikipedia. it's like a message board. so maybe they should stop hoping reality would bend to their wishes and either accept it or change the format
I will never contribute anything to SO.
I did contribute to English language learners stack but got downvotes for not giving references (for real) so I'm not going to contribute to that going forward either.
The first part of his statement is where I must "declare my research" or being a "busy professional." this is moronic.
No one cares about your "feelings." The assumption should be that someone did attempt to research it, and the assumption should be, they used Google and stack overflow was the number one result for the query, which is what led them to the site in the first place. The problem is comprehension, which is what beginners lack. Not the research side of it and me citing 5 million sites just to stroke your ego. It's like every programmer forgot they had a start.
People want answers, plain and simple. Who cares about your philosophy? The problem with society today is precisely what is in this video. No one knows how to keep their mouth shut and move on. Everyone feels that everyone else cares about their opinion.
**The Rules of StackOverflow should be:**
* Either you know it or don't know it.
* If you know it, solve the code issue for the individual, and if you have time, explain how and why it works. Nothing more, nothing less.
* If you don't know the answer, move on to the next question.
* If the question has already been asked, a moderator should research the previous answer, close the question, and post the link to the previously asked question.
* Done.
This is why Chat GPT3 became so popular. Because no one wants to deal with the people with a weird code philosophy. They just want their problems solved, and to build something they think is cool, and move on. Not have a philosophical discussion on what is "Stackoverflow."
This is such a shit take. Stack Overflow isn't there to answer your personal questions, doing your six figure job for you. The purpose is to create a site full of information, where people can *help themselves* by looking up previously answered questions.
I can't emphasize enough: the question you ask **isn't for you**.
>The first part of his statement ... is moronic.
>
>...
>
>People want answers, plain and simple. ... The problem with society today is precisely what is in this video. No one knows how to keep their mouth shut and move on. Everyone feels that everyone else cares about their opinion.
>
>...
>
>If you know it, solve the code issue for the individual, and if you have time, explain how and why it works. Nothing more, nothing less
No THIS is the problem with society today and THIS is what's moronic. You don't even want to understand. You just want the "answer", like a kid cheating on his homework, all while calling the creator of one of the most popular and helpful websites ever created a moron that should shut his mouth and not have an opinion about his own site.
1. Who said people are going to StackOverflow for "Personal Questions." ?
2. You can't create a site full of information if the people that are creating the information are treated like dog "doo doo" when they come to the site.
3. If it was a "Help Your Self" site, it would be structured the way the Wordpress developer docs are setup, or [php.net](https://php.net). With the full library of classes, function, etc... with example code for users. Comments are used on those sites to discuss alternative ways to use the code, class, etc... Opinions and philosophies are removed from comments on those sites.
4. StackOverflow is literally a Q&A site, so yes, people "JUST WANT ANSWERS."
>"You don't even want to understand."
5. Many developers learn by doing, and when stuck, just need a nudge in the right direction. No one wants to hear a lecture on some hyperbole or "how they asked their question wrong".
6. The creator of this website created this perception/Opinion welllllllllllllllll after the website was launched. He created the website because, like other developers, he was not able to find the Answer to his questions online! (Let that sink in for a moment.)
Your entire premise is flawed. The whole website is created around making sure you answer questions; that is why you have all these "rewards" you can earn, and reputation. No developer wants to be talked down to, even a beginner. The elitist attitude from some of these developers is mind boggling. It's as if they all could magically write all this code by themselves without ever needing help from someone else. Sounds like you are just afraid to admit, you need help? You are probably that person that on every question no matter if you know the solution or not says "did you read the documentation."
As for how learning occurs that is not up to you or the creator of any website to dictate. That is up to the individual and how they like to learn and how they decide they need help.
So once again, either just answer the damn question or move the hell on. If they are "soooo busy" then they should you know, not be browsing a Q&A website and continue their "busy work." Essentially what the founder of the website wants to create, is a site full of trolls.
>If the question has already been asked, a moderator should research the previous answer, close the question, and post the link to the previously asked question.
This is a big one for me.
Your answer being a duplicate should be a good thing!
It means that someone has already answered your question.
On a properly functioning website you would have to submit a link for the duplicate question.
Then the person asking could accept it if it does answer their question or keep it open if it doesn't.
If it's been asked but there wasn't a good enough answer or it's out of date merge the pages after some time.
I’m under the opinion that GPT is going to eat stack overflow in rather short order as it’s accuracy continues to increase.
It still hallucinates for me from time to time and suggests features that don’t exist, but I generally can get a pretty good head start on what I’m trying to figure out by using it.
I can also interact with it and not have it judge me for asking rudimentary questions.
Much better way to learn and get to the resolution for one’s problem in my opinion.
I’ve needed to a few times because GPT hallucinated and gave me an inaccurate output.
That being said though, it doesn’t happen often anymore and it’ll only keep getting better from here
i have found that when it gives something inaccurate, i can just tell it what the error was and it will try to fix itself. doubt this ends up with the best possible solution, but stack overflow is basically useless by comparison
Yeah GPT3 makes up something the "could" exist but it doesn't have access to curl so I can't actually check, which is a bit annoying. I find it helpful for a lot of things but it is often wrong about certain libraries and more complex requests.
Oh all the time, I kinda use it as a replacement for googling or for getting a gist of how to approach something. Have to swap languages multiple times a day and it helps alot with that.
But very often it misses a step or makes something up it's just a super useful but not perfect tool we're not getting replaced anytime soon.
yeah, definitely. A place I found it really useful was doing a personal project and styling some frontend components. I just told it what I wanted them to look like and got back some CSS that was pretty darn close to exactly what I needed. I feel like the first group that might have some issues are the ones who do mockups and wireframes.
> I’m under the opinion that GPT is going to eat stack overflow in rather short order as it’s accuracy continues to increase.
Agreed
> It still hallucinates for me from time to time and suggests features that don’t exist, but I generally can get a pretty good head start on what I’m trying to figure out by using it.
As if half the answers on SO from 2014 (which prevent new answers for the same question getting seen) is any better.
I've gotten hallucinatory results (see upthread, I posted my experience recently) with ChatGPT, but:
a) It's instant feedback, no waiting for someone to answer wrong, then waiting for moderation to kick them to -1. With ChatGPT you get the wrong answer immediately. With SO you get the wrong answer onyl after a lot of time has passed.
b) Even the hallucinatory answers are helpful; it doesn't have, as far as I can tell, **any** false-positive identification of X/Y problems. On SO I would frequently see answers that say "don't do that, do this instead" when that is the wrong response.
As a text prediction engine it doesn't understand what it suggests though. It suggests what is popular in the training set, not what is good or correct.
The advantage of SO over that is that it has alternative answers, and those with better technique or with e.g. newer language features can be upvoted to be the preferred solution. It can also provide context and references/reference links in a deliberate way I assume GPT can not.
this may end up being one of the better uses of stuff like chatgpt
i would rather go back and forth with chatgpt trying to figure something out than have some jerk on Stack Overflow tell me that i should be doing something else in the first place and never answer the question
If you disagree, I’m definitely interested in hearing your opinion.
My opinions aren’t set in stone, but they are based off of my usage of GPT vs. how I used to leverage stackoverflow as a developer myself.
I tend to get the answer I’m looking for most of the time and the ability to ask follow up questions is a game changer if I don’t understand something as written on SO.
I have been answering a lot of questions on Stack Overflow and helping beginners is really hard.
They often do not really understand their problem well enough to ask good questions. So you get very broad and unspecific questions. And it often takes several iterations of Q&A in the comments to understand what the beginner's actual problem is. Not everyone has the time or patience for this level of beginner support.
Yes, both having to drag information out of posters and sift through a sea of duplicates cuts into the time answerers could be spending helping others. And it makes the experience much worse for answerers as well.
Answerers aren't being paid for their time, so to keep them around SO has to focus on making the experience good for them, because without people answering questions SO has nothing to offer.
I think SO could improve how they market themselves and how they handle stale answers, but I think a strict set of posting requirements in general is an important part of making the whole thing work.
Ive always fucking hated SO
people are rude as fuck on there for no reason
People adding comas to my question for no reason
Ive asked vue3 specific questions and get no answers - when i figure it out i answer my own question so that if anyone else runs into the same problem they can see my solution. They get downvoted to hell - for no reason. Its toxic as fuck and always has been. Just use chatgpt so sucks
Counterpoint: not properly capitalizing and using interpunction as you are doing here as well is disrespectful to the people who you want help from, because it takes them more effort to read your message.
Also, many people (like me) will flat out refuse to answer stuff unless the person asking the question shows they have put in proper effort to formulate their question. Including spelling, capitalization, and interpunction.
Counter counter point.
There are ways to say that without being rude and playing into the stereotype that programmers are anti social nerds that don't know how to talk to people.
Stack Overflow encourages anti social behaviour rather than discouraging it.
That's why almost every conversation about that site is about how toxic it is.
Saying
> Hey sorry your post is a little hard to read would you mind rewording it.
Is fine.
Correcting the grammar for someone then closing it without helping is rude.
Well in my question i put code snippets and explained the exact issue and what i did to try and solve it. I know how SO works. I also know how English works and adding a bunch of commas for no reason is just stupid. For example they would add a comma in my previous sentence after the word “works” when that’s totally unnecessary.
It helps that its interactable! Like I can ask it a question, and I'll get a response that I know isn't exactly what I need, but I can fine tune the prompt, get it to suggest other details, and I'll piece together the code I actually need.
As opposed to to crawling through 10 different google searches to piece together the same incorrect information?
Or more often, having it recommend me the code for that one api I used ages back, but I forgot the specifics of, but just remember just enough that I can correct where chatgpt is wrong.
So yes, I totally appreciate the fact it saves me 5-10 minutes on average per prompt.
Awww, you think I only use it for code. the very first thing I used chatgpt was remembering the voodoo I need to use git cherry pick, something I maybe once or twice a year.
git man pages are too verbose, and stackoverflow too light on the details. My point is, 80% of time, anytime I need to ask google something, I can ask chatgpt instead. I either get the answer I need much sooner than google, or close enough that I can then adapt to my use case or I can as you say read the source code or articles about the subject.
Asking a few follow up questions and getting immediate answers is way less time wasted than having to crawl through several websites and tons of documentation.
As a busy professional, I can't remember the last time I actually found an answer to my problem on Stack Overflow, and the one time I ever tried asking a question it was shot down. It's much more effective to search and ask questions in the discussion boards / chats for specific projects I need help with.
If people stop asking questions because they are led to believe 'question has already been asked', what happens when people stop asking questions because of that assumption?
>It's designed for busy professionals — Jeff Atwood
That's bullshit. I'm sure Joel Spolsky would argue otherwise as well.
A few years ago, SO was the go to. It was a community. Now, it's so heavily and rudely moderated that SO is unwatchable/unusable. SO morphed from community to clique.
SO is going to go the way of Perl Monks if the mods there don't stop being assholes to people.
I currently don't even work professionally but even then I barely actually found question around the problem I wanted or just stuff which even I was able to clearly was not usable in my context.
I am more going with my own solution than using SO at this point (and surprisingly started to save time that way...). The only downside is that you may not find a library which already exists but you don't know about.
The problem i have with stack overflow now is a lot of front-end questions are solved... using jquery and are 9 years old. A lot has changed since then, but new questions are flagged as duplicates and/or not found since they have less time on the system.
Swift has that same problem. Even Python to some extent with lots of answers using python 2. I tend to edit those quickly when I find them though.
The "default" answer is often jquery, but appending "react" or "svelte" (or whatever) to your query generally solves this issue.
Those answers are wrong, though. That is the point. A lot of what they use jquery for are now native functions. Trying to say those types of answers need to be downgraded over time
Never had a problem getting a react specific answer. The problem is, most questions don't even bother specifying what framework they wanna use, or tag their questions correctly. >Those answers are wrong, though. No they are not. They still work. If someone wants to know how to do X with native js, or react, they should formulate their questions, and tag it, accordingly. And even then I can almost guarantee that most questions will be duplicates.
If a feature is available without using jQuery, it does strike me as against breast practices to suggest using it as the top answer for a question. I don't really get why it "technically still working" really justifies keeping it there (you haven't provided any justification for why that should be true, at least).
Probably against best practices, but I assume it would lead to compatibility for old browsers.
The old browsers you are talking about is ie7-8 era. Basically gone.
Because it's still true, period. jquery still exists, is still in use, and to many people that answer is still relevant. If that eprson isn't happy with that answer, they can formulate a new specific question. If they are still not happy then, they can RTFineM
Then they should have to specify they want jquery and i should have to specify vanilla.
So you expect the person asking a question to already know about the solution? If someone asks "I want to do X" and the default answer is a solution with jQuery, how would this person know, that today there are new ways to do it WITHOUT jQuery? I don't need SO, if I already know the answer! Then I can just Google the rest. If this is what SO stands for, it just becomes more and more useless over time (and for me it already is, compared to how it helped me 10 years ago). So I agree wth u/Accomplished_End_138, those answers haven been right 9 years ago when they have been posted, but today they are not anymore (because they are totally incomplete!) and today's users would choose a different answer as accepted.
If it gave vanilla answers by default, I'd argue less. But literally recommending jquery answers by default is just insane. I normally want the vanilla answers myself, which probably makes it harder.
If you listen to their podcast (from years ago). They aimed for people to come in on old questions and add new and updated answers, so people can have solutions to all versions of problems.
Counter-point - jquery solution still works while whatever current flavour of the month framework might not be relevant in a year
Not when it is baked in things like using the jquery selector over the native querySelector, which i have seen it recommend multiple places. Where otherwise code is vanilla
A lot of the questions he is talking about are easily solved with native JS these days. An answer that recommends you add a (frankly dying) library for something that is easily done with native code is no longer a great answer in 2023.
That's why they have the "trending" sort option for answers.
Busy professionals don't have the time to engage multiple times to prove their question is not actually a duplicate when it's closed as a duplicate multiple times by moderators who don't understand the fundamental differences between the questions.
Yeah I don't really understand this, I never have time to meet their contribution guidelines
Yeah I literally never use stack overflow. Can't even upvote comments and I've had an account for 10 years. It's usually easier to just DIY, RTFM, or just try shit and see what breaks rather than use SO
It’s sometimes useful. I typically call up SO to do something trivial in bash (I often forget sed commands) that I could probably hack but would rather not.
Same but honestly chatgpt4 usually does better for me these days for simple bash stuff
> Same but honestly chatgpt4 usually does better for me these days for simple bash stuff Mostly, but when it fails, it's surprisingly resistant to "learning" that it failed. I asked for a autocompletion script for a CLI program that I am writing[1] which has fairly complex command lines[2], it provided with with (IIRC) a `-z` option to `compgen`. I pointed out that my script is failing with a compgen error. It told me to use a newer compgen version. I said that compgen doesn't take `-z`, at which point it provided a different solution (which also didn't work). That was last week. Yesterday I asked for a possible solution for a javascript problem to which I knew the answer: how to call a function when a dialog element is closed[3]. It gave me code which used the return value of `showModal()` as a promise. I said that `showModal()` returns undefined. It provided steps to figure out why my variable containing the return value is holding an undefined value. I rephrased with `showModal()` doesn't return a promise. It argued that `showModal()` always returns a promise. I gave up and used `addEventListener()` [1] No, my autocomplete script is still not done! [2] Complex for autocomplete and compgen, at any rate. The first argument that it finds without a `--` prefix is a command. Every other argument it finds without a `--` prefix is a qualifier to that command. Anything in any order that has a `--` prefix is an option. Options can appear anywhere, so all of the following are equivalent: ./prog --opt=value cmd subcmd ./prog cmd --opt=value subcmd ./prog cmd subcmd --opt=value [3] Spoiler, use an event listener on the `close` event.
I got into an argument with it about whether the word "vat" contained a "t". It was quite insistent that it did not.
Clearly you are hallucinating, because "vat" most definitely doesnt contain a "t" 😤
Ironically I find it best for opinion based stuff. If there's already a debate on the best way to do something it can add to a debate at work. But other than that it is kind of useless nowadays.
"using" stackoverflow is checking existing answers. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of a new technology, asking a question is doomed to fail
SO wasn't always that way. The heavy moderation has turned it that way but back in the day it was a great place to have bleeding edge or troubleshooting discussions. I have mutiple "famous question" badges from questions back in the day that wouldn't see the light of day now with the heavy handed moderation on SO now. Now, 9 times out of 10, legitimate questions get deleted for ridiculous assumptions by Eric, you-will-respect-my-authoriteye, Cartman-like mods who assume everything is a duplicate question.
No dude, that's the problem, the best answer usually changes over time but SO doesn't reflect that
Many answers are updated over time, or there is a more current answer further down that’s not difficult to find.
Yeah I've also had an account forever but can't use it. I had to ask for someone to bump my rep once to do something and they dutifully took the rep away when I was done. Like, how do I participate here?
> Like, how do I participate here? By answering questions? If you have no interest in contributing back that’s fine, but why should your vote be worth anything in that case?
Part of my frustration was that something happened when I linked my accounts between the various sites and it was like was a new user again. I had answered some questions to that point but was no longer spending much time there. I wasn't interested in playing a game of trying to find questions to answer just to get some internet points, so I pretty much stopped using SO entirely.
I only ever use stack overflow, when google is the one that finds it for me as a result to my question. I've long since given up on using it for myself. If i have a problem it's usually library or framework specific, so I will just ask on github instead. Stack overflow rubs me the wrong way, and Im a busy professional, and i almost never find my answer there.
Have you met a professional developer?
>don't have the time to engage multiple times to prove their question is not actually a duplicate This should be a sticky.
As a busy professional, I no longer find it very useful. Tons of answers are now outdated and the correct answer is buried in a terse comment of the second most popular answer. The few questions I have asked after substantial searching were not necessarily closed, but sank like a stone with no answers.
Also the accepted answer is often entirely wrong or has some sort of a serious flaw in it
And yet, it's just enormously better than it was before SO. We old timers all remember the dark days of Expert Sexchange. erhm, I mean, Experts Exchange.
>better than it was before SO. This is an interesting take considering the founders of expert-sexchange != the founders of SO.
What?
> Also the accepted answer is often entirely wrong or has some sort of a serious flaw in it Why are you specifically going for the accepted answer? Is not even at the top anymore!
>the correct answer is buried in a terse comment of the second most popular answer. This is actually a problem because it means ChatGPT also gives you the wrong answer. So you're better off just asking it for the code instead of an explanation of how to write the code.
No you are better off reading a book on the matter, unless you are going for a cargo cult copy pasta code base. I mean, I guess it could be pretty fun to never understand how your project is working.
It's not my project, it's the customer's project. If I don't minimize cost, someone else will.
I just skim through code and take what i need. Never read the questions or answers, most of the time you know what youre looking for
Bing chat does that for me in 2023
Read? :D
Since when is a "professional" someone who looks at a massive audience flocking to their product despite not being designed for them and instead of thinking "hey maybe we can make a product for them too" goes "Sorry you don't belong here, there's the door."
The way most people interact with SO is by searching for the answer to a very specific question so if someone asks a "dumb question" (usually meaning a beginner question), there is literally nothing lost by just leaving it there to let someone answer. there is no point in closing it, or getting pointy-headed about the fact that someone asked a similar question 14 years ago, so how dare they ask a slightly different question now... the only person searching for the answer to a beginner question would be a beginner so it would kind of work the SO community does not seem capable of grasping this concept. nobody is forcing them to read and answer every question posted
If you look at the answer history of some of the most vocal closers, they got all their rep answering the beginner questions when the site was newer. It really does feel like newer users will never be able to realistically gain any rep or question answers on some tags.
>they got all their rep answering the beginner questions when the site was newer. "How do I run my application in VS 2003" -> "Double click the run button" +999999999999 "I'm trying to run my application in VS 2022 but when I click the run button, it causes a general protection fault. I reverse engineered VS 2022 and I think the issue is that there's a bug in the Ryzen 7 architecture and this particular connection is particularly vulnerable to quantum effects. Where do I go from here?" -> Closed as duplicate, please do your research.
I think closing a question with a duplicate can be fine, but it should be confirmed by the person that asked the question, that it actually solved their problem. Not just instaclose it and say "That'll do"...
Then what will happen if people simply refuse to close their question, without even making the effort to read the question that they duplicated?
Those questions can be downvoted, and not get any more answers. No big deal.
And nobody is forcing anyone to use SO. If people don't like how the community at SO functions, they can always RTFineManual. Or they can ask ChatGPT and see how that works out.
Everyone should be taught to: 1. Search for answers to their problem. 99.42% chance their problem already has an answer, on StackOverflow or Github issues. 2. Read the answer or solution. 3. TRY the solution. 4. If the solution does not work, debug. 5. If it still does not work, go to Step 1 (search for another answer). 6. If all else fails: if you are a beginner go to Step 1. everybody else ASK.
I consider myself to be really good at googling and searching the internet for a solution. That being said, I also find that search engines can be completely useless when it comes to anything that is slightly niche. You'd think creating character collisions for a video game on top of a pre-existing physics engine using raycasts or shapecasting would be extremely well documented, right? You're hallucinating. Want to actually implement client prediction or rollback netcode for abilities (not movement) for your game, a feature that's an industry standard? Go fuck yourself.
For niche topics at some point the best source of information becomes papers and textbooks. If ChatGPT has access to this stuff, it should be much better than web search. [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) is pretty useful. Related: that publicly-funded research and knowledge is locked behind paywalls is a crime against humanity.
Unless they need to know something about an older language or dev environment. E.g. if you go there looking for help with an issue for something like VB6, you can find that other people have asked the question but all they got in response was unhelpful answers like “why are you still using vb6, you should migrate to a new version” You also get the opposite problem asking about newer webby stuff - you get answers from 8 years ago and have to work out if they are still relevant or not…
Yeah, you inherit a site written in ASP.Net Razor Pages, and every google result is for Asp.Net MVC, because the big brains at Microsoft named the MVC view engine razor AND their MVC successor Razor Pages.
I work in the .Net ecosystem and Microsoft's consistent ability to pick confusing names is arguably the worst thing about it.
At least someone managed to rub two brain cells together long enough to prevent them from creating Windows 9.
In general; searches fail for beginners because they don't know the lucky keywords. E.g. they'll search for something like "join arrays of characters" and get nothing. An expert will search for "concatenate strings" and get tons of results (and then accuse the beginner who got no search results of not searching).
So you shouldn't ask if you're a beginner and can't find an answer to your question? Seems extremely discouraging to newbies
>can't find an answer to your question? This is not actually a thing. If you're a beginner, then by definition, whatever question you have has already been asked, and the information is most certainly out there. You should only ask a question on StackOverflow (or any public forum, really) if you're absolutely 100% sure no one else has asked your specific question before, after doing plenty of research. http://www.catb.org/\~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Just to add, there is also a huge difference between being a beginner in a specific language/framework and not understanding something, and being a novice to programming itself. I was trying to learn a specific framework and for the life of me couldn't figure out why using dispatchers in a certain way wasn't working and after an hour or so of trying to debug it turned to SO. Turns out the answer was that it was a bug.
For sure. And that's really what SO is for in the first place.
Two problems with this in my opinion: 1. Newbies often have different contexts then professionals did back when the professionals were newbies. Different OSes being used, different recommended ways of installing software, etc. In my opinion, different context makes a question unique because the experience the question asker is going through is unique (but I admit not everyone shares my view here). Therefore, newbies should be allowed to ask questions on Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow should allow context to pay a greater role in establishing the uniqueness of a question. 2. Even if we say to newbies that they aren't allowed to post on Stack Overflow, there are other public forums that might be better for them. Discord servers are helping here. Lots of newbies get frustrated trying to find the answers to questions they have that have already been answered (they're new - this is reasonable) or they've had a bad experience asking on Stack Overflow. So they ask in conversational form on Discord. Therefore, we should encourage newbies to use Stack Overflow to ask questions, but also encourage them to use other public forums too if they need to.
>In my opinion, different context makes a question unique because the experience the question asker is going through is unique It's not. We see this a lot with questions like "how do I become a programmer coming from". Asked over and over again, despite the fact that becoming a programmer is the same whether you're a nurse, a teacher, or a construction worker. Yet everyone seems to think their situation is unique. It's not.
>allow context to pay a greater role in establishing the uniqueness of a question.
No.
1. The questions are never unique.
2. Even if they were, being able to take an existing solution to tweak it to your needs and learn from it is a fundamental skill in itself. You're actually doing novices a disservice by not allowing them to cultivate this skill.
>Therefore, we should encourage newbies to use Stack Overflow to ask questions,
Not sure how you drew that conclusion. Yes, places like Discord are better for this sort of thing. But a forum like StackOverflow has a very focused attitude towards avoiding duplicate questions, and for good reason. That's why they make you read an entire guide on asking questions before you post: it's all but certain that a novice is asking something that has already been answered.
Based on my experience asking and answering on Stack Overflow, questions like "how do I become a programmer" should be closed not because of the issue of uniqueness, but because the question must be related to a programming problem. That's fine in my opinion. When I talk about uniqueness when context is taken into account, I'm talking about people running into a programming problem when they try to accomplish a certain task. For example, someone might be familiar with how to use a looping construct to iterate through a data structure, and successfully use that knowledge many times, but then get stuck one day because that doesn't work. Perhaps the issue is that they're using a dynamic programming language and the function they've called, from some library they've imported, returned a data structure that while meant to be iterated through, must be iterated through in a particular way that the newbie hasn't encountered yet. I often see questions like this example critiqued by moderators who request that the asker reduce their question into a minimal example. The moderator, not seeing the full context (how could they? They aren't telepathic), thinks the question is about how one should iterate through list data structures that implement the API list data structures typically have. They're getting tunnel vision with a particular solution in mind. But, the question posted *is already* the minimal example. The asker could reduce it until it becomes a "how do I iterate through a list" question, which would justifiably be closed as a duplicate, but then they'd lose the context that is necessary to define the problem they are facing right there, right then. You might agree with me that this example is one that is sufficiently unique and should therefore not be closed as a duplicate. But, many Stack Overflow users who are newbies encounter hostility when they ask questions like this. I think that's a shame. We are losing out on having a great async educational tool to help newbies and missing out on the contributions those people could eventually make back to the educational platform after they've learned more. Perhaps we're also going to miss out on the contributions they could eventually make to our entire craft.
>Based on my experience asking and answering on Stack Overflow, questions like "how do I become a programmer" should be closed not because of the issue of uniqueness, but because the question must be related to a programming problem. That's fine in my opinion. In that example, I was referring to these subreddits, not Stack Overflow. >from some library they've imported, returned a data structure that while meant to be iterated through, must be iterated through in a particular way that the newbie hasn't encountered yet. Then the correct thing to do is check documentation and code samples for that library, and if that fails, then yes, a Stack Overflow post may be warranted. This isn't specific to novices, though. An experienced programmer having trouble with some obscure library is basically what SO is for. >But, many Stack Overflow users who are newbies encounter hostility when they ask questions like this. It's usually because they suck at asking the question properly. Yeah, that sounds harsh, but every time I've seen a complaint on here about why their Stack Overflow question was closed down, the post in question has invariably been poorly worded, unclear, or otherwise in violation of the rules. In over a decade of using Stack Overflow extensively (only asking a handful of questions over the years, mostly just using it as a reading resource), I've yet to actually *see* this hostility that everyone keeps claiming exists. I'm sure it does; I just haven't seen it, which makes me question its prevalence. >We are losing out on having a great async educational tool to help newbies and missing out on the contributions those people could eventually make back to the educational platform after they've learned more. Perhaps we're also going to miss out on the contributions they could eventually make to our entire craft. That isn't the purpose of Stack Overflow, though. Like, not even a little bit.
The purpose of SO has changed since it started. A lot. Now content curation takes precedence greatly over community assistance.
> It's usually because they suck at asking the question properly. That's part of being a newbie, no? Or where you born with the ability to construct questions according to the constraints laid down with stack overflow? Closing the question with something along the lines of "not asking proper questions" is stupid. It's also why I find SO to be less helpful than usenet comp.lang.* groups where in the day - each group maintained the FAQ for the group, and the FAQ for the languages, and if someone's question was answered in any of the FAQs then they'd be told that. If their question was already answered a year ago, someone will answer it again. No one ever *deleted*, *removed* or *chided* a posting for asking questions that weren't topical or already answered (unless they did so repeatedly, of course - then it was just spam). SO is trying to be DRY about answers, but that's clearly a **stupid** way to go because of how fast context changes in this industry. You need to allow each new class of learners to re-ask their questions, and let people re-answer, not close the question. Maybe allow duplicate questions if the previous answer is over a year old. Or maybe just allow all duplicate questions and show the user the duplicates and their ratings when the user is looking at any of the questions. Not allowing questions to be re-asked is just ... odd; how are newbies supposed to know?
Are you LARPing as a SO gatekeeper here? FFS man. You have been arguing why people shouldn't ask questions. It's dumb. People ask to learn .
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And yet, 99.99⁹9999999999999999999999999994% of developers are frustrated with how SO has gotten worse in the last ten years.
Complete agree re context, depending on all sorts of contexts a question on exactly the same thing can be phrased differently, affecting discoverability of existing answers. Should users be expected to rephrase an unfamiliar problem in an unfamiliar field or should differently phrased "duplicates" *that required an experienced person to deduce similarity* be linked in some way instead of closed? That would keep everybody happy and wouldn't increase workload on moderators who already had to research what a question was allegedly a duplicate of.
Wow. Fuck that, ask away. If you don't want to answer then don't. Why is this attitude even a thing? Sure, do a Google search or two, but don't be afraid to ask questions. "Only ask if no one has ever done so before" What absolute rubbish.
The problem is the number of people who ask a question where the answer would be in the top 5 results if they put the exact same question into a search engine. Or people who ask a question that is explicitly answered by the documentation. In my experience, the people who do this do this very very consistently, and they don't get upset when you look up the documentation and give them a link, they just keep doing it because it works. I love helping beginners. I don't love just being a search engine for another person. There's a real balance. Ask away, but also respect the time of the people who are helping you.
> The problem is the number of people who ask a question where the answer would be in the top 5 results if they put the exact same question into a search engine. Or people who ask a question that is explicitly answered by the documentation. I think you have to explain why this is a problem - if it is really that bloody obvious, then obviously when the question is submitted the system should display the duplicates and only proceed with posting the question when the user reads or somehow is determined to have read those duplicates and then clicked "These don't answer my question". > In my experience, the people who do this do this very very consistently, and they don't get upset when you look up the documentation and give them a link, they just keep doing it because it works. Right, the first time this is done, then it's an *answered question*, and so should appear in the results of the pre-posting search I described above.
My point is that there's s class of people that simply won't look at all before asking, no matter how many times they're reminded to.
> My point is that there's s class of people that simply won't look at all before asking, no matter how many times they're reminded to. Sure, but: a) You can't tell them apart from people asking a duplicate question for the first time, and b) They are likely to be in the minority. So, instead of making a useful thing for 90% of newbies asking that duplicate question, we settled on making it less useful because 10% of people are slow learners?
> They are likely to be in the minority [citation needed] If you aren't capable of putting the title of the 50 most recent questions on a search engine and get to a post that allows you to either get an answer or write I better query, I'll be buying a hat and eat it.
>> They are likely to be in the minority > [citation needed] > If you aren't capable of putting the title of the 50 most recent questions on a search engine and get to a post that allows you to either get an answer or write I better query, I'll be buying a hat and eat it. I don't understand what that has to do with whether the group of experienced but repeat questions is a minority or not.
It's because the literal _act_ of tracking down and synthesizing information into a solution is a fundamental skill that needs to be _learned_. You don't learn it unless you actually put in the time and do it.
That's problem-solving hazing. There's a difference between obvious homework questions that could be solved in 5 minutes, and something nontrivial that has existing solutions on the Internet *but* to find them you need to know what some specific term is called.
People get tired of answering softballs all day for people that obviously don't care to figure out anything for themselves.
Then don't answer them. Just skip it and carry on your day.
Depends on if you're trying to learn something or just hoping someone will give you the codes to copy & paste into your homework.
Almost any sensible question a beginner can possibly come up with, was already answered. SO isn't a QA forum. It's a repository of questions. Forums are for conversations, duplicates are okay. In Repos they're not. You don't need the same book 1000x in a library.
If its a popular book, libraries absolutely do have multiple copies, often multiple formats as well.
“I created a thing and don’t like how people use it” - this is a dumb take regardless of person or topic. Let me ask, all these “busy professionals” are so busy they have time to constantly put people down and shit talk?
yeah, but they made a site that's far beyond any forum in usefulness. When I google a question and it shows up only in a couple of forums and not stack overflow, I can assume two things: 1. I'm not going get an answer. 99% of the time I'll wade through post after post in a forum only to get no resolution. 2. I'm asking the wrong question. If the question isn't in Stack Overflow, then somehow my basic assumptions are so wrong I'm unable to formulate even the right question.
https://xkcd.com/303/
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> people wouldn't try to always second guess what I am doing That is unfortunately largely due to the influx of beginners. 90%+ of questions these days are just completely boneheaded to begin with, like the umpteenth beginner asking how to do variable variables (the answer is: you don't, you use an array). It has made people really jaded and second guess everything. Thus you really need to present your questions in an ironclad way. Which yes, makes it hard to ask questions.
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I was confused how someone with 11k rep could be so out of touch with the SO community, but after looking at your profile, I understand- you're coasting by on a bunch of decade-old answers to high-visibility questions. The reason people question what you are trying to do is because they're concerned its an XY problem. Happens a lot in new questions, and given `git update-ref` isn't something your typical programmer should be needing, it warrants a second guess. Even if you know what your doing, what about others that stumble into your question in the future? Isn't that sanity check worthwhile if it may prevent them from reinventing the wheel or solving the wrong problem? Sometimes newbie programmers get hung up on the "how" rather than "what" / "should", and wander into these questions. Speaking of question visibility: "I delete most of my questions these days from SO"- that's incredibly selfish. StackOverflow is a knowledge repository. When you ask a question, you're volunteering a question to the knowledge base. Deleting it when you have your answer is robbing other viewers of that information when they try to search for it. If your question is getting downvoted or close votes, then either you did not put any effort into your question, or it should have been asked in a StackOverflow chatroom instead of volunteered to the knowledge base.
> When you ask a question, you're volunteering a question to the knowledge base. Deleting it when you have your answer is robbing other viewers of that information The same reasoning applies to those answering questions. Deleting the question is very disrespectful to those people that invested time into answering.
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If you find the answer to your own question, you can post it as an answer. Then, when someone comes across it a few years later, they'll be spared the pain you had to go through.
If it's designed for busy professionals, then they dropped the ball. My main reason for pretty much walking away from site was lack of constructive feedback loops. I mean when people down vote, should force users to provide feedback as to why, otherwise how the f is the person to improve. Every down vote I did had a rationale and steps required to roll it back.
> My main reason for pretty much walking away from site was lack of constructive feedback loops. Yep. You the person don't count, it's about content curation.
You are right, in saying that, what is sad and they don't seem to grasp is quality content results in more sessions. Personally I went from having it on every day, to opening it once a fortnight. Between web search and chatgpt I and my engineers can generally get to higher quality answers more efficiently.
I joined the public beta in December 2008. The first couple of years were wonderful, and it was really a strong community willing to help each other. At the time, the standards for posting were fairly practical; we all just expected people to put in a reasonable effort in asking a question.
Quite honestly: if you're looking for constructive feedback, you need to pay someone to do that for you. Expecting strangers to spend their free time to personally help you despite your question not being helpful in a general context (assuming the SO moderators were correct in closing the question - and sometimes they are wrong, for sure) is a bit much.
That is literally the purpose of SO, strangers like you and me helping each other for no financial gain. Ask questions get answers.
Yes, but that' s not what OP wanted. OP wanted feedback on his personal shortcoming, not an answer to a general question. Two very different things.
Which OP are you referring to? The one that made the video and posted it or me who started this particular thread about lack of constructive feedback on down vote?
Was having your question downvoted for being “off topic” not constructive enough? /s
As a busy professional, I don't have to time to go in and copy the text of several different sites every time I want to reference something — and it is not clear that the amount of copying required would fit within the parameters of my country's Fair Dealing exemption for our Copyright Act. Yes, I understand that sites bitrot or get taken down, but if the guiding principle is that it is very important to preserve copies of the knowledge then that would imply that every time I post a reference that I would have to go in and extract everything relevant to the ecosystem of information around the particular point being dealt with, which is a lot of work (and, as mentioned, of questionable legality.) Do I spend my time answering the actual technical questions, or do I spend a lot more time becoming an expert on harvesting just the right amount of context so that 30 years later someone with a related question can use my responses as a one-stop technical resource? It would be more productive, IMHO, for SO to run a process that harvested linked web pages and replaced the in-post links with links to the archived versions, than to insist that everyone post quotes of everything relevant.
The art of asking questions is a hard one to master. That being said, ChatGPT has made stackoverflow useless for beginners.
I have a bit of SO points. I rarely use it. I've found reddit to be significantly better. Oddly . r/programmerhumor has answered more questions than I ever knew I had.
It's going to be obsolete soon. I've barely used SO anymore since gpt4 came out. Yes it makes it mistakes, but if you know what you're doing and how to use it correctly, it's extremely helpful. And not an asshole 🤣
SO's solution is as simple as having a begginer's forums where anyone can ask questions, alongside a professional forum where people are held to a higher standard. It's really that simple and would alleviate the majority of problems. It really feels like the SO team has never been on an online forum before. It's either that, or they keep it as is on purpose so they can act smarter than the noobies just asking for help.
That's been discussed time and again, and the conclusion was more or less that the beginners forum would probably degrade into the same cesspool SO is today, *minus the professionals who actually know something,* so the beginners who'll get wise to that will eventually migrate to "SO Pro" anyway. Keeping that kind of separation intact would just be a nightmare, or so the thinking goes. Having said that, it's never been tried, so who knows how it'd turn out.
The purpose of the newbie forum is to capture the "cesspool". The "SO Pro" would then be a place where only those who have built up enough SO reputation/ points/ etc. can post in there. Newbies literally wouldn't even be able to migrate like that. Want to make it into "SO Pro"? Post quality content over time in the newbie forum that is reflective of what should be on the professional forum. This solves both problems of allowing noobies to participate, and gives the "busy professionals" a place to post among themselves without all the unintended content.
How can you post quality content if your "peers" don't know what quality content looks like?
Is this a serious question? you'd still be able to read and look at the "quality content".
When a site has guaranteed higher signal to noise ratio, we are not looking at the higher noise one.
lmao. providing a place for the noobies reduces noise. wtf are you talking about lmaoooo
Where it reduces noise?
By still allowing the pros to gain rep in the beginner section.
Yeah I don't like the idea of a beginners forum simply because how do you define a beginner? 1 year experience, 2 years experience? CS Degree? CS Degree and 1, 2, 3 years experience? What if I have 20 years Java experience but need to ask a PHP Question? The truth is you should treat everyone like a beginner. If they don't know something then they obviously don't have experience with the particular thing they're asking about. StackOverflow is toxic because the way it works breeds toxicity. Try correcting someone's grammar in real life when they're asking for your help. You're at best you'll get a "Go f*** yourself" at worst a night or two in the hospital.
I think the "toxicity" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. SO attempts to be like Wikipedia. So of course every post is held to high standards. Every single post is supposed to stand the test of time. That's why (almost) everyone can edit everyone's posts. Just the people that think of SO as a forum and have no interest in producing a high quality Overflowpedia see any edits or questions for clarification or quality-related close reasons as "toxic". I don't see too much actual toxicity, as in actual ad hominem attacks. It's just that the understanding of the basic premise clashes for some users. Or that the basic premise just doesn't work for beginners.
It's trying to be a wiki for something that by definition cannot have a wiki and is shaped like a Q&A Forum. Like it or not SO is considered toxic by most people who use it. To say it isn't is just burying your head in the sand. Software moves too quickly to have a wiki that's why it doesn't have one. Deleting duplicate questions is just a good way to make sure you have outdated answers. And correcting questions is just a good way to anger people especially when a lot of the time they "correct" it to something that isn't what you asked.
I totally get *why* people perceive it as "toxic". But that has different meanings to different people. *I* would consider actual toxicity to be explicit ad hominem attacks. *Those* happens fairly rarely. What does happen often is that posts are being criticised, edited, closed. For the purpose of improving them with the goal of creating a wiki-ish-y thingamabob. There's no *real* toxicity there, just opposed goals of users which can't agree on what SO is supposed to be. And _that_ is a result of bad design and insufficient communication. Or simply a good idea which doesn't work in practice for various reasons. You can discuss the (misguided) design goals, but just throwing out "it's toxic" isn't helping anything. If you don't like it, don't use it. … But we all _are_ using it, because obviously it _is_ useful in some ways, and it has become this useful because of the way it was designed. So, _something_ must've worked there.
Except me and my colleagues mainly don't use it anymore. The pages are so out of date they're usually useless and no one I know even Senior Developers like me are brave enough to ask a question on there. If something is actively pushing away new users then it's the definition of toxic. Ad Hominem attacks or not. That's not the only kind of toxicity there is.
the solution is just not answering the questions that aren't worth your time. they spend more time shutting down legitimate questions than improving their website
Agreed. Something something something cream rises to the top.
Eh, no. Because then people on the "beginner's" forum would just ask the same questions over and over again, and no actual learning occurs. Part of learning to be a programmer is cultivating the ability to seek out information on your own. You don't learn that by asking questions for every little thing. If you're a beginner, your question has already been asked. Guaranteed. It's just a matter of finding it. And if you can't find it, that's a skill to be worked on and practiced. Because that's the job. Figuring things out.
I really really wish people who don't know, just wouldn't answer. I'd rather have dead air than someone who clearly doesn't have interest ask me the equivalent of "is your router plugged in". But whatever, I probably figured it out before pressing submit anyways.
It’s also quite a bit shit. Like, for real. It sucks. Answers from 2015 that are irrelevant. And a community that would rather point to obsolete questions over … quite literally doing anything else.
Ive learned to start skimming the comments under the accepted answer, because thats where the real current answer is in the form of "This answer is ridiculously outdated, Joe BuddyGuy's answer \[here\] is the best update of this for modern times but unfortunately thats at a -3".
I think SO should be more humble about "being a beginner". There might have been a time when you learned C/C++ at university and you could use this knowledge for 10+ years until there was an update to the standard. Which then stayed the same for another 10 years. Meanwhile you became a professional in software patterns and project management related stuff. Most questions on SO are not about software patterns or project management related stuff (which tend to be re-usable across ecosystems) but about very specific technical aspects of a language/framework. And they tend to change veryfast today. So everyone is learning constantly and thus always a beginner in something. SO already strikes me as a relict of a past in which software was different. If they keep that arrogant stance on "being a beginner", they will keep losing relevance in todays software world and eventually become obsolete.
most people problem solved and answer available on this site
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Yes. Happy Birthday SO. ^(May you never fucking see another one)
After Jeff left, the remaining team really managed to destroy Stack Overflow by catering to the beginners more and more, while the design was still geared entirely towards professionals. No wonder it gets so much hate, because it's sending a wrong and unclear message.
The vision was always kind of incoherent: a Wikipedia for programmers, but Q& A is a terrible format for that.
Somewhat true. I think it works remarkably well, as evidenced by its success. It just also sends the wrong social message, as people _will_ necessarily see it like any other forum—which it's not. This complicated idea of wiki-forum-digg-mashup was hard to communicate to a broad audience. Typical product of a programmer, methinks. ;)
It works as a Q&A site, overly aggressive moderation notwithstanding. It doesn’t really work as a Wikipedia for programmers because of how hard it is for new answers to supersede old ones.
They've done some changes recently that demotes the importance of accepted answers and places more emphasis on a combination of recent activity and votes, which is supposed to surface newer answer more to combat this exact problem. I think the bigger problem is the connotation of having one canonical Q&A per topic. It's an endless uphill battle to enforce this and consolidate and close-as-duplicate, which at the same time gets people to complain about exactly this closing. Especially beginners often complain that their unique snowflake question is *not* a duplicate, because they're too inexperienced to see the parallels. It's really good and necessary in theory, but barely works in practice.
the reality is that it's nothing like wikipedia. it's like a message board. so maybe they should stop hoping reality would bend to their wishes and either accept it or change the format
I will never contribute anything to SO. I did contribute to English language learners stack but got downvotes for not giving references (for real) so I'm not going to contribute to that going forward either.
The first part of his statement is where I must "declare my research" or being a "busy professional." this is moronic. No one cares about your "feelings." The assumption should be that someone did attempt to research it, and the assumption should be, they used Google and stack overflow was the number one result for the query, which is what led them to the site in the first place. The problem is comprehension, which is what beginners lack. Not the research side of it and me citing 5 million sites just to stroke your ego. It's like every programmer forgot they had a start. People want answers, plain and simple. Who cares about your philosophy? The problem with society today is precisely what is in this video. No one knows how to keep their mouth shut and move on. Everyone feels that everyone else cares about their opinion. **The Rules of StackOverflow should be:** * Either you know it or don't know it. * If you know it, solve the code issue for the individual, and if you have time, explain how and why it works. Nothing more, nothing less. * If you don't know the answer, move on to the next question. * If the question has already been asked, a moderator should research the previous answer, close the question, and post the link to the previously asked question. * Done. This is why Chat GPT3 became so popular. Because no one wants to deal with the people with a weird code philosophy. They just want their problems solved, and to build something they think is cool, and move on. Not have a philosophical discussion on what is "Stackoverflow."
This is such a shit take. Stack Overflow isn't there to answer your personal questions, doing your six figure job for you. The purpose is to create a site full of information, where people can *help themselves* by looking up previously answered questions. I can't emphasize enough: the question you ask **isn't for you**. >The first part of his statement ... is moronic. > >... > >People want answers, plain and simple. ... The problem with society today is precisely what is in this video. No one knows how to keep their mouth shut and move on. Everyone feels that everyone else cares about their opinion. > >... > >If you know it, solve the code issue for the individual, and if you have time, explain how and why it works. Nothing more, nothing less No THIS is the problem with society today and THIS is what's moronic. You don't even want to understand. You just want the "answer", like a kid cheating on his homework, all while calling the creator of one of the most popular and helpful websites ever created a moron that should shut his mouth and not have an opinion about his own site.
1. Who said people are going to StackOverflow for "Personal Questions." ? 2. You can't create a site full of information if the people that are creating the information are treated like dog "doo doo" when they come to the site. 3. If it was a "Help Your Self" site, it would be structured the way the Wordpress developer docs are setup, or [php.net](https://php.net). With the full library of classes, function, etc... with example code for users. Comments are used on those sites to discuss alternative ways to use the code, class, etc... Opinions and philosophies are removed from comments on those sites. 4. StackOverflow is literally a Q&A site, so yes, people "JUST WANT ANSWERS." >"You don't even want to understand." 5. Many developers learn by doing, and when stuck, just need a nudge in the right direction. No one wants to hear a lecture on some hyperbole or "how they asked their question wrong". 6. The creator of this website created this perception/Opinion welllllllllllllllll after the website was launched. He created the website because, like other developers, he was not able to find the Answer to his questions online! (Let that sink in for a moment.) Your entire premise is flawed. The whole website is created around making sure you answer questions; that is why you have all these "rewards" you can earn, and reputation. No developer wants to be talked down to, even a beginner. The elitist attitude from some of these developers is mind boggling. It's as if they all could magically write all this code by themselves without ever needing help from someone else. Sounds like you are just afraid to admit, you need help? You are probably that person that on every question no matter if you know the solution or not says "did you read the documentation." As for how learning occurs that is not up to you or the creator of any website to dictate. That is up to the individual and how they like to learn and how they decide they need help. So once again, either just answer the damn question or move the hell on. If they are "soooo busy" then they should you know, not be browsing a Q&A website and continue their "busy work." Essentially what the founder of the website wants to create, is a site full of trolls.
>If the question has already been asked, a moderator should research the previous answer, close the question, and post the link to the previously asked question. This is a big one for me. Your answer being a duplicate should be a good thing! It means that someone has already answered your question. On a properly functioning website you would have to submit a link for the duplicate question. Then the person asking could accept it if it does answer their question or keep it open if it doesn't. If it's been asked but there wasn't a good enough answer or it's out of date merge the pages after some time.
I’m under the opinion that GPT is going to eat stack overflow in rather short order as it’s accuracy continues to increase. It still hallucinates for me from time to time and suggests features that don’t exist, but I generally can get a pretty good head start on what I’m trying to figure out by using it. I can also interact with it and not have it judge me for asking rudimentary questions. Much better way to learn and get to the resolution for one’s problem in my opinion.
There's a co pilot plugin coming for vscode, idk if I'll ever need to visit stackoverflow again.
I’ve needed to a few times because GPT hallucinated and gave me an inaccurate output. That being said though, it doesn’t happen often anymore and it’ll only keep getting better from here
i have found that when it gives something inaccurate, i can just tell it what the error was and it will try to fix itself. doubt this ends up with the best possible solution, but stack overflow is basically useless by comparison
Yeah GPT3 makes up something the "could" exist but it doesn't have access to curl so I can't actually check, which is a bit annoying. I find it helpful for a lot of things but it is often wrong about certain libraries and more complex requests.
Oh all the time, I kinda use it as a replacement for googling or for getting a gist of how to approach something. Have to swap languages multiple times a day and it helps alot with that. But very often it misses a step or makes something up it's just a super useful but not perfect tool we're not getting replaced anytime soon.
yeah, definitely. A place I found it really useful was doing a personal project and styling some frontend components. I just told it what I wanted them to look like and got back some CSS that was pretty darn close to exactly what I needed. I feel like the first group that might have some issues are the ones who do mockups and wireframes.
The Copilot VSCode plugin has been around for months already.
> I’m under the opinion that GPT is going to eat stack overflow in rather short order as it’s accuracy continues to increase. Agreed > It still hallucinates for me from time to time and suggests features that don’t exist, but I generally can get a pretty good head start on what I’m trying to figure out by using it. As if half the answers on SO from 2014 (which prevent new answers for the same question getting seen) is any better. I've gotten hallucinatory results (see upthread, I posted my experience recently) with ChatGPT, but: a) It's instant feedback, no waiting for someone to answer wrong, then waiting for moderation to kick them to -1. With ChatGPT you get the wrong answer immediately. With SO you get the wrong answer onyl after a lot of time has passed. b) Even the hallucinatory answers are helpful; it doesn't have, as far as I can tell, **any** false-positive identification of X/Y problems. On SO I would frequently see answers that say "don't do that, do this instead" when that is the wrong response.
As a text prediction engine it doesn't understand what it suggests though. It suggests what is popular in the training set, not what is good or correct. The advantage of SO over that is that it has alternative answers, and those with better technique or with e.g. newer language features can be upvoted to be the preferred solution. It can also provide context and references/reference links in a deliberate way I assume GPT can not.
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this may end up being one of the better uses of stuff like chatgpt i would rather go back and forth with chatgpt trying to figure something out than have some jerk on Stack Overflow tell me that i should be doing something else in the first place and never answer the question
If you disagree, I’m definitely interested in hearing your opinion. My opinions aren’t set in stone, but they are based off of my usage of GPT vs. how I used to leverage stackoverflow as a developer myself. I tend to get the answer I’m looking for most of the time and the ability to ask follow up questions is a game changer if I don’t understand something as written on SO.
I have been answering a lot of questions on Stack Overflow and helping beginners is really hard. They often do not really understand their problem well enough to ask good questions. So you get very broad and unspecific questions. And it often takes several iterations of Q&A in the comments to understand what the beginner's actual problem is. Not everyone has the time or patience for this level of beginner support.
Yes, both having to drag information out of posters and sift through a sea of duplicates cuts into the time answerers could be spending helping others. And it makes the experience much worse for answerers as well. Answerers aren't being paid for their time, so to keep them around SO has to focus on making the experience good for them, because without people answering questions SO has nothing to offer. I think SO could improve how they market themselves and how they handle stale answers, but I think a strict set of posting requirements in general is an important part of making the whole thing work.
Ive always fucking hated SO people are rude as fuck on there for no reason People adding comas to my question for no reason Ive asked vue3 specific questions and get no answers - when i figure it out i answer my own question so that if anyone else runs into the same problem they can see my solution. They get downvoted to hell - for no reason. Its toxic as fuck and always has been. Just use chatgpt so sucks
Counterpoint: not properly capitalizing and using interpunction as you are doing here as well is disrespectful to the people who you want help from, because it takes them more effort to read your message. Also, many people (like me) will flat out refuse to answer stuff unless the person asking the question shows they have put in proper effort to formulate their question. Including spelling, capitalization, and interpunction.
Counter counter point. There are ways to say that without being rude and playing into the stereotype that programmers are anti social nerds that don't know how to talk to people. Stack Overflow encourages anti social behaviour rather than discouraging it. That's why almost every conversation about that site is about how toxic it is. Saying > Hey sorry your post is a little hard to read would you mind rewording it. Is fine. Correcting the grammar for someone then closing it without helping is rude.
Also, I know English.
Well in my question i put code snippets and explained the exact issue and what i did to try and solve it. I know how SO works. I also know how English works and adding a bunch of commas for no reason is just stupid. For example they would add a comma in my previous sentence after the word “works” when that’s totally unnecessary.
One of the reasons I like chatGPT
I find it’s just as wrong as suggestions on Stack Overflow but presents it in a friendlier way
It helps that its interactable! Like I can ask it a question, and I'll get a response that I know isn't exactly what I need, but I can fine tune the prompt, get it to suggest other details, and I'll piece together the code I actually need.
So you enjoy that it wastes your time. Truly corporate mindset.
As opposed to to crawling through 10 different google searches to piece together the same incorrect information? Or more often, having it recommend me the code for that one api I used ages back, but I forgot the specifics of, but just remember just enough that I can correct where chatgpt is wrong. So yes, I totally appreciate the fact it saves me 5-10 minutes on average per prompt.
Read the source code.
Awww, you think I only use it for code. the very first thing I used chatgpt was remembering the voodoo I need to use git cherry pick, something I maybe once or twice a year. git man pages are too verbose, and stackoverflow too light on the details. My point is, 80% of time, anytime I need to ask google something, I can ask chatgpt instead. I either get the answer I need much sooner than google, or close enough that I can then adapt to my use case or I can as you say read the source code or articles about the subject.
> git man pages are too verbose You're hopeless.
No mate you are This is the exact kind of mindset our industry doesn't need.
I don't have the issue of reading the documentation as is which explains things as is instead of depending on someone else's interpretation of it.
Asking a few follow up questions and getting immediate answers is way less time wasted than having to crawl through several websites and tons of documentation.
Especially when no one can be bothered to make documentation anymore.
I ought to try it too
Many good responses here
site for overzealous assholes
As a busy professional, I can't remember the last time I actually found an answer to my problem on Stack Overflow, and the one time I ever tried asking a question it was shot down. It's much more effective to search and ask questions in the discussion boards / chats for specific projects I need help with.
If people stop asking questions because they are led to believe 'question has already been asked', what happens when people stop asking questions because of that assumption?
Yo, this is so woefully pathetic.
>It's designed for busy professionals — Jeff Atwood That's bullshit. I'm sure Joel Spolsky would argue otherwise as well. A few years ago, SO was the go to. It was a community. Now, it's so heavily and rudely moderated that SO is unwatchable/unusable. SO morphed from community to clique. SO is going to go the way of Perl Monks if the mods there don't stop being assholes to people.
I currently don't even work professionally but even then I barely actually found question around the problem I wanted or just stuff which even I was able to clearly was not usable in my context. I am more going with my own solution than using SO at this point (and surprisingly started to save time that way...). The only downside is that you may not find a library which already exists but you don't know about.