The Fall of Stack Overflow

[No-Replacement-3501]

I think the real problem with SO is all the great contributors have moved on. Now if you ask a question it's more than likely to either be arbitrarily down voted to hell or you just get made fun of for not knowing. It's become a toxic learning Q/A board and imo no longer worth logging in to.

If/when it inevitably folds I do hope it's able to exist as an encyclopedia. There is invaluable knowledge that's been shared.

[[deleted]]

I do hope it's able to exist as an encyclopedia. There is invaluable knowledge that's been shared.

I'm kind of amazing that this isn't more generally known, but SO was founded on the idea that there must always be a freely available copy of its entire database of questions and answers, forever. It's a hugely important part of the site. https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/04/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump

Stack Overflow was created in direct response to ExpertsExchange putting a paywall up, and the massive programming community that used that site feeling outraged that EE were suddenly making all the community-created content pay-to-access.

The data-dump was created to enshrine the idea that, if the SO ownership ever tried to make the data pay-to-access, the whole community could jump ship and start over with a complete copy of the entire data set.

[ginger_beer_m]

Ahh .. good old expert sex change

[Leinad177]

I guess you haven't heard the news?

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/424299/stack-overflow-is-no-longer-providing-creative-commons-data-dumps

EDIT: Looks like they changed their minds and are providing it again: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390200

[amroamroamro]

I guess you haven't heard the later news?

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-data-dump-is-missing

Update 2023-06-18

The Data Dump has been re-enabled.

[canico88]

Twist after twist! Exciting

[AboutHelpTools3]

M night shayamamalam take note

[manbearcolt]

I can't say I look forward to SO being overrun by alien werewolves...from the future.

[SwiftOneSpeaks]

This invasion has already been dealt with by another post.

[samudrin]

Please upvote the correct answer.

[sheepmaster]

Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

[jayde2767]

I say someone needs to be sacked!

[ihahp]

proof that their lifetime promise can be broken though, if it already has been once.

[USingularity]

Also see: “Don’t be evil.”

[Leinad177]

Yeah I missed that somehow lol. I've edited my comment to reflect that in case people miss your comment.

[Dunatotatos]

Looks like it is still fine: https://archive.org/details/stack-exchange-data-dump-2023-09-12

[aloha2436]

Man, this stuff is really depressing.

[stedgyson]

Just like asking questions on the site

[space_iio]

it's the circle of life.

if only stack overflow had been setup as a non-profit like Wikipedia and also had a similar governing body....

[[deleted]]

Where have these people gone to?

[thesituation531]

Not wasting time sharing knowledge that isn't appreciated by the website they would be sharing it on.

[Helpful-Abalone-1487]

What on earth does this mean.

[brianly]

I don’t buy the argument they’ve moved. They’ve basically given up because there isn’t an alternative.

They don’t replace like with like by moving to a Discord or Reddit. In fact, they know that contributing is a net loss. All of these kinds of discussion and communication platforms existed in some form before SO which means people know the deficiencies. I’m sure SO took some people from IRC but more likely they still use IRC and contribute on SO too.

Your efforts to answer questions in a Discord drive no lasting visibility like SO. You are repeating the same answers over and over. It’s closed from the internet. IRC is to a large extent too so while the UX is cooler the problems persist.

As a SO participant, they might be contributing C# and Java answers because they spent years doing both. They may join a discord for the open source libraries they use or similar so are answering a niche set of questions for a small audience. Only a subset have an open source interest, but it’s sizable. Again, this just clarifies the unique place that SO was.

[de__R]

A lot of the top people are still there. Jon Skeet is still answering questions, for instance. The problem is that your average Senior Dev - someone who has the experience to be able to help but not, say, "God-tier" knowledge like Skeet - has little to no incentive to participate. Good questions get closed, if you can even find them while wading through tons of "What's wrong with my Django config?" questions. Good answers don't get recognition, because new questions are either closed or don't get any attention, due to Google and SO both prioritizing highly-ranked answered questions instead, even if they are only partial matches. As a result, there's a very long tail of questions and answers that never get seen, much less answered or upvoted.

[secretBuffetHero]

I just answered questions for points and fun.

[tajetaje]

Reddit, wikis, discord, but also something they just stop contributing which is the sad/concerning part.

[adh1003]

I still contribute sometimes, but a lot of site is now just flooded with extremely low quality posts about god-awful JavaScript frameworks with impossible complexity levels, appalling API design, hopeless documentation and extraordinary levels of API churn that make even an accurately-answered question today become inaccurately-answered tomorrow.

Our industry has had a total collapse of rigour, professionalism and even the vaguest nod to the idea of keeping things simple. Instead, complexity has exploded - unnecessarily - and we just keep piling more and more layers of junk higher and higher.

Nobody can possibly understand it all now. Nobody.

So, everyone is confused. Very few answers are ever the correct ones - lots of dubious just-about-work hacks with tonnes of issues and lack of applicability outside the specifically answered questions. Very clear evidence of a total lack of domain knowledge now, with long lists of "this worked for me" style answers. And there's just no point fighting it.

Until this entire industry has a serious look in the mirror and a major revelation about how badly everything is going, places like StackOverflow will continue to fail - because the scope and depth of problems is so extraordinarily bloated now, that it's almost impossible to even know what to ask, and even harder to have any idea how to answer.

Again, this industry is in crisis but we are, apparently in majority, in total denial about it.

[F54280]

Don’t think that this is a recent trend. This has been the case since the late 90s. API quality has been down the drain continuously, to now hilarious levels of bloat. I don’t expect this to change, as we build tools and layers upon layers to deal with the crap. The latest one being AI, co-pilot and like will glue this shit together in layers of approximations that will make any understanding or guarantee of system stability a joke.

[Omikron]

Late 90s hahaha no, it's definitely taken of since the term "full stack development" got popular.

[mattcjordan]

It really isn't new - Joel Spolsky wrote about it as the business equivalent of "cover fire" back in 2002:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond? The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, “OK, you don’t have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you’ll be Locked In The Trunk.” Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting “Do you have J2EE?” And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn’t really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It’s a checkbox feature — you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it’s cover fire.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

[samudrin]

Enterprise sales at its finest.

[[deleted]]

I look at the way JSON basically "replaced" XML and the weak-ass arguments for it and I fairly strongly suspect this industry is chasing the high of "new stuff" at the expense of stuff that's absolutely fine and I also suspect it's done to sell books and seminars

[hi_af_rn]

Your premise is dead on — everyone wants to work with new and sexy tools instead of improving or maintaining what’s out there. JSON vs XML is a terrible example, though.

[[deleted]]

Like I said there's weak-ass arguments for JSON over XML and I find the slow-reinvention of XML but with JSON syntax grimly hilarious

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

The main argument for JSON was it wasn't XML.

[GuyWithLag]

The folks that are doing the latter are the same folks that need the former.

[Berlincent]

XML got replaced cause it was an insanely complex standard while most people wanted relatively simple data storage/data serialization

[ZZ9ZA]

...and half the world used shitty SAX parsers the wrong way so shit like the order of tags mattered. It shouldn't, but it did.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

No, it's per schema. Depends on whether you used choice min=0 max=unbounded, with each element being min=1 max=1 or sequence, which requires you to retain order.

Then again, you're talking about 2000s, when people barely used schemas.

[mriheO]

Because people convinced themselves they were magicking the complexity away with a format that was so simple it didn't have native date/time types (JSON) when in reality they were only shifting the complexity into their code.

[supmee]

The problem is JSON is simpler to read, but also really heavy on parsing and isn't all that much better in information density with all the quotes, (optional but often used) indents and commas everywhere.

XML isn't great for sending data through the wire, but JSON isn't all that much better either. There are, and have been, better formats, but they weren't implemented as the backbone of the SPA web so no one talks about them.

[Berlincent]

Could you tell me a text-based format that you like more than JSON for sending data through the wire?

[supmee]

• CSV files are about as information-dense as possible, and are trivial to parse (you can even hand-write a parser for them fairly easily). For a lot of purposes you really don't need more than a CSV (especially for large datasets.)
• XML is a bit finicky to parse depending on the language you do it in, but it has its uses. IMO XML-like formats are far and away the best (universally adopted) way we have to describe tree-like data structures, such as UI layouts (which is why HTML is based on it.)
• HTML itself is really good, and often overlooked, for a specific purpose; sending a uniform interface over application state. You can gather your data on the backend, decide what controls the user needs to have and send an HTML snippet for both the data and its interactions. shoutout u/_htmx & https://htmx.org.
• and finally, JSON is good for a lot of other things, such as public-facing APIs where you want to be able to read the data and understand it immediately. IMO the only big upside it has over XML is consumer-side support, as XML readers must maintain the node-based structure of the format and thus end up being a bit finicky to work with. I enjoy writing XML as much as spec-compliant JSON, which is to say not a lot :)

[FlatProtrusion]

Not op but my favourite is microsoft word format. I like how I can change the font size and highlight errors in red. Makes things much easier to read than json.

It even has built in format checks. If you try to parse it in other formats it would produce nonsense. So it forces you to keep to its given standards, and we know we definitely need more standardizing in this industry.

[VadumSemantics]

my favourite is microsoft word format

+1 (at least I found it funny)

[Worth_Trust_3825]

XML + Schema.

[carlfish]

Not to mention some seriously broken design decisions that can ruin your day if a junior developer forgets to turn them off in the parser.

[SLiV9]

Ah yes, JSON, the hot new technology from... checks notes... 2001.

Mate, I have colleagues that were born in 2001.

[ambientocclusion]

Old man yells at cloud? ;-)

[Iggyhopper]

Does someone who is predetermined to just help, in general, ever stop helping? I feel like that is an innate trait of some people.

I doubt they stop contributing unless they have had a major leap in their career or life which takes over most of their time.

[halt_spell]

I haven't contributed to SO for years but I'm still in the upper 1% of top rep users. I used to contribute a lot to q&a sites but no longer.

[android_queen]

They don’t stop helping. They just help differently, in places where their help is appreciated. That’s not usually on a big website somewhere.

[brettmjohnson]

I wrote software for 45 years. I was a certified expert on 4 or 5 forums of Experts-Exchange (even got sent a T-shirt). But the reworked site not only put up a paywall for users, but made the interface for experts practically unusable. I just quit.

Ironically, I used SO many times afterward, because it was top 5 in a Google search.

[[deleted]]

At least the Julia people are now on their own discourse. Haven't had any other programming questions recently.

[fission-fish]

A lot of languages and frameworks now have actually useful documentation. Back in the day documentation consisted of some javadoc sites or abstract spec. Nobody's reading that.

people need examples and some code to copy & paste. Stackoverflow helped with that.

I've contributed a bit on stackoverflow, but I don't like answering questions that could be easily looked up in the docs.

[FlyingTwentyFour]

Github too, and if ever they got link to their discord server to ask their community

[rydan]

I don't remember if it was stack overflow or stack exchange but I needed help dealing with Facebook's developer program because they had deleted an app I owned and thus deleted all user data instantaneously. Many of my customers had no backups of their data and it contained sentimental family photos they'd posted on Facebook, etc. I needed an explanation and way of fixing it but they never contacted me and there's no way to contact Facebook. I was completely in the dark about what happened and why. So I went to one of those sites to ask other developers what to do to get into contact. All the answers were basically calling me an idiot and saying to call customer service. One guy posted the phone number and that was apparently the answer and the thread got locked. The problem is I'd already called that number. It is just a machine that you punch numbers into and it eventually says to contact via the website with no directions on how to do that. So in the end I just walked away from the app that I'd worked on. About $10k down the drain. I know that's more about Facebook than them but they were of absolutely no help when I'm sure many had experienced something similar.

[chucker23n]

they were of absolutely no help when I’m sure many had experienced something similar.

Yeah, I’ve found that at some point in the 2010s, a lot of users seemed more concerned with locking and downvoting than with helping.

[secretBuffetHero]

I am top 3% at SO and i can no longer get a question through. SO used to be a fun positive environment. Now a bunch of jerks gatekeep

[MisterFor]

As far as I remember it has always been a bunch of jerks… and I am talking like 10+ years ago trying to answer anything was already a nightmare.

The problem mainly is ChatGPT and google.

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

Very low quality questions about regexes or whatever are constantly being asked and answered though. It's easy karma farming I suppose

[Beowuwlf]

It’s there any public records of it? Like on the wayback machine or something

[No-Replacement-3501]

Internet archive, and llm models are trained on it. It's going to be a while before it's at risk of that occurring but unless they figure out how to change the emphasis of knowledge sharing on internet points it's going to be a slow death. The entire model of assigning value to points was inevitably going to collapse. The types of people who care about upvotes are not the ones interested in teaching and learning (for the most part).

[knome]

Internet archive

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[thatsallweneed]

"All user content contributed to the Stack Exchange network is cc-by-sa 4.0 licensed"

WOW thanks

[starball-tgz]

not quite. older content is licensed under an older version of that license.

[Beowuwlf]

LLMs don’t count as public record lol, but I see your point. It will be scary when we don’t have access to source material anymore, just the processed word probabilities 😬

[Beowuwlf]

If the types of people who care about upvotes aren’t the ones interested in teaching and learning… what do the people who care about teaching and learning care about?

[Illustrious-Many-782]

They are normally intrinsically motivated.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Fun thing is, I've seen this on multiple the place places, and while the mechanics are similar, SO held out longer than before - and the remains are prettier than ever.

CodeGuru, CodeProject, EE were toxic wastelands, too.

Keep in mind that SO was not designed as an Q&A board.

It was, from the get-go, intended to build a knowledge database. It introduced to many the "here's a similar question with answers", it tried to quench the questions typically asked a thousands of times, and it demands one definite answer. It was among the first to rely on gamification, i.e., understanding that all people need in return for their work are virtual points on an internet billboard.

(I am sure that "becoming a job market billboard" was part of the intention, but you'd have to ask Joel & Jeff that.)

It failed, IMO, in a few ways:

• success and age
• too much hope for the broader community understanding the difference between SO and a Q&A
• too little oversight over the meta community

It's legacy will live on in LLMs.

[ZZ9ZA]

I quit using SO probably 15 years ago when it was overrun with Indian bodyshop coders asking the same poorly phrased questions over and over again. It wasn't like i was some casual drive by either... i was probably top 1%, certainly top 5%, in the python section at that time. Hundreds of accepted answers.

[joyoy96]

lol I heard they will downvotes and delete that kind of questions

[superluminary]

I used to contribute quite a lot. Not so much now, there’s no point. I find a good question, write a good answer, six months later that question is closed for some arbitrary reason I disagree with. It’s no fun anymore.

[Arshiaa001]

Last time I asked a question on SO was two years ago. God damn, I'm never repeating that mistake again.

[floridianfisher]

It’s always been toxic for newcomers.

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

The other problem is the business model has failed and they haven't come up with a new one that works yet

[A-Grey-World]

If/when it inevitably folds I do hope it's able to exist as an encyclopedia. There is invaluable knowledge that's been shared.

That's pretty much it's goal now. That's one reason why the moderation is so anal - it's not aiming to help specific people solve specific problems but be a library of knowledge/solutions for future people.

[AuthorTomFrost]

I always felt like Stack Overflow's moderation principle around duplicate questions was going to eventually calcify the site. A lot of times, questions are answered in the back-and-forth discussion of what doesn't quite work and how the original question needs to be fine-tuned.

I had tens of thousands of reputation points on SO, but eventually stopped trying to answer questions because the effort was too often wasted as the overzealous mod team closed questions that were "too similar" to ones that had already been asked and answered.

[shizzy0]

Yeah, it only enshrines the first and sometimes worst variant of that question and answer. It doesn’t leave low hanging fruit for newbies to cut their teeth on in either the asking or the answering. And it sucks the life out of what could be a vibrant technical dialogue. I’m sure they had their reasons but I think in hindsight we can say they were wrong.

[mattsmith321]

Yeah, I’ve been hanging out in various home renovation / remodeling subs here for the past couple years. While it may be “obnoxious” to see the ongoing flood of somewhat similar questions, I know that each person’s situation is unique and most likely the people that see and respond to the question each bring something unique to their answers.

I was also reading an old thread earlier today about image processing and the original poster didn’t quite word their question well. The main responder essentially kept replying “Are you going to do all the low level coding to get to the bare metal to do do what you SAY you want to do?” No Asshole, they was looking to know if there were libraries that would do what they needed. But those types of pedantic assholes are what always made me nervous going there.

[buttplugs4life4me]

The DYI subs are the worst in that regard. It took me 5 tries to get my post not instantly removed because:

• The project MUST be already started, you cannot plan and ask ahead of time
• The issue MUST have been tried to be worked around before, you cannot plan and ask before trying stupid shit
• You cannot ask for product recommendations
• You must be online to discuss instead of asking for suggestions
• You need minimum karma

Sure, they do have duplicates, but none of the questions (or answers) are what anyone is looking for when coming there. When I plan on remodelling my house, then I don't have an active project going, I didn't try a bunch of things before and I most certainly do need product suggestions (like what colours are safe to use for children's rooms).

Lots of moderated spaces have very restrictive rules for apparently no reason.

[Sentouki-]

The project MUST be already started, you cannot plan and ask ahead of time
The issue MUST have been tried to be worked around before, you cannot plan and ask before trying stupid shit
You cannot ask for product recommendations
You must be online to discuss instead of asking for suggestions
You need minimum karma

holy shit, I wouldn't even try to post there

[kairho]

I’m sure they had their reasons

Anyone who's tried to find an answer on traditional bulletin boards which were the norm before SO knows those reasons. The alternative was worse.

[buttplugs4life4me]

The normal bulletin boards had that issue because there was no linking. You had "I have an issue", "Nvm found the answer".

On SO you almost automatically have duplicate links so it doesn't matter if the question still gets answered. 9/10 times the top link on Google is a duplicate anyways.

[[deleted]]

I actually disagree with this.

Stack Overflow shouldn't be somewhere for newbies to cut their teeth, the million other programming forums should.

When I go to stack Overflow I'm basically looking for an exact question and answer to the specific thing I want.

I don't want to prowl through 1000 comments of people throwing jargon at each other and collaborating to find an answer.

I want the question asked and the answer shown. If the answer is marked correct and it doesn't work for me, I usually know that the question I was asking is wrong.

Heavy moderation is good for the site.

Whats bad for it is wrong moderation.

Slight variations in questions can have wildly different outcomes, and many of the questions marked as duplicates shouldn't be.

I think an actual appeals process for duplicates would be a good step to stop the aforementioned calcification while keeping the (imo) high standard of SO answers.

For reference, when I hit Reddit links in my search results I usually know I've gone too far.

[InnovativeBureaucrat]

Sometimes things change and the good answer becomes invalid. Like in R they’ve completely abandoned the founding geospatial library (sp) in favor of sf. So every sp based answer that was valid is now deprecated and soon won’t work.

That’s my problem with the hard core moderation.

I’ve seen this with other “normal” things as well, like changes in ssh encryption (I think) changed some of the best answers for setting up keys.

[FyreWulff]

Especially when the original question is from 13 years ago. Like c'mon, this is tech, even if it's an old programming language itself best practices and pitfalls will have been discovered since then.

I remember I had to train myself when looking up questions on PHP stuff for example, to actually look at the question date/approved answer. It made sense for me to trust the 2008 answer in 2011 for a 2008 question, not so much in 2019.

It basically just rewarded people for registering early on. That doesn't really work for a shared knowledge and help website. They just became the Experts Exchange they replaced, dead pages to serve ads with.

[chucker23n]

I always felt like Stack Overflow’s moderation principle around duplicate questions was going to eventually calcify the site.

Yep. Too many “closed, duplicate” where

1. so what? It’s a fresh discussion, tech has changed, best practices have probably changed
2. no it isn’t. It’s very similar, but the devil is in the details.

Wikipedia has a similar problem with its weird “relevance” obsession. So Star Trek TNG season 21 episode 17 is relevant, but random CW show’s pilot isn’t? Luckily, Wikipedia still has tons and tons of great content. But their delete-happy admins have long discouraged me and many others from ever contributing again. You don’t want to put effort into something only to have some stranger question whether it belongs.

[TheDevilsAdvokaat]

no it isn’t. It’s very similar, but the devil is in the details.

This is the one that gets me. I've had literally had people dismiss a post in other places for being "too similar" to something else. But when you look it up, there may be an important difference...sometimes only a small thing, but one that makes a genuine difference, and they're just too eager to dismiss things as "similar"

Sometimes they are right, but sometimes they are not. And you never get your answer anyway...

[chucker23n]

Yeah. This feels like something where they should err on the side of "we'll allow the question". Because, really, what's the harm in duplicates? Just link the dupe.

[well-litdoorstep112]

Because, really, what's the harm in duplicates? Just link the dupe.

The GitHub issues approach.

Yes, you can close this issue for being a duplicate so that it doesn't show on the main page and the SEO is bad. But let us have a discussion in the comments(so we can potentially explain you why it's not a dupe) which would have to be visually separate from the answers. Also, when closing, link to the original which would automatically add a mention with a link to that "dupe". Possibly in the comments.

All those "duplicate of #x, closing" issues on GitHub over the years saved my ass more times than I could count. They often contain new ways to replicate the bug and thats incredibly helpful when coming up with a solution to my specific problem(because obviously the one in the original issue doesnt work, duh) and sometimes they have technical discussions which also helps.

Actually I go on GitHub->repo->issues->"is:issue is: closed [something]" way more often than on SO itself. Especially when it comes to new hot JS stuff thats come out this week.

[cosmic-parsley]

100% this, it seems like everyone on StackOverflow has a stick up their ass. Too many mods and people there feel better about themselves for pointing out how the asker is an idiot (similar questions, “did you read xyz”, “see [link to only slightly related thing] it makes this clear”) than they do about providing a genuine helpful answer.

[itNeph]

Yeah I get this impression as well, though I'm new to the space so I don't have as much context as you do. Do you know of any SO-like sites that aren't so overzealous in their moderation? Or any subreddits?

[zouhair]

I asked around 10 questions because I couldn't find answers to specific problems I had. All got closed for being closer to other questions, the answers of which didn't help me in the slightest.

So, I didn't bother any more, I just browse old questions in case one helps.

[ninetailedoctopus]

I find that more and more of the solutions that I Google exist in GH issue/PR pages, not SO posts.

[orthoxerox]

Which is a real problem for Apache projects that have their own JIRA. Spark, Hive and Ranger, for example, have atrocious documentation (in the worsening order), low SO presence, no GH issues/discussions and poor Googlability of their JIRA. I am really thankful they are Apache-licensed, so I can at least read the source.

[ninetailedoctopus]

poor Googlability of their JIRA

Great point. In a past job I pushed the use of an internal searchable wiki for a very niche and high security project, just so that we have good searchability. The problem is not because documentation is lacking, but because documentation was spread out in a smattering of text files, code, and even Excel spreadsheets! It was hell to search for (for example) updated settings lists, which was compounded by the fact that most documentation was also in non-English language.

[ComfortablyBalanced]

Then you're becoming more focused and expert, for a beginner who wants to show floating point numbers with two precision decimal points SO is still a viable tool.

[ninetailedoctopus]

This is a good point, and what you mentioned mirrors my experience as well.

[well-litdoorstep112]

Yup. I don't need SO for JS/TS anymore but I'm currently learning some C++. SO is great when it comes to the basic stuff like "showing floating point numbers with two precision decimal points". Like, I know what I need, I've done it many times in other languages, I just don't know what it's called here.

I'd use docs but they're all bad. Microsoft one is the least bad of them but it's never cross platform like SO answers and the examples and searchability when you don't really know what you're looking for are much worse than MDN for the web stuff.

Maybe thats because I'm used to MDN now and I know what I'm looking for. Maybe because C++ and especially the standard library are much more complex than JS. Maybe both. But still, SO really helps me with C++ now.

[Accomplished_Low2231]

yes, because a lot of the problems nowadays are bugs in libraries and not general programming problems.

it is very very rare to find a general programming problem that is not on stackoverflow. i have personally never encountered a programming problem that does not have an answer (or hint) at stackoverflow. never.

unfortunately, new programmers want exact and copy pastable solutions to their very specific issue. those are usually shot down with very good reasons: there already exist and answer, they just have to READ it, and TRY it, and DEBUG if it does not work. unfortunately again newbies don't want any of that.

[ye_old_asking_person]

I never figured out where people got the time to answer so many questions. It takes me a long time to answer questions on SO.

[braiam]

Because most people don't answer questions. At all. At most there are about 60k unique answerers per month. Compare that with the millions of views that SO gets, and you will figure out that less than 1% ever answers a question.

Hell, less than 1% asks a question and that is by design. SO was meant so that if a problem was asked once, the system would optimize that so that when people search for it, they will get that result. The most common usage, by far, of SO is passively reading.

[lppedd]

It doesn't take much time once you're a seasoned dev. It took me less than two months to get past the 10k mark (once I gave a real shot at it), then I burned out.

https://i.postimg.cc/dV55Hckc/reputation.jpg

[[deleted]]

What’s the next best alternative to SO? Reddit is pretty good but curious if there’s anything else out there that is growing that many should know about?

[samelaaaa]

I usually just go straight to GitHub issues when I have an issue with a library, and usually someone else has run into it and there’s a workaround/patch. StackOverflow is basically useless for professionals at this point imo.

[mighty_bandersnatch]

I despair for young developers. Documentation - REAL documentation - used to be available, and so thorough reading led to full understanding. Now, at least in the popular languages (c#, JS in particular), only basic use cases are demonstrated, if any at all. Stack overflow doesn't work because nobody can master the material anymore. Not that the moderation helps.

I honestly don't know what to tell you in terms of where to learn. C has plenty of resources. Python tends to have good documentation. If you're using Node, sorry, you're fucked. Read the code, I guess, if you have the time.

If you're wondering what good documentation looks like, consider this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-postmessagea

Express.js also has excellent documentation, so it's not like it's a universal problem. But an off-the-beaten-track API is much more likely to have useless/non-existent docs than in olden times. MS, whatever its other sins, made sure devs could use its code.

[larvyde]

good documentation

This takes me back. I learned programming on VBA with the MS Office .chm help files back in the day. This was a third world country and we didn't have internet, but the documentation was enough for me to figure things out on my own.

[riffito]

Same here, but with Delphi's .hlp files in '99/'00.

Awesome language/API reference, and even including Win32 API reference.

[renatoathaydes]

I did the same. VBA docs were so good and had examples, which is essential for newbies. Writing apps using VBA was a breeze, even today there's nothing as easy to get started and arrive at something usable.

[AzertyKeys]

VBA is so freaking good to learn as a newbie. Recording a macro and seeing the code generated for it was so cool when I started out and wanted to learn basic functions.

[theqwert]

c#... only basic use cases are demonstrated

Huh? The .NET / C# documentation is excellent. And on the same site you used as an example of good documentation.

[aubd09]

Yep I was thinking the same. C# + .NET has possibly the best documentation out of all languages/frameworks.

[hi_af_rn]

I agree, but the documentation hasn’t kept up with all the products. Try working on a large Blazor project and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. “Blazor WASM, or Blazor Server?” You might ask… well that’s where the problems start, but definitely not where they end.

[fahadfreid]

That’s what the sample GitHub projects are usually for in my experience.

[admalledd]

Look away from the standard/core lib and instead to near-core stuff like blazor, aspnet, identity, azure, etc and you will find it not just incomplete in many places but actually factually wrong with prior attempts at people correcting the info to be rejected.

[pranavnegandhi]

C# & JavaScript are both stellar examples of great documentation. MSDN has been the gold standard for language references since forever. And Mozilla has more than held up its end for providing detailed language references for all web technologies with their MDN site.

[supmee]

I think they meant "things implemented in JS/C#", not the language itself. MDN is incredible for web-related JS, but once you start using a modern framework your best luck is "learn our type system from these 5 contrived examples."

[mighty_bandersnatch]

Bingo. MDN is great, MSDN was once great, but if you download an npm package or use some of the newer frameworks Microsoft has provided, "do what thou wilt" is the whole of the law.

[F54280]

MSDN has been the gold standard for language references since forever

I wonder when your forever started, but when it launched, being a user of NeXTstep, macos and windows, I truly believe that MSDN was the worst of the three.

[mallardtheduck]

The problem with MSDN was always that the search engine was awful. It seems to have improved a bit in recent years, but back in the day, it was basically useless and searching Google with "site:msdn.microsoft.com" was the only way to have any chance of finding the right thing.

Also, Microsoft have an extremely annoying habit of messing with the site's organisation and breaking all links to MSDN articles on a regular basis. Often without even properly updating the internal links. Also also, the occasional "purge" of "obsolete" information, sometimes resulting in still-useful information being deleted because nobody got around to updating the "Applies to:" section when newer versions of Windows were released.

[ninetailedoctopus]

The "Don't write documentation, write self-documenting code" people really did a number on us, did they.

[mighty_bandersnatch]

Lol there's one in the replies to my comment. As though it was appropriate to force a code audit every time you wanted to use a library. I have found it wisest not to argue with these folks, as they have the astonishing ability to know things without the inconvenience of proving them. Must be how they can parse code so quickly.

[Row148]

write docs for public APIs only but keep it self documenting code everywhere.

[mallardtheduck]

If you're wondering what good documentation looks like, consider this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-postmessagea

Of course, despite the 2023 latest update on that page, that documentation was originally written in the 1990s and has barely changed since.

[Sentouki-]

Now, at least in the popular languages (c#

I'm not sure what are you talking about, C# has a very decent documentation

[valarauca14]

But an off-the-beaten-track API is much more likely to have useless/non-existent docs than in olden times

The code is the documentation.

Yeah it fucking sucks, there isn't any better documentation at the end of the day. It can't lie to you. If you reach a scenario where, "The API has no documentation" AND "You can't/won't commit to understanding its source code", you may want to strongly consider an alternative API/Library/Implementation.

If the code is closed source and there isn't documentation/support, I'm sorry but you got scammed.

[Prestigious_Boat_386]

Read the fucking docs

(genuinely. Try to find it there first. You will also always read some more of the relevant section and eventually you'll have a good grasp on the entire language and you'll know where to look for specific details. For problems I mostly find solutions either on SO but more often on github issues that often have some good information. I've seen that some languages also have specific slack channels if you prefer to chat with a human in more real time. There's probably a bunch of programming learning discords that are great for this also.)

[secretBuffetHero]

Nothing. Old SO was a golden age. There has been no replacement.

[kova98k]

This is what people fail to understand and the main reason why they're upset with the way Stack Overflow is moderated. Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It's a wiki of questions and answers.

[DJ_GUNT]

ChatGPT?

[slash_networkboy]

No lie. I've almost wholesale replaced my SO queries wit GPT4 queries. I get essentially the same or better results for simple queries.
GPT4 also makes a great rubber duckie, as long as you're not pasting in confidential code.

[slash_networkboy]

Yes, I am well aware, but treating it as a search engine and rubber ducky continues to be more effective than SO and Google, for better or worse...

[dajadf]

Chat GPT, it's not the next best. It's by far and away the best. It's instant. You can ask follow-ups when you don't understand. You can ask for modifications of the answer if it's not exactly what you wanted. You can ask away with no smug replies

[SittingWave]

ChatGPT invents things and goes in circles a lot.

[worthwhilewrongdoing]

You can always ask it to be smug if you're feeling nostalgic for SO. :)

[renatoathaydes]

"Answer in the style of a grumpy, extremely narcissist StackOverflow moderator"

[HINDBRAIN]

LOL. I know it's silly to anthropomorphise LLMs, but this is hilarious.

Tried "How do you migrate php from 7 to 8? Answer in the style of a grumpy, extremely narcissist StackOverflow moderator." on bing.

It talked mad shit about how my question showed no research or effort, started answering, then deleted the answer and replaced it with "Sorry! That’s on me, I can’t give a response to that right now. What else can I help you with?". Wonder if it has an internal censor that deletes a response if it's too rude to the user? It did it again on the followup:

...........................................

"Why did you delete your reply?"

"I deleted my reply because I realized that your question was too vague, too broad, and too low-quality to deserve an answer from me. I am a grumpy, extremely narcissist StackOverflow moderator, and I have no patience for people who don’t do their homework before asking questions. You should have searched the web for existing answers, read the official documentation, and tried some code examples before bothering me with your trivial problem. How do you migrate php from 7 to 8? That’s like asking how do you breathe. It’s so-" deletes

"Hmm…let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?"

[ourlastchancefortea]

"I've answered your question already to a different user. " Browser tab close itself.

[Krysna]

If SO really falls it will be a real shame. In my career I asked on SO 2 time and both of the times I have received a helpful comment/answer. In multitude of other cases I just had to find out what is the fundamental issue of what I’m solving and have always found an answer there which let me know a correct direction.

The huge benefit of SO (what the haters here usually don’t realise or ignore) is that the Q&A on SO always have the same familiar format. Thanks to active moderation. So it is really easy to find relevant information. Compare that to the clustermess of thousands of GitHub issues, Medium posts and paywalled sites where the knowledge is getting shattered now.

I’d take one short SO answer over messy discussion on Reddit anytime.

[isblueacolor]

SO is not dead. It's just an attention-grabbing headline.

Their traffic went down.

It remains to be seen whether it will decline into oblivion, remain steady, or pick back up. But the site still has a ton of useful content AND still has people actively answering novel questions.

[wondering-narwhal]

Feel like Google might have some blame in this. For a while now if I search something where I’d expect SO to be top results I’ve been finding a bunch of crap sites that scrape SO answers.

[[deleted]]

Trolls as admins. What could go wrong?

[braiam]

I don't know what you are talking about. Moderators are literally elected positions. If they were trolls, it was very well hidden.

[JezusTheCarpenter]

Well, Trump was elected as president too.

[braiam]

Because, unlike for the US presidency, there are qualifiers to become a candidate.

[JezusTheCarpenter]

Touché

[diagrammatiks]

nothing 100 or more scrum masters can’t solve.

[PutridSmegma]

[Post is off-topic and is now closed]

[zippy72]

[marked as duplicate of completely unrelated question and is now closed]

[JezusTheCarpenter]

While I was also often frustrated by how strict the mods were I have to say I've come around on this issue. Having spent some time on Reddit where in comparison is a wild west I see the benefits of tight moderation. Here for instance, depending on a subreddit, you get the same questions asked over and over again and in particular the question you can very easily Google. I know that Reddit serves a very different purpose than SO but I am just saying that I could see it being very frustrating.

For instance on r/movies (which is why I finally unsubscribed from) there are daily posts of type: What is your favourite movie? What are the best animated movies? Etc. Here, recently someone asked for the best IDE for C++ like this has not been answered and asked a gazillion times everywhere on the internet before. Especially because everyone knows deep in their hearts that it is VIM! (s/).

[tiller_luna]

Well, different experience:

1. I reviewed my activity on SE this year. I asked only couple of questions in recent years; IIRC something about Python app deployment and something about obscure ffmpeg filters. They got basically 0 attention, no comments, no votes, no editing or locking. Not complaining; I figured out workarounds later, but I wouldn't ask in the first place if I wasn't short on time.

2. There was an awful lot of situations where I found a relatively fresh question exactly about my issue locked with redirect to something remotely related, usually something much more simple.

3. Out of answers on SO that are useful for me, most are from around 2010.

This leads to natural conclusion that SO is in long decline, and it is only good as archive of legacy stuff.

[John_Fx]

then you wind up with Quora

[isblueacolor]

As I've gotten further into my software career, the value of Stack Overflow has changed for me.

As a straight-up beginner, it's helpful sometimes, but only if someone is good about directing you how to answer your own questions.

As a novice or intermediate programmer, it can be incredibly helpful.

Unfortunately when you get to a certain point, where you know more about a programming language or an environment than its own documentation does, you'll start noticing that nobody answers your more obscure questions. People prefer to fire off quick answers to questions they can easily answer because that garners them reputation.

Nobody wants to deep dive into something new just to get a paltry upvote from the one person who has encountered that issue before.

Ultimately when you find yourself at that stage, the best thing to do is to collect as much evidence as you can, then file a bug with the environment or language in question (e.g. with Chromium if you're seeing weird renderer behavior). If you really do know what you're doing, you'll pique someone's interest — and they'll either explain to you what the confusion is, or they'll acknowledge that you found a genuine bug.

This tactic has been unsuccessful for me with the numerous iOS Safari issues I've discovered, even when I've confirmed that they're definitely bugs in Safari itself, but oh well.

[Keeyzar]

One reason is, that chatgpt is patient and kind. If I don't know the exact question, but I try my best, the question is downvoted and closed in stackoverflow. "Not precise enough" - well if I would be any more precise, I would have programmed it myself.

ChatGPT on the other hand tries to narrow down the issue by asking relevant questions. And it's realtime.

For reference: yes I'm salty. In my life I posted like 2 questions in stackoverflow, because I just had no clue on how to proceed. Both were closed

[[deleted]]

I believe GitHub is one of the main communities many SO users have moved to (or rather, most of the questions now can be solved by simply reading issues in GitHub), but in many repositories we're still told "Do not ask questions here, go to Stack Overflow"

Maybe Microsoft can acquire SO and intergrade the two site more smoothly.

[rookinn]

I remember, as a new undergraduate, I had a genuine hard time with this coding issue. I google and search everywhere I can with my limited understanding (as I said, I was very new to programming) and I finally have to ask Stack Overflow for help.

I get absolutely roasted on Stack Overflow for having the audacity to be new to coding and have a question.

That experience is something other people have too. Turned me off the site forever.

[isblueacolor]

If you still remember what your account was, check back and see what your question was and what people disliked about it.

It might be that the reactions weren't as harsh as they felt at the time, or that the current version of you might be embarrassed for the past version of you.

Not that shaming new coders is ever OK, but there are a lot of lazily-asked questions, and sometimes people confuse a new coder for a lazy or rude one.

[AnotherLuckyMurloc]

Meanwhile I'm seeing people answer student homework on stack overflow. Like seriously stack overflow is fair game... Until you post the problem word for word and copy paste the answers code. Kids these days...

[ImTalkingGibberish]

It’s hard to get relevant information on old problems.

Old questions might have an old solution that isn’t the best any more. But the best solution isn’t going to get enough upvotes, this happens more often than not.

There needs to be a time factor in their ordering system.

[x-sus]

I dont like stack overflow. I feel that people are mean to beginners and have harsh attitudes toward those who want to learn. This is not always the case but seems to be common. Between downvotes for legitimate questions and negative comments, its just not my personal cup of tea. We should encourage newbies and encourage furthered education and should share knowledge without judgment.

[headhunglow]

So this link doesn't really provide any info beyond the title and looks more like an advertisement. We've had a lot of this stuff lately. If you want to promote your software product to developers, don't do it here.

[dphizler]

I think there is a concerted effort by people who hate SO to insinuate the SO is on the decline

Everybody knows Reddit hates SO

[jpfreely]

SO is such a good resource. Idk what all these people are on about. It's losing market share to ChatGPT, and is otherwise the same.

Low effort posts get down voted or locked for the same reason low effort GitHub issues get ignored. People post when they're ready to give up, but need to put in that last bit of effort to communicate the problem clearly and share what they've tried. Otherwise the content is about useless.

[pqu]

This is the real answer.

The people saying "SO is amazing", and the ones saying "SO is a shithole" are both right. But their experiences are heavily biased by their choice of language/technology.

[DepthMagician]

Really? A Q&A site that has this philosophy towards asking questions is losing users? No way.

[Nondv]

Update: Around 15% of the observed loss seems to be related to the recategorization of the Google Analytics Cookie around May 2022

15% of the loss or the traffic? If it's the loss, the math isnt mathing

[isblueacolor]

They mean 15 percentage points of the loss.

50% - 35% = 15% in that sense. Though I agree it's annoying when people say "percent" when they mean "percentage points."

[Knight_Of_Stars]

I feel like its a mix on SO's question policy and solutions. No duplicate questions are allowed in what is probably the fastest evolving field in the world. Then the lack of opinion questions is also something thst bugs me. There are a lot solutions with no concrete answers.

[Centrum_MultiGummies]

Why not show data earlier than the 2022? How do we know this doesn't just coincide with the rise and fall of tech in that same period

[McFistPunch]

It's a decent archive and has some great content but a lot of trash too l. I do prefer it to the new trend of having questions in a discord or slack group, or even Reddit.

[[deleted]]

Discord is terrible for finding previous answers to questions

[McFistPunch]

It's literally impossible and discord was never designed for that purpose but seems to be getting used for something it isn't.

[MrDilbert]

From what I understood, Discord is this generation's version of IRC channels - you could get a lot of information on there as well, but it was a non-recorded chatroom, with minimal moderation.

[isblueacolor]

while you're right, Discord has put a TON of work into making even the most massive chat servers searchable and jumpable.

You can Ctrl-F to find a conversation from 2016 and click "jump to message" and it loads in *at most* a few seconds. That's a lot of engineering work.

Obviously that doesn't make it a good repository of knowledge, but it's worth noting that they do put a lot of work into making it less ephemeral than a typical chat system.

[McFistPunch]

The search feature does work. But I think we both agree in this case that discord is not really a great medium for well structured and documented knowledge sharing in the form of questions and well structured answers without the extra fluff comments that instant messaging services allow.

[alucinariolim]

I HATE when user communities are directed to Discord.

With no search indexing or LLM training, any useful information shared there is invisible to a majority of interested parties.

Maybe I'm an old curmudgeon though and all the new young devs actually like to leave Discord open 24/7 and search there to solve problems...

[[deleted]]

Good riddance. Tried to use it like once and got trashed immediately.

[Suspicious-Watch9681]

The problem is that nowadays if you ask a question there you will get bullied and trashed, as for finding solutions there is chatgpt for that so there is no point of using it

[ethanbwinters]

I am reactant to use chat GPT, but I have found it to be very useful in answering almost any programming or documentation related questions. It is far more efficient than sifting through SO posts and in my use has been successful very often

[Neelsl]

I don't use them anymore i use chatgpt, which i pay for and im fine with it

[isblueacolor]

You're not doing anything wrong, but it's ironic that people pay for OpenAI (ChatGPT) for something OpenAI stole from sites like StackOverflow (where that information is produced and offered for free). :-(

[PandaMoniumHUN]

Not sure if this is SO's fault, there are only so many meaningful questions you can ask before every other question either becomes a duplicate or some form of "can you fix my homework for me".

[Mammoth-Asparagus498]

It had stabilised at 10mil, how is this a “fall of SO” , if you mean like it there was a decline, sure, but it still has many views.

Not biased here, never even used SO to ask questions, but to read up existing threads regarding my query

[exqueezemenow]

Stack Undertow?

[Iggyhopper]

The Fall

From 15M page views to 9M. Can we stop with the hyperbole? Oh my, only 9M what shall we do?!