Stack Overflow stopped caring about developers a long time ago
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- čas přidán 20. 07. 2024
- If you’re a developer and you come across a coding question that needs to be answered, well stack overflow is the first place you would visit. Recently, the platform has been receiving a lot of criticism because of their new partnership with OpenAI. But, upon researching more about stack overflow… it seemed like the decline would have happened either way.
#programming #developers #coding
Timeline:
00:00 Introduction
00:33 The rise of stack overflow
03:13 There were cracks in the walls before AI
07:06 the issue with questions on Stack Overflow
08:40 When core users start to complain
11:10 Hello AI, welcome to stack overflow
15:01 If you can’t beat them, join them
18:31 The great deletion
20:25 So what’s going to happen? - Věda a technologie
Hey everyone. Sorry for the editing issues with this video and me appearing twice sometimes. I’m not sure what happened but it seemed to just not render properly. 🫠 unlike stack overflow, I will do better next time and make you all happy! Thanks for watching
You actually tricked me into believe that it was an intentional editing. 😄I thought it was a play with AI or something along those lines.
@summerishere2868 No. it was a skill issue… my skill issue ☠️
I noticed one, but I make mistakes in my code all the time. Nobody's perfect :D
I thought wow, this is good stuff 🤪
excellent youtube channel 1:31 ❤❤❤❤❤❤
It's been terrible for years. The admins are pedantic narcissists.
Yup
Narcissists are attracted to positions of authority like flies to 💩. Unfortunately, that's also why everything eventually turns to 💩.
😔
Absolutely. SO is basically a non-interactive site for a lot of people now. You browse for solutions, but you don't engage with the community because it's infested with petulant man-babies who get their jollies from being condescending.
Unfortunately yes. My experience when I first joined. Some merit, but some are just as this. Situation has improved in my view.
Definitely true. Stack overflow has become like a game chat server where the mods and many users try to exert dominance over others.
The worst part is, you're googling a problem, found the same question by other user on stack overflow, only to find the admin shutting down the question and ask the user to google it. Wtf.
StackOverflow on job interview:
-Why do you want to work for us?
Candidate:
-What a dumb question to ask!
StackOverflow:
-You are hired!!!
Yes, they believe we have to work for them and be paid by humiliation
"Closed as duplicate. Go ask my previous employer for why they hired me."
🤣
Seems legit but that wouldn't be about SO job but an admin interview. SO users vote admins and the overall culture is mostly run by popular vote these days. If you think that democracy is a good idea, you should also accept what SO has become.
Nothing drove me nuts more than finding a post with the exact same question I had only to see one comment "why would you even want to do this," adding zero value to the post.
To be fair, lots of questions at StackOverflow are typical XY-questions and comments are exactly there to clarify on or challenge various things, including the basic design to tackle your problem. If you read at SO for like 20 minutes you'll probably find more than a handful duplicate questions. Now consider sitting there for hours trying to "moderate" questions (for whatever reason?!) I can understand why some then get a bit more direct and find the idea posted questionable from the start. I have to say, I'm guilty of that myself when I read posts where people lack an understanding of the topic at hand and just want a one-liner to solve their issues.
See the XY problem
Yep… so often people are asking for a solution when they can even articulate their problem. Many times there is a better/cleaner solution to the issue once the problem is defined.
And the mods shutting down the question.
I hate those replies, and the ones where they offer an alternative solution that doesn't fit with what you are working on. These replies seem awfully condescending.
Stack Overflow will make money from their deal with OpenAI, but it seems like that might be the last money they ever make.
I'm sure they've already trained on all of SO, data after all its public. Could this be just asking permission after the fact to avoid litigation?
The top answers that you are referred to if you search on a search engine, are more often than not closed as a duplicate.
If you then go to the question that SO refers to as the master question, it is often only vaguely related, and has a lower quality in the answers, and even of the questions itself.
I got scolded for not having the latest version of the R programming language even though the question was valid regardless of the version. The person didn't stop and went on with the rant about the evil of not using the latest version. My company had a licensed version that was always some versions behind and he refused to understand or acknowledge that. It was water off a duck's back for me but for many new developers the hostility is intimidating.
Versioning ALONE creates many opportunities for new problems to sound like old problems. Same with the entire stack versus some other stack. It's amazing that experienced mods do not pay much attention to these things.
This is going to sound inflammatory but its genuinely, honestly, a problem that exists because there’s a reaaally disproportionate amount of autistic and antisocial people in the software engineering space. Having an environment where you have zero contact with other human beings and you already don’t understand social queues is random hostility waiting to happen. The people typing out the vitriolic answers honestly don’t understand that they’re being venomous, it’s social ineptitude
That's typical of users there, questioning your question instead of providing help.
That would be irritating. There is an abundance of reasons projects use old versions of languages, it isn't even uncommon. Heck, C89 is still widely used, even in new projects.
Once I asked a question there, some high rep dude came with this not here for doing your homework attitude, then some time later I answered my own question that I figured out how to solve the issue, then the guy edited my question and said that my own solution did not answer the question. And he was rigth, since he modified my own question the way that the answer no longer covered it. Cool huh?
from the newbie's point of view it used to give the impression of an exclusive club, an elitist group with a purity culture.
Club atmosphere is right, and we all know that you have to behave in a certain way to join a club. Overflow has so many club rules that it's like walking through a minefield just to post a question.
not only from a newbies view.
@@zeppelinmexicano Isn't this just a very exclusive club? Being rejected feels bad, so many complain about the harsh culture. To me, it looks like an Eternal September situation. IMO, the two productive ways to use SO now are either to jump through all the hoops, actually learn the rules and obey them, or just actively participate elsewhere and use SO just as a nice source, without actually contributing. The middle ground may be that you learn some of the rules, specific to e.g. voting or moderation of comments, and you help clean up the mess in those areas while extracting the information you came for.
it was an absolute circle jerk for egomaniacs
They are a step away from being forgotten. Nobody likes being treated like a noob for asking a question. They are rude, impolite, and absurd. AI is just the last nail in the coffin.
They lost me when I realized I couldn't upvote a particular answer when multiple answers were presented, some of which were provably(!) incorrect. This was because my reputation was only 1 (= new user). That was ~10 years ago. If a website for programmers and engineers values reputation more than proof, then this is not the right place for me anyway.
@@rostislavsvoboda7013 the system is in place to prevent salty people from making new accounts to downvote. A downvote costs you a point to discourage it, it's meant to be a very strong indicator that something is wrong with a question. You can upvote the best answer for free so the community can see what a good answer is. It's not really a problem if there are answers that aren't entirely correct, that's often very subjective even, there just need to answers that are good. Reading other answers and usually comments under them explaining why it's not good gives you even more perspective, maybe you also thought about that solution
The irony is: You always complain about people asking "stupid questions", but whenever I ask a really compelling question, I get ZERO replies. I might get upvotes for the questions and some "me too" comments, but no answers at all. So apparently most users there are not even able to answer really challenging questions, but they keep complaining about simple questions being too easy.
The reputation system works against people who generally stfu but have expertise in a few topics.
If only everyone would stfu about things they lack expertise on... Sounds like utopia to me.
@@MartinMaatsociety if everyone STFU on things they weren't experts on frfr.
@@mage3690that’s a bit of an overgeneralisation. it’s only through social diffusion that understanding of important issues gets established. it’s the bad actors that are the issue.
Upvote systems are a really terrible proxy for quality.
@@mallninja9805 Is there a better one?
StackOverflow lost me when the moderators started power tripping … no thanks …
Not all of them, but there where some. And now it's a large commercial company.
Absolutely agree. One Admin closed a question I wrote that was helping lots of people with lots of upvotes. Eventually this Admin got so much abuse from other commenters saying it should have stayed open he gave up and made the question open
@@toonkrijthe7565 Not all of them? Right. Sure.
For me it was All of them I encountered.
My favourite gripe is the inability to change the “correct” answer. Often the answer is ambiguous or wrong and it often stays as “correct”
The check mark is selected by the person who posted the question. The very same person who didn't know an answer at all half an hour ago is the one who's now supposed to select which of N answers is the best. Not to sound elitist, but the results aren't always great.
@@jcoffin01 Or even worse, you get totally unhelpful answers like `WinSCP Installation Issue` on AskUbuntu (same engine as SO). The answer is both wrong and unhelpful and yet cannot be changed.
@@jcoffin01 To the questioner, any answer that works is an acceptable answer. If you want to find out what really is the best answer, that's what the voting system is for. The seal just says "I tried it and can confirm that this answer worked and solved my problem".
There is nothing more discouraging than asking a question and being made to feel like an idiot by someone you hoped could help you out! This is one of the major problems with SO. This is why it is used as a last resort. I even went so far as to avoid asking questions and would just try to do searches for similar questions with hopefully accurate answers.
Searching for similar questions is good for everyone including you. If you post anywhere, stackoverflow or any other site, without doing your own research for at least a few minutes, then what? Wait for days for someone else to answer your question without even knowing if it was already asked and answered elsewhere? That would be far slower at getting your question's answer than if you find your answer on an existing question. What I find discouraging is that people are marking questions as duplicates when they're not duplicates and just have some vague similarity. Another thing is I had one of my good answers downvoted by the asker simply because the question was asked 4 years earlier. My answer would be good for everyone with a similar problem and that's the majority of people who benefit from finding answers on stackoverflow. I generally don't care about gamification but the fact that seemed so backwards and opposite of grateful just put me off the site completely. Marking almost every new question as a duplicate without looking at how different it is from the question it supposedly duplicates was one big point against it. Feeling punished for contributing was the last straw.
I contribute to quora instead if I feel like helping people now. It has a lot more questions that are essentially duplicates but that's better than the stackoverflow problems.
Funny. You SHUOLD first search for answers, and only then ask new question. Do you think all these clever people like to answer the same questions of lazy guys over and over again???
@@PSHomeVideo At no point do they force anyone to answer anything! Being a jackass is just unacceptable although it is commonplace nowadays! Also, use spellcheck before posting! Grammarly is pretty good and it is free!
@@PSHomeVideo Are you one of those horror mods? You sound like them :D
@@StefanReich Yeah, it sounds like what the mods would say, but basically, it is correct - search first, ask after that :-)
Unfortunately, all of these problems have been apparent for years, as shown in the video, and they still haven't invested anything into solving them, so I don't see them solving their actual issues. Instead, they've invested all their time into growth tactics that make no sense because these tactics are only growth tactics, not stuff that has to do with the user's experience and what they perceive as valuable. Gamifying the experience is only a growth tactic when it doesn't improve anything and it's just there for user retention. This is a huge reason as to why most gacha games don't last more than 2 years. Gacha games are literally developed with user retention in their core and that's why they all shutdown so fast as they have no base to expand on for the unachievable user retention rates these companies aim for based on no true unbiased data and stats
I used to use SO all the time, but would never dare ask a new question. Now I’m using Gemini Advanced, and I love the writing tone of the good information (and code).
Gemini is so good compared to ChatGPT
Consistently going against the core userbase's interests has killed quite a few platforms over the years. And it will kill StackExchange, if they continue going this way.
I hope it does, SX deserves it.
Same for Reddit, probably.
It's always the same. You are new, ask a question, and most people only say: RTFM. Very encouraging.
Because you should RTFM
@@kaqqao Some manuals are damn hard to read and are incomprehensible or with insufficient information :-)
In fairness, lots of questions on SO really are pretty terrible. An immense number are something like: "I tried to write some code to parse a data file, but it's not working. Can somebody please tell me what's wrong?" And that's it. They haven't shown the code that's failing. They haven't shown what data they're trying to parse. They haven't said anything about what they actually want.
As much as I (among others) hate to make somebody feel badly, as it stands the question is completely unanswerable. Yes, comments should be polite, and preferably tell the user what they need to add to improve the question. But some programmers (including many who are very good technically) aren't so great on personal communications.
Yea, but did you RTFM?
@@kaqqao Never mind the fact that the manual either only provides very high-level information & doesn't help with your specific application, OR it's so dense that the specifics are scattered throughout 900 pages of crap & it will take you a year to piece them all together...
Another issue i have noticed recently with SO is people editing your question purely for a bit of rep, like they will edit it in such a way that it doesn't improve the question in any way, they just found a way to re-word it so they can say they edited it, or they edit it so much it actually changes the question. I had this recently and when i reversed the edit, i suddenly got a downvote (I'm assuming from the user that edited my question, he then edited it again, which i again reversed, then i got an email from a mod saying Im not allowed to undo edits, despite this mods edits making no sense. So after 30 mins fighting a mod I deleted the question. I have used the site for 10+ years and have circa 10k rep, Im not a new user I know how the site works, its just frustrating when people try to just piggy back on your question to get some rep for doing nothing of value.
I think there is a daily/weekly cap on edit-reputation. With not enough reputation that edit has to go through a peer review anyway and with enough rep there are other ways to "earn" more rep quicker. Worst I've seen was a user that probably had like 40 accounts which he used to upvote his posts he wrote. Problem was, he posted his message and a few seconds later he had all those 40 upvotes when all the other answers just had like 1 or 2 at max and were posted significantly before that user's post and even contained more information on the topic at hand. A mod was then taking action and deleted that answer and probably gave that user (and his accounts) a bit time to think if not even straight out banned.
I still don't get it that people think that high-rep is really needed or makes you a better "programmer". I also "only" have 12-13k but that does not mean that someone with 100k knows much more than I do or that I know more than someone with 1k rep. I just spend my time on other stuff or answer at niche-topics rather than those basic API/framework questions that quickly gain 100s of votes within a couple of days. I was once invited to a job interview because that company looked for StackOverflow "experts" with I guess 7.5k+ rep and a history to answer certain tags. During that interview their CTO was a bit frustrated because he had like 10-15 50k+ StackOverflow users before that couldn't program a line of code without frequenting SO or Google and that in an area where they even had gold and silver badges.
It happened to me. They totaly changed the meaning of the question.
Yeah pretty much every edit I've got made the content worse and more vague. Often with broken Engrish.
@@Kessra you sir are a master craftsman of code. Thank you for your service
There's sometimes a valid reason to reword and even change meaning of the question a bit and that is to make it broader or generic. It's not your question anyways, it's meant to be an example so other people with the same question can benefit from the same answer. People's questions are often very specific to their problem but the problem they have often isn't. Misunderstanding questions or just people hunting for rep is a big problem though
You can see their past comments. Go to activity, then filter it to "All Actions".
A few years ago I saw a question on SO about piece of Linux interface that I’ve written. I’ve created an account just to answer it. As an author of the interface I could provide all the necessary details. My efforts were rewarded by being downvoted by people who had no idea what they were talking about. I’ve closed my account soon after and never been tempted to contribute to SO ever again.
This is another common problem with SO. As someone who has been using a development system for maybe two decades, you have to be taught by newbies who have only known the system for 6 months and think they already know everything better, but their answers are so full of mistakes that it's not worth trying to correct them because you don't even know where to start.
Absolutely agree. One Admin closed a question I wrote that was helping lots of people with lots of upvotes. Eventually this Admin got so much abuse from other commenters saying it should have stayed open he gave up and made the question open
the negative scores for asking a question at 2:42 was so triggering! God I hated those negative scoring for stupid reasons!
Most of the time I don't even know the reason. I ask a question on SO, a decent question, well written, with code examples, links to documentation, as well as a detailed explanation of the issue I cannot solve and when I come back 24 hours, it has no answers, no comments, wasn't closed as duplicate but it got three downvotes. Half a year later it is still open, still unanswered, still has no comment but now it has 8 downvotes.
It was sliding for years. AI just delivered the death blow
Hooray for chatGPT, since it can answer all my trout related love questions
I hope AI will one day replace SO completely and they will bankrupt from the lack of traffic. I have had to ask few questions because AI didn't know and google didn't know either and it got downvoted without even explaining what was wrong so I have no way of asking the same thing better or edit the question. I would be happy to see AI getting to the point where I never need to visit SO.
The paradox of "Stack Overflow" has always been that the answers are of low quality, even when they work, and it takes someone with deep insight and experience to recognize what the actual clean, high quality solution will be from that low quality answer. The industry's inside joke is "woe to you if you ended up on Stack Overflow looking for a solution!"
Some people are just arseholes, and some of the arseholes have just been allowed to get away with it.
16:00 I have been writing to SO quite a lot and before you can write *anything* to SO, you have to accept that all your content is licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0. This was the requirement way before any version of ChatGPT ever existed. So SO or nobody else had no reason to ask anybody for a permission before using all the data as AI training material.
If you publish stuff to any social media site without bothering to read the license, don't claim that the company doesn't have right to do stuff that you *agreed on* in the EULA.
And the attribution part of the CC license only applies to verbatim copying which falls under copyright law. If the AI simply explains the same idea, that would be covered by patents only, not by copyright. And CC license explicitly says "Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License."
19:00 After you have licensed your content with a perpetual license agreement such as CC BY-SA, you cannot take it back. Even trying to do might be contract breach and therefore illegal.
This is why developers need platform cooperatives.
One of the best things about AI is that it’s going to help a lot with NOT having to deal with poor teachers (as much).
Yes, a 'teacher' that doesn't actually know whether what it's saying is correct is *exactly* what I want... /s
@@HaploBartow Actually, possibly it is. The process of learning is about the student asking questions and independently finding answers, the teacher's role is to just guide them, perhaps by suggesting new questions to ask. If students learn more critical thinking because of all the contradictory bs current AI gives them, that's a net win for humanity.
Agree with all you say. I rarely use it but when I do it’s usually because I can’t remember the name of the PHP function I want. I search on a description of the function and the answers are always a page of code written, and upvoted, by people who don’t know the function exists.
Let me get this straight. Quality answers were developed by highly a knowledgeable group, who left because corporate didn't value their expertise and mistreated them, thereby driving them out, only to be replaced by AI. Now, AI works by reading older expert data and spitting out new answers, but the older data is aging out, and nobody wants to waste their time taking a trip down the time wasting rabbit hole, but corporate decided to double down on AI, which cannot actually develop new accurate and correct answers by itself for the foreseeable future...
Yes, I think I see the flaw in corporate's plan.
You pretty much nailed it!
And for emphasis, I'll add this:
The so-called "Artificial Intelligence" of ChatGPT (and its ilk) isn't the least bit intelligent at all. It's merely rehashing data that has been scraped from the Internet, with an extra dash of obfuscation/paraphrasing to try to skirt copyright laws.
I started calling them Snark Overflow🤡. Plus a lot of the arrogant star users give terrible long winded BAD answers.
Maybe the impolite and condescending answers a result of drop in quality of questions. When SO started it was a place for developers to share expertise. With getting more and more famous the community got diluted and high school kids or lazy college kids got onto SO and stared exploiting the very experienced developers.
Gamification ruined SO.
Maybe some codemonkeys think they will get a better job by simply having a record of useless medals and points in SO.
SO has faced the fate of every social media platform. People are the problem. That is the unvarnished truth.
This great deletion makes me a bit worried. It makes me feel that I need to write myself a proxy for SO that would save every single question I see to my local computer so that I can read it years later if I need.
Yup! These are all reasons why I refuse to ever participate. I've had a few very negative experiences on the platform so I only use it for reference. I never ask or talk to anyone because of this. Even the mods were pretty rude and unhelpful. I've even been redirected to answers that didn't actually answer my question...
So many times Ive seen interesting questions which people obviously want to engage with, which are deleted as too general, opinion-based etc. I dont think it profits them to delete every such question. I tried to ask a question of my own, quite specific but a little complex to explain. (It was about an algorithm rather than a specific issue I was having). It was deleted almost immediately. I edited the question to improve the clarity, but it did no good. It was a complete waste of my time.
Stack Overflow had it coming. If you have a shitty attitude towards your customers, you can't expect to stay in business. I would not ask a question if I was an expert. I don't mind researching a topic but sometimes you just need a pointer in the right direction, not a shit answer.
Once when I searched, found no answer, asked the question, I was told the question had been asked before but there was no reference to the previous question. Having already failed in the initial search, I still had no answer.
Another time when I searched, found no answer, asked a question, I was the question had been asked before and there was a link to the previously asked question, but it didn't answer my question.
But I still get upvotes on a couple of questions I answered years ago. Got one an upvote two months ago!
These days, I might search Stack Overflow, but I'm more likely to use one of the AIs. They seem to be good at answering simple and weird questions like "what is the syntax of that c# thing where you can embed the variables in the string". (Having not used c# for 6 years, I forgot the syntax)
I was barred from Stack Overflow for the crime of telling the person whose question I was answering, what opensource project of mine the answer came from. Stack Overflow charges advertisers $10,000 US per month minimum, and doesn't want you leaving their ad revenue to see an opensource project. I am glad AI has forced them to layoff staff.
My comments were edited in SO to point to a close source competitor to the FOSS project I maintain. This was the community, not SO. But SO is getting what it deserves.
How can you tell chatgpt answered instead of SO? it was polite.
@@arugulatarsus ...but was it correct?
@@junkertom7766 subjective. The question was how do I do X in Y, the answer was use tool Z instead. But they put it under my name. I deleted my account from that.
Stack Overflow usually leaves me with more questions than I had from the beginning. Easier to type a question in Copilot and get an answer.
I dont know why would i ever use that, S.O will be the internet archives of coding, also it was full of prima donas, their life purpose was to mark a question as possible duplicate
If everyone moves to AI generated content which is based on original human content, how are the next generation of AI models going to learn new things if communuites like SO are destroyed by first generation AI? Likewise, where will developers go when they have new questions the AI can't answer and no human communities willing to share answers because they don't want to contribute to future AI models? Ugh...
I have been wondering this, in general, about LLM's.
Exactly. There in lies the problem with everyone depending on AI. It can only answer from what exists in its training data.
What did developers do before SO and GPT? They relied on each other or just figured it out like real developers. You all act like no one solved coding problems before the last 15 years or, hell, the last 15 months.
Wondering about this too
@@bitmanagent67 Before SO languages and, more importantly, libraries were a lot simpler (they had to be because available compute and RAM back then didn't have room for a lot of modern libraries and frameworks)... there was so much less you needed to know back then, it was much simpler for your friends and colleagues to support you.
I left one community and removed all the key words from the text and left word salad, another community that would not allow mass deletion I replaced the text with dots and white space. I have a feeling if users were clever about it they could edit these in such a way no one noticed until it was too late to fix it. Also wonderful channel, I subscribed after seeing your video on the Failure that is Agile.
A comment asking "Why do you want to do this?" can be asked nicely, and it's generally very much worthwhile. Many questions show up in the form of "X-Y" problems, where a person wants to do "X" and for whatever reasons conclude that they need to do "Y" in order to achieve "X". Finding the real motivation for an unusual question can be very helpful to the original questioner, because it can get them out of "the woods" in pursuit of a bad solution to their actual problem. Civility is sort-of a separate issue, and I agree that there could be more of it. I consider it to be a training ground for being nice to people.
Another issue that permeates the Stack Overflow world is the phenomenon of people very very new to programming diving in and trying to do something far beyond their abilities. That's a problem that goes way beyond the website; there are really no good pedagogical patterns for new programmers to follow. They're told "learn to code" and that's about it. There's not a lot to be done about that, sadly, at least not from a Stack-like site.
(Full disclosure: 400K+ reputation on SO)
Being "nice to people" is not an obligation, and those who aren't nice usually do not expect reciprocal "niceness" either. It's a culture and experience thing. Either you want to spend effort on being nice and get back some the same currency, or you don't care. As it happens, and as a rule of thumb, people who are expert in any domain tend to care less about this wrapping than people who are noob. Possibly because their idea of "nice" aligns more with "interesting, intriguring, clever" rather than the shallow "dumb nice" that the broader society considers appropriate. This is not a surprise because by laws of large numbers the broader society is "average" (not leet).
@@clray123 I think we were colleagues in my last company. Are you Joe M., that asshole without any friends that think was superior to everyone, besides everyone having an approximate wage?
They seem to often hate their customers. We're trying to get a job done, and we've spent hours researching it on their site and elsewhere and were unable to resolve the issue. That alone means they should STFU and leave us alone as we try to help eachother, but nooooooo, "I'm mister mod and I close your question, period."
I use it only in a passive way to look for answers. I understand that they need rules and they don´t want duplicates etc. But when I saw the harsh reactions I decided not to dare to ask any questions ever. And I don´t think I would ever be able to contribute there. They have so many highly experienced devs who can write better answers.
Huh? Just the risk of getting a rude answer causes you to shut up? I guess you are a perfect obedient citizen for any sort of dictatorship then...
Your answer doesn´t make any sense to me. I don´t speak about political participation and SO is not a political forum.
@@chaotic-voices-in-my-head I'm referring to your general attitude expressed in the comment. To quote you, "not dare ask questions". My point is you should dare ask questions, in all contexts in life, no matter what.
My point relates only to SO. I didn´t speak about a general context-unrelated attitude.
I thought SO was annoying too after trying to post some questions in the past. Glad it's not just me. I basically only view it nowadays if google returns a link to it as a possible answer to my question.
Your analysis seems pretty-much spot-on. Just one very small point. If you want to see comments posted by an SO or SE user, just open their profile, click on 'Activity', and then select 'All Actions' on the left of the screen. You can now select comments (I think it's the 5th option on the list above the actions display).
Is there an actual stack overflow alternative?
Expertsexchange or Codidact are two, plus Spiceworks sometimes but that's more an alternative to general computer use questions.
No, just Reddit, it seems
As a dev with 20 years of experience writing low level framework and backend code I can tell You the elitist behavior and calling users stupid, locking questions and linking outdated answers is the reason I will only ever go to stackoverflow after exhausting like 2 pages of google results. probably visited it like only 10 times since 2016 because of this.
Reading comments, one has to ask if what really happened to stackoverflow was the phenomena of "Trolls".
Those who get a kick out of just angering people, mucking things up deliberately, being destructive, trashing things, as their only source of getting their sick jollies? Is it possible this was part of the overflow cultural change?
(In addition to being bought by a commercial entity.)
The number of times I search for a question and find someone with the exact issue i have only to see they had their question shut down and pointed to and extremely old answer that was either
- Not at all the same
- Only partially relevant but not truly the same and was either mostly or entirely unhelpful
- Worked but was obviously overly complex
- Worked but had little to no explanation of how the code worked
- Worked but had a far to technical explanation of how the code worked (AKA the explanation is only useful if you have a higher level of proficiency)
AI may be wrong sometimes but it doesn't scold you for asking a question that someone else has asked.
Yesterday I posted a very specific question on Stack Overflow and it was soon closed as duplicate, and linked to a very general question I was supposed to have found and read first. But this was not the part that bothered me most, but the mocking comment of a user, and the fact that his comment was the most upvoted. I closed my account! I don't want to be part of a community like that. There's so many other sources of information like blog posts, videos and documentation that I'm probably not going to miss it!
SO locking questions is the worst. Especially if the answer is not immediately forthcoming but can be answered years later. I have accumulated enough points to actually be a moderator but I can't stand SO policies, so why would I inflict them on anyone else?
What always gets me with the "did you Google it?" answers is the number of times I have a problem, I Google it and the results I get say "did you Google it?", "did you Google it?", "did you....." GAAAH!
Answers asking a question, and nothing more than "did you Google it?" Surely no such answer exists on SO. If you mean *comments* asking that, please do flag those for moderators to delete, as they're noise, unfriendly, and not needed on the site (and the SO community agrees w/ you that those comments don't belong). I rarely see such comments, personally.
related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/5280/997587 and meta.stackexchange.com/q/8724/997587
Lets be honest though, eventually you would post your question and it would get closed because it was to similar to something that was answered with 10 year old solutions.- it's a dead horse, so the owners are getting what they can for it at the glue factory.
I've never used any AI stuff to help me. I go to stack overflow often though. And yep I find that the answers often are not what I'm looking for and are outdated. But I still often find useful info and solutions.
What really bothers me though is when documentation is hard to decipher. I've wasted a lot of time, many times, due to poor explanations. Then hours or days later I finally figure out how it works and it's like "why the hell couldn't they just say that?"
Like, if the people writing the documentation just put a few more minutes of effort to be clear, it would save me hours or days. Multiply that times how many other people have to go through the same shit and we could be talking years of time saved.
The examples that you give in the "There were cracks in the walls before AI", is exactly my experience with StackOverflow as well. I tried to get in a few years ago, I was completely new to the platform, but I asked a few questions, and most of all, I tried to answer some of the questions that I felt I had valid answers for. Every single time, I was discarded, and almost insulted, by a veteran member. They were so rude and obnoxious, it really pushed me away very quickly. After not even one week, I gave up. I never went back since.
(By the way, pretty much the same experience that I had when I tried reddit, to me all these "old communities"' are quite toxic, so now I just don't really participate in anything online anymore, besides a few comments here and there, and sometimes a discord, but that's it)
Stack Overflow is not a way of life, it is just an online forum where people ask and answer questions. Firstly, most the time you ask a question you either get awful answers, rude answers, or it gets closed and redirected to an old post that does not adequately answer the question. I hate to say it, the AI will do a better job than their users have..... unfortunately for Stack Overflow I can access the same level of AI answers from my browser's search bar and as such won't need to visit their website at all to get better answers. It won't affect me at all, since I rarely use stack overflow anyway. AI is slowly taking over the internet.
The internet for years has largely been a consolidated corporate world of bots and astroturfing. Very little creative or genuine content still exists. The Dead Internet Theory was only partially correct a decade ago or so, but it is getting more true by the minute.
Being patient is a skill. Consider in the workplace if you often have to train up new people. Those new people are going to all be asking the same questions you've heard before from previous ones. Sometimes they may seem obvious to you, the skilled person. Maybe you think they should have been able to work it out for themselves, or that you pretty much told them already. But if you're impatient you will create immediate bad feeling in the trainee, and a sense of hostility. You will put them off asking again, then maybe they won't ask something for fear of your response, and screw up instead. So you really have to be patient, and kind, and make it clear that this is a "ask any question you have" environment. You must remember that the person asking this for the hundredth time is not the person who asked for the 99th time or the 98th or the 1st, and you probably asked this, or similar "obvious" things, when you were the trainee.
People offering answers for free on the internet, who may be short tempered, in programming or other nerd skills, where they may well be neurodivergent, are probably not good at this. It's an inherent problem.
The foundation of Stack Overflow is flawed. No one should have ever been given credit for their effort. It should have been given freely.
My first interaction with SO, was in 2013 I was in the first CS courses and had back then what might have seemed like stupid questions to experienced engineers but I was new to the field. I can't even remember what I asked but I was basically publicly berated and humiliated made to feel like an idiot for not having a masters level understanding of CS as a 1st year student. Even the feedback was moronic like the expectation was to essentially answer your own question and upload the answer ....
This became the excepted culture on SO, and turned a lot of people away especially with the owners actually condoning the toxic culture. ChatGPT doesn't suffer from this fatal human flaw called EGO. I've always hated the SO platform it was everything thats wrong with the whole culture surrounding software engineering.
Working in an area I'd not been in before- writing an instrument plugin in the Steinberg VST2 stylee with its poorly documented API, I found ChatGPT invaluable, it acted like an eternally patient tutor. Sometimes its answers were wrong but I could find that out very rapidly rather than the very slow human response time of a website like Stack Overflow, and it never called me an annoying idiot.
Don't forget that a ton of devs were let go from their jobs in this sector during the past couple of years. They aren't searching SO because they can't get a job in the sector anymore.
Interesting. I remember a time when Stack Overflow outright banned anything AI related stuff from their website.
and they still do that
Yes, that's another significant event that didn't make it into this video. SO originally banned answers written by AI, and the company was on board with that. Then the company *secretly* told moderators they weren't allowed to delete that stuff any more, but they wouldn't disclose their new policies publicly, putting moderators in a bind. That led to a nine-week moderation strike in the summer of 2023. The company eventually both disclosed and amended the policy to end the strike. (There were some other promises too, some greatly delayed. I've lost track of whether they have yet, almost a year later, done everything they promised the strikers.)
@@eng3d Of course they still do, you cannot train an AI with data created by an AI. You need human answers to train the AI. If you feed AI answers into an AI, you create a feedback loop where the AI keeps confirming it's own nonsense and then you end up with increasingly more nonsense in the future.
Chatgpt has been replacing and my goto for questions. I think Stackoverflow forgot their vision and got pased by technology. The lack of innovation and vision lead to their decline in the past years. Like you mentioned, AI was just the technology bump that overthrow the company due to lack of direction and entity.
My expectation is that they will slowly fade away in the history of the internet as they got technologically overthrown. The current decisions they have been taken trying to 'save' rather then to innovate are exposing a true mismanaged company which eroded his valies for growing profit.
Thank you for this interesting overview! Btw: You CAN see the comment history of a user (even publicly without being logged in): "Activity" tab under the user image in the user profile, then "All actions" tab under it, then "Comments" tab on top of the actions list. The particular user isn't consistently mean or impolite. I don't find his "Why" question mean at all either. The "Why" has been asked even twice in the comments. And isn't that a weird question indeed? Every developer learns to encapsulate their code into many small functions to reduce repetition and improve readability, and the questioner wants to do the contrary. I was active til 2014 answering questions, and I could imagine to have asked "Why" as well because I had had the suspicion that some other problem or misunderstanding lies behind the question. I probably had added a guess like "Do you want to improve your code's execution performance by inlining function calls?" or something, just because a plain "Why" COULD sound offensive. (We are in the Internet and don't look into each other's face.) If the answer would have been "yes, that's the reason", maybe somebody would have explained that excessive inlining is counterproductive for performance. (I have actually no clue.) Which might have been valuable information for the questioner, maybe more than an answer to the original question. But the user didn't answer the "Why" or replied to any other comment to the question. I would not have questions for clarification or context left unanswered, that's impolite, if I expect from somebody to invest their time in answering my question. But yes, in general, I agree that the overall tone has become worse on SO over the years. "We are not here to do your homework" is an unneccesary sentence (how could we know this for sure?).
If the question is easy enough to answer, it's easy enough to put caveats in there. Often someone will ask a question because they're forced into a certain solution by the surrounding legacy code. Having such a question devolve into a discussion about why this or why that, is a waste of everybody's time.
The problem of just commenting "why do you need this?" is the implication that you have the answer but you want the person asking the question to explain themselves, like a child to a parent, so you can decide if they should be allowed to continue.
Unless you suspect someone to be doing something illegal I can rarely see a good reason for asking why the user wants to do something.
"This is how you do it *but* you should know that it's considered best practice to do this instead."
@@Novacification Actually knowing someone's true motivation/goal can help provide a better answer, rather than an answer which just caters to implicit invalid assumptions the question author may have made. If the author knows that the question is odd, but there are special circumstances, maybe they should just mention it themselves in order to prevent the (justified) "whys".
@@clray123 I didn't say no one should be allowed to ask questions about the details of a question. However, a short "why" question, like "why do you need this?" doesn't accomplish anything like that.
Also, even when people do mention that they are locked into a specific solution you can still see people asking why in the comments.
@@Novacification Asking "why do you need this?" accomplishes that the original poster may explain why they need this.
@@clray123 and when they answer that it's for a project they're working on?
90% of the time, if I find that someone already asked the same question I have, there's no answer or a single answer with a score of 1 or 0, so I still don't know if the answer is good or not.
Did anyone think that they didn't open source their SO answers, implicitly?
17:49 Machines can't exploit humans. Humans exploit humans.
Stack Overflow actively blocking people from removing data could be a violation of gdpr laws
I used SO three times (my usual rule, 3 strikes). One question was answered amidst dozens of demands for why I wanted to do it, or equivalents to "RTFM" or why I didn't upgrade to a newer version. The other two questions were never answered as asked/described. So I deemed the site another useless internet cesspool, and have never been back.
Pro tip: If someone asks a question, always stay on the topic of the question. Don't ask why, don't insult, don't berate, and most importantly, let them use the version they want to use, it's none of your fucking business why they haven't upgraded. If I'm met with those kinds of questions when I have a problem, my typical response is "None of your fucking business, do you have a solution or not? If not, fuck off and let someone else answer."
Coding is an arena where hallucinations are far less of a worry, because you're immediately going to test the output to verify (huge difference from say a student asking Chat GPT for the causes behind the industrial revolution and just accepting the output as fact). And if it doesn't work, you have something to work with to correct with a helpful talking rubber duck :) Eventually you learn to adapt your prompts and be more explicit to handle issues. As a formerly heavy Stack Overflow user, even ignoring the rudeness factor, you could not pay me to search on there compared to using Claude 3.5 or GPT4, it's a night and day difference for quality as well as productivity.
Only true if the hallucinated bug is so obvious that it immediately manifests itself... rather than a year later while someone else has taken over "your" code.
When you look for an answer to something simple and someone just posted his entire project and you're like "Im not going to read that"
SO has become the basis on which many developers base their daily professional coding, nicknamed Cargo Cult Coding. Without the helpful SO experts sample code snippets, this will be impossible.
Ourcome is hard to predict, but a growing shortage of developers are one scenario.
But SO is not going away, it is just getting stolen and rebranded as an AI offering by Microsoft.
@@clray123 But the helpful SO experts are going away.
@@jojje3000-1 Not really, they are just going to start demanding pay for being helpful experts, as was the case before SO arrived and fooled people into free labor in exchange for good feels and dubious "fame".
The reason people answer questions on SO in comments instead of posting actual answers also has to do with toxic behavior on the site. Comments can only be upvoted, not downvoted, so you can gain points by writing good comments, but you will never lose points just because someone doesn't like your answer or the fact that you answered a question or you personally. Answers, on the other hand, can be downvoted, and you will lose points when that happens, and quite often it's not because your answer is bad, but just because someone is trying to troll you, or people don't like the fact that you answered a question they don't think is worth answering. Yet comments don't even show up when you visit SO on your smartphone, as the mobil version of the page shows no comments at all!
There's also a fundamental mistake that the users of all "community" sites make again and again. It's the belief that the "community" site exists for the purpose of building the community... this is not the case. "Community" sites exist to maximise the financial profits of their owners. We, as users, may not like this. We may wish the opposite was true. But, no matter how hard we wish, it isn't going to change.
SO was great as long as I was just using it to find answers. However when I then started to feel like I should contribute by answering questions, then I found out how disrespectful mods there could be. I no longer use nor feel grateful for it. Are you my worst enemy? Then please go there and ask a homework-like question! /s
What's better than one Dee? Two Dee's :3
Next video will be 3D :D
I no longer see any need for stack overflow with chatgpt around. I've had a lot of quick programming tasks done by chatgpt like I have an extra developer handy.
Me: "How to X? Tried Y, it doesn't work any more."
So:"closed, it's a duplicate of Y"
Pretty interesting, thanks for the insight. I'd noticed that SO doesn't show up as much in search results and even when it does the results don't seem as helpful as they used to.
The answers there are definitely high quality and less repetitive as a result so I don't mind.
This is completely backwards.. SO could've used AI to go through the question/answers/comments to generate a metamap of the site and then used that knowledge to redirect users to (actually) related/duplicate issues where people post(ed) answers.. but no, instead it's still people that are locking the threads, and it's AI that's responding..
however, to play the devil's advocate, people are growing increasingly more impatient, lazy and uninterested. Especially younger generations that don't care about where the info is coming from as long as it "there in a second" (because, essentially, despite being incredibly crap for programming) that's what chatGPT does.
It won't work it's ALL been archived and Uploaded ALL of Stack Overflow.
Too late
In think 80% of the time we do a question in stack overflow is a dummy question
If stack overflow is a toxic environment for newbie questions it will lose A LOT of users for chatgpt.
It has been a cesspool for a very long time, with many people on power trips who often seem to just close good unique questions because they can.
There's another video out there of a guy with similar sentiment reviewing the site though not as polite as Dee, lol
@@straightup7up Usually it's the CZcamsrs making the videos that are the assholes, not the site they're refusing to learn how to use.
Stackoverflow closes all my questions, but not because they duplicated, because it's hard to answer to them. Stackoverflow aren't interested in hard questions.
Agree, this makes SO questions difficulty level ”window” at not to hard and not to easy, which is odd and not productive for developers.
Interesting… they probably want questions that will be easy to rank on search? Easier to search, easier to appear on google -> more traffic?
I had the same problem... some years back i had a system for a client that generated code and while maintaining the system i was having problems generating a generic abstract controller... so i had to post a question on stack overflow and was down voted and received a lot of comments like: "just code the controller... why you want to generate it..." i was like: "dear lord i don't need to explain the product and the full story... f just be constructive"... a bit like this example post "i'm having a problem with this code for a text editor i'm writing" awsr: "why do you need to write a text editor?"
@@codingwithdee Highly likely, but they could also harbour really difficult questions within their processes with some design. It suprises me a bit.
@@pedrofigueiredo9146 😂😂⤵️
I am fine with SO replacing their commentators with AI. The last thing any new programmer wants when they have a difficult programming problem is rude abusive comments from trolls. I stopped posting questions on SO years ago because of this. So, no, I am not saddened that SO is falling. 😐
Until AI learns to be an asshole, too.
AI is not always correct which is a problem. SO gives you multiple solutions and sometimes a combo of those solves your issue. It also adds in creative thinking which AI can't do because it doesn't think at all. I'd rather take a bit of abuse over wasting hours with AI and not realizing the bastard is wrong.
*Key are the aging answers*
Putting AI on top of it will do nothing to address the core issue.
They need to archive old information and under certain conditions put it back to the front.
The site simply needs to feel new and fresh again (information wise).
I bailed on Stack Overflow a long time ago. But ChatGPT and Claude completely killed it.
19:30 btw it was impossible to delete popular answers way ago before AI arrived. I know because I tried to replace my really up-voted but really outdated answer(was not marked as "a solution" btw) with most up-to-date and did not want to edit initial answer into something completely different. Makes sense, every answer and question can be direct-linked from the outside.
You can't delete an accepted or upvoted answer. People would need to remove their votes before you can actually delete your post, which is also only possible when you edited your message before. And by deleting it is still on the platform but just not visible to others. With enough rep or with mod-priviledges you can see this deleted posts even years later. When you delete your account i.e. all posts you wrote will then show up your name as "Deleted User" or the like and will change your post to a community answer instead so that questions and answers don't get lost.
I once produced and answer to a question that tackled the title of the question and a bit of its question context but this was not really what the OP was asking for. The question itself was a bit confusing and ambigious. He then modified his question and added some further tags and clarification which made my answer a bit invalid and thus negative votes came in over time and I couldn't remove that message as some have upvoted that post. A moderator just adviced me to either ignore that post or update it to fit the question again and then upvotes will come "naturally" over time.
If it's your own answer post, just edit to prepend the more up-to-date answer content to the outdated content.
For every helpful comment on SO I usually wade through 10x as many jackasses. It makes reddit look cordial. I gave up trying to seriously contribute years ago.
Sometimes, the most upvoted answer on Stack Overflow is not as powerful as a comment with a low score. I like to scroll down and chew over which answer suits me
A bit like how a Microsoft top ranked help page is too algebraic and I tend to prefer other web site help pages.
I would bet that AI, behind the scenes, is often someone doing what I just described and then packaging it as "AI".
I first started to learn coding in 2016. I still have little reputation as I just keep Googling. Basically you can't comment as a new or user who hasn't posted but then the question is already there with answers so you can't add a comment when appropriate. Yet if you post it as an answer that's the same but a small change I don't post it because I know it will be removed as a duplicate
AI isn't 100% reliable. But if you test the AI's answer and it doesn't work, ask again. If you ask for solutions to small tasks or just show it your error message with a little bit of context, it gives you a solution that works 90% of the time. Learning to program was an absolute pain before AI chatbots. I dropped out of CS many years ago, one of the reasons was I showed my code to the professor and asked for help, he suggested I went to the library and read a book on Java.
If SO wasn’t so snarky then perhaps there user base would not be declining