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
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.
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 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.
A lot of the time when devs answer questions they ignore that the OP might be stuck with an old version or old tools or an old codebase that they are not allowed to rewrite. In some cases they may be up to date on a language version but are forbidden to use new features. That happens. Of course, in answering a question, you won’t necessarily know this upfront. But once the OP tells you their constraints then you should respond appropriately.
@@lubricustheslippery5028 That would be a huge problem if SO was the sole generator of new ideas or if AI was the only way to retrieve it. They are not.
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.
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.
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.
That was my experience as well. Every question I asked was closed on the grounds of being a duplicate. The questions I was directed to were all similar to, but completely inapplicable to my situation. For example, I would ask something like: How can I do A without using B? My question would be closed as a duplicate and I would be directed to a question where every answer explained how to do A using B.
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?
Between outdated answers and dealing with egotistical douchebag know it alls newer developers don't see Stack Overflow as relevant in the days of Ai assistants.
@@SiddiqueSukdikiMany functionalities of SO/SE are locked behind reputation. You cant comment if you dont have at least 5 (i think) you cant edit your own post till 500 (or so) and etc. After you pass 1000 you are a human being and can use your account as you would any other... but if you fibd yourself an asshole with possy you wont even be able to ask a question. Only thing you can do (with negative rep) is to use community chat. Who even knew that existed? I didnt ... till i reached -100... but oh well. Im at 1000+ now, i can edit your post and say you love hitler if i wanted to.
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.
They are also very unintelligent. They can't answer subtle questions. They can't read and can't parse non trivial text. They harass you and then the mods take part in harassment. It's a hellish site.
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.
@@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.
They have a purity of egocentrism but they can't read non trivial sentences, can't debate, can't do simple logic. "This is not a forum" is a contradiction in itself if you reply to someone: if you can reply it's a forum
@@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.
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).
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.
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
If I had a nickel for every time I had a genuine question, found a good answer on StackOverflow, and then saw that the question was “closed” due to some rules violation. Or worse, you have a question in the context of a complex program, so to ask the question you have to simplify the code, and then comes the obligatory StackOverflow comment, “Why would you ever want to do that, that’s bad design.” And you wonder whether or not to explain, “There’s a good reason, but it would take pages and pages to explain. So are you able to help or not?” Then a stupid argument ensues that is totally a waste of time.
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.
Was in a similar situation. I solved a problem that was asked a few times around the web, no answers (pretty obscure language and lib). So i decided to answer the unanswered SO question. I just couldn't get it, people who knew nothing about it felt deep need to update the wording of my answer, in one case nearly inverting the meaning of the paragraph. Well, they can keep the dead account, I guess.
Sounds like Reddit. Work in a highly niche field. Have much experience in niche field. Post experiences about said subject. Get downvoted to hell and called a liar, because no "proof" of experience. They claim lack of public citations is evidence of a liar, but all the information and code was proprietary. Could not legally share source or documentation even if I wanted to without getting sued in civil court. Of course this info is now widely known and cited in public media, but it was not the case a decade ago.
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
AI may give good answers in the short term (exploiting past expert answers), but can it substitute the knowledge of human experts in the long term? If not, a new model is needed to ensure the flow of human expertise into the system.
Same issue in Wikipedia. It took years to get an English page for Proxmox VE created. VMware had a page, Hyper-V too and many others but open source Proxmox could not have a page because it was "commercial advertising", "irrelevant" etc. Some people just seem incapable of using their power to moderate in a reasonable manner, such people then back each other up and if you are not in their club you might as well not exist at all. So the newbies give up and stop contributing, leaving the power tripping mods to control their little corner of the internet.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
@@xcoder1122, you made them feel bad for not being able to answer it. I think most of the problems discussed here can be explained by people wanting to feel good about themselves at all costs. So the real product of SO is not answers to questions, but feelgood for giving the appearance of expertise. And nothing challenges an appearance like the real thing.
About 10 years ago I've asked my first and only question on Stack Overflow platform, because despite reading the documentation of what interested me, I've didn't understand the concept, and asked for help. I was literally demolished with comments and downvotes. Also, while searching for other questions, I noticed a lot of posts where the answerer was asking the questioner why he asked that question instead of giving a solution. So I agree with you 100%.
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?
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)
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.
I usually would find stack overflow answers via Google searches. So I would click and see something idiotic like "we're not here to answer homework questions".... Or what was also annoying were all the moderator junk like "This is being asked in the wrong forum" or whatever. I just wanted the darn answer I didn't care. Nowadays if I ask GPT it just gives me the answer.... And stack overflow wonders why they're losing relevance. You nailed it in this video.
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.
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".
@xcoder1122 so they have the UX wrong, the checkmark just calls the wrong mental picture in most people. I too had to unlearn paying it any mind on SO.
@@mrdkyzmrdany8742 Usually the highest upvoted answer is also the best, regardless of whether it is accepted or not. Assuming that the accepted one is the best means "you are assuming that the person who had no idea how to solve a problem is now capable of judging which solution presented is best", but to judge that would require that person to have a certain level of knowledge, and if that person had that level of knowledge they would not need to ask this question. There are exceptions, though, as in some cases an answer may have a very high upvote, and then someone else posts an even better answer, and being late to the party, that new answer has no chance of ever catching up, even though it is better. Another problem is that languages and libraries evolve. So often an answer that was good 8 years ago is nowhere near as good today, because there is a much better way to do it today. There is no objective way to say which answer is the best I'm afraid.
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).
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.
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.
@@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...
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.
20:27 - This action is probably a violation of the agreement between the writers and the site. After registering your discontent, you should probably pursue legal action to enforce the agreement with damages. With OpenAI as a defendant, you could probably find a lot of lawyers who would take the case on contingency...
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)
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.
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.
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.
I like the video thanks for the insight, I am going on to comment on two different things, one what the video is about and also the internet as a whole with the direction it is going in. I do think stack overflow is a great source of information, but at the same time it is not very friendly to new users, the obvious problem is a new user cannot post a comment, they can only post a question or an answer. This is very flawed because you might want to respond to an answer or a question with something that should not be posted as an answer, it is a very bizarre limitation for new users. This can lead to lower quality answers from new users, who will be of course unable to ask for clarification from the person asking the question and being desperate to raise their reputation. I once asked a question which was then edited by a moderator because they felt I didnt ask the question properly, but the problem is they then made it into a different a question, which to meant they interpreted my question incorrectly, but who am as a new user to fight a moderator of the site? In my view in that instance the moderator is overstepping what they should be doing. I also agree with you on the duplication problem, this issue exists on other communities as well, I understand preventing duplications of very recent posts/questions, but its going too far if the duplicated contents is several months or years old, and of course I agree with the reasons you stated where the old answer may no longer be relevant. Reddit has a similar problem of overly strong moderation. Of course I agree that users on such a site should not be replying telling someone to google it, I myself have e.g. been told to google something, when I have already done so, maybe I suck at using keywords in google, but to assume I havent searched before asking is a bit insulting, and if I get this kind of reply often, I will be driven from a community. Now moving on to your final point with people deleting answers, because they not happy with the answer being used by AI, this is a problem on the wider internet, a lot of communities are now moving to Discord, and the problem with Discord is none of it is indexed by search engines, its kind of like a modern form of IRC, where its isolated from the wider internet, but even worse because there is no way to search for Discord servers, you have to be aware it exists and have an invite link to get on the server you want. Discord in it self is very unsuitable for archival of questions and answers aka knowledge sharing, its primary strength is live chat. We are already seeing lots of game developers and modders moving to discord and that knowledge is getting locked away, it would not surprise me at all if we end up with the parts of the stack overflow userbase that doesnt want their answers becoming part of an AI site moving to discord knowing that their data wont be able to harvested on a private discord server. I dont like this direction the internet is going, as for me the prime function of the internet is to share information. My background I do work with developers and occasionally I have gone to stack overflow and similar sites to try and resolve issues or to help me write a script, I also have done as a hobby game modding primarily in Final Fantasy 7, the point being here, is that much of the reverse engineering for fF7 is on a website, which in the 2000s and 2010s had a very thriving community that shared information with each other, now game modding communities are largely done over Discord, and finding ways to create mods for the games in question is really difficult as all the information is locked away. The internet in a decade is going to be even worse and far more hostile than it is now.
Sad to see SO going down this road! I was an early user, not the most prolife (wow, Jon Skeet!), but I found the site incredibly useful. I eventually acquired a reputation of over 12,000, 17 gold, 87 silver, and 123 bronze badges. I retired in 2016, and have since only visited a few times when developing little apps for my own use.
I've been a user since the beta, but I come and go (under 2k rep). There were complaints about it getting bad for a long time, and I thought the community adapted. But lately, it has gotten noticeably worse. It used to be that a lot of new questions were randomly downvoted with no comment... then new, solid questions would get downvoted. Recently, bots are now auto-closing and hiding these nicked questions. Recently I noticed that several questions I asked were removed, and it doesn't even tell you when you are scheduled, but when it is deleted, you get a -2. For context, I've probably asked about 150 questions over 10 years, and maybe 5 or 6 were marked dupes or closed. This year its ~75%.
SO's one true answer model doesn't work so well when the language changes or updates. How do I do 'x' on iOS questions frequently have a ten year old ObjC answer, scroll down a bit and you get the Swift 2.0 code, scroll a bit more and you'll find Swift 5.0. Not the best experience. LLMs are going to eat their lunch.ChatGPT works well. I know some aren't to happy about how the learning material is acquired, but the end user experience is great. Yes, you can't take the code on blind trust, but I would hope no-one takes SO examples on trust either. The best thing is the rapid iteration: • How do I draw a rainbow using SwiftUI? • > Code that draws a circle with rainbow coloured segments • No, I want the segments to be concentric • > Code that draws rainbow coloured segments offset, but one starts where the other finishes • I want concentric and the start and end points to be at the same position of the arc • > Working code All done in a couple of minutes.
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...
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.
@@bitman_agent67 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.
I appreciate the learnings I got from SO 14 years ago. Like how to ask and formulate software development questions to get relevant answers. However, I deleted my account many years ago and for the past 2 years I have not even visited the site once..
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.
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.
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.
If the various AI leaders have apparently scraped all human data from the internet, then all the questions and answers would already be in AI. Another example of corporates arrogant lack of respect and doing exactly what they want to do, then gaslighting those who had their creative produce stolen. Makes me angry every time I think about it! Dee, you are a breath of fresh air!
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.
I’ve found with the AIs that even when they get an answer slightly wrong they’re still helpful and sometimes you can correct them using information they’ve actually given you! So they teach you and you teach them back based on what they taught you. I’ve also found this in non-coding areas,
@@kevinmcfarlane2752, except that the AI does not actually incorporate anything you tell it. Only the chat interface on top of it is programmed to refer back to what was said recently.
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...
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.
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.
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?"
Petulent children were bad enough, but in many circles they are gaining more power. It's like a psychotic version of Logan's Run, but with many more executions (canceling and excommunication) and slander while claiming compassion. There are always consequences to rampant hate, no matter how it is spun.
I gave up, mostly, on SO because whenever I have a question it’s due to a unique situation. I needed people to work with me to find a solution. But I rarely got that in the last few years - instead, just general unpleasantness and even spite. That, and Gen AI seems to get it right more often than not, and is always polite.
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.
4:34 - wait - that's actually quite legitimate question that was part of usenet netiquette and frankly, your reaction to it is hallmark of what is wrong with software industry. Once it used to drill down to essence of the problem, why is it even a problem because person who asked question might already be set on wrong way toward faulty solution or at very least, it is example of law of instrument in action! And yeah, if somebody asks tutorial level questions - well, how can you expect people who expect to have everything served to them contribute back? Also, showing HOW and WHERE original problem where wrong HAS educational value for others! If you want free knowledge, give OTHERS opportunity to learn - especially on YOUR mistakes! Don't come in with entitled attitude 'do it for me'
The problem with most comments of that kind that I see on SO is that they are not made to get a wider perspective at the problem. They are made to just reject the question as silly because you can just remove the constraint. Except most of the time it's a production constraint imposed by the client's IT department. The developer is in no position to remove that constraint unless he can give a detailed explanation as to why this constraint makes the entire thing impossible. So the harsh comment is irrelevant and a waste of time for everybody. Especially when you can scroll down 1 or 2 pages and find an answer by someone who understood the situation and gave a solution that deals with the constraint. But that excellent solution is hidden way behind several invalid solutions that ignore the constraint.
As an example, I noticed most Qs related to java-springboot are answered for versions before 3. There are very few new questions for version 3. Even when the question specifies the version, the answer does not work 😢 And same has been happening with less and less content related to new technologies or approaches
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.
I just want a quick answer while I'm in the flow. Not some idiot telling me off who wasn't even in nappies when I was coding Fortran and assembler. Or never having anyone bother to answer at all. Even a bad AI answer gives me a new way to look at a problem and often it's better grammar and well written. Sometimes I don't want to spend the day reading a manual. I just want to keep the flow going.
If you are really in the flow, you don't want a quick answer, you want the correct answer. There is no good to a ton of code that is of dubious quality. Most of my career has been doing software maintenance, we have way too much code out there that the original authors don't understand! Understand what you are trying to do in your code. If you need to read the docs, then read them!
I just discovered your videos with this one. quite good. thank you for the work. Tiny observation as I saw this in my family and it can go worse if not checked - and please take that for what it is as just a caring comment: I suggest you consult a medical doctor for your neck (thyroid) keep the good work i subscribed.
I was active on this site ten years ago. I used it to learn to be a better programmer, by answering questions. I would mock up the question, then write and test the answer.
At 7:38, Dee briefly displays a comment that questions are likely to get a legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago. That's right! I often find answers that do not actually apply to today's software.
It's true. The few times I've asked question of stack overflow, I spent a lot of time google-fu-ing to make damn sure there wasn't a question already on SO or else they'd bite my head off.
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
I don't use Stack Overflow anymore. I just use an AI chat, where I get an answer fast, and is not judged. An I am an experienced developer. So quite often, I don't even receive an answer on SO. Perhaps because there is no easy answer, or nobody knows about the specific issue.
This is the prime selling point of AI, its never going to scold you, disrespect you, instead it will just try to help you, whilst humans get emotional, have bad days and can get temperamental. Add in the fact that many communities are moving to discord, I think searchable knowledge is going to be eventually dominated by AI.
Hey Dee -- I'm a new subscriber, only watched a small handful of your videos, and while I've loved the content I've seen thus far, the editing of this one was distracting. Several times your webcam was on screen in two different places at the same time or the text reveal you were reading was lagging by 2+ seconds. I know video editing is hard and the preview you see while doing so isn't always accurate, so I just wanted to let you know you may want to watch the final result before posting. Anyway, that aside, the content of this video hit hard because I hate to see SO decline, but all your points are spot-on.
Thanks so much for letting me know. I actually didn’t watch the final video (well I watched it on the video editor and not the exported version). I was having weird issues during the editing but I thought it was fixed and guess it wasn’t. How frustrating. I’ll post a pinned comment. Thanks for watching and letting me know, I appreciate it!!
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
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.
I stopped using Stack. I've been developing since the 90s, I know how forums can be. I asked my first question on Stack in maybe 2012 (somewhere around that time). I read the rules, I posted a clear question and explained below why similar sounding questions (with links) weren't the solution to my problem and...instant closed with "Duplicate of
I think the main problem with comments is that there is no "down vote" on them. (Just a slight nudge to signal that maybe this wasn't a productive use of your keyboard.;) Mean people can write comments and pile on by up-voting them, and nice people can't do much. So there is very little deterrent against being mean (unless massive number of people start reporting these comments to moderators... which is not the intended use of that system and would create an even larger problem, moderator burnout, and nice people wouldn't do that... on the other hand, all evil needs to succeed is for nice people to do nothing)
To me it looks like the guy who wanted to make "the world a little bit better" is more focused on the recognition. "I want to feed the homeless, but I better be recognized for this work. Because my real goal is recognition". I use AI a lot by now. I am one of those who very early in my career was VERY intimidated by the responses on Stack Overflow (Not so much to me, but to others, so I never dared posting some myself), and I am SO happy an alternative exists. It saves me time on a magnitude that simply can't be ignored. So. The world moves on. You have given your answer, and the world is better for it. People will forget it was you who gave the answer. Accept your answer is valuable without your name attached to it, and that you DID make the world a little bit better. Some day you'll be dead, and forgotten, and nobody cares what you gave the world. And then the Sun expands, and engulf the Earth. Bye. (But thanks for your contribution!)
I've avoided Stack Overflow for years because it stinks of snark. There are much better places to go that are inhabited by people that want to help you.
It just seemed like a nest of ppl who wanted to sit on high and look down their noses at the rest of us working-class scrubs. I was always too intimidated to ask a question.
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.)
Even as someone that wants to answer questions it sucks because either the question is way above my skill level, or it is closed so it's hard to build reputation
5:25 - I don't have a 5-digit rating on Stackoverflow, but I've answered a few questions. I agree with the opinion - this is decided laziness on the part of the OP. Python is well-described in it's documentation, and has lots of resources that are outside of the Python infrastructure. I think the writer would have been better off simply not responding. I suspect that he was just having a bad day and the OP made himself a convenient scapegoat.
21:27 my workflow definitely does not check ai last, it checks it first. Or docs visible in ide first then ai. Copilot is in my ide and so very low barrier to entry with fail fast answers.
I have let's say a solid reputation on two other sites of stack exchange network I'm not new to the network... And I have not asked on stack overflow for YEARS, yeap because (my perception) is that enough users are rude and quick to downvote questions, and I did not wanted to be banned for negative points.
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!
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.
@@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.
The “I want to know why you’re trying to do this” isn’t necessarily meanness. The user might be thinking that the person asking the question has narrowed the focus of the expected solution too early, and a different solution to the real high-level problem might be superior.
My experience with Stack Overflow: Me: How do I do A without using B? SO: Please note this is a duplicate question. It has been marked closed. [with a link to "How do I do A using B?"] The questions that led me to S.O. in the first place were all closed on the grounds of being duplicates and I was directed to the "original" question. Without exception, these "original" questions were similar to but NOT the same as my question. With only one exception, the answers provided to the similar questions were not applicable to my situation. Ironically, on that one occasion where the "original" question did actually contain an answer to my question, that answer had been down-voted to the bottom of the page for being inapplicable to the question that was asked. To add insult to injury, I was unable to give this answer an up-vote as I lacked the necessary 'reputation'. This one down-voted answer was the only answer I found on S.O. All the other answers I needed I went elsewhere to find. I suspect that SO will die out eventually, as they seem very abusive to new users.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
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 🤪
Thank you for a perfect content. These video issues are not critical bugs to correct them immediately. So, it's alright.
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.
@@WooShell underrated comment
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.
A lot of the time when devs answer questions they ignore that the OP might be stuck with an old version or old tools or an old codebase that they are not allowed to rewrite. In some cases they may be up to date on a language version but are forbidden to use new features. That happens.
Of course, in answering a question, you won’t necessarily know this upfront. But once the OP tells you their constraints then you should respond appropriately.
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?
That is an huge problem even if the AI works, because we will stop generate data for future AI so they can't get better. Especially for new stuff
@@lubricustheslippery5028 That would be a huge problem if SO was the sole generator of new ideas or if AI was the only way to retrieve it. They are not.
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.
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.
That was my experience as well. Every question I asked was closed on the grounds of being a duplicate. The questions I was directed to were all similar to, but completely inapplicable to my situation. For example, I would ask something like: How can I do A without using B? My question would be closed as a duplicate and I would be directed to a question where every answer explained how to do A using B.
Yup. I too often, weekly during busy times, come upon closed duplicates that are better, in one or more ways, than the originals.
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?
was the guy a moderator or something? How is the person able to edit your question?
Between outdated answers and dealing with egotistical douchebag know it alls newer developers don't see Stack Overflow as relevant in the days of Ai assistants.
@@SiddiqueSukdikiAll users with basic reputation can edit all content, like a wiki
@@SiddiqueSukdikiMany functionalities of SO/SE are locked behind reputation. You cant comment if you dont have at least 5 (i think) you cant edit your own post till 500 (or so) and etc. After you pass 1000 you are a human being and can use your account as you would any other... but if you fibd yourself an asshole with possy you wont even be able to ask a question. Only thing you can do (with negative rep) is to use community chat. Who even knew that existed? I didnt ... till i reached -100... but oh well. Im at 1000+ now, i can edit your post and say you love hitler if i wanted to.
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.
@@rostislavsvoboda7013you right. I consumed content but never got to gain rep so never could contribute. It put me off.
They are also very unintelligent. They can't answer subtle questions. They can't read and can't parse non trivial text. They harass you and then the mods take part in harassment. It's a hellish site.
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 have a purity of egocentrism but they can't read non trivial sentences, can't debate, can't do simple logic. "This is not a forum" is a contradiction in itself if you reply to someone: if you can reply it's a forum
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?
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
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
If I had a nickel for every time I had a genuine question, found a good answer on StackOverflow, and then saw that the question was “closed” due to some rules violation. Or worse, you have a question in the context of a complex program, so to ask the question you have to simplify the code, and then comes the obligatory StackOverflow comment, “Why would you ever want to do that, that’s bad design.” And you wonder whether or not to explain, “There’s a good reason, but it would take pages and pages to explain. So are you able to help or not?” Then a stupid argument ensues that is totally a waste of time.
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.
Was in a similar situation. I solved a problem that was asked a few times around the web, no answers (pretty obscure language and lib). So i decided to answer the unanswered SO question.
I just couldn't get it, people who knew nothing about it felt deep need to update the wording of my answer, in one case nearly inverting the meaning of the paragraph.
Well, they can keep the dead account, I guess.
Sounds like Reddit. Work in a highly niche field. Have much experience in niche field. Post experiences about said subject. Get downvoted to hell and called a liar, because no "proof" of experience. They claim lack of public citations is evidence of a liar, but all the information and code was proprietary. Could not legally share source or documentation even if I wanted to without getting sued in civil court.
Of course this info is now widely known and cited in public media, but it was not the case a decade ago.
@@potato9832 TL;DR: Crowd-sourced "documentation" is an oxymoron.
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.
AI may give good answers in the short term (exploiting past expert answers), but can it substitute the knowledge of human experts in the long term? If not, a new model is needed to ensure the flow of human expertise into the system.
Same issue in Wikipedia. It took years to get an English page for Proxmox VE created. VMware had a page, Hyper-V too and many others but open source Proxmox could not have a page because it was "commercial advertising", "irrelevant" etc. Some people just seem incapable of using their power to moderate in a reasonable manner, such people then back each other up and if you are not in their club you might as well not exist at all. So the newbies give up and stop contributing, leaving the power tripping mods to control their little corner of the internet.
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 :-)
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.
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
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.
The catch is you have to be experienced enough to know is bad code and why.
@@noam65exactly. The ai answers can be great but you have to know how to sanity check them
You can see their past comments. Go to activity, then filter it to "All Actions".
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.
@@xcoder1122, you made them feel bad for not being able to answer it. I think most of the problems discussed here can be explained by people wanting to feel good about themselves at all costs. So the real product of SO is not answers to questions, but feelgood for giving the appearance of expertise. And nothing challenges an appearance like the real thing.
About 10 years ago I've asked my first and only question on Stack Overflow platform, because despite reading the documentation of what interested me, I've didn't understand the concept, and asked for help. I was literally demolished with comments and downvotes. Also, while searching for other questions, I noticed a lot of posts where the answerer was asking the questioner why he asked that question instead of giving a solution. So I agree with you 100%.
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?
Hooray for chatGPT, since it can answer all my trout related love questions
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)
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.
I started calling them Snark Overflow🤡. Plus a lot of the arrogant star users give terrible long winded BAD answers.
I usually would find stack overflow answers via Google searches. So I would click and see something idiotic like "we're not here to answer homework questions".... Or what was also annoying were all the moderator junk like "This is being asked in the wrong forum" or whatever. I just wanted the darn answer I didn't care. Nowadays if I ask GPT it just gives me the answer.... And stack overflow wonders why they're losing relevance. You nailed it in this video.
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.
Stack overflow, like most large organizations, cares about itself.
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".
@xcoder1122 so they have the UX wrong, the checkmark just calls the wrong mental picture in most people. I too had to unlearn paying it any mind on SO.
@@mrdkyzmrdany8742 Usually the highest upvoted answer is also the best, regardless of whether it is accepted or not. Assuming that the accepted one is the best means "you are assuming that the person who had no idea how to solve a problem is now capable of judging which solution presented is best", but to judge that would require that person to have a certain level of knowledge, and if that person had that level of knowledge they would not need to ask this question.
There are exceptions, though, as in some cases an answer may have a very high upvote, and then someone else posts an even better answer, and being late to the party, that new answer has no chance of ever catching up, even though it is better. Another problem is that languages and libraries evolve. So often an answer that was good 8 years ago is nowhere near as good today, because there is a much better way to do it today. There is no objective way to say which answer is the best I'm afraid.
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).
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.
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...
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.
20:27 - This action is probably a violation of the agreement between the writers and the site. After registering your discontent, you should probably pursue legal action to enforce the agreement with damages. With OpenAI as a defendant, you could probably find a lot of lawyers who would take the case on contingency...
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)
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.
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.
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.
Me: "How to X? Tried Y, it doesn't work any more."
So:"closed, it's a duplicate of Y"
thank you! I am "passive" user of SO for so many years and I was always happy with finding my answers
I like the video thanks for the insight, I am going on to comment on two different things, one what the video is about and also the internet as a whole with the direction it is going in.
I do think stack overflow is a great source of information, but at the same time it is not very friendly to new users, the obvious problem is a new user cannot post a comment, they can only post a question or an answer. This is very flawed because you might want to respond to an answer or a question with something that should not be posted as an answer, it is a very bizarre limitation for new users. This can lead to lower quality answers from new users, who will be of course unable to ask for clarification from the person asking the question and being desperate to raise their reputation.
I once asked a question which was then edited by a moderator because they felt I didnt ask the question properly, but the problem is they then made it into a different a question, which to meant they interpreted my question incorrectly, but who am as a new user to fight a moderator of the site? In my view in that instance the moderator is overstepping what they should be doing.
I also agree with you on the duplication problem, this issue exists on other communities as well, I understand preventing duplications of very recent posts/questions, but its going too far if the duplicated contents is several months or years old, and of course I agree with the reasons you stated where the old answer may no longer be relevant. Reddit has a similar problem of overly strong moderation. Of course I agree that users on such a site should not be replying telling someone to google it, I myself have e.g. been told to google something, when I have already done so, maybe I suck at using keywords in google, but to assume I havent searched before asking is a bit insulting, and if I get this kind of reply often, I will be driven from a community.
Now moving on to your final point with people deleting answers, because they not happy with the answer being used by AI, this is a problem on the wider internet, a lot of communities are now moving to Discord, and the problem with Discord is none of it is indexed by search engines, its kind of like a modern form of IRC, where its isolated from the wider internet, but even worse because there is no way to search for Discord servers, you have to be aware it exists and have an invite link to get on the server you want. Discord in it self is very unsuitable for archival of questions and answers aka knowledge sharing, its primary strength is live chat. We are already seeing lots of game developers and modders moving to discord and that knowledge is getting locked away, it would not surprise me at all if we end up with the parts of the stack overflow userbase that doesnt want their answers becoming part of an AI site moving to discord knowing that their data wont be able to harvested on a private discord server. I dont like this direction the internet is going, as for me the prime function of the internet is to share information.
My background I do work with developers and occasionally I have gone to stack overflow and similar sites to try and resolve issues or to help me write a script, I also have done as a hobby game modding primarily in Final Fantasy 7, the point being here, is that much of the reverse engineering for fF7 is on a website, which in the 2000s and 2010s had a very thriving community that shared information with each other, now game modding communities are largely done over Discord, and finding ways to create mods for the games in question is really difficult as all the information is locked away. The internet in a decade is going to be even worse and far more hostile than it is now.
Sad to see SO going down this road! I was an early user, not the most prolife (wow, Jon Skeet!), but I found the site incredibly useful. I eventually acquired a reputation of over 12,000, 17 gold, 87 silver, and 123 bronze badges. I retired in 2016, and have since only visited a few times when developing little apps for my own use.
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
I've been a user since the beta, but I come and go (under 2k rep). There were complaints about it getting bad for a long time, and I thought the community adapted. But lately, it has gotten noticeably worse. It used to be that a lot of new questions were randomly downvoted with no comment... then new, solid questions would get downvoted.
Recently, bots are now auto-closing and hiding these nicked questions. Recently I noticed that several questions I asked were removed, and it doesn't even tell you when you are scheduled, but when it is deleted, you get a -2. For context, I've probably asked about 150 questions over 10 years, and maybe 5 or 6 were marked dupes or closed. This year its ~75%.
SO's one true answer model doesn't work so well when the language changes or updates. How do I do 'x' on iOS questions frequently have a ten year old ObjC answer, scroll down a bit and you get the Swift 2.0 code, scroll a bit more and you'll find Swift 5.0. Not the best experience.
LLMs are going to eat their lunch.ChatGPT works well. I know some aren't to happy about how the learning material is acquired, but the end user experience is great. Yes, you can't take the code on blind trust, but I would hope no-one takes SO examples on trust either. The best thing is the rapid iteration:
• How do I draw a rainbow using SwiftUI?
• > Code that draws a circle with rainbow coloured segments
• No, I want the segments to be concentric
• > Code that draws rainbow coloured segments offset, but one starts where the other finishes
• I want concentric and the start and end points to be at the same position of the arc
• > Working code
All done in a couple of minutes.
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
@@bitman_agent67 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.
I appreciate the learnings I got from SO 14 years ago. Like how to ask and formulate software development questions to get relevant answers. However, I deleted my account many years ago and for the past 2 years I have not even visited the site once..
I got grilled many times on that site. I feel they abuse users that look for help.
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?
It was sliding for years. AI just delivered the death blow
6:30 You can see the comments of any user by going to their profile, choosing Network profile and then Activity.
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.
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.
Goohle's search algorithm pushes sponsored posts at the expense of actual high-quality responses to search queries.
If the various AI leaders have apparently scraped all human data from the internet, then all the questions and answers would already be in AI. Another example of corporates arrogant lack of respect and doing exactly what they want to do, then gaslighting those who had their creative produce stolen. Makes me angry every time I think about it!
Dee, you are a breath of fresh air!
This is why developers need platform cooperatives.
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.
I’ve found with the AIs that even when they get an answer slightly wrong they’re still helpful and sometimes you can correct them using information they’ve actually given you! So they teach you and you teach them back based on what they taught you.
I’ve also found this in non-coding areas,
@@kevinmcfarlane2752, except that the AI does not actually incorporate anything you tell it. Only the chat interface on top of it is programmed to refer back to what was said recently.
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...
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.
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 😂😂⤵️
Petulent children were bad enough, but in many circles they are gaining more power. It's like a psychotic version of Logan's Run, but with many more executions (canceling and excommunication) and slander while claiming compassion.
There are always consequences to rampant hate, no matter how it is spun.
I love the subtle negative ratings on the example new stackoverflow questions and answers :)
5:30 - That's a very polite and important comment. What one must be smoking to think that it's not?
I gave up, mostly, on SO because whenever I have a question it’s due to a unique situation. I needed people to work with me to find a solution. But I rarely got that in the last few years - instead, just general unpleasantness and even spite.
That, and Gen AI seems to get it right more often than not, and is always polite.
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
4:34 - wait - that's actually quite legitimate question that was part of usenet netiquette and frankly, your reaction to it is hallmark of what is wrong with software industry. Once it used to drill down to essence of the problem, why is it even a problem because person who asked question might already be set on wrong way toward faulty solution or at very least, it is example of law of instrument in action! And yeah, if somebody asks tutorial level questions - well, how can you expect people who expect to have everything served to them contribute back? Also, showing HOW and WHERE original problem where wrong HAS educational value for others! If you want free knowledge, give OTHERS opportunity to learn - especially on YOUR mistakes! Don't come in with entitled attitude 'do it for me'
The problem with most comments of that kind that I see on SO is that they are not made to get a wider perspective at the problem. They are made to just reject the question as silly because you can just remove the constraint. Except most of the time it's a production constraint imposed by the client's IT department. The developer is in no position to remove that constraint unless he can give a detailed explanation as to why this constraint makes the entire thing impossible. So the harsh comment is irrelevant and a waste of time for everybody. Especially when you can scroll down 1 or 2 pages and find an answer by someone who understood the situation and gave a solution that deals with the constraint. But that excellent solution is hidden way behind several invalid solutions that ignore the constraint.
17:49 Machines can't exploit humans. Humans exploit humans.
What about those models behind? Are you also a model maker? They look nice.
As an example, I noticed most Qs related to java-springboot are answered for versions before 3. There are very few new questions for version 3. Even when the question specifies the version, the answer does not work 😢
And same has been happening with less and less content related to new technologies or approaches
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.
I just want a quick answer while I'm in the flow. Not some idiot telling me off who wasn't even in nappies when I was coding Fortran and assembler. Or never having anyone bother to answer at all. Even a bad AI answer gives me a new way to look at a problem and often it's better grammar and well written. Sometimes I don't want to spend the day reading a manual. I just want to keep the flow going.
If you are really in the flow, you don't want a quick answer, you want the correct answer. There is no good to a ton of code that is of dubious quality. Most of my career has been doing software maintenance, we have way too much code out there that the original authors don't understand! Understand what you are trying to do in your code. If you need to read the docs, then read them!
I just discovered your videos with this one. quite good. thank you for the work.
Tiny observation as I saw this in my family and it can go worse if not checked - and please take that for what it is as just a caring comment: I suggest you consult a medical doctor for your neck (thyroid)
keep the good work i subscribed.
I was active on this site ten years ago.
I used it to learn to be a better programmer, by answering questions.
I would mock up the question, then write and test the answer.
At 7:38, Dee briefly displays a comment that questions are likely to get a legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago. That's right! I often find answers that do not actually apply to today's software.
It's true. The few times I've asked question of stack overflow, I spent a lot of time google-fu-ing to make damn sure there wasn't a question already on SO or else they'd bite my head off.
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
I don't use Stack Overflow anymore. I just use an AI chat, where I get an answer fast, and is not judged.
An I am an experienced developer. So quite often, I don't even receive an answer on SO. Perhaps because there is no easy answer, or nobody knows about the specific issue.
This is the prime selling point of AI, its never going to scold you, disrespect you, instead it will just try to help you, whilst humans get emotional, have bad days and can get temperamental.
Add in the fact that many communities are moving to discord, I think searchable knowledge is going to be eventually dominated by AI.
Hey Dee -- I'm a new subscriber, only watched a small handful of your videos, and while I've loved the content I've seen thus far, the editing of this one was distracting. Several times your webcam was on screen in two different places at the same time or the text reveal you were reading was lagging by 2+ seconds. I know video editing is hard and the preview you see while doing so isn't always accurate, so I just wanted to let you know you may want to watch the final result before posting. Anyway, that aside, the content of this video hit hard because I hate to see SO decline, but all your points are spot-on.
Thanks so much for letting me know. I actually didn’t watch the final video (well I watched it on the video editor and not the exported version). I was having weird issues during the editing but I thought it was fixed and guess it wasn’t. How frustrating. I’ll post a pinned comment. Thanks for watching and letting me know, I appreciate it!!
I thought it was deliberate. "Hmmm... is that the kind of jump cut edits the kids are up to these days?" You could start a trend!
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
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.
I stopped using Stack. I've been developing since the 90s, I know how forums can be. I asked my first question on Stack in maybe 2012 (somewhere around that time). I read the rules, I posted a clear question and explained below why similar sounding questions (with links) weren't the solution to my problem and...instant closed with "Duplicate of
Well said. These sites are ruined by such behaviour. People put their ego above being helpful.
I think the main problem with comments is that there is no "down vote" on them. (Just a slight nudge to signal that maybe this wasn't a productive use of your keyboard.;)
Mean people can write comments and pile on by up-voting them, and nice people can't do much.
So there is very little deterrent against being mean (unless massive number of people start reporting these comments to moderators... which is not the intended use of that system and would create an even larger problem, moderator burnout, and nice people wouldn't do that... on the other hand, all evil needs to succeed is for nice people to do nothing)
To me it looks like the guy who wanted to make "the world a little bit better" is more focused on the recognition. "I want to feed the homeless, but I better be recognized for this work. Because my real goal is recognition".
I use AI a lot by now. I am one of those who very early in my career was VERY intimidated by the responses on Stack Overflow (Not so much to me, but to others, so I never dared posting some myself), and I am SO happy an alternative exists. It saves me time on a magnitude that simply can't be ignored. So. The world moves on. You have given your answer, and the world is better for it. People will forget it was you who gave the answer. Accept your answer is valuable without your name attached to it, and that you DID make the world a little bit better. Some day you'll be dead, and forgotten, and nobody cares what you gave the world. And then the Sun expands, and engulf the Earth. Bye. (But thanks for your contribution!)
I've avoided Stack Overflow for years because it stinks of snark. There are much better places to go that are inhabited by people that want to help you.
It just seemed like a nest of ppl who wanted to sit on high and look down their noses at the rest of us working-class scrubs. I was always too intimidated to ask a question.
What is the little box with the stroked 0 you are wearing around your neck? A throat mic?
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.)
Even as someone that wants to answer questions it sucks because either the question is way above my skill level, or it is closed so it's hard to build reputation
i know that there are chapters but i dont know where is the actual answer for the topic and/or conclusion
5:25 - I don't have a 5-digit rating on Stackoverflow, but I've answered a few questions. I agree with the opinion - this is decided laziness on the part of the OP. Python is well-described in it's documentation, and has lots of resources that are outside of the Python infrastructure. I think the writer would have been better off simply not responding. I suspect that he was just having a bad day and the OP made himself a convenient scapegoat.
I bailed on Stack Overflow a long time ago. But ChatGPT and Claude completely killed it.
21:27 my workflow definitely does not check ai last, it checks it first. Or docs visible in ide first then ai. Copilot is in my ide and so very low barrier to entry with fail fast answers.
I have let's say a solid reputation on two other sites of stack exchange network I'm not new to the network... And I have not asked on stack overflow for YEARS, yeap because (my perception) is that enough users are rude and quick to downvote questions, and I did not wanted to be banned for negative points.
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!
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.
The “I want to know why you’re trying to do this” isn’t necessarily meanness. The user might be thinking that the person asking the question has narrowed the focus of the expected solution too early, and a different solution to the real high-level problem might be superior.
My experience with Stack Overflow:
Me: How do I do A without using B?
SO: Please note this is a duplicate question. It has been marked closed. [with a link to "How do I do A using B?"]
The questions that led me to S.O. in the first place were all closed on the grounds of being duplicates and I was directed to the "original" question. Without exception, these "original" questions were similar to but NOT the same as my question. With only one exception, the answers provided to the similar questions were not applicable to my situation.
Ironically, on that one occasion where the "original" question did actually contain an answer to my question, that answer had been down-voted to the bottom of the page for being inapplicable to the question that was asked. To add insult to injury, I was unable to give this answer an up-vote as I lacked the necessary 'reputation'.
This one down-voted answer was the only answer I found on S.O. All the other answers I needed I went elsewhere to find.
I suspect that SO will die out eventually, as they seem very abusive to new users.
Some people are just arseholes, and some of the arseholes have just been allowed to get away with it.
Harder to deal with when, unlike other sites, those arseholes provide a lot of the value