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Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers (devclass.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

Maybe StackOverflow is dying because its community is full of incredibly toxic, passive-aggressive and hostile basement dwellers who will berate, downvote and lock the threads of anybody who dares ask a programming question. Genuinely the kind of people you often see moderating subreddits or Discord servers who have never been punched in the face.

ChatGPT hammered the final nail in the site's coffin because it's now become a tool where you can ask specific programming questions and likely get an answer that isn't "use the search bar you fucking dipshit. Question closed as off-topic."

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well it might goes both ways. People are not afraid to ask stupid questions to AI. And at the same time, AI will not judge the user.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Eh, they will complain that "ai is stupid" when the actual issue is pepple's inability to even describe their problem. We already see this happen.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Another big problem is that we've been collectively trying to shoehorn everybody into programming careers for the better part of two decades. In fact, "just learn to code" is often thrown around by people in response to the prospect of AI automating and taking over everybody's jobs.

    What they don't understand is that coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math, which is a significant portion of the population if you look at statistics, grades, test scores, etc. Expecting a lowly paid call center worker who lost their job to AI to suddenly open up Visual Studio and write any code is a fools errand.

    I bring this up because I think there's a correllation between people asking low-quality questions and people being pushed into making a career move into tech.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    coding is actually very difficult, especially for people who are bad at math

    I disagree tbh. I'm a software dev with 20+ years of experience and I think most coding is not very difficult relative to other jobs. The problem is that coding requires specific motivation because the information breadth is insane compared to other professions and that becomes incredibly overwhelming for many people are not stubborn in a specific sort of way.

    I think you have a point here regarding corellation between low-quality questions and people "who don't want to be here" - that's probably true.

    Though people generally really suck at describing their issues and that goes way beyond code. LLMs are making this even more apparent because a dude who can describe everything is having a great time and others just yell "LLMs suck and have no value" so the difference is crazy.

    There's something with our society where introspection and detail is not natural and very difficult to learn for some people.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Agreed. There are definitely many areas of software to do require/benefit from good math skills. But software is an incredibly diverse field. Kids, if you're interested in programming/software, there are plenty of areas you can do just fine in with varying levels of math skills.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    I've been contributing on SO for a decade and comments like this drive me nuts.

    It was a free self moderating tool and people couldn't even ask question properly for people to do the work for them for free. The entitlement is astonishing and to have the gal to call SO toxic just shows how undeserving some people are of any assistance.

    Yes use the search bar and yes lock the thread if people can't spend 5 minutes to form their question there is no saving of these fools. Period.

    In fact my main reason for stopping to contribute was dramatic decrease of question quality not the AI. Just try to follow the new section for a day and tell me it's not a problem, I'll wait.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I too contributed fairly significantly over a long period of time, particularly on electronics.stackexchange.com. I generally just ignore the weak/low quality questions or vote them down. I might respond and ask them to fix the question if I felt charitable, but I never understood the "question nazis".

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    SO did go overboard at times; I've seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being "duplicates" of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.

    But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They'd prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    I'm not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project and I had to teach myself HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL because my sixth form was shit and was only teaching us Visual Basic 6 when the IDE/language had been obsolete for nearly a decade) and I have never personally posted on StackOverflow. In fact, the only StackExchange site I've ever been part of was EpicAdvice, a short-lived offshoot that was for World of Warcraft specific questions. But I do have a sibling with a computer science and software engineering background which is how I became aware of the site in the first place.

    This isn't my personal criticism of the site, it's me echoing the sentiment of the many who have complained about the community across the web.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    There are poor personality types everywhere, but I have found stackexchange/stackoverflow to be one of the better sources of user curated help. LLMs are a new and interesting avenue and I've had some good success with them too, but Stackoverflow was really, really good.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I fully agree. Ai is hallucinate answers & solutions. Maybe very simple questions or programming issues can be solved by AI. But more complex, or very language specific or use case specific questions not.

    And the result could be catastrophic when relying on AI too much.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes. Stack overflow is a place where you can get knowledge from experts for free. The people that complain about the moderation being toxic generally think they are entitled to expert's time without putting in any effort themselves and would drastically degrade the utility of the site if they got their way.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Here's the thing - Stack Overflow replaced existing non-corporate less shitty places on the Internet where we experts shared knowledge for free. Stack Overflow quickly got so bad that many experts stopped sharing, but only after disrupting existing sharing communities.

    People who remember what came before have a right to be angry that SO embraced and extinguished the free (and advertising free) forums and IRC channels that came before it.

    (I admit SO was better in many ways. But it also killed off something more resilient. I hope we can someday rebuild some of what we had, outside of the long corporate line-must-go-up shadow. I don't know if we will or not.)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    In the earlier days of StackOverflow, the founders try to fight the toxicity. I don't know whether they got overwhelmed or just gave up, but the trolls wound up taking over. Maybe good moderators aren't willing to put up with both overwhelming toxicity AND no pay.

    I still love what StackOverflow once was. I tried coming back and giving a chance a few times. My last question got "answered" by people who clearly had not taken time to read the question. After updating the question with, "Note: I'm am NOT talking about 'X', its subtle, please read the question fully." I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.

    I eventually figured it out and didn't bother posting the answer to the issue. Fly-by answers by people just looking to improve their stats made continuing to interact with SO frustrating and pointless.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    It is very refreshing conversing with AI about technical problems.

    I notice AI pretty much always knows what I want, even if it can't give me the correct answer on how to get there.

    When asking for helping among 'you people,' it's almost like pulling teeth. It genuinely feels like a lot of you can't comprehend what you're reading and blame users for having issues you can't solve.

    With AI, it feels more like I'm talking with a normal person than a lot of the people on the internet.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Found the person that asks shitty questions

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