Comment on Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers
Clbull@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
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.”
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.
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.
I’m not a programmer (last time I seriously dabbled into coding was building a website for an A Level Computing project) 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.
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.
Found the person that asks shitty questions
Found the shitty moderator
Alas, I’m just a person who only had positive experiences in stack overflow and know the type of entitled dumbasses who think they should be able to ask volunteers to do their homework for them
They took on a very strict ruleset to avoid clutter and chaos.
sturger@sh.itjust.works 4 hours 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.